I just watched "Pride and Prejudice", Jane Austen's greatest work, which I read many times many years ago, maybe for the fourth or fifth time. Although I know almost all of Elizabeth's and Mr. Darcy's lines by heart... Despite their long-lasting rudeness to each other, their mutual misunderstandings, their accusations against each other, they love each other and get engaged, but their prejudices do not end...

"Nothing is really good or bad, it all depends on the way you think," says Shakespare. The easiest and simplest of the phenomena that make up our thoughts is labeling or our prejudices. We all have these prejudices. We have them, but sometimes we go beyond that and become prisoners of our prejudices. We are trapped in the distant cities of fairy tales of our own invention. We have tides that are in between our doubts, or our sapphire blue molds eat us up...

What is this prejudice? I went through the book I read last year, Individual and Behavior, for you;

According to Allport, "Prejudice is antipathy based on an erroneous and inflexible generalization. It is something that is felt or expressed. It is directed against a group or an individual because he or she is a member of that group. Or it is a set of beliefs and negative expectations about an individual or an object."

Stereotypes simplify the unknown by categorizing it and produce prejudice as a side effect. This is because stereotypes are "overgeneralization". Prejudice does not always transform from an attitude into behavior.

According to psychoanalysts, prejudice is related to the brutal childhood experiences of children raised in authoritarian families. In fact, they argue that prejudice in childhood is instinctively a normal developmental phenomenon. But the key issue is how to reduce these prejudices after childhood.

According to modern social psychology, "This feeling, which arises from the concerns of "belonging" and "being accepted" to a group, is a state of attribution directed at those who are different from oneself and who are outside the world that one knows and recognizes."

Lipmann, on the other hand, defines prejudice as "a picture in the mind" or "a mental schema". In other words, in terms of this approach, we accumulate the events and people we encounter since childhood, label them in our minds with each other and with what they make us feel, and when we encounter them in our later life, we call them as an idea, information, generalize, and make expectations. While this may seem like an advantage in childhood, in later years it serves to feed our prejudices. These stereotypes turn into illogical and unfair characterizations.

In a village far away, there was a pregnant woman. Her husband died before her child was born. One day she found a wounded ferret on the mountain and brought it home. Although it was not a domestic animal, it was very docile and would not leave her side for a moment.

A few months later the child was born. Since the woman lived alone, she did everything herself.

One day she had to leave the house for a short time, leaving the baby and the ferret alone.

A few minutes later she returned home and found the ferret's mouth covered in blood. She went crazy and attacked the ferret and killed it on the spot.

Just then she heard the baby crying from inside. She rushed into the room...

First she saw the cradle in the room and the baby in the cradle...

And then the dismembered snake right next to the baby.

Mukaddes Pekin Başdil

Researcher-Author

Source: Denizli Haber