This type of behavior can stick with someone for his or her entire life. Children are not born with prejudices. Children learn prejudices through example, most often from their family. If parents taught children tolerance from an early age, people would have greater respect for the differences found in society today. Ignorance, there is not a better synonym for prejudice than that of ignorance.
Biases are simply opinions about a generalized subject based off of a limited amount of information.
People letting only a little bit of information about something affect their entire judgment on the subject is just plain ignorance. If someone only learned arithmetic and thought they knew all they needed to know about math, society would tell them they were stupid. Well, why doesn t this work with differences amongst people. If someone makes a judgment about a race, religion or group of people based off of the knowledge of only a few people in that group, they are being ignorant. This type of assumption is known as generalizing and it is very much based in a lack of education in the diversity of cultures.