By Matija Šerić

Prejudices are like an invisible veil that envelops our society – they are everywhere, yet often unnoticed. So deeply woven into media, conversations, and everyday speech, they are nearly impossible to escape. Every person, at least once in their life, has felt their negative effect — either as a victim of someone’s judgment or as one who consciously or unconsciously spreads them.

Examples surround us: “immigrants bring problems,” “blondes aren’t very smart,” “women are bad drivers,” “Russians are prone to alcohol”… Such statements arise from the human need to simplify the world — to reduce complex reality to easily understandable patterns.

Thus, generalization becomes a way for individuals and societies to navigate through a sea of differences — but at the cost of truth and fairness. Prejudice is not merely a mistake. It is a seed of mistrust that can grow into hatred, discrimination, and division. While it may begin as harmless jokes or stereotypes, its true impact is often much deeper and more painful.

Definition of Prejudice

Prejudice is usually conceptualized as an attitude that, like other attitudes, has a cognitive component (e.g., beliefs about a target group), an emotional component (e.g., dislike), and a behavioral component (e.g., the predisposition to act negatively toward the group).

In his work The Nature of Prejudice (1954), Allport defined prejudice as antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It can be felt or expressed. Prejudice may be directed toward a group as a whole or toward an individual because they are a member of that group. Most researchers have continued to define prejudice as a negative attitude, that is, antipathy.

Psychologists have assumed that, like other attitudes, prejudice subjectively organizes people’s environments and orients them toward objects and individuals within those environments. Moreover, prejudice serves psychological functions such as enhancing self-esteem and providing material advantage.

While psychologists tend to focus on prejudice as an intrapsychic process (an individual’s attitude), sociologists emphasize its social and structural functions in group relations — especially racial relations. They analyze group dynamics in economic and class terms, often excluding individual factors.

Prejudices – in the Service of “Defending” the Collective

Despite these different approaches, both psychology and sociology seek to understand how groups and collective identities shape intergroup relations. Sociologist Herbert Blumer, for example, proposed a sociological approach centered on defending group position, where intergroup competition lies at the heart of prejudice formation and maintenance.

Referring to racial relations, Blumer wrote:

“Racial prejudice is a defensive reaction to a challenge to the position of group feelings… As such, racial prejudice is a protective mechanism. Its functions, though shortsighted, maintain the integrity and position of the dominant group.”

Prejudices explained

Prejudice as a Mechanism for Maintaining the Status Quo

Recent definitions of prejudice bridge the individual focus of psychology and the group-level focus of sociology by emphasizing its dynamic nature. For instance, Eagly and Diekman view prejudice as a mechanism that preserves status and role differences between groups.

However, they also highlight the contribution of individual reactions: those who deviate from traditional group roles provoke negative responses, while those who reinforce the status quo receive positive ones. These complexities make it difficult to formulate a single, comprehensive definition.

Nevertheless, based on extensive sociological and psychological research, we may define prejudice as:

an individual attitude (positive or negative, usually negative) toward a group and its members that creates or maintains a hierarchical relationship between groups.

Categorization – A Way of Life

Humans constantly categorize social groups — for practical reasons (e.g., finding a suitable store, choosing a church to attend, selecting a sports field, or deciding which line to stand in) or social ones (e.g., which music to listen to, which movies to watch, whom to befriend).

The fact that people generally agree on how to categorize others most of the time is both natural and essential to human life.

The Negative Side of Categorization

The problem arises when the human brain — which uses categorization to distinguish tables from chairs, night from day, rivers from lakes — applies the same mechanisms to make assumptions about similarities and differences among people.

People tend to perceive more similarity within a category (e.g., older adults) and greater differences between categories (e.g., between young and old) than actually exist. As a result, individuals routinely make assumptions about others based on their group membership, which are often incorrect. For instance, an elderly person will not always think and react slowly, just as a young person will not always think and react quickly.

Prejudices – the Consequence of Simplifying the World

According to social identity theory, people tend to value the groups they belong to (in-groups) more than those they do not (out-groups), because this enhances their self-esteem and sense of identity.

These two elements — categorization and identity — form the foundation of prejudice. Prejudice arises from the human tendency to oversimplify differences between categories and overvalue one’s own group.

Moreover, the way people categorize themselves and others, and the value they assign to social groups, can predict whether prejudice will emerge. For example, how individuals define their national identity can strongly influence their attitudes toward immigrants.

Social Norms Create Taboos

Human behavior is not solely determined by rational decision-making. Societies share values and standards of acceptable behavior that members are expected to follow. Culture or society guides the behavior and opinions of its members through collectively agreed expectations and rules.

These behavioral guidelines usually take the form of social norms and taboos. Norms and taboos profoundly shape people’s lives. How individuals behave, dress, eat, drive, and even express their sexuality — all are regulated by the norms and taboos of the society they belong to. Anthropologists have long studied taboos, recording and analyzing them across various societies, including remote or “exotic” ones.

References:

Dovidio, J. F., Hewstone, M., Glick, P., Esses, V.M. (2013) “Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Overview”,  SAGE Publications Ltd; 1 edition

Fersthman, C., Gneezy, U., Hoffman, M. (2011) “Taboos and Identity: Considering the Unthinkable”, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 3 (May 2011): 139–164,

https://www.britannica.com/topic/taboo-sociology

https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14098