Prejudices have been studied for several decades by social psychology. Today in this post we talk about how they affect the Coronavirus.
What are prejudices?
In 1954, Allport defined the prejudice as “an antipathy based on an inflexible and erroneous generalization, which may be felt or expressed and is directed toward a group as a whole or toward an individual because he is a member of the group.”
In the case of authors such as Eagly and Diekman (2005), they consider prejudice as an intrapsychic mechanism whose purpose is to maintain a status and a role in intergroup differences. From this perspective, prejudice can be considered as a strongly rooted opinion of a negative nature mainly against a person or a group.
Likewise, there are other elements that are implicit in the topic of prejudices and that go beyond this theme, that is, that in addition to the opinion or apathy that almost always corresponds to the cognitive component, they address others such as the affective and behavioral, typical of what is called attitudes.
Prejudice and the Coronavirus
In early December 2019, in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it was reported that a group of people were suffering from pneumonia symptoms, their cause being unknown. All these sick people only had in common that they worked at the Huanan South China Seafood Wholesale Market. This market is widely known for selling live exotic animals, most of which are bought for human consumption.
Although its origin was in China, soon the Coronavirus – COVID-19 spread to numerous countries, causing thousands of deaths in all of them, coming to be considered a pandemic. The fact that the Chinese were the first to know about this disease led to the citizens of that country being the first to suffer discrimination, blaming them for the origin of the pathology.
That is why the World Health Organization (WHO) had to warn about the tremendous seriousness of the stigmatization of the Chinese in the contagion of the Coronavirus. In doing so, it explained that many citizens hid the disease for fear of the prejudice they might suffer, which surely favored the multiplication of contagions. Precisely, attitudes of indifference towards the Chinese population have been the most evident form of the materialization of prejudice in many societies.
Prejudices, fears, and discriminations
So much so that in Ukraine, some residents of the country even attacked a minibus carrying travelers from China with stones, thus showing a clear example of discrimination towards these groups of people. Similarly, statistics also show that, in many parts of the world, sales of Chinese restaurants decreased by about 70% since the beginning of the outbreak.
But this discrimination and prejudice towards certain population groups is not recent, as the same thing happened in the past with the emergence of the so-called Spanish Flu. In this case, although it is pointed out that the origin of said pandemic took place in France, China, or even the United States, the Spanish population was the one that suffered the stigmatization because Spain did not censor the publication of the consequences of this flu in the country’s press.
Thus, it can be seen how, many times, opinions and even attitudes of a negative nature are generalized towards other groups that we consider different, which ends up constituting the clearest examples of prejudices and their materialization in daily life.
These and other elements of consideration will be presented in my new book COVID-19 Applied Social Psychology, Psychosocial Effects of Coronavirus, which will soon be available on the international market.