Reverse prejudice

We have prejudice being defined as "An adverse judgement or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge of the facts." (Wiktionary). Ergo, thinking someone is a bad person and/or below you without knowing the person in question, based on socio-political-economical group he/she belongs to.

Here I want to examine something different. If this term has been coined previously I am not sure, but I am refering to it as reverse prejudice. That is, when you have an unanimously positive opinion about a person based based on socio-political-economical group he/she belongs to without knowing the person.

I know I have it. I consider many, many group of people inherently superior to me owing to their affiliations. Some examples:

• The academia.
• The police and the military.
• War veterans of any conflict.
• People with disabilities.
• Rape/abuse victims.
• People living in depression or psychological distress.
• People living in poverty.

I hold any person living or dead among these groups, among others, in very high esteem without knowing whether knowing that person deserves it or not. Is that a bad thing? Does anyone have the same feeling?

Support Taleworlds!

If that person does have a job that probably took a lot of work to reach, then yeah, I'm going to respect them for it because it's a clear indicator of who they are... which is also why I don't consider judging someone by their job or position to be prejudice, just application of past experience (though extreme cases can run into prejudice).

What I consider to be prejudice is when you associate two unrelated traits. For example, if you're Asian, then you're smart is a prejudice because being Asian and being smart are not directly linked. I may think that your culture has a higher focus on work ethic because that's what many Asian students have mentioned and shown, but I won't assume you're smart because of it.

The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.

Relative to some other things, perhaps. I think a prejudice isn't necessarily a problem. What would be a problem is maintaining that prejudice in the face of counter-evidence. It's fine to start out with a rather simplistic concept of a given group, but as you're exposed to a variety of its individual members, the rational thing is to incorporate new information and gain a more nuanced understanding. There are some groups I tend to give a greater benefit of the doubt than others, but I don't have an entirely positive feeling about any group*

^{not even serial killers}

. My worries about falling prey to cognitive biases cause me to specifically compensate for this sort of thing by looking for exceptions to generalizations about groups.

That's funny, I've heard people assert the inferiority and contemptuousness of any/all of the above groups way more often than I've heard approval. The same could be said of most groups of people. Which may be why prejudice is associated with negativity so closely that you had to specify positive bias in your title in the first place.

Aww, did I hurt your widdle fee-fees?

I can understand the idea of reverse prejudice, especially the OP's examples; those are all either positions of authority, or hardships people must struggle with. It really depends on the person. You can personally know and respect someone who works their ass off to get by in poverty yet still think little of poor people in general; likewise you may know one asshole who uses his autism to bully others into treating him with favor, yet do not think people with disabilities or disorders should automatically be treated worse for it.

Consider this: if the condition that inspires the reverse prejudice were to go away, would that suddenly change your opinion of the person? Would a guy who quits the police force be suddenly less worthy of respect? Would you assume a poor man who becomes middle class or somehow hits it rich be suddenly a jerk? If so, why? Any prejudice, positive or negative, needs to be justified at least in the eye of the one who holds it.

It's still a prejudice. Prejudice doesn't mean you hold a negative opinion on someone beforehand, it means you hold an opinion on someone beforehand. I mean, it's in the word.

The fact that prejudice commonly only refers to negative opinions can be attributed to the fact that nobody minds when the opposite happens.

Murrl LustFatM

You nailed it.

Enjoy the Inferno...

Are we talking genuine victims or the BAWWWWWWWW A GUY GROPED MY ASS AT A CLUB ONCE BAWWWWWWWW SYMPATHISE WITH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE kind?