Prejudice 

Instinct or ignorance?

1.
Is prejudice really just the result of ignorance? Or does it go deeper than that? Is it a matter of instinct that Americans would care more about the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq than about dead Iraqis? According to some researchers, prejudice is an instinct. The good side to this argument is that it's not our fault if we have prejudices. The bad side is that we are all prejudiced. 

2.
Researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found that angry people are more likely to have a negative reaction toward members of a different group. According to the researchers, anger is a signal that there is a threat in our environments.

3.
Since members of a social group usually protect and support one another, it's more likely that any threat would come from an outsider. The researchers suspect that prejudice might have an evolutionary root. It seems that prejudice may have developed as a quick, crude way for early humans to protect themselves from danger.

4.
Unfortunately, this means that a bias against outsiders may exist in all of us. But researchers believe that acknowledging this possibility is the only way to solve the problem of prejudice. Armed with this knowledge, hopefully, we will be able to deal a fatal blow to prejudice.