Motives That Drive People Towards Discrimination

Why do people discriminate against others?

What is the motive? What do they hope to gain?

If we understand the answers to those questions, it can help us stop discriminating against others, and enable us to understand and help those who discriminate against us, people discriminate against others for many different reasons when people don’t understand they would rather judge there are a lot of reason why we discriminate as:

Insecurity

Subconsciously, we may be insecure and feel a need to tear others down as a way of raising ourselves up. We are all vulnerable to feelings of inferiority, insecurity and inadequacy.

Just let someone point out an unflattering physical feature, or deficiency, and the flush of embarrassment or anger that follows is a sure-fire sign of our vulnerability to nsecurities. In situations such as these, we usually either retreat or attack, and discrimination is a tool we use to make ourselves more comfortable.

Ignorance

Ignorance is that when someone doesn’t feel a person is “normal” they treat them differently then they would treat a “normal” person which is called fear of difference through ignorance included the fact that we are created in the image of God, He intends us to experience unity in the midst of diversity so we should accept and respect others differences.

If we don’t know these things, were never taught these things, or the opposite, we may be more vulnerable to the temptations brought on by insecurity. People want to be cruel and show they are stronger, so in this situations we use discrimination as a defense method to feel stronger through cruelty of this act.

Weakness

We may have grown up in a culture of discrimination. Our family, our school, our town/city may have had discrimination as a value, and though we may have known or sensed that it was wrong, we did not have the personal strength to stand against it. Peer pressure is a so powerful thing!

Fear

Discrimination seems mainly driven by fear which once again ties into its evolutionary and adaptive roots. Despite it being an irrational fear, since the chances are slim, the FBI further reports that many Americans are afraid that someone in their family will become a victim of terrorism

Favoritism

Another cause of discrimination, that is more likely to occur when that fear is not immediately present. Based on study of psychologist Tony Greenwald at University of Washington, “discrimination is not caused by an intention to harm people who are different. Instead it comes from the need to help people who are similar. We can produce discrimination without having any intent to discriminate or any dislike for those who end up being disadvantaged by our behavior”

Though we found that most researchers defined discrimination as based on negative attitudes and hostility, only rarely treating favoritism as a component of discrimination as Greenwald did

The results of this study seemed to point towards the idea that most discrimination actually occurs due to favoritism and does not involve as much hostility as most people assume it does. Yet even with this study there is no doubt that discrimination unfortunately still does occur, even if violence is not always the outcome.