Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts ………
Prejudices and biases – they create such a vicious circle that unless you do a conscious effort of recognizing your actions and thoughts and breaking away from them, you consistently keep on cementing them and keep creating a world of your own expectations, responses and reinforcements.
My prejudice and biases, predisposes me to expect a particular response from someone I am interacting. Now we all know that majority of people will respond to the way they are treated. Since my treatment or approach to someone is already influenced by predisposed expectations from him/her, the response from that person would be most of times in line with my expectations – primarily because of my interpretation and also because the other person would not be bothered to correct my bias (be realistic .. who has time?). But the sad part is that this interpretation or response would do a positive reinforcement of my biased opinions which would nestle more deep within my mindset. And irony is anyone who would actually have time and inclination to clear me of my biases, – my intelligent mind will quickly label that person in the category of “Exception” and move ahead making no change to the prejudices deeply rooted in my mind. The complex network of predisposed notions, expectations, responses, habits and a instinct to cleanly label and categorize every experience/interaction in our life , never let us to break free of this vicious cycle!
“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow
Reflections 