A prejudiced adolescent would be rigid in his/her approach to a ________.

Concept: In educational and social psychology, prejudice is linked to cognitive rigidity — a fixed, inflexible way of thinking that resists adjustment even when a situation calls for a different strategy. This rigidity shows up most clearly in how a person approaches and works through a problem, since solving a problem requires flexibly switching strategies as new information appears.

Application: A prejudiced adolescent carries this fixed, all-or-nothing thinking style into everyday problem-solving: he/she tends to seize on one early, familiar solution and resist reconsidering it rather than adapting the strategy step by step. "Problem" is precisely the domain where this rigidity is documented — a problem is exactly the situation that demands strategy adjustment, and the prejudiced adolescent's rigidity shows up as resistance to making that adjustment.

Cross-check — contrasting the other options by what each term actually denotes:

• life style — an everyday habit or personal preference; a behavioural choice, not a cognitive-developmental trait, so it is not the object of the documented rigidity.

• concept — an abstract category or idea itself, formed through the cognitive process of concept-formation; reasoning about strategy adjustment in problem-solving is a distinct cognitive process from concept-formation.

• reality — the objective state of one's surroundings; rigidity here would indicate denial or distorted perception, a different clinical phenomenon, not the prejudice-rigidity link documented in this research.

Result: Hence, the only term describing the task/strategy domain where cognitive rigidity in prejudiced adolescents is the established finding is "problem".