The Importance Of Stereotypes In Literature

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.

Stereotypes are generalizations about a group of people whereby we attribute a defined set of characteristics to this group. These classifications can be positive or negative, such as when various nationalities are stereotyped as friendly or unfriendly.

“A stereotype is a rigid, oversimplified, often exaggerated belief that is applied both to an entire social category of people and to each individual within it. Stereotypes form the basis for prejudice, which in turn is used to justify discrimination and attitudes. They can be positive as well as negative.” Stereotypes exist within any social group, and social group or cliques which are groups of people who share similar characteristics and interests such as the ones priorly said.

A "stereotype" is a social perception of an individual in terms of group membership or physical attributes. Stereotypes are generalizations made about a group and then attributed to all members of that group.

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

Stereotypes can be defined as sweeping generalizations about members of a certain race, religion, gender, nationality, or other group. They are made everyday in almost every society. We develop stereotypes when we are unable or unwilling to obtain all the information we would need to make fair judgments about people or situations. By stereotyping, we assume that a person or group has certain characteristics. Quite often, we develop these ideas about people who are members of groups with which we have not had firsthand contact. Stereotyping usually leads to unfair results, such as discrimination, racial profiling, and unnecessary violence, all behaviors which need to be stopped.

Stereotypes run rampant in the literary world today. It is much easier to write a stereotypical character because of the reader expects them to act or respond a certain way and does not require an explanation of their motivation. But much like Chimamanda Adichie warns, “Show a people as only one thing over and over again, and that is what they become” (Adichie 00:09:25-00:09:37). But this issue is often addressed in reference to the protagonist. The hero is always white; the hero is always attractive. The hero never disserves to suffer. Single stories do not just refer to the physical characteristics of the character, though in can and often does. The heroes all tend to look the same so we associate goodness with that specific physical description, but motivations can be just as misleading. All the heroes do good things because they lived the same experiences, so these experiences make someone good. Also society remains so focused on the single story surrounding the protagonist, it often forgets the other main component of a story, the antagonist. But by dissecting the possible motivations for the villains, as my adaption does, I hope to explore the different avenues to villainy and in turn disrupt their single story.

The dictionary defines stereotypes as “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.” Our world today is run by an infinite amount of stereotypes. They affect every aspect of people's’ lives. Members of society let others’ opinions affect their own, and people who go against stereotypes are frowned upon. Some stereotypes include those surrounding African Americans, people of Asian descent, and transgendered people. Most people look at an African American male and either get scared of him, assume he raps, our plays sports. However not every single black male in the world partakes in those activities. Some people look at Asians and assume they are all smart, and good at every subject in school, but that

Stereotypes are deeply embedded in every society in numerous ways. The dictionary definition of a stereotype is “one that is regarded as embodying or conforming to a set image or type.” Stereotyping or Labeling is a technique that “attempts to arouse prejudices in an audience by labeling the object of the propaganda campaign

Stereotypes can be defined as people putting labels on other people or things just because they have a fixed mindset of how they should be represented, and they impact our society in many ways. (Stereotypes). For example, in an interview with Guy Raz from NPR, Jamila Lyiscott says that “You have this lens where you're looking at yourself through the lens of other people the way that they're looking at you.” (Raz, Jamila) This shows the meaning of stereotypes by revealing that Jamila Lyiscott feels that she is being judged in a way she should never be judged just because of the way she speaks. As a society, we must not be so quick to judge people, especially by the way they speak because not everyone is going to speak properly or even use the

Stereotypes or as some people call them generalizations are assumptions people often make about the characteristics of members apart of a certain group or race. Though there is no exact period to determine when stereotypes were developed, through commonsense, the answer to these questions is captured in the social learning theory which specifies that learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction. In agreement with an article in Psychology Today, the brain uses stereotypes to create shortcuts for itself to explain why things may be a certain way, and many people don’t realize that their brains are making these presumptions subconsciously. Growing up in the

Stereotypes refers to the features imposed upon individual groups which are conventional, formulaic and exaggerated regarding to their nationality, race and sexual alignment, among many others (Stuart Ewen & Elizabeth Ewen; 2006). These features tend to be over simplications of the groups involved. For instance, somebody who meets some few people from a certain country and finds them to be old fashioned and quit may spread to all the people from the country in question are reserved and quiet. A simplification like this doesn’t tolerate diversity among groups and may lead in stigmatization and wrong perception of the groups if the stereotypes associated to them are largely negative (Hilton &von, 1996). Even the so known as

Stereotypes are by definition a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person. Stereotypes can apply to other things as well but I will focus on the stereotypes seen in society. As we have seen in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, stereotypes have been present throughout history. However, it seems that even though stereotypes usually carry negative effects on people with their presence, they have lingered with us for some strange reason.

. As people grow older and realize their racial, religious, and cultural groups, they tend to differentiate themselves from other groups. The main reason we develop stereotypes is because it is just human nature for us to categorize people. Stereotypes are a way to simplify groups of people and establish identities, especially when one doesn’t know much about the group (“Overcoming Stereotypes”).

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.