Muslim asks for hugs after Paris terrorist attacks
Negative and even aggressive attitudes towards other groups of people or individuals are often in response to our constant prejudices. Prejudices often influence our perception of people; guide our judgments and our expectations. Judging constantly everything that is around us is a great problem that society has nowadays and has always had, since most people do not accept others who do not share their same values, religion, appearance, ideas, etc.
Everyone has prejudices, but one way to countering them is by using the mechanism of empathy because, as it is an affective response to other people, that makes you put in its place and somehow try to understand them better. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the state of the thoughts and feelings of others, and it is necessary to adopt a double attention focus, so that we can take into account our own mind and the other person’s mind.
PREJUDICES
According to Emile Bruneau, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), lack of empathy is precisely what fails when there are situations of hostility and rejection between groups, and for that reason proposes the concept of "empathy gap", or “empathy breach”.
Contrary to what is commonly assumed, the lack of empathy towards another person is not so much related to poor empathy or personality, but to the degree of identity with the group itself, whereby they are assigned higher characteristics and people tend to exaggerate the differences between them and the rest. Bruneau observed that in such cases the brain silences the empathic signal in order to avoid understanding and putting ourselves in the shoes of our "enemy." Thus, the more biased identification with the group itself, the less empathy towards the other.
A clear example of this is the situation of Muslims today, given that because of the many attacks that have been going on, most people feel prejudices towards them and society does not accept them, assuming that they are like terrorists. Therefore, we are going to put a video in which you can clearly see how a Muslim asks for empathy towards him
