The Effects of Prejudice Essay -- Racism Essays

Evolutionary theory suggests that in order to stay contact with harmful pathogens, people identify and avoid heuristic cues that argon associated with disease (Schaller, 2011). Further, people who feel most vulnerable to disease hunt down to associate subjectively foreign out-groups with disease and act more negatively toward them (Faulkner, Schaller, Park & Duncan, 2004). The negative effects of prejudice are both personal and psychological People who inform being subjected to prejudice also had greater amounts of visceral fat (Lewis, Kravitz, Janssen & Powell, 2011) and ambiguous racism decreased peoples performance in cognitive tasks (Salvatore & Shelton, 2007). Hence, it is of obvious benefit to society to turn off prejudice and alleviate these detrimental outcomes.Combining this past research, Huang, Sedlovskaya, Ackerman and Bargh (2011) reported crosswise three studies a significant correlation between modern health interventions, such(prenominal) as vaccination and h andwashing, and reducing prejudice. Their studies, however, indicate that it is the perceive resistance from disease which is important in reducing prejudice, which limits the extent that health interventions wholly will impact prejudice. Further it will be argued that other factors, such as the prolific nature of disease and alternative causes of prejudice, limit how substantive these findings are in realistically impacting on social prejudice. A clean alternative that will be discussed is that any threat or perceived harm, not solely disease-based, towards an in-group may produce xenophobic attitudes.In deal one Huang et al. (2011) examined the effects of vaccination status on reported racism. They reported that when confronted with disease, unvaccinated part... ...61Lewis, T. T., Kravitz, H. M., Janssen, I. & Powell, L. H. (2011). Self-reported experiences of discrimination and visceral fat in middle-aged African American and Caucasian women. American Journal of Epidemiolo gy, 173, 1223-1231. Retrieved from http//aje.oxfordjournals.org/Salvatore, J. & Shelton, J. N. (2007). Cognitive costs of image to racial prejudice. Psychological Science, 18, 810-815. DOI 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01984.xSchaller, M. (2011). The behavioral immune system and the psychology of human sociology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 366, 3418-3426. DOI 10.1098/rstb.2011.0029Schaller, M., Park, J. H., & Mueller, A. (2003). Fear of the no-account Interactive effects of beliefs about danger and ambient darkness on ethnic stereotypes. Journal for Personality and Social Psychology, 29, 637-649. DOI 10.1177/0146167203029005008