Argumentative Essay on Reducing Prejudice, Achieving Tolerance is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Argumentative Essay on Reducing Prejudice, Achieving Tolerance at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

Even as evidence suggests the decline in some countries of certain forms of prejudice, other evidence suggests that more subtle, indirect, and pernicious forms of prejudice have emerged. Further complicating matters, prejudice has a multitude of causes. Characterizing searches for the causes of prejudice are two broad perspectives, one emphasizing individual differences and the other emphasizing intergroup processes. Based on these perspectives, scholars have theorized and demonstrated that many factors can contribute to prejudice, including competition for resources, power, or prestige; economic hardships; social categorization and subsequent social comparison processes; psychological processes; personality characteristics; social stereotypes; socialization influences (e.g., through families, classmates, or the media); and conformity motives. Although reducing such a multicausal problem as prejudice is not simple, programs to reduce prejudice are ubiquitous and can be found in employment organizations, schools, and society more generally, and in both private and public organizations.

One major approach to prejudice reduction is encapsulated in the contact hypothesis, which states that contact between majority and minority group members will decrease prejudice, but only when members of two groups have (a) equal status, (b) shared goals, (c) active cooperation with each other, and (d) the support of authorities. These conditions can be very difficult to fulfill in everyday life. Notably, research and theory on contact played a significant role in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling desegregating schools.

Importantly, a recent meta-analysis (an integrative examination of a variety of studies) found that intergroup contact effectively reduces intergroup prejudice--a finding that generalized across ethnic, racial, and other categories studied. The meta-analysis also found that instances in which the four conditions were met were the most effective in reducing prejudice amid intergroup contact.

Other approaches to reducing prejudice include the conversion model, which hypothesizes that encountering an atypical member of a group will provoke a change in one's prejudice, and the bookkeeping model, which hypothesizes that exposure to prejudice-contradicting information will gradually lead to the reduction of prejudice. Still other approaches to prejudice reduction focus on social categories. These include decategorization models, which focus on increasing the extent to which individuals are seen as individuals rather than as members of groups, and recategorization theories, which posit that prejudice is reduced to the extent that groups are reconceived so that "we" and "they" are combined into a single "us." Recategorization may be achieved by creating superordinate identities (e.g., "We are all Americans") or superordinate goals (e.g., "We are all working to preserve the environment"). More recent work emphasizes dual categorization--concurrent emphasis of shared and distinct identities--in order to avoid counterproductive reactions that might be instigated by the emphasis of shared identities at the expense of distinct identities. Still other work focuses on reducing prejudice through cross-categorization, which considers  each individual's multiple group identities, particularly  those identities shared by individuals who see each other largely as members of different groups. For instance, a young person prejudiced against an older person (ageism) might experience a reduction in prejudice if reminded that they are both Christian women (and thus share a religious group and a gender group).

A much-discussed and controversial approach to prejudice reduction is blindness, often called color blindness in the case of race and ethnicity. This perspective argues that, if prejudice involves attention and consideration to difference, then policies--and indeed society--should be blind to difference in order to reduce prejudice. Critics of this perspective charge that it paradoxically impedes prejudice reduction by under-appreciating the structural barriers that codify prejudice into the structures and forms of our social institutions. They further argue that color-blind approaches impede collective action by groups suffering from prejudice and encourage blindness to difference that can make communities vibrant, interesting, and rich in potential.

Historically, the term prejudice has connoted negative prejudice--negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward the members of a group. To achieve tolerance across groups, research has primarily sought to reduce negative prejudice. But what lies beyond tolerance? Recent work on intergroup attitudes answers this question by investigating positive intergroup thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Research on allophilia (from the Greek for "liking or loving the other") has focused on such attitudes and finds that positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors about members of other groups are as central to understanding positive behaviors across group divisions (e.g., proactive support of the "other") as negative prejudices are to understanding negative ones. This work also suggests that negative prejudice and allophilia have distinct antecedents: what it takes to reduce hating across groups is different from what it takes to increase liking. In sum, this work supports a two-dimensional model of intergroup attitudes in which liking and disliking--allophilia and negative prejudice--are often negatively correlated, but also exhibit significant independence (different antecedents and different outcomes).

Whether the focus is on reducing the negative (e.g., employment discrimination) or on increasing the positive (e.g., increasing an individual's comfort, kinship, and engagement with those of another group), the prejudice construct has been a vibrant, fertile, and productive area of inquiry for social scientists and a place where science has met practice in service of society.

References:

1) Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

2) Devine, Patricia G. 1989. "Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56:5-18.

3) Dovidio, John F., Samuel L. Gaertner, and Kerry Kamakami. 2002. "Implicit and Explicit Prejudice and Interracial Interaction." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82:62-68.

4) Fiske, Susan T. and Shelley E. Taylor. 2007. Social Cognition. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

5) Gaertner, Samuel L. and John F. Dovidio. 2000. "The Aversive Form of Racism." Pp. 289-304 in Stereotypes and Prejudice: Essential Readings, edited by C. Stangor. New York: Psychology Press.

6) Greenwald, Anthony G. and Mahzarin R. Banaji. 1995. "Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem and Stereotypes." Psychological Review 102:4-27.

7) Jost, John T., Brett W. Pelham, and Mauricio R. Carvallo. 2002. "Non-Conscious Forms of System Justification: Implicit and Behavioral Preferences for Higher Status Groups." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38:586-602.

8) La Pierre, Richard T. 1936. "Type-Rationalizations of Group Antipathy." Social Forces 15:232-37.

9) Pettigrew, Thomas F. and Linda R. Tropp. 2006. "A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90:751-83.

10) Pittinsky, Todd L. and Stephanie Simon. 2007. "Intergroup Leadership." Leadership Quarterly 18(6):586-605.

11) Word, Carl O., Mark P. Zanna, and Joel Cooper. 1974. "The Nonverbal Mediation of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Interracial Interaction." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 10:109-20.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.