Scapegoat Theory In Sociology

Many individuals is aware of the difference between race and ethnicity. There are assumptions that both of the words has the same definition but they do not. Race is define as your biological features that is inherited from one’s parents which include your skin color, eye and hair color, as well as a tendency toward developing certain diseases. Ethnicity is the cultural background in which a group of people who share a belief in common ancestry. According to Max Weber, “ethnic groups are formed by colonization and immigration”.

However a minority group is, “any group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment,

Scapegoat theory refers to the tendency to blame someone else for one’s own problems, a process that often results in feelings of prejudice toward the person or group that one is blaming. Scapegoating serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one’s positive self-image. If a person who is poor or doesn’t get a job that he or she applies for can blame an unfair system or the people who did get the job that he or she wanted, the person may be using the others as a scapegoat and may end up hating them as a result. However, if the system really is unfair and keeps the person from succeeding financially, or the other people got the job because of nepotism or illegitimate preferential treatment, then blaming those factors would not be scapegoating. Essentially, scapegoating generally employs a stand-in for one’s own failures so that one doesn’t have to face one’s own weaknesses., developed initially from (Dollard, J., 1939) frustration-aggression theory, suggests that the dominant group will displace their unfocused aggression onto a subordinate group. An example is the way that Adolf Hitler was able to use the Jewish people as scapegoats for Germany’s social and economic problems, and same thing we see today in the United States where immigrants have been disenfranchised. Usually we

At one moment or the other we have either stereotyped a group of persons (oversimplified ideas about groups of people) or be prejudice in our thinking (thoughts and feelings about those groups), worst still discriminatory toward them (through actions). As mentioned, Stereotypes can be based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation almost any characteristic, such as when members of a dominant racial group suggest that a subordinate racial group is stupid or lazy. In either case, the stereotype is a generalization that doesn’t take individual differences into