In AP Psychology, prejudice is a negative attitude or feeling toward a person based on their membership in a group, formed before (and often despite) actual experience. It is the affective (emotional) piece of the trio you must keep straight on the exam: stereotype (thought), prejudice (feeling), discrimination (action).
Prejudice is a prejudgment. It's a negative attitude toward someone based purely on the group they belong to, not on anything they've actually done. Notice the word attitude. Prejudice lives in your head and your gut, which is exactly what separates it from discrimination (the behavior) and stereotypes (the beliefs).
Where does it come from? AP Psych gives you two big sources. First, prejudice is learned. From a social-learning perspective, kids pick up prejudiced attitudes by watching parents, peers, and media models, the same observational learning process you study in Unit 3. Second, prejudice grows out of normal cognition gone lazy. Your brain builds schemas to sort the world into categories, and when a schema about a group of people hardens into an automatic negative feeling, you get prejudice. That's why someone can hold prejudiced attitudes without ever consciously choosing them.
Prejudice anchors the Bias, Prejudice, and Discrimination material in Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality (the 9.5 study guide covers the full topic). But it earns its spot on this page because it pulls in concepts from across the course. The schema-building Piaget describes (AP Psych Revised 3.4.A) explains how group categories form in the first place, and the social and cognitive factors in learning explain how prejudiced attitudes get transmitted from models to observers. On the exam, prejudice is one of the most reliable 'precise vocabulary' traps. Multiple-choice questions love to hand you a scenario and make you decide whether it describes a stereotype, prejudice, or discrimination. If you can't split those three cleanly, you'll miss easy points.
Keep studying AP Psychology Unit 9
Discrimination (Unit 4)
Discrimination is prejudice put into action. A hiring manager can feel prejudice toward a group and never act on it; the moment they reject a qualified applicant because of that feeling, it becomes discrimination. The exam tests whether you can spot which side of the attitude/behavior line a scenario falls on.
Stereotype (Unit 4)
A stereotype is the cognitive ingredient, the generalized belief about a group. Prejudice is what happens when that belief comes with an emotional charge. Think of it as a recipe. Stereotype supplies the thought, prejudice adds the feeling, discrimination serves the behavior.
Social Learning of Attitudes (Unit 3)
Nobody is born prejudiced. Through observational learning, children imitate the attitudes modeled by parents, peers, and media. This is why a question asking where prejudice comes from often points you back to the social-learning concepts from Unit 3 rather than anything in social psych.
Schemas and Assimilation (Unit 3)
Piaget's schemas explain prejudice's staying power. Once you have a schema about a group, you tend to assimilate new information into it instead of accommodating the schema to fit reality. Pair that with confirmation bias and you get an attitude that resists contradictory evidence.
Prejudice shows up mostly in multiple choice, and the questions cluster around three jobs. First, pure definition. A stem describes 'a preference that inhibits impartial judgment' or a negative feeling toward a group, and you pick prejudice over stereotype or discrimination. Second, origins. Questions ask what explains prejudice from a social-learning perspective, and the answer hinges on observing and imitating models. Third, reduction. Expect scenarios about improving relations between two antagonistic groups, where the strong answers involve cooperative contact and working toward shared goals rather than just putting groups in the same room. Classic demonstrations like Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise also appear as research scenarios testing whether you understand how quickly group-based prejudice and discrimination can be created. No released FRQ has used the term verbatim, but a research summary about intergroup attitudes is exactly the kind of source the AAQ and EBQ free-response formats pull from, so be ready to apply the concept to data, not just define it.
Prejudice is the attitude; discrimination is the behavior. You can be prejudiced without discriminating (feeling dislike but treating everyone fairly), and you can discriminate without personal prejudice (enforcing a biased policy you don't agree with). On the exam, watch the verbs. If the person in the scenario feels, believes, or assumes, that's prejudice. If they refuse, exclude, or treat differently, that's discrimination.
Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a person based on their group membership, formed before or without real experience with that person.
Keep the trio straight: stereotype is the belief (cognitive), prejudice is the feeling (affective), and discrimination is the behavior.
From a social-learning perspective, prejudice is learned by observing and imitating models like parents, peers, and media.
Prejudice persists because schemas and confirmation bias make people assimilate new information into existing group beliefs instead of updating them.
Effective prejudice reduction requires cooperative contact between groups working toward shared goals, not just exposure to each other.
Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise showed how fast arbitrary group divisions can produce real prejudice and discrimination, even in children.
Prejudice is a negative attitude or feeling toward a person based on their membership in a group, not on their individual actions. It's the affective component in the stereotype-prejudice-discrimination trio covered in Unit 4.
No. Prejudice is the internal attitude or feeling, while discrimination is the outward behavior. Someone can hold prejudiced attitudes without ever acting on them, and the exam frequently tests this exact distinction.
A stereotype is a generalized belief about a group ('group X is lazy'), which is cognitive. Prejudice is the negative feeling attached to that belief, which is emotional. Stereotypes often fuel prejudice, but they're scored as separate vocabulary on the AP exam.
Elliott divided her third-grade class by eye color and told one group it was superior. Within a day, the 'superior' kids showed prejudice and discriminatory behavior toward the others, demonstrating how easily arbitrary group divisions create real bias.
Cooperative contact works best. When antagonistic groups must work together toward shared goals that neither can reach alone, hostility drops. Simple exposure without cooperation usually isn't enough, and AP questions about interventions reward the cooperation answer.