Why We Fear The Unknown
The article discusses how people tend to automatically associate other people with certain groups or characteristics based on how they appear. The reason for this could be due to "social identity theory" or that people boost their self-esteem by identifying with a group, and then boost the characteristics of the group so that they are viewed as better than other groups. People then tend to view others as either ingroup or outgroup members, and often fear or mistrust outgroup members (xenophobia). This can lead to people harboring prejudicial attitudes and ultimately discriminatory actions against people who are believed to be in a certain (often unsavory) group (e.g. terrorists). The article then discusses whether this is an innate aspect of human nature, or if society is responsible for our "rush to judgement".
The Implicit Association Test was developed to test whether people have these tendencies to judge images and words as either in-group or out-group could be measured by reaction time.
The link provides a bunch of short tests concerning specific subjects. I tried the Presidents IAT and found I had a preference for Barack Obama over Richard Nixon.
I encourage everyone to try at lease one of these. I'm sure many have done this before for class, but now that you know what you know about motivation, what could be behind these tendencies? Are there large social issues that might relate to this? (I'm thinking of Prohibition and now the war on drugs)
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