Strategies for Handling Prejudice

Knowing the causes of prejudice is the first step toward handling it. Any effective strategy must work on multiple fronts: reducing the chances for people to learn prejudice in the first place, changing prejudiced attitudes that already exist, weakening the over-importance people place on their own group (the ingroup), and stopping the victims of prejudice from falling into a self-fulfilling prophecy where they behave in ways that confirm the stereotype.

These four goals can be pursued through two main approaches.

Education and information dissemination directly attacks the stereotypes that fuel prejudice. When people are given accurate information about a target group, the false beliefs that support prejudice are corrected. This also helps tackle the problem of strong ingroup bias — the tendency to favour one’s own group simply because it is one’s own. Learning about the positive qualities of outgroups makes it harder to maintain an irrational preference for the ingroup. …