The Pros And Cons Of Stereotyping

Stereotypes have been apart of society since the beginning. Stereotypes are often a generalization or assumption of an individual, and can be positive or negative. Stereotypes appear in the workplace, school, and daily life. There are stereotypes on race, gender, religion, sexuality, social class, professions, weight, and schooling. One example of stereotyping is if one sees a white-American female with blonde and blue eyes, one may say she’s “dingy”, “dumb”, and or “typical”. Now that female may be an all honor student, but because of a stereotype she was generalized to be the complete opposite of who she really is. Stereotyping a person based off of their appearance is one of the harmful effects of stereotypes. Stereotypes are harmful and counterproductive

Stereotyping is something we are all guilty of. Putting people into categories and creating the expectation that they will act accordingly. According to Merriam Webster dictionary, stereotype means a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudice attitude or uncritical judgement. People are constantly fitting their friends and neighbors into categories and judging them in the process. Anyone who would say that is mean and rude would be right in saying so. The mere idea that people can fit into boxes and stereotypes we have made is bizarre idea, one that is far from the truth.

Stereotyping can be found all around us. It is constantly in the media, including the Internet, television, and movies. Family and friends certainly influences our initial thoughts about others, too. The people that we spend time with and trust are often those that we tend to reflect. For example, I come from a pretty welcoming family, so I tend to be open when I meet new people.

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).

Stereotyping individuals makes us overlook their uniqueness, making us often think things of others that may not be true.

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.

According to Dictionary.com a stereotype is something conforming to a fixed or general pattern, especially an often oversimplified or biased mental picture held to characterize the typical individual of a group (dictionary.com).

A stereotype is a widely held, but fixed and oversimplified image of a person or thing. Stereotypes can drastically affect the way people view themselves and others.

Stereotyping has been a normal occurrence since human beings have been able to do so to others, as tragic as that is. Although it has been through our history, nothing from the past can possibly compare to the amount of stereotyping going on in our world in the modern day, and how much it impacts us and others around us. Robert L. Heilbroner says it best in his article “DON’T LET STEREOTYPES WARP YOUR JUDGMENT (citation) “Stereotypes are a kind of gossip about the world, a gossip that makes us prejudge people before we ever lay eyes on them. Hence it is not surprising that stereotypes have something to do with the dark world of prejudice (Heilbroner Pg.19 number 5).” He then goes on to say that “Once we have typecast the world we tend to see people in terms of our standardized pictures.” He then goes on explaining about a demonstration he performed with a number of Columbia and Barnard students, showing

Stereotyping is very much a natural and unconscious process – we cannot help it. Stereotypes can come from situations we ourselves may experience, our values and attitudes as well as our perception of certain topics, but typically stereotypes are a result of media portrayals. We engage in stereotyping for a number of reasons – it makes life easier for us as it allows us to remember only certain features or parts of a stereotype, which is much easier than remembering each unique characteristic that makes up a person. We also stereotype because of our need for closure, and in particular our need for cognitive closure. This means that we tend to fill in the missing information

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 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

We have all been stereotyped at a point of our lives because of the “groups” we were born into, like our gender or nationality. People identify Arabian Americans as terrorists because they are middle eastern. Others assume that all Mexicans came to America illegally. It is predetermined that girls can only become nurses, not doctors. We commonly categorize people into groups that society has a popular belief about. Society associates these individuals into groups we think we they should be in. We make judgements about someone, taking their identity away before even meeting them. It seems as though stereotypes are used so we can justify our racist behaviors and attitudes.

Stereotypes are something that we are all affected by in our everyday lives in one way or another. You may have made a stereotype about someone, and not even realize that you are stereotyping them. For that reason I believe that there are many different stereotypes embedded into our minds. Everyone has made a stereotype about someone, and may have been wrong or right about that stereotype. Either way if you were wrong or right about what you thought about, or labeled on a person, it is still a stereotype. I have noticed that people do not take the time to get to know someone, but rather stereotype them off appearances or gender, or religion, and many other different categories of people.

A stereotype is a generalized characterization for a group of people in a particular category. A majority of the time people stereotype by the manner they express information to one another. A teacher states a fact in class about how children with a high socioeconomic status are more likely to send their children to college than children of low socioeconomic status. Later on the student goes home and misrelated the fact by stating “Bob our neighbor isn’t going to get a good job because his family is poor.” As a society people relay information incorrectly all the time by twisting the story around and putting a negative spin on facts in turn forming a stereotype for a particular group of people.