Racial prejudice has its roots in children’s natural drive to carve the world up into categories. Can research attain anything to fix this?Racist stereotypes,at their root, come from quite a fundamental learning mechanism. Humans are able to memorize and adapt so quickly because they are excellent at making generalisations approximately the world based on very limited experience. Take dogs, and for example - a toddler might reasonably conclude after meeting just two or three that all dogs are furry,bark and own tails that should be treated with some caution.
On the whole, stereotypes are often accurate – dogs attain normally bark and wag their tails. The difficulty arises when this learning mechanism is applied to groups of people. Race is an easy mental category to fit people into because skin colour is a salient (significant; conspicuous; standing out from the rest) visual feature. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com