Root Causes of Discriminatory Attitudes in Life

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PHI101 Quiz 2
Discrimination is the type of conduct directed to an individual because they belong to a certain group in society. The common groups used to determine discriminatory acts are skin color, race, sexual orientation, marital status, and social status. However, activists in different parts of the world have advocated for people to stop expressing discriminatory attitudes regardless of a person’s origin. This paper will focus on social-cultural, cognitive, personality, and motivational factors as the causes of discriminatory attitudes.
The social-cultural factors indicate that discriminatory attitudes can be learned as people grow. The perspectives can be passed from parents to children and the mass media. When a child grows up in an environment where certain people are being discriminated against, they tend to think that it is right to discriminate against other people (Voss, Peggy, Ehud Bodner, and Klaus). The mass media can also present information to the public that makes people believe they can discriminate against others. An example of such information can be witnessed in advertisements and other television programs.
Cognitive factors contribute to discriminatory beliefs because they result in people believing that a particular group of people possess negative characteristics. Such characteristics contribute to the hatred that society show against such a society. It is through such feelings that people express discriminatory attitudes towards others. The cognitive factors that contribute to developing such attitudes result from categorization and the selective processing of information. For instance, if an individual gets the impression that they should hate another person, the chances are...