Racial Stereotypes

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n Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he mentioned that people need somewhere to belong to, be it a group of similar gender, race or occupation. Due to distrust, conflicting interests arise between groups. Differentiating between in-groups and out-groups is an automatic reaction. While we have positive emotions towards our in-groups, we often have negative emotions towards the outgroup.(Roy et al, 2003).These negative emotions or thoughts cannot be eliminated. However, human can amazingly suppress them and express our thoughts in a neutral way without bias to the out-groups. (David, 2010) In David’s research on racial stereotypes using EEG, he found that when people are shown pictures of other races, they tend to have higher activity in their…show more content…
We get our emotions, including anger or disappointment, from the amygdala of the limbic system. Together with the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, inhibition towards aggression can be achieved. (Dale, 2013) In Raine’s study on brain activities of murderers and non-murderers, PET scans have shown that murderers have a less active prefrontal cortex. (Raine et al, 1997) Since the prefrontal cortex acts as a boundary to control anger within one’s mind, one with a weaker prefrontal cortex tends to express their dissatisfaction more easily through violence. Although a lot of environmental factors can affect the judgement of the brain, thus different ways to express anger, the above possible physical factors leading to violence cannot be ignored. To compensate to this abnormality, I believe it is important to educate people the right way to release anger. Even though some may suffer from brain abnormality, it is still down to their final decision on whether violence will be performed. One way to deal with the abnormality is by closely monitoring the emotions of past murderers in jail and conditioning them to express anger through other channels instead of violence, such as exercising. This way, their chance of choosing violence to express anger can possibly be reduced in the future. This is one of the ways that could bring us one step closer to world
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