Much of the attitude and personality a person has in life is developed at an early age. A child s view of other people in this world is almost completely in the hands of their parents for the first five years of their life. If a young child is exposed to intolerance or prejudice at an early age, they will be very likely to be influenced by that. 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.