Stop Bigotry is an ongoing campaign to raise awareness about the impact of everyday bigotry, particularly bias and discrimination against people of color. This campaign seeks to address bias and discrimination through education, advocacy and organizing. It calls on all Americans to join together in a common commitment to fight prejudice and bigotry in our daily lives, our communities and our country.

Bias and bigotry are part of life, but too often they go unchallenged. They are not just insidious, they can be destructive to one’s physical health and mental well-being. People on the receiving end of day-to-day discrimination report feeling a constant sense of hypervigilance that can lead to chronic stress. Many also feel that their own values, beliefs and perceived strengths are under attack.

Often, bias is most blatant in groups like churches, schools, neighborhoods, work and sports teams. In those settings, people may be less likely to challenge one another’s assumptions because of feelings of familiarity or fear of losing respect for friends and colleagues. This can result in a vicious circle where people keep quiet about hurtful remarks and behavior.

Other times, bigotry is more subtle. For example, a female manager is frequently referred to as the “office mom,” while male managers are not. This form of sexism reinforces stereotypes about women as homemakers and caretakers. Native Americans report being accused of being too “ethnic,” and gay students have reported being called “too feminine” or “too gay.”

Rather than ignore these microaggressions, individuals should take action to prevent them from happening in the first place. People can educate themselves about how to respond to bigotry, and they should encourage their friends to do the same. They can make it clear that their workplaces, clubs, sports leagues and other groups will not tolerate bigotry. They can also encourage the use of alternate humor, and they can provide examples of the negative impacts of bias on a person’s self-esteem and self-worth.

If they encounter an incident of bigotry, people should consider two things: who has power over the offender and what policies might support a complaint. If a person has leverage, they should speak up, starting with the offender and moving up the chain of command.

People should not be afraid to hold politicians, corporations and hate groups accountable for fanning flames of bias and bigotry. They should demand that their elected representatives take a stand against racist and anti-Muslim comments. They should lobby to ensure that government agencies have enough resources and training to combat bigotry, and they should call on their local community leaders to do the same. They should also speak out against the growing number of bigoted attacks against immigrants and refugees. They should insist that their families, neighbors and co-workers become involved in educating their communities about the negative effects of bigotry and racism. They should help to organize events where people can discuss their experiences and come together as a community to fight prejudice and bigotry.

Hate is widely recognized as a destructive and negative emotion that can lead to a variety of harmful behavior. Hate is also one of the most common emotions and it occurs across a wide range of topics, from discrimination and hate speech to terrorism and hate crime. However, in spite of its pervasiveness and serious consequences, it is still a very under-researched topic, especially within psychology. Research in a number of disciplines such as sociology, political science and communication studies, has been providing interesting new empirical data on hate and it is encouraging to see that this subject is also starting to attract more interest from researchers in the field of psychology.

According to several interviewees, hate speech is especially hard to deal with if it is directed at one’s personal life. This is because it seems to amplify self-doubts, especially when accumulated over a period of time (Twitterstorm). Women interviewed also reported that hate speech was hard to handle at the beginning of their careers as they often feared for their lives.

For these reasons, many interviewees found it helpful to seek support from other women. This support was often from female friends who had experienced similar situations or conducted research on the matter. In addition, interviewees consulted with professionals to obtain advice and help.

Some of the strategies employed to combat hateful messages included deleting them and publicly confronting the perpetrators. Three interviewees also answered the comments they received in a bid to try and change their haters’ perspectives. In some cases, these responses were even successful.

Another important strategy was to try and prevent the perpetrators from accessing their personal information. This could be done by deactivating the notification feature on Twitter or blocking specific users. For a few of the interviewees, talking to the police was an option, but they did not find this approach particularly effective. This was mainly because they were afraid the police would downplay their experiences or not take the issue seriously.

In America, people are now more likely to hate those from the opposing party than they are to love them. This increase in political sectarianism has disrupting implications for the country’s politics. Behaviorally, it leads to more polarized views and the perception that opposing partisans are less competent, and may motivate people to engage in discriminatory behaviors such as paying an opposing partisan less than a copartisan for equivalent job performance or recommending that they be denied a scholarship. Researchers have suggested various interventions to mitigate this trend, including correcting misperceptions of the opposition, fostering cross-party interactions and reforming campaign finance and partisan gerrymandering.

When it comes to prejudice, the terms bias, discrimination and hatred are all closely linked and there is often a misunderstanding about what the differences are between these concepts. Generally speaking, discrimination refers to the unfair and negative treatment of people who belong to different groups (e.g., racial or ethnic, sexual orientation, age) while prejudice is the beliefs and judgments we hold about those groups.

Prejudice is a natural part of the human experience and is necessary for our ability to think about social groups. However, in a social context, we have the ability to make conscious decisions about how to respond to these situations. When we are exposed to new information, we can choose whether or not to change our existing categories and this is the basis of the prejudice-reduction process.

A number of approaches to tackling prejudice have been developed, and these tend to fall into three broad categories: awareness-raising; encouraging people to report discrimination or hate crimes; and anti-prejudice campaigns that focus on particular groups and settings (e.g., ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ – a campaign to tackle racism in football). A key challenge with any of these types of interventions is that they can run the risk of essentialising social group categories which may be counterproductive. For this reason it is important that any initiatives based on intergroup theories are evaluated with targeted audiences in pilot projects before being launched, and that feedback is sought and acted upon regularly.

Research has shown that prejudice has both individual and societal costs. At the individual level, prejudice leads to negative attitudes that can lead to isolation and depression and in some cases it can even cause health problems. For example, a recent study found that the anticipation of prejudice and discrimination can lead to a physiological stress response (see Thapar-Olmos, 2011). The impact of prejudice on society is more serious and in some cases can take the form of hate crimes or violence against members of specific groups.

Many people will want to be tolerant and free of prejudice, but the fact is that they may still hold implicit bias. These are the kinds of prejudice that can be changed by a range of laboratory-based interventions, such as the work done by Devine and colleagues (2012) who showed that an intensive, long-term programme could produce a lasting reduction in implicit bias. Genuine institutional and cultural change is undoubtedly much harder to achieve, and it is important to bear this in mind when designing, implementing and monitoring prejudice-reduction strategies. As with the oxygen mask on an airplane, it is important to put your own mask on first before helping the person next to you. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with prejudice. A good place to start is by understanding where prejudice comes from. This will help you to recognise it in yourself and others. It will also give you the tools you need to combat it.