Discrimination: forms, causes, and social impacts

Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is divided into four parts. They are:

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

Six Ways to Make People Like You

How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

How to Change People without Giving Offense or Causing Resentment.

In each section, there are subsections describing certain situations. For example, Part 4. How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment contains these ideas:

When you must find fault, begin the discussion with praise and honest appreciation.

If you must criticize, try to call attention to people's mistakes indirectly.

Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing theirs.

Since no one likes to take orders, ask questions or request suggestions instead of giving orders.

Remember to let the other person save face.

To spur people on to success, remember to praise even the slightest improvement.

Make faults or problems seem easy to correct.

Try to make the other person happy about doing the thing you want or suggest.

I believe people should read this book because it teaches its readers how to interact more effectively with others. It helps readers learn how to offer constructive criticism without offending the other person - whether that person is a spouse, a lover, a co-worker, a friend or a subordinate. People interested in improving their interpersonal skills and in being seen by others as someone they would want to spend time with should read this book. People who are not good communicators should read this book. People who tend to say the wrong things at the wrong time can help correct these mistakes by reading this book.

A learned a number of things about myself by reading this book. Mainly what I learned was the things I was doing wrong in my interpersonal interactions both at home and at work. For example, I tended to criticize with little regard for others' feelings. I discovered that I criticized too often and praised too infrequently - and that this mistake applied to loved ones as well as acquaintances. I learned that I tended to monopolize discussions, and that I was far more interested in talking about myself than I was about learned from, and about, other people. I learned how to disagree without deliberately causing offense. For example, I learned not to say, "you're wrong." I have learned to say instead, "I feel a bit differently about this issue." I also learned to ask people for their ideas about how problems are going to be corrected, rather than telling them what they need to do. As Dale Carnegie suggested, I found that by asking for ideas that I was able to steer a discussion in a particular direction and allow the other person to believe they had arrived at the solution themselves.