People With Low Self-Esteem Show More Signs of Prejudice - When people are feeling badly about themselves, they’re more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works

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People that are Racist and show a lot of Prejudice, Bias and Resentment are in many cases those with the lowest self-esteem, some of them may suffer from Inferiority Complexes, Dysfunctional Families and Childhood, Being Bullies, Torture of Animals, etc ...


Association for Psychological Science
People With Low Self-Esteem Show More Signs of Prejudice
By Keri Chiodo
February 23, 2011 



People With Low Self-Esteem Show More Signs of Prejudice


Some excerpts :

When people are feeling badly about themselves, they’re more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works.

“This is one of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves,” says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen. “When we feel bad about ourselves, we can denigrate other people, and that makes us feel better about ourselves.”

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But what psychologists don’t agree on is how this works. “People were using the exact same data to make completely different arguments about why,” Sherman says. There are two possibilities: either feeling bad about yourself activates negative evaluations of others, or it makes you less likely to suppress those biases.

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By plugging in the data from the experiment, they were able to determine that people who feel bad about themselves show enhanced prejudice because negative associations are activated to a greater degree, but not because they are less likely to suppress those feelings.

The difference is subtle, but important, Sherman says. “If the problem was that people were having trouble inhibiting bias, you might try to train people to exert better control,” he says. But his results suggest that’s not the issue. “The issue is that our mind wanders to more negative aspects of other groups. The way around that is to try and think differently about other people. When you feel bad about yourself and catch yourself thinking negatively about other groups, remind yourself, ‘I may be feeling this way because I just failed a test or something.’

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