Stereotypes

We have heard them all. African Americans are lazy and incompetent workers. Hispanics are all drug-dealers. The Irish are heavy drinkers. These are all stereotypes. Stereotyping is a problem that refuses to go away. It recurs, across various contexts and discourses, as a divisive and troubling issue, and remains a central source of contention in the politics of representation. Many stereotypes exist: different ones towards racial groups, women, the elderly, the mentally ill, fat people, homosexuals, the physically handicapped, and individuals with AIDS, to name just a few. Stereotypes can have negative outcomes both for the individuals who are the target of prejudice and for society at large.

Stereotypes are a set of beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people. It was journalist Walter Lippman who first coined the term "stereotype" to refer to our beliefs about groups. He borrowed the term from the printing process in which a "stereotype" literally was a metal plate that made duplicate copies of a printed page. Lippman believed this term aptly describes how we continuously reproduce the "picture in our heads" that we have about a group whenever we encounter members of that group. In other words, Lippman recognized the human tendencies to categorize people into groups, and then to see individual members as a reflection of that group, rather than as the unique person they are.(Pickering, p.16-21)

Although stereotypes may be products of individual cognitive processes, they also maybe consensually shared within a society. Collectively held stereotypes may be especially pernicious as they are often widespread in a society, As an example of this important distinction between individual and collective stereotypes, suppose you are a member of Group X who has been denied employment because the employer assumes that your group is intellectually inferior to the dominant group. While this world undoubtedly be a frustrating experience for one, one may easily be able to find employment elsewhere. However, if this belief that your group is intellectually inferior is widely accepted within a society, finding employment may prove to be challenging. Thus, it is the widespread acceptance of particular stereotypic beliefs about a social group, rather than an individual's idiosyncratic beliefs about the group, that is more problematic.(Hecht, p.40-41)

Stereotypes can be both positive ("Asians are the model minority") and negative ones ("the Irish are heavy drinkers"). But even complimentary stereotypes are not as benign as they initially appear, because they are equally exaggerated generalizations. A person who accepts seemingly positive stereotypes as factual may be prone to readily accept the less positive ones as well (Stangor p.64-68). Nonetheless, if stereotypes represent inaccurate or distorted generalizations, why do they persist over time? For example, during the days of American slavery, Blacks were stereotyped as intellectual inferior, unevolved, primitive, and apelike. Beliefs about innate physical differences (i.e. Blacks are less sensitive to pain than Whites; Blacks have thicker skulls than Whites) and innate abilities (i.e. Blacks are innately more athletic and rhythmic than Whites) were commonplace among Whites in the United States and Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. Sad to say, these stereotypes persist today. In a telephone survey of White and Black residents of central Connecticut in 1995, researchers S. Plous and Tyrone Williams found that the majority of respondents (58.9%) endorsed at least one stereotypical difference in inborn ability. Whites, for example, were most likely then Blacks to be viewed as superior in intellectual ability, whereas Blacks were more likely than whites to be viewed as superior in athletic and musical ability. Moreover, nearly half (49%) of those surveyed believed at least one stereotypical anatomical difference between Whites and Blacks: Almost one-third of respondents believed that Black skin is thicker than White skin; 20% believed that Blacks have thicker skulls than Whites; and 14% believed whites were more sensitive to pain than Blacks (Bender, p.44-51). Surprisingly, Blacks were somewhat more likely than Whites to endorse racial stereotypes. That these racial stereotypes resulting from the legacy of slavery endure in American society, even among African Americans, is perplexing. The crucial question is: Why?

How and why do people form stereotypes? The commonsense answer to this question is captivated in social learning theory. Simply put, we learn stereotypes from parents (our first and most influential teachers), peers, and the media. However the social learning theory does not explain it all. Researchers see that our ways of stereotyping go on a more cognitive level (Stereotypes). People invent and reciprocate stereotypes that later become a part of an individual's beliefs. Historically it can be shown that stereotypes of a social group may often reflect the prevailing economic and social relations within a country. Stereotypes of Japanese and Germans changed dramatically during World War II, moving from positive stereotypes prior to the war to highly negative stereotypes during the war. In general, competition and conflict do have a tendency to increase negative stereotyping, but competition is not the only ingredient that promotes negative stereotyping. In fact, several basic cognitive processes lay the foundation upon which stereotypes may then be built. One such way is through categorization, a fundamental cognitive process that allows us to reduce the flow of incoming information from a complex social world. Typically we group people according to similar attributes, and attributes that are visibly identifiable (such as gender, age, race) and or deviate from the norm (such as physical disability and sexual orientation) are likely to serve as basic categories for groupings. Once we perceive an aggregate of people as belonging to a social group, we overlook their individualities (Pickering, p.28-32). Other research on cognitive processes suggests that we have a tendency to focus on distinctive stimuli in our environment. We notice the unusual, the atypical, the anomalous, the out of the ordinary. Once the stimuli has been detected, we process it as different and it therefore sticks out in our minds: this is known as Illusory Correlations (Stereotypes).

Stereotypes as expectancies about groups and their members guide information processing and often are perpetuated by confirmatory biases that they generate. Activation of a stereotype can affect all aspects of information processing, including attention, interpretation, inference, and retrieval. Stereotypes can also influence the type of information sought about a target, and can direct behavior in confirmatory

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