Negative Consequences of Sterotyping

Stereotypes are a form of prejudice everyone will once experience in their lifetime. Stereotypes are centered around an individual's race, gender, social class, religion, and age. They have been known to be elements people use to make judgments and subjectify people to one key feature. As Gordon Allport states, “ To state the matter technically, a noun abstracts from a concrete reality some one features and assembles different concrete realities only with respect to this one feature”(364). Mr.Allport’s words can be summed up to say stereotypes have been used as key fundamentals to associate one feature or aspect of a person with a group that represents it, typically in an unfavorable way.

First of all, stereotypes are destructive and prevent or discourage individual growth because it can cause violence and harm. For example,

The purpose of stereotypes is to help us know how to interact with others. Each classification has associations, scripts and so on that we use to interpret what they are saying, decide if they are good or bad, and choose how to respond to them (or not).

Stereotypes have great impacts on people all over the world. One of the reasons why people believe stereotypes blindly is that they know less about the objects. In order to decline the uncertainty of this new object, people choose to believe the stereotypes to feel safer. For the purpose of understanding the world more objectively, we ought to treat stereotypes critically and at least not be convinced of stereotypes blindly anymore.

Furthermore, stereotypes are used to increase an individual’s self-esteem and strengthen their social identity. Social identity theory contributes largely to the formation of stereotypes, as it states that a person’s social identity is formed from being part of a group. To justify one’s own group, they often pick out real or imaginary differences and flaws in other groups and compare those to their own group (Ford & Tonander, 1998). This led Ford

Stereotypes are unescapable. No matter what part of the world you are at or who you are talking to, everyone has some bias. Claude Steele say’s exactly this in his book “Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do” when he states “ We could all take out a piece of paper, write down the major stereotypes of these identities, and show a high degree of agreement in what we wrote.” His piece addresses the effects of stereotypes, which result in what Steele calls “stereotype threat”. Stereotype threat is being aware that there is an expected behavior or response to a certain part of your identity and being afraid to carry out this expected behavior or response. The threat of proving this stereotype can cause you to lose

By stereotyping we infer that a person has a whole range of characteristics and abilities that we assume all members of that group have. Stereotypes lead to social categorisation, which is one of the reasons for prejudice attitudes.

First of all, what are stereotypes? A stereotype is a quality assigned to groups of people related to their race, nationality, and sexual orientation, but there is not only one type of stereotype there are actually two types of stereotypes. There are positive and negative ones. For example, a positive stereotype about asians would be that they are smart and polite. A negative one would be something like asians have small eyes or they’re short. Some people may get offended by these and other people will not care about it at all. These are effects from the stereotypes.

In life, there is a common ground on which most every person can relate. At one time or another, we have all been promoters of or victims of the unremitting nature of stereotypes. According to the Webster’s dictionary, a stereotype is defined as “a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group.” Most stereotypes take on a negative form and are based on characteristics such as age, gender, race, status, and personal beliefs. Generally speaking, the greatest problem that arises with stereotypes is that they judge group of people by the characteristics and actions of their ancestors, rather than on an individual basis. More often than not, these assumptions will

The concept of stereotype is defined as “a belief that associates a group of people with certain traits” (Kassin, Fein, & Markus et al., 2008, p. 133), which can influence a person’s thinking process and perception of others as well as the world. Stereotypes are related to other concepts, such as prejudice and discrimination, which strengthen the distortion of people’s reality. Another component of a stereotype includes the concept of outgroup homogeneity effect which is the “tendency to assume that there is greater similarity among members of outgroups than among members of ingroups” (Kassin et al., 2008, p. 135). The concept of outgroup homogeneity effect refers to a misconception of others caused

Stereotypes make us simplify our social world so it’s it becomes easier to recognize some situations. They make us understand basic groups of people to some extent of truth. “The most famous study of racial stereotyping was published by Katz and Braly in 1933, 100 university students were asked to indicate the traits most characteristic of ten different social groups. Students displayed a high level of agreement about the traits of certain racial and ethnic groups, such as Negroes (described as superstitious by 84% of the students, and as lazy by 75%), and Jews (described as shrewd by 79%).” All kinds of people of stereotypes about others.

Stereotypes surround us everywhere we go; they are imbedded in our thoughts, conversations, and actions alike, and are simply regarded as “human nature”, but what if they are affecting us more than we think? Sometimes, they are so disguised or normal to us, that we forget what a stereotype really is, or how it began. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a stereotype is “to believe unfairly that all people

Devine (1989) argues that stereotypes are inevitable on the basis that stereotypes and prejudice coexist and that stereotyping occurs automatically. Devine attempts to prove this hypothesis in three experiments. Devine reasons that “as long as stereotypes exist, prejudice will follow.” This hypothesis is rooted in a correlation. Prejudice and stereotypes are related, however there is no clear evidence of causality; Knowledge of a stereotype does not mean an individual agrees with it.

Although prejudice and stereotype seem similar, they actually have two different meanings. While stereotyping involves the generalization of a group of people, prejudice involves negative feelings when “they” are in the presence of or even think about members of the group. “Prejudice comes from direct intergroup conflict, social learning, social categorization and other cognitive sources” (Ferguson). Not all stereotypes are negative; there are also positive and neutral stereotypes. Some stereotypes do not slander a race, culture, gender, or religion, but nonetheless generalize a group of people that may or may not be true. For example, some people say that all Asians are smart or good at math. Though people of Asian descent may often be more studious, not all Asians do equally well in school (Floyd, 62). Another common example of a positive stereotype is that all black people are good athletes, dancers, and singers. Though these are positive stereotypes, when people believe them, they don’t take into account that every person is an individual and different. A neutral stereotype

The presences of stereotypes are overwhelming and are developed by both the environment a subject is raised in and their family. Stereotypes, which are pervasive throughout different societies, become intertwined in the collective values of the society as justification for all forms of social, economic, and political inequality among groups (Devine and Elliot 2000;Kaplan 2004; Operario and Fiske 2004). As people become more exposed to stereotypes they start to become a permanent part of a person’s life, they begin to stereotype themselves almost always involuntarily.