• Corpus ID: 17624686

The psychology of prejudice, sterotyping, and discrimination: An overview.

@inproceedings{Plous2003ThePO,
  title={The psychology of prejudice, sterotyping, and discrimination: An overview.},
  author={Scott Plous},
  year={2003}
}

• S. Plous
• Published 2003
• Psychology

It is hard to imagine more classic examples of prejudice than the statements of Osama Bin Laden. Although social scientists often differ in the precise way they define "prejudice," most agree that it involves a prejudgment, usually negative, about a group or its members (Fiske, 1998; Jones, 1997; Nelson, 2002). As commonly used in psychology, prejudice is not merely a statement of opinion or belief, but an attitude that includes feelings such as contempt, dislike, or loathing. For Osama Bin Laden, non-Muslim Americans are the main target of prejudice, and his hatred is so great that he would like to see them die. Where prejudices lurk, stereotypes are seldom far behind. The term "stereotype," coined in 1798 by the French printer Didot, originally referred to a printing process used to create reproductions (Ashmore & Del Boca, 1981). Journalist Walter Lippmann (1922) later likened stereotypes to "pictures in the head," or mental reproductions of reality, and from there, the term gradually came to mean generalizations -or, quite often, overgeneralizations -about the members of a group. As with prejudice, these generalizations can at times be positive (e.g., women are nurturing, Japanese excel at math), but for the most part, they tend to be negative and resistant to change. For example, until the 1960s the Encyclopædia Britannica entry for "Races of Mankind" relied on centuries-old pseudoscientific stereotypes of Black people as unevolved and childlike. In its 1964 edition, the encyclopedia described "woolly-haired groups" as having: