India, July 9 -- It's a fact that most of us are prejudiced or have an opinion on something before actually knowing the facts. One of the earliest psychological explanations of prejudice described it as: "an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalisation towards a group as a whole or towards an individual because they are a member of that group."
The first thing that this explanation tells us is that prejudice is not something logical or based, but rather on a series of assumptions, half-truths, and guesses. Secondly, it tells us that prejudice is based on generalisation - on a whole host of characteristics and qualities that we assume a person has, based purely on the fact that he or she is a member of a particular group.
We oft...