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People that are prejudice shouldn't judge others without knowing their reason for what they did. I believe that people aren't born into prejudice they just start to think and go by their opinion (:

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All people have prejudices, but learning more about them could help keep them in check. Crowd image via www.shutterstock.com.

Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere are entrenched in networks of neurons within our brains.

Social motivations, such as the desire to be a member of a group or to compete with others, are among the most basic human drives. In fact, our brains are able to assess "in-group" (us) and "out-group" (them) membership within a fraction of a second. This ability, once necessary for our survival, has largely become a detriment to society.

Understanding the neural network controlling these impulses, and those that temper them, may shed light on how to resolve social injustices that plague our world.

Daniela Hartmann, CC BY-NC-SA

Prejudice in the brain

In social psychology, prejudice is defined as an attitude toward a person on the basis of his or her group membership. Prejudice evolved in humans because at one time it helped us avoid real danger. At its core, prejudice is simply an association of a sensory cue (e.g., a snake in the grass, the growling of a wolf) to an innate behavioral response (e.g., fight-and-flight). In dangerous situations time is of the essence, and so human beings adapted mechanisms to respond quickly to visual cues that our brains deem dangerous without our conscious awareness. The rub in all of this is that our brains have inherited the tendency to erroneously deem something dangerous when it is in fact benign. It is safer to make false-positive assumptions (avoid something that was good), than to make false-negative assumptions (not avoid something that was bad).

The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping, David M. Amodio

Neuroscience has begun to tease out the neural underpinnings of prejudice in the human brain. We now know that prejudiced behavior is controlled through a complex neural pathway consisting of cortical and sub-cortical regions.

A brain structure called the amygdala is the seat of classical fear conditioning and emotion in the brain. Psychological research has consistently supported the role of fear in prejudiced behavior. For this reason, the vast majority of brain research on this topic has focused on the amygdala and the cortical regions that influence it.

Focus on the amygdala

In one study by Jaclyn Ronquillo and her colleagues, eleven young, white males underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while being shown photographs of faces with varied skin tones. When they viewed black faces, it resulted in greater amygdala activity than when they viewed white faces. Amygdala activation was equal for light and dark black faces, but dark-skinned white people had greater activation than those with lighter skin tone. The authors concluded that Afrocentric features drove an unconscious fear response in white participants.

The effect of skin tone on race-related amygdala activity: an fMRI investigation, Ronquillo (2007), Author provided

More recent imaging research has supported the intractable nature of prejudice in the human psyche. Chad Forbes and colleagues found that even self-reported non-prejudiced subjects could be prejudiced in some situations. White study subjects had increased amygdala activation while viewing images of black faces when they were listening to violent, misogynistic rap music, but not when listening to death metal or no music. Interestingly, they found that a region of the frontal cortex - an area of the brain expected to tamp down amygdala activation - was also activated.

The researchers speculated that the music reinforced a negative stereotype about black subjects, creating a situation in which the white subjects were not able to temper their prejudiced emotions. In fact, the authors speculated that the frontal cortices - generally thought of as areas of "higher" brain function - were instead recruited to help justify the feelings of prejudice felt by the participants listening to rap music.

Other research has shown that the amygdala response to out-group faces is not strictly bound to characteristics such as race. The amygdala responds to any out-group category, depending on whatever someone deems is salient information: your sports team affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, where you go to school, and so on.

Brains can control bias too

The Forbes et al study highlights that our ability to control reactionary implicit bias is dependent on the frontal cortices of the brain. A particularly important region of the cortex is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).

The mPFC is the seat of empathy in the brain. It forms impressions about other people and helps us consider other perspectives. A lack of mPFC activity is associated with prejudice marked by dehumanization and objectification of others. For example, it is known that mPFC activation increases when we view a person of high esteem or prestige - for example, firefighters or astronauts - but not when we view someone marked with disregard or disgust, such as a drug addict or homeless person. Men with highly sexist attitudes have less mPFC activity when viewing sexual images of female bodies. These men also believed sexualized women have "less control over their own lives."

Taken together, it seems that though the frontal cortices are able to reduce our innate prejudices about certain people, they are greatly influenced by context. In other words, our desire to not be prejudiced may sometimes get trumped by exposure to media supporting stereotypical portrayals of certain groups. Moving forward, it is essential to take into account not only the neural architecture of prejudice, but also the context in which we humans live.

Babies image via www.shutterstock.com.

Current questions being addressed in this field of research include whether or not amygdala activation in response to those of other races is something we're born doing or a learned phenomenon. So far, research suggests that amygdala activity in response to out-group members is not innate, and develops later in adolescence. Also, studies support the notion that childhood exposure to diversity can reduce the salience of race in adulthood.

In today's world people are more connected than ever - from social media to Skype, to the never-ending news cycle - people are exposed to increasing diversity. Due to these advances, we as a global community are also faced with the knowledge that prejudice-based discrimination and violence still exist. It's become a human imperative to transcend divisive impulses which no longer serve our survival. Neuroscience has started to educate us about innate human drives. It's now up to all of us how to use this information.

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Humans are wired for prejudice but that doesn't have to be the end of the story

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Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere are entrenched in networks of neurons within our brains.

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I believe that we are born with prejudice, it is human tendency to judge others in all sorts of way such as race, religion, ethnicity etc. So is why I believe that its part of human nature although we are not taught it comes to individuals naturally.

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TEMPE, Ariz. -- Contrary to what most people believe, the tendency to be prejudiced is a form of common sense, hard-wired into the human brain through evolution as an adaptive response to protect our prehistoric ancestors from danger.

So suggests a new study published by Arizona State University researchers in the May issue of the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," which contends that, because human survival was based on group living, "outsiders" were viewed as -- and often were -- very real threats.

"By nature, people are group-living animals -- a strategy that enhances individual survival and leads to what we might call a 'tribal psychology'," says Steven Neuberg, ASU professor of social psychology, who authored the study with doctoral student Catherine Cottrell. "It was adaptive for our ancestors to be attuned to those outside the group who posed threats such as to physical security, health or economic resources, and to respond to these different kinds of threats in ways tailored to have a good chance of reducing them."

Unfortunately, says Neuberg, because evolved psychological tendencies are imperfectly attuned to the existence of dangers, people may react negatively to groups and their members even when they actually pose no realistic threat.

Neuberg and Cottrell had 235 European American students at ASU think about nine different groups: activist feminists, African Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, fundamentalist Christians, gay men, Mexican Americans, Native Americans and nonfundamentalist Christians. The researchers then had the participants rate these groups on the threats they pose to American society (e.g., to physical safety, values, health, etc.) and report the emotions they felt toward these groups (e.g., fear, anger, disgust, pity, etc.).

Consistent with the researchers' hypotheses, findings revealed that distinct prejudices exist toward different groups of people. Some groups elicited prejudices characterized largely by fear, others by disgust, others by anger, and so on. Moreover, the different "flavors" of prejudice were associated with different patterns of perceived threat.

Follow-up work further shows that these different prejudices motivate inclinations toward different kinds of discrimination, in ways apparently aimed at reducing the perceived threat.

"Groups seen as posing threats to physical safety elicit fear and self-protective actions, groups seen as choosing to take more than they give elicit anger and inclinations toward aggression, and groups seen as posing health threats elicit disgust and the desire to avoid close physical contact," says Cottrell.

"One important practical implication of this research is that we may need to create different interventions to reduce inappropriate prejudices against different groups," says Neuberg.

For example, if one is trying to decrease prejudices among new college students during freshman orientation, different strategies might be used for bringing different groups together.

"For instance, given that whites stereotypically perceive blacks as threats to physical safety, it would be inadvisable to suggest a game of outdoor night-time basketball, given that darkness heightens people's fear. Sharing a plate of nachos might be a better choice," Cottrell says. "But if the aim is to reduce prejudice against gay men -- viewed to pose a health treat because of association with AIDS, and thereby eliciting physical disgust --sharing finger food might not be a good idea."

Neuberg and Cottrell are both adamant to point out that just because prejudices are a fundamental and natural part of what makes us human, that doesn't mean that learning can't take place and that responses can't be dampened.

"People sometimes assume that because we say prejudice has evolved roots we are saying that specific prejudices can't be changed. That's simply not the case," Neuberg says. "What we think and feel and how we behave is typically the result of complex interactions between biological tendencies and learning experiences. Evolution may have prepared our minds to be prejudiced, but our environment influences the specific targets of those prejudices and how we act on them."

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racial issues; psychology; relationships; social psychology; human evolution; cultures; evolution; early humans

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Prejudice Is Hard-wired Into The Human Brain, Says ASU Study

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Contrary to what most people believe, the tendency to be prejudiced is a form of common sense, hard-wired into the human brain through evolution as an adaptive response to protect our prehistoric ancestors from danger.

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yes i believe that we were born prejudice because some people see other people whit different in there looks.

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The tendency to prejudice - that is, to divide the world into 'people like me' and 'others' and to form negative value judgements about the others - is innate and something we have to work hard against to avoid.

However, what constitutes 'other' and what about them we use to justify our prejudice is learned.

This was shown by experiments in which researchers assigned people to two groups at random but rapidly found that competitiveness between the two groups became outright antipathy. But mix the groups up, and former enemies become allies and vice versa.

Ironically, prejudice is probably adaptive. In our hunter-gatherer history, extended kin groups that banded together against outsiders were probably more successful at defending their territory and resources, and therefore surviving and reproducing. It's another example of a survival trait that becomes counterproductive in a more advanced society.

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Answer: The tendency to prejudice - that is, to divide the world into 'people like me' and 'others' and to form negative value judgements about the others - is innate and something we have to work hard against to avoid. However, what constitutes 'other' and what about them we use to justify our ...

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we are not born with prejudice we learn it by the experience in our lives  

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we are not born with prejudice we learn it by the experience in our lives  

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i believe not because for example some people dont judge first they get know the person and maybe then sometimes judge them.

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I dont believe that we were al born pre because not all people are so judgemental towards people.

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i believe prejudice is not innate in all humans, because that is something you learn from the people that raise you.

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We are definitely born with this if it's in our personality, but we all have different personalities. so yeah

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Although some ordinary people in Germany and occupied Europe were brave enough to help the Jews, others became killers. Looking at the background of just four of the people involved in the Holocaust and wider Nazi atrocities against the disabled and other groups, shows that there was nothing that marked them out as sadistic murderers. Click on the labels to find out more.

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Although some high-ranking Nazis were prosecuted at the Nuremberg and later trials, many perpetrators were never investigated. The sheer number of people involved made it logistically impossible. Once the Cold War started, the Allies spent less and less time pursuing perpetrators. West German and Austrian authorities were also unwilling to investigate large numbers of their citizens. Some had fled to South America, where right-wing dictatorships offered them refuge. Others found their way to the US, Canada and Britain. Presenting themselves as refugees from communist regimes, they were rarely questioned about their wartime activities.

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Why did ordinary people commit atrocities in the Holocaust?

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Why did hundreds of thousands of ordinary people turn on their neighbours to take part in the Holocaust?

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i believe that people are prejudice is something that people are taught along the way that they grow up.

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i believe that people are prejudice is something that people are taught along the way that they grow up.

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http://faculty.elmira.edu/dmaluso/prejudice/prej-howlearn.html

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i think in the world we live in we arent born to hate but learn it

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Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren't comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.

In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.

People who are prejudiced feel a much stronger need to make quick and firm judgments and decisions in order to reduce ambiguity. "Of course, everyone has to make decisions, but some people really hate uncertainty and therefore quickly rely on the most obvious information, often the first information they come across, to reduce it" Roets says. That's also why they favor authorities and social norms which make it easier to make decisions. Then, once they've made up their mind, they stick to it. "If you provide information that contradicts their decision, they just ignore it."

Roets argues that this way of thinking is linked to people's need to categorize the world, often unconsciously. "When we meet someone, we immediately see that person as being male or female, young or old, black or white, without really being aware of this categorization," he says. "Social categories are useful to reduce complexity, but the problem is that we also assign some properties to these categories. This can lead to prejudice and stereotyping."

People who need to make quick judgments will judge a new person based on what they already believe about their category. "The easiest and fastest way to judge is to say, for example, ok, this person is a black man. If you just use your ideas about what black men are generally like, that's an easy way to have an opinion of that person," Roets says. "You say, 'he's part of this group, so he's probably like this.'"

It's virtually impossible to change the basic way that people think. Now for the good news: It's possible to actually also use this way of thinking to reduce people's prejudice. If people who need quick answers meet people from other groups and like them personally, they are likely to use this positive experience to form their views of the whole group. "This is very much about salient positive information taking away the aversion, anxiety, and fear of the unknown," Roets says.

Roets's conclusions suggest that the fundamental source of prejudice is not ideology, but rather a basic human need and way of thinking. "It really makes us think differently about how people become prejudiced or why people are prejudiced," Roets says. "To reduce prejudice, we first have to acknowledge that it often satisfies some basic need to have quick answers and stable knowledge people rely on to make sense of the world."

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Research States That Prejudice Comes From a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking

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Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren't comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.

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I believe that we are not born with having hatred within us.  As a society we have seen human fault which then allows us to perceive people different based off of these actions.

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I believe that humans aren't born prejudice. i think that it develops due to the environment we grow up in. We aren't born with an immediate hatred towards a certain group of people

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I believe that we aren't born with  prejudice because we choose to judge others on their appearance or the way they act .

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people are raised by hating on certain things in life .

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I believe that we aren't born with hatred, that in our young adolescent years we are persuade as we live on through our lives  we are drawn to interesting facts that make us believe in things we shouldn't, then again there are some family and groups that want to fill there children's head with racism and  then again some children as they get older can develop there own scenes of how racism should be dealt with 

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I believe that we aren't born with hatred, that in our young adolescent years we are persuade as we live on through our lives  we are drawn to interesting facts that make us believe in things we shouldn't, then again there are some family and groups that want to fill there children's head with racism and  then again some children as they get older can develop there own scenes of how racism should be dealt with 

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How to find the fragile middle in a time of racial tension

Courtesy of Connie Schultz

My earliest memories of my father's racism are rooted in the family dinners of my childhood.

Dad sat to my left, always. My mother sat across from me, with my little brother seated to her right. My two younger sisters sat at opposite ends. In the 1960s, our table was metal, and small. There was no escaping whatever was on our father's mind.

I cannot quote verbatim his tirades, and I am grateful for that small mercy, but I remember his tone with a bone-deep weariness. Raised voice, fist on the table. He was angry with black people for reasons that depended on his day at the plant, a song on the radio, a story he'd read in the afternoon paper. To this day, I hear the n-word and can see the contortions in his face.

Most daughters want to be daddy's little girl. This aspiration was lost on me at an early age. I loved my father, always, and feared him too often, but by age 6 or so I knew there was something wrong about him. He would rant about black people he'd never met, and I would see the faces of my classmates, my friends. Silently, I'd pick at the fried Spam or pile of goulash on my plate and think about Sandy and Gary and Valerie and Phillip, and sometimes my eyes would sting. It was not the natural order of things to be so young and know your father had no idea what he was talking about.

I live in Cleveland, where a 12-year-old black boy named Tamir Rice was recently shot and killed by a white police officer. The community at large professed outrage, but when I attended his public funeral it was filled with black mourners, and I left wondering if maybe most of us white people think this isn't our problem anymore. After weeks of reading and moderating public comment threads about the deaths this year of Tamir and two other unarmed black males, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I can't ignore this dark and familiar something clawing at my heart.

There are moments when it feels like we're inching back toward the 1960s, but back into communities that are far more segregated, by race and means. If you are black and poor, you can now spend your entire childhood knowing only other poor, black children. If you are born lucky and grow up surrounded by mirror images of your good fortune, it's easy to see yourself as a majority stakeholder in a world primed to do your bidding.

Last week, I walked down to the basement of my home to dig up class pictures from my elementary-school days. I haven't looked at those faces in 20 years, I'll bet, but I could summon the names of just about every child in them, and the complicated memories that tag along.

There we are, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on risers in the basement of West Elementary School, hands to our sides, faces wide. In each picture, half of the class is black. Those black faces, as surely as the color of my eyes and the gaps between my two front teeth, are evidence of my roots. At the same time, they telegraph the lifelong struggle of my father, who for so long saw their existence in my life as a failure in his.

I grew up in Ashtabula, a working-class town of 20,000 people an hour east of Cleveland. Mom stayed home with us in the early years. Dad worked for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company on Lake Erie's shore. His job made him big and strong and often angry for reasons we didn't understand. He worked in maintenance. Until I was 10, I thought that meant he was a custodian, when in reality he held one of the most skilled jobs at the plant. We were raised to understand that our father went to work so that he could take care of us. Our curiosity ended there.

We lived in a rental house on U.S. Route 20, on the integrated side of town. The West End, we called it. The house is still there, and has been boarded up for years. Our street was all white, but the short walk to school delivered me to classrooms evenly divided between white and black kids. In second grade, we had eight black kids, seven white. By fourth grade, the numbers jumped to 15 each. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Norton, was black. This was a big deal in my neighborhood. My mother often mentioned that Mrs. Norton had a lot of class, but she said this only to her girlfriends. Never at the dinner table.

I grew up surrounded by children who didn't look like me, and my only problem with that, aside from the constant tension with my father, was that I wanted to be them. The girls were my confidants, my touchstones. We played with each other's hair and swapped barrettes and ribbons like boys trading baseball cards. I loved their music, from the Motown on their kitchen radios to the gospel songs in their churches, where worshippers praised God like they knew him, instead of sitting ramrod-straight week after week waiting to make his acquaintance.

I loved their mothers, too. Ours was not an "I love you" kind of home, and I melted in the arms of these women who called me "child" and "honey" and always ordered me to sit at their tables for after-school snacks. Surely they noticed that their children were never invited to my home, but I never felt they held that against me.

My father had no idea that I visited my black friends' churches or stepped foot in their homes. I don't remember my mother ever saying we were keeping our secrets. The conspiracy was implicit; the necessity understood.

Here begins the long list of excuses I've made for my father in my head all of my adult life.

He grew up on a farm in Northeast Ohio, surrounded by other white, rural folk, many of them family. By his lights, the high point of his life was his senior year in high school, when the local newspaper heralded him as one of the best point guards in the state. I have his scrapbook from that year. It's full of yellowed newsprint and black-and-white glossy photos starring a skinny hotshot with sweaty red hair from Nowhere, Ohio. I have his collection of felt varsity letters, too. Nearly 60 years old, and in pristine condition.

My father had a chance to go to college on a basketball scholarship. I learned this only after his death, when my sisters found the letter from the university's basketball coach. He never mailed in the appointment card, never used the bus ticket. Instead, Mom became pregnant with me, and Dad got a marriage license and a union card the same year. By the time he was banging his fist on the dinner table in 1963, he was still four years from 30 and the father of four. Everywhere he looked, he saw his missed opportunities blooming in someone else's life.

When I started junior high school in 1969, my father and I were arguing all the time, sometimes about boys, occasionally about hemlines, but usually about race. He was full of contradictions. He liked a black guy at work, but that's because he didn't "act black." He loved The Supremes until I played them constantly, at which point he set a limit on how many black artists' records I could buy with my babysitting money. One a month, tops. He smashed my 45 of Aretha's "Respect" into a pile of pieces when I violated the rule.

The timing of his attempt to rein me in couldn't have been worse, because everything was changing at school. Within days of my seventh-grade year, the kids who had come from the all-white elementary school on the other side of town took note of my companions at the lunch table and started calling me a n- lover. The kids from the mostly black elementary school badgered my friends for hanging out with the white girl. The same mothers who used to pull me to their bosoms now acted like they didn't see me in the hallways and at Friday-night games, and nodded terse hellos to my parents.

My father saw a glimmer of hope in my feelings of abandonment. So much for friendship. Blood's thicker than water. Guess you're learning that God made us different for a reason.

Courtesy of Connie Schultz

I had spent most of my childhood identifying with children who did not look like me, and in a fit of pubescent angst, decided it was time to change that. A week before school pictures, I talked a neighbor lady into cutting my long hair and giving me a white girl's Afro with a Toni perm.

My mother collapsed on the sofa and fanned her face with her apron. My father refused to be seen in public with me. When he found out I had a crush on a black boy, he grounded me for weeks. I bought tubes of QT and worked on my tan.

My father and I were at war.

By the time I was a senior in high school, in the fall of '74, my dad had finally managed to save enough money to buy a house on the white side of town. For the first time, I had my own room, and he took me to Sears to buy a bedroom set. A peace offering, but détente was temporary. I left for college and joined the school newspaper. I was back at it, this time with an audience. After a disastrous sophomore summer home, he ordered me to live elsewhere, and I happily complied.

If the story ended there, at the gulf of our divisions, I would feel no hope now in these troubled times. I would look at those class pictures from my childhood and see a failed experiment in good intentions. I'd have to tell myself that some white people, white people like my father, are just unreachable.

For years, I wondered: How good is a daughter's liberation if her father only sees it as his failure? Where's the victory in that? Maybe it's enough for those who don't care what their father thinks, but I always did. I didn't want his approval. I wanted his agreement that he'd been wrong all along about black people. More to the point, I wanted him to admit he'd been wrong about me.

I wish I could say I stayed true to my roots in a rocket-straight trajectory from that first-grade picture to today. I raised my two children in diverse school systems, deliberately so, but after they graduated from high school I just as deliberately spent eight years in an all-white suburb on Cleveland's west side. I didn't move there because everyone looked like me-I had married then-U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown, and we had to live in his congressional district-but I should have known that a lifetime of something else would render me a hypocrite under the circumstances. If I've learned anything about myself in the last few years, it's that somewhere inside me resides a five-year-old capable of delivering withering criticism. A child remembers, always.

Last year we moved into the city of Cleveland, where I've worked as a journalist for more than 30 years. I can't run to the drugstore or fetch a loaf of bread without crossing paths with faces that remind me of what I came from-of who I came from, I should say. Some suburban acquaintances have questioned our move with various versions of the same indictment: What were you thinking? Always, I am able to answer: Home. I was thinking of home.

My father died in 2006. He lived seven years longer than my mother. She never got in the middle of our fights about race, but it was her short illness and death, at 62, that helped us find our way to a fragile middle.

The turning point arrived without warning in a hospital waiting room.

It was late August 1999. My mom was weeks from dying. Dad and I were a tag team of concern. We spent our days sitting in offices and waiting rooms, sometimes with Mom, sometimes without her. Over and over, my father would whisper to me, "This should be happening to me. I should be the one who is dying."

On this particular morning, Dad and I sat wedged together in a packed room, our backs against a wall. We were waiting for Mom, again.

To get to this place, this moment, we had walked behind the black orderly who pushed Mom's wheelchair down the hall. We had thanked the black receptionist who directed us where to sit. We had just nodded hello to the black resident who always made my mother smile.

My father leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

"God," he said, "they're everywhere now."

I clenched the armrests and tried to control my breathing as I turned to look at him. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes. For the first time ever, he reached for my hand.

We started there.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Connie Schultz is a nationally syndicated columnist and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

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How to find the fragile middle in a time of racial tension My earliest memories of my father's racism are rooted in the family dinners of my childhood. Dad sat to my left, always. My mother sat across from me, with my little brother seated to her right.

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i believe that we are born with prejudice we judge others due to the group, religion and or race.

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All people have prejudices, but learning more about them could help keep them in check. Crowd image via www.shutterstock.com.

Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere are entrenched in networks of neurons within our brains.

Social motivations, such as the desire to be a member of a group or to compete with others, are among the most basic human drives. In fact, our brains are able to assess "in-group" (us) and "out-group" (them) membership within a fraction of a second. This ability, once necessary for our survival, has largely become a detriment to society.

Understanding the neural network controlling these impulses, and those that temper them, may shed light on how to resolve social injustices that plague our world.

Daniela Hartmann, CC BY-NC-SA

Prejudice in the brain

In social psychology, prejudice is defined as an attitude toward a person on the basis of his or her group membership. Prejudice evolved in humans because at one time it helped us avoid real danger. At its core, prejudice is simply an association of a sensory cue (e.g., a snake in the grass, the growling of a wolf) to an innate behavioral response (e.g., fight-and-flight). In dangerous situations time is of the essence, and so human beings adapted mechanisms to respond quickly to visual cues that our brains deem dangerous without our conscious awareness. The rub in all of this is that our brains have inherited the tendency to erroneously deem something dangerous when it is in fact benign. It is safer to make false-positive assumptions (avoid something that was good), than to make false-negative assumptions (not avoid something that was bad).

The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping, David M. Amodio

Neuroscience has begun to tease out the neural underpinnings of prejudice in the human brain. We now know that prejudiced behavior is controlled through a complex neural pathway consisting of cortical and sub-cortical regions.

A brain structure called the amygdala is the seat of classical fear conditioning and emotion in the brain. Psychological research has consistently supported the role of fear in prejudiced behavior. For this reason, the vast majority of brain research on this topic has focused on the amygdala and the cortical regions that influence it.

Focus on the amygdala

In one study by Jaclyn Ronquillo and her colleagues, eleven young, white males underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while being shown photographs of faces with varied skin tones. When they viewed black faces, it resulted in greater amygdala activity than when they viewed white faces. Amygdala activation was equal for light and dark black faces, but dark-skinned white people had greater activation than those with lighter skin tone. The authors concluded that Afrocentric features drove an unconscious fear response in white participants.

The effect of skin tone on race-related amygdala activity: an fMRI investigation, Ronquillo (2007), Author provided

More recent imaging research has supported the intractable nature of prejudice in the human psyche. Chad Forbes and colleagues found that even self-reported non-prejudiced subjects could be prejudiced in some situations. White study subjects had increased amygdala activation while viewing images of black faces when they were listening to violent, misogynistic rap music, but not when listening to death metal or no music. Interestingly, they found that a region of the frontal cortex - an area of the brain expected to tamp down amygdala activation - was also activated.

The researchers speculated that the music reinforced a negative stereotype about black subjects, creating a situation in which the white subjects were not able to temper their prejudiced emotions. In fact, the authors speculated that the frontal cortices - generally thought of as areas of "higher" brain function - were instead recruited to help justify the feelings of prejudice felt by the participants listening to rap music.

Other research has shown that the amygdala response to out-group faces is not strictly bound to characteristics such as race. The amygdala responds to any out-group category, depending on whatever someone deems is salient information: your sports team affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, where you go to school, and so on.

Brains can control bias too

The Forbes et al study highlights that our ability to control reactionary implicit bias is dependent on the frontal cortices of the brain. A particularly important region of the cortex is the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).

The mPFC is the seat of empathy in the brain. It forms impressions about other people and helps us consider other perspectives. A lack of mPFC activity is associated with prejudice marked by dehumanization and objectification of others. For example, it is known that mPFC activation increases when we view a person of high esteem or prestige - for example, firefighters or astronauts - but not when we view someone marked with disregard or disgust, such as a drug addict or homeless person. Men with highly sexist attitudes have less mPFC activity when viewing sexual images of female bodies. These men also believed sexualized women have "less control over their own lives."

Taken together, it seems that though the frontal cortices are able to reduce our innate prejudices about certain people, they are greatly influenced by context. In other words, our desire to not be prejudiced may sometimes get trumped by exposure to media supporting stereotypical portrayals of certain groups. Moving forward, it is essential to take into account not only the neural architecture of prejudice, but also the context in which we humans live.

Babies image via www.shutterstock.com.

Current questions being addressed in this field of research include whether or not amygdala activation in response to those of other races is something we're born doing or a learned phenomenon. So far, research suggests that amygdala activity in response to out-group members is not innate, and develops later in adolescence. Also, studies support the notion that childhood exposure to diversity can reduce the salience of race in adulthood.

In today's world people are more connected than ever - from social media to Skype, to the never-ending news cycle - people are exposed to increasing diversity. Due to these advances, we as a global community are also faced with the knowledge that prejudice-based discrimination and violence still exist. It's become a human imperative to transcend divisive impulses which no longer serve our survival. Neuroscience has started to educate us about innate human drives. It's now up to all of us how to use this information.

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Humans are wired for prejudice but that doesn't have to be the end of the story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere are entrenched in networks of neurons within our brains.

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I believe that we are born with this as human nature, since we aren't perfect beings and we judge others for not being as we would like them to behave, be, or even look. I believe we have this trait to beware around different people, similar to how we are cautious by nature when we feel we are in dangerous environments, such as dark woods, a lonely street, or creaky sounds.

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Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren't comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.

In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.

People who are prejudiced feel a much stronger need to make quick and firm judgments and decisions in order to reduce ambiguity. "Of course, everyone has to make decisions, but some people really hate uncertainty and therefore quickly rely on the most obvious information, often the first information they come across, to reduce it" Roets says. That's also why they favor authorities and social norms which make it easier to make decisions. Then, once they've made up their mind, they stick to it. "If you provide information that contradicts their decision, they just ignore it."

Roets argues that this way of thinking is linked to people's need to categorize the world, often unconsciously. "When we meet someone, we immediately see that person as being male or female, young or old, black or white, without really being aware of this categorization," he says. "Social categories are useful to reduce complexity, but the problem is that we also assign some properties to these categories. This can lead to prejudice and stereotyping."

People who need to make quick judgments will judge a new person based on what they already believe about their category. "The easiest and fastest way to judge is to say, for example, ok, this person is a black man. If you just use your ideas about what black men are generally like, that's an easy way to have an opinion of that person," Roets says. "You say, 'he's part of this group, so he's probably like this.'"

It's virtually impossible to change the basic way that people think. Now for the good news: It's possible to actually also use this way of thinking to reduce people's prejudice. If people who need quick answers meet people from other groups and like them personally, they are likely to use this positive experience to form their views of the whole group. "This is very much about salient positive information taking away the aversion, anxiety, and fear of the unknown," Roets says.

Roets's conclusions suggest that the fundamental source of prejudice is not ideology, but rather a basic human need and way of thinking. "It really makes us think differently about how people become prejudiced or why people are prejudiced," Roets says. "To reduce prejudice, we first have to acknowledge that it often satisfies some basic need to have quick answers and stable knowledge people rely on to make sense of the world."

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Research States That Prejudice Comes From a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking

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Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren't comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.

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I believe that prejudice is innate in all humans because it is a factor in our survival rate. Humans tend to stick with familiarity in their surroundings in order to survive. We tend to think using probability and prediction, familiar surroundings make it easier for humans to predict the future, thus being afraid of "differences".

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I think that the we are born with prejudice of human kind. For example, now this days, the sexual contant, like the Kavanaugh's alligation that he sexually raped this girl in the 1980's.Also Trump was talking sexual contant in the bus. 

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I think that the we are born with prejudice of human kind. For example, now this days, the sexual contant, like the Kavanaugh's alligation that he sexually raped this girl in the 1980's.Also Trump was talking sexual contant in the bus. 

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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/kavanaugh-s-tv-interview-was-extraordinary-so-was-platform-he-n912836
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.3b82187c8930