Overcoming Prejudice and Discrimination: A Call for Action
In this essay, we talk about the “Prejudice and Discrimination Essay” topic. Prejudice and discrimination aren’t something new in modern cities. Prejudice and discrimination are everywhere such as racial and religious discrimination. However, it is quite a lot of people get prejudiced on the Chinese and get serious. You may ask what is prejudice? What is discrimination? Prejudice is a negative attitude and discrimination is based on prejudice, which is negative behaviour. And how come the Chinese will discriminate by others?
Because since the 1970s, the Chinese economic reform is presented by Deng Xiaoping. He started to implement a series of economic reforms and measures, it can be said as 'inward reform, open to the outside world”. At the same period, capitalism is also introduced into the market economy of China. In the past, China is a communist, peasant society, land and capital assets are jointly owned by the people, and under this system, people aren’t rich. After the reform, economic liberalism is used, Deng Xiaoping let Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen and Hainan Island be the 5 special economic zones, the purpose is to attract outsiders to invest on China, so that can let part of the residents get rich first. Of course, this is definitely a success, people who are living in China nowadays are getting much richer, and they have their own land and capital assets. Moreover, the China government try to promote civilization too, the media will make some advertisement about civilization such as be nice and giving a seat to the elderly, taxi drivers not refusing customers, get along well to make a peaceful society etc.
But, are this civilization, being rich on the correct railroad? Actually not, it’s really cruel. In reality, China's fine words dress ill deeds. Let parts of the residents become rich? No, they are not letting residents rich at all, is first let the bourgeoisie rich. Civilization? No one is taking action on it. Why? Because value is changed by money, this is a common social phenomenon in China. With low transparency, sensitive news or topic will be blocked, fall in people’s quality… In these few years, the Chinese become rich and they think money is universal, and they can use it for whatever they want. For example, they went to a western country or Japan, they will keep shouting, being impolite, and thinking that they have money that’s why can get special treatment, but this definitely is not. It’s not a problem not to integrate into local culture, but at least needs to be respected. And quite surprised some people in China may disguise hit by a car and cheat money or even there may have a real accident but none of the pedestrians would help. As we all know, plagiarizing intellectual property and technology is China’s strength, they ‘copy’ lots of ideas from others countries, especially the USA.
Hong Kong is also labelling the people from China. Hong Kong is part of China, why labelling will happen? The 5 special economic zones are near to Hong Kong, and with the free travel policy implemented in 2003, there are much more people from China coming and make parallel trading activities, increasing general prices as demand grows, this is labelled as ‘Parallel Traders’. The reason is they do not trust the product in the mainland(melamine milk powder), but the main problem is those ‘parallel traders’ had almost bought all of our daily supplies and are out of stock, the problem in Sheung Shui is most serious, people are complaining too, since the parallel traders always caused various nuisances, coming not for sightseeing but evade taxes. According to what has just been mentioned, traders make supplies that are out of stock, they are labelled as ‘Locust’ which destroys the crops it passes by, it has an implied meaning.
In addition, China’s middle-aged women are also labelled as ‘Chinese Dama’, they usually like buying gold, dancing and singing in squares, and making trouble out of nothing. This term brings a bit scornful tone. Although there are parts of some people of this country are not behaving well, it doesn’t mean all the people in the country are behaving in the same way. We can’t tar them with the same brush. We should try to look more objective.
Prejudice and discrimination on something are not as simple as we think, everything has a reason. The congenital factor of discrimination is prejudice and the acquired factor is a stereotype. If you are human, congratulations, you have prejudice and discrimination too, no one is excluded, all of us are affected by cognitive bias. So that we can explain why China will be discriminated against because of parts of bad behaviour people.
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, some are effects of information-processing rules that are mental shortcuts, called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Here are 4 types of cognitive biases related to this topic: belief bias, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and illusory correlation.
What are those biases mean? Belief bias is an effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion. Confirmation bias tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions. Fundamental attribution error is the concept that, in contrast to interpretations of their own behaviour, people tend to unduly emphasize the agent's internal characteristics, rather than external factors, in explaining other people's behaviour, this is described as 'the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are”. Illusory correlation is inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events. These biases are a primacy effect, it input of information through the 'first impression' on the subsequent perception of something. The first impression is the strongest, and the duration is long, it is more effective than the information obtained in the future. For example, if a student failed in every exam, although he did very well in other aspects, the teacher may still think he is a bad student. People will only see what they want to see, the first impression of China is negative, and people will prefer that China can’t turn their image to positive, they will also think that parts of the resident behave like this, the others may too because all of them come from the same nationality, in the long run it becomes stereotypes and changed to prejudice, the worse is discrimination.
Daniel Kahneman had mentioned that our cogitation is divided into two systems which are the automatic system(1) and the effortful system(2). System 1 is intuitive, and fast, no need to think and identify abnormalities and wrong things at a second. We usually use system 1 in daily life, however, it is easy to have errors, since we make decisions decisively, quickly and simplify complex problems, we just think what we see, finally leading to over-trusting a single causal relationship, this causes triggers affect, subjectivity, and prejudice will appear. System 2 is slow, logical, resourceful, and controls and monitors our behaviour, we will use it when we are calculating, and writing, this system is affecting our next decision, but this system may interfere by system 1.
The trigger effect refers to a person's understanding or impression of the matter will be affected by the information received previously, and linking up the information to be related, but actually, it’s not relevant at all. Moreover, as long as people get a message first, they will react faster to the same type of information. The trigger effect has the categories of semantic promotion, association promotion, and response promotion. For example, a father heard his daughter’s conversation with her friend, daughter said ‘I’m looking forward for tonight because I will meet a boy, he is a player with fantastic skills’, father feel so nervous and thought she will meet a nought boy, however that boy is just a player from a ballgame team. We can know, that similar misunderstandings often occur.
In fact, we cannot completely avoid prejudice and discrimination, because our brain is too clever, it will automatically help us to define things and establish heuristics, pareidolia. It’s hard to correct our illusions by willpower. The things that we can do is only jump out of the thinking trap, be multi-perspective thinking, and draw enough information from different aspects, and positions. Think about whether you have received any information before that has affected to make decisions and avoid too focusing on a single message. At last, the more important thing is don't blindly accept the others said, ask yourself more questions on why, how, and influences, this can reduce our prejudice and discrimination, the society will be more peaceful.
