Why On Earth Do We Feel Threatened By Appearance? It is present everywhere. Humans feel intimidated by the people around them. We look at the body type, body language, fashion styles of others and silently envy these people. We then form our opinions of them off of their habits. This is a form of prejudice, and most of the time we are fatally wrong in our assumptions.
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Just think of your own life. We see groups of people that are different than us, and automatically feel a bit intimidated because we don't completely understand them. Especially if those people are giving off a certain look. If you see someone who dresses differently and gives a sort of 'scary' vibe, you quickly feel threatened and form prejudices about them before you even get to know them. Just the same, if you see someone who you think is better looking than you, you feel jealous and threatened, and again form stereotypical prejudices about that person. But you don't really know what that person is like. You just feel intimidated by someone who is different than you, and form judgments about them to make yourself feel better.
Stereotypes of people also have a lot to do with it. There are so many stereotypes that we grow up with or hear, and they really affect our perspective of things. In fact, we become so used to these stereotypes that we just accept them as facts. As a result, we just automatically label certain people with a certain stereotype, and become prejudice. For example, a typical stereotype of black people is that they are associated with crime. So when a white person sees a group of black people, they automatically feel threatened just by the mere color of their skin. This is because of the white person's prejudice beliefs. And they don't even stop to question why in the world they feel threatened by a group of people just based on their looks; it's just a natural reaction. But if that person had stopped and wondered where the logic is in just determining someone's character based on the way they look, maybe they would see that prejudices and stereotypes really don't make much sense. |