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  • Essay / Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Societal Power...

    There are different speculations about why people are prejudiced. Psychologist John Dollard believes that people take out their frustration on a scapegoat, which in this case is a racial, ethnic or minority group. Another psychologist, Theodor Adorno, believed that prejudice comes from a person's personality. He did an experiment and concluded that people who were insecure and listened to their superiors named an authoritarian personality. From a sociological perspective, functionalists believe that prejudice is a result of the social environment. Conflict theorists believe that capitalists attempt to keep workers divided so that they can keep wages low. They do so out of fear of unemployment or a reserve workforce. They also encourage and manipulate racial and ethnic divisions. The division of labor between racial and ethnic groups is called a divided labor market. Symbolic interactionists believe that labels create selective perceptions, or allow us to see that and block others, and these labels cause