Prejudice

When people encounter strangers during their day to day life, they unwittingly form a premature judgment of the person's character based on looks, age, gender, and even dialect. This action can be defined as prejudice. The causes and effects of prejudice are most likely shared by most cultures of the world. We try to deny it and even ignore it, but the fact of the matter is that it is and always will be present and impact our lives.

Prejudice can be caused by past experiences that we have habitually learned to predict and assume to be correct. For example, if a person were to spend their entire life in a gang infested environment, they would observe and remember the clothing styles and culture of these gangs. Suppose this same person came upon a complete stranger who dressed and talked like a gangster. This person would automatically assume that this person is involved in gangs because of the high number of times they have been correct about this assumption in the past. Another cause of prejudice is because of ignorance. Most people do not know or understand the societies and cultures outside of their own. Because of this lack of knowledge they use what little information they have of foreign people and classify them vaguely as a whole and not as individuals. The most prominent cause of prejudice is what we learn from our parents while we are still in our early stages of development. My parents are both in the medical profession. Doctors notoriously criticize lawyers and their objectives as evil and greedy. My father is passionately prejudiced towards lawyers because of the legal situations they have forced him into. As a child I adopted his prejudice and am not able to help feeling resentment for lawyers just because of the impression his opinion made on me.

Prejudice has no positive outcomes. Mostly it leads to completely unnecessary fear between people. This fear causes us to avoid strangers that friendships could possibly have been formed