What is prejudice?

What Does prejudice Mean

In Latin is where we find the etymological origin of the term prejudice. Specifically, we can establish that it comes from the word praeiudicium, which can be translated as "prior judgment."

The prejudice is the action and effect of prejudging ( judge things without thorough knowledge or before the due time ). A prejudice, therefore, is a prior opinion about something that is little or badly known.
For example: “Believing that all Arabs are fundamentalists without even having traveled to Asia is prejudice” , “Put aside prejudices and go for wearing colorful shirts” , “I thought that I could never fall in love with a woman from such a culture. different, but they were just prejudices ” .

Prejudices, therefore, are made from opinions that arise before judging the determination of the evidence . In other words, a prejudice is a criticism that is made without having enough previous elements to substantiate it. If a person who has never traveled to France affirms that the French are not very affectionate and distant in their dealings, they are incurring a prejudice and reproducing a stereotype .
These types of thinking are linked to discrimination . Prejudices are usually negative (something or someone is rejected before they have enough knowledge to judge it with motives) and they promote division between people: if a subject believes that someone is bad, they will not even approach to meet and verify it.
The most extreme part of prejudice can cause harm and serious consequences in society. Thus, for example, those who have prejudices about people of another color, of another race or of another sexual condition, and also in a radical way, can target them and cause them physical or moral harm. Specifically, they can insult them, they can isolate them when participating in an act, they can hit them ...
This is fundamentally reflected in the neo-Nazi or far-right groups that defend the supremacy of the white race and that are committed to “ending” homosexuals, the homeless, people of color ...
In this way, there are a multitude of actions, ideologies and trends throughout history that are precisely the result of prejudices. This would be the case of slavery, homophobia, anti-Semitism, machismo, racism, sexism or the Holy Inquisition.
Specifically, in addition to all the above, we can make it clear that there are two clear types of prejudice:

Social. Within this category we can highlight, for example, the prejudices that are held about men and women in many aspects of life.

Racial As their name suggests, they are those that are established based on the color of people's skin. Thus, there are those who reject black people simply because their opinions about them are based on stereotypes and nonsensical ideas.
For psychology , cognitive biases are distortions that alter the way people perceive reality. Several of these processes were verified empirically by scientists. Prejudices led the Catholic Church to reject, at the time, scientific evidence that proved that the Earth revolved around the sun, among many others.