We would be dead without Prejudice.

Prejudice. While almost everyone thinks that it is bad, few people think about why we do it. Is it down to personality? Is it because we enjoy it? Or is it some subconcious human thinking pattern?

Lets look deeper into this theory. What is prejudice? Dictionary.com gives us this definition. "an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason."

Why do humans do this? Why do we form these "unfavourable opinion's"? It actually goes back to the start of our very existence.

When the race of humans were young, we needed a method of staying alive. That method was, of course, the creation of tools. But theres another method, without which we would not be around. That's prejudice.

It may seem far-fetched, or even unethical to say that without prejudice humans would be dead, but its true. We know that there are plenty of Plants out there that would kill you should you ingest them (or their fruit, depending on the plant) and we know that sometimes it can take only a small dose for death to occur. So we humans needed a way to figure out what was poisonous and what wasn't. Our method was not exactly the smartest, but it got the job done.

The method was simple. Berries that lead to death where not to be touched again. We would see someone else eat a berry, then soon after drop dead, we put 1 and 1 together and got "Poisonous". After a while, I guess humans figured that a large portion of berries of a certain colour, are very likely to be poisonous. This is where Prejudice comes in.

We see that one of said berries is dangerous, and we extrapolate that, because if we didn't each meal would be a lucky draw really. We thought "Do not eat [colour] berries" (whatever that colour happened to be in that particular area of the world) and because we thought that, we managed to stay alive. The berries wouldn't kill us if we were smart enough to avoid them.

The same applies to modern life. If, for the first time, we see someone of a certain race for example, say a white man (random dice roll decided the race thank you), breaking through a door or some other destructive event, we would instantly link people with an easily identifiable measure (skin colour) as all sharing the same attribute. That is in no way different from the colour of a berry showing that is poisonous or not. Same theory, different application.

I guess what I'm saying is that Prejudice started out as a defense mechanism, but then quickly soured and became what it is in modern day.

I do realise that prejudice is an inductive fallacy, but its inbuilt, just like any cognitive bias humans face. The moral is that humans are built to be prejudiced. Without that, humans would be a thing of the post-judging past...

Aarandorf