Where is stereotyping used

In Azul Airlines , the author quoted the protagonist to explain why he selected Brazil as the location for his company. And I thought Brazilians were just the friendliest people in the world. Lacking context and reinforcing stereotypes about consumer behavior. We also saw stereotypes in descriptions of consumer motivations or behaviors. Here are some examples from two different cases about Cialis, the prescription medication for erectile dysfunction ED. In Product Team Cialis: Getting Ready to Market the author includes a section about partners of men who experience erectile dysfunction and only women partners are described.

Promoting gender stereotypes and reinforcing gender roles. In cases with a women protagonist authors commonly included details that reinforced stereotypes of women as communal and men as agentic.

We also found that authors used descriptors or highlighted details for women that are not typically used for male protagonists — and were not relevant to the teaching points.

For example, in Heidi Roizen , the author included this quote:. Similarly, authors often included quotes that promote and reinforce gender roles. Conflating stereotypes and marketing segmentation. Case studies in marketing and advertising can be particularly challenging since authors need to capture how various organizations identify and describe personas, which often draw from stereotypes.

Take this example. Our goal as educators should be that students from every gender, race, national origin, age, or social status see themselves as leaders or learn about leaders who are not like them in authentic — not stereotypical — ways.

We developed a series of questions to help both instructors and students identify stereotypes in cases and other classroom materials. These lessons are not exclusive to the classroom. The lessons here could also be used by people developing educational materials more broadly — in talent and learning organizations, in online tools, and in classrooms of all kinds.

Of course, using social categories will only be informative to the extent that the stereotypes held by the individual about that category are accurate. If police officers were actually not that knowledgeable about the city layout, then using this categorization heuristic would not be informative.

The description of social categorization as a heuristic is also true in another sense: we sometimes categorize others not because it seems to provide more information about them but because we may not have the time or the motivation to do anything more thorough.

According to this approach, thinking about other people in terms of their social category memberships is a functional way of dealing with the world—things are complicated, and we reduce complexity by relying on our stereotypes. Although thinking about others in terms of their social category memberships has some potential benefits for the person who does the categorizing, categorizing others, rather than treating them as unique individuals with their own unique characteristics, has a wide variety of negative, and often very unfair, outcomes for those who are categorized.

One problem is that social categorization distorts our perceptions such that we tend to exaggerate the differences between people from different social groups while at the same time perceiving members of groups and particularly outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are.

This overgeneralization makes it more likely that we will think about and treat all members of a group the same way. Tajfel and Wilkes performed a simple experiment that provided a picture of the potential outcomes of categorization. As you can see in Figure In one of the experimental conditions, participants simply saw six lines, whereas in the other condition, the lines were systematically categorized into two groups—one comprising the three shorter lines and one comprising the three longer lines.

Lines C and D were seen as the same length in the noncategorized condition, but line C was perceived as longer than line D when the lines were categorized into two groups.

From Tajfel Tajfel found that the lines were perceived differently when they were categorized, such that the differences between the groups and the similarities within the groups were emphasized. Specifically, he found that although lines C and D which are actually the same length were perceived as equal in length when the lines were not categorized, line D was perceived as being significantly longer than line C in the condition in which the lines were categorized.

Similar effects occur when we categorize other people. We tend to see people who belong to the same social group as more similar than they actually are, and we tend to judge people from different social groups as more different than they actually are.

Patricia Linville and Edward Jones gave research participants a list of trait terms and asked them to think about either members of their own group e.

The results of these studies, as well as other studies like them, were clear: people perceive outgroups as more homogeneous than their ingroup. Just as White people used fewer piles of traits to describe Blacks than Whites, young people used fewer piles of traits to describe elderly people than they did young people, and students used fewer piles for members of other universities than they did for members of their own university.

This prevents us from really learning about the outgroup members as individuals, and as a result, we tend to be unaware of the differences among the group members.

Once we begin to see the members of outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are, it then becomes very easy to apply our stereotypes to the members of the groups without having to consider whether the characteristic is actually true of the particular individual.

If men think that women are all alike, then they may also think that they all have the same positive and negative characteristics e. And women may have similarly simplified beliefs about men e. The outcome is that the stereotypes become linked to the group itself in a set of mental representations Figure Our stereotypes and prejudices are learned through many different processes. This multiplicity of causes is unfortunate because it makes stereotypes and prejudices even more likely to form and harder to change.

And there is often good agreement about the stereotypes of social categories among the individuals within a given culture. In one study assessing stereotypes, Stephanie Madon and her colleagues Madon et al.

The participants tended to agree about what traits were true of which groups, and this was true even for groups of which the respondents were likely to never have met a single member Arabs and Russians.

Even today, there is good agreement about the stereotypes of members of many social groups, including men and women and a variety of ethnic groups. Once they become established, stereotypes like any other cognitive representation tend to persevere. We begin to respond to members of stereotyped categories as if we already knew what they were like.

Yaacov Trope and Eric Thompson found that individuals addressed fewer questions to members of categories about which they had strong stereotypes as if they already knew what these people were like and that the questions they did ask were likely to confirm the stereotypes they already had. In other cases, stereotypes are maintained because information that confirms our stereotypes is better remembered than information that disconfirms them.

If we believe that women are bad drivers and we see a woman driving poorly, then we tend to remember it, but when we see a woman who drives particularly well, we tend to forget it. This illusory correlation is another example of the general principle of assimilation—we tend to perceive the world in ways that make it fit our existing beliefs more easily than we change our beliefs to fit the reality around us.

And stereotypes become difficult to change because they are so important to us—they become an integral and important part of our everyday lives in our culture. Stereotypes are frequently expressed on TV, in movies, and in social media, and we learn a lot of our beliefs from these sources. In short, stereotypes and prejudice are powerful largely because they are important social norms that are part of our culture Guimond, Because stereotypes and prejudice often operate out of our awareness, and also because people are frequently unwilling to admit that they hold them, social psychologists have developed methods for assessing them indirectly.

One difficulty in measuring stereotypes and prejudice is that people may not tell the truth about their beliefs. Most people do not want to admit—either to themselves or to others—that they hold stereotypes or that they are prejudiced toward some social groups. To get around this problem, social psychologists make use of a number of techniques that help them measure these beliefs more subtly and indirectly.

Interestingly, people express more prejudice when they are in the bogus pipeline than they do when they are asked the same questions more directly, which suggests that we may frequently mask our negative beliefs in public.

Other indirect measures of prejudice are also frequently used in social psychological research; for instance, assessing nonverbal behaviors such as speech errors or physical closeness. People who sit farther away are assumed to be more prejudiced toward the members of the group. In these procedures, participants are asked to make a series of judgments about pictures or descriptions of social groups and then to answer questions as quickly as they can, but without making mistakes.

In the IAT, participants are asked to classify stimuli that they view on a computer screen into one of two categories by pressing one of two computer keys, one with their left hand and one with their right hand. For instance, in one version of the IAT, participants are shown pictures of men and women and are also shown words related to academic disciplines e.

The basic assumption is that if two concepts are associated or linked, they will be responded to more quickly if they are classified using the same, rather than different, keys. Implicit association procedures such as the IAT show that even participants who claim that they are not prejudiced do seem to hold cultural stereotypes about social groups.

Even Black people themselves respond more quickly to positive words that are associated with White rather than Black faces on the IAT, suggesting that they have subtle racial prejudice toward their own racial group. Because they hold these beliefs, it is possible—although not guaranteed—that they may use them when responding to other people, creating a subtle and unconscious type of discrimination. Do you hold implicit prejudices? Although in some cases the stereotypes that are used to make judgments might actually be true of the individual being judged, in many other cases they are not.

Stereotyping is problematic when the stereotypes we hold about a social group are inaccurate overall, and particularly when they do not apply to the individual who is being judged Stangor, Stereotyping others is simply unfair.

Even if many women are more emotional than are most men, not all are, and it is not right to judge any one woman as if she is. Once we believe that men make better leaders than women, we tend to behave toward men in ways that makes it easier for them to lead. And we behave toward women in ways that makes it more difficult for them to lead. The result? Of course, you may think that you personally do not behave in these ways, and you may not. But research has found that stereotypes are often used out of our awareness, which makes it very difficult for us to correct for them.

Furthermore, attempting to prevent our stereotype from coloring our reactions to others takes effort. Our stereotypes influence not only our judgments of others but also our beliefs about ourselves, and even our own performance on important tasks. In some cases, these beliefs may be positive, and they have the effect of making us feel more confident and thus better able to perform tasks.

On the other hand, sometimes these beliefs are negative, and they create negative self-fulfilling prophecies such that we perform more poorly just because of our knowledge about the stereotypes. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson tested the hypothesis that these differences might be due to the activation of negative stereotypes.

Steele and Aronson argued that thinking about negative stereotypes that are relevant to a task that one is performing creates stereotype threat — performance decrements that are caused by the knowledge of cultural stereotypes. That is, they argued that the negative impact of race on standardized tests may be caused, at least in part, by the performance situation itself. Research has found that the experience of stereotype threat can help explain a wide variety of performance decrements among those who are targeted by negative stereotypes.

Even groups who typically enjoy advantaged social status can be made to experience stereotype threat. Prejudice can take the form of disliking, anger, fear, disgust, discomfort, and even hatred—the kind of affective states that can lead to behavior such as the gay bashing you just read about.

Our stereotypes and our prejudices are problematic because they may create discrimination — unjustified negative behaviors toward members of outgroups based on their group membership. Stereotypes and prejudice have a pervasive and often pernicious influence on our responses to others, and also in some cases on our own behaviors.

To take one example, social psychological research has found that our stereotypes may in some cases lead to stereotype threat — performance decrements that are caused by the knowledge of cultural stereotypes. In one particularly disturbing line of research about the influence of prejudice on behaviors, Joshua Correll and his colleagues had White participants participate in an experiment in which they viewed photographs of White and Black people on a computer screen.

Across the experiment, the photographs showed the people holding either a gun or something harmless such as a cell phone. Discrimination is a major societal problem because it is so pervasive, takes so many forms, and has such negative effects on so many people.

Even people who are paid to be unbiased may discriminate. Price and Wolfers found that White players in National Basketball Association games received fewer fouls when more of the referees present in the game were White, and Black players received fewer fouls when more of the referees present in the game where Black. The implication is—whether they know it or not—the referees were discriminating on the basis of race. You may have had some experiences where you found yourself responding to another person on the basis of a stereotype or a prejudice, and perhaps the fact that you did surprised you.

Perhaps you then tried to get past these beliefs and to react to the person more on the basis of his or her individual characteristics. And yet, despite our best intentions, we may end up making friends only with people who are similar to us and perhaps even avoiding people whom we see as different. In this chapter, we will study the processes by which we develop, maintain, and make use of our stereotypes and our prejudices. We will consider the negative outcomes of those beliefs on the targets of our perceptions, and we will consider ways that we might be able to change those beliefs, or at least help us stop acting upon them.

Correll, J. The influence of stereotypes on decisions to shoot. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37 6 , — What gives them their power to shape our thoughts and feelings about other people? Melinda Jones identified four different origins of stereotypes. We think in terms of the categories we create from our experiences. Those categories clarify the world for us, but they also over-simplify it.

At some point, those natural over-simplifications cross the line into stereotypes. Simply knowing about social groups can lead us to stereotype their members because we assume there must be something important that led to their common classification in the first place, something that makes them essentially alike. We see close up the individual differences among members of our own social groups, but those in other social groups blur together in the distance into a homogeneous whole, everyone a minor variation on the same basic theme.

They tried adding new counter-stereotype information. They told people that over the years the members of the groups changed significantly. They even told one group that they got the names mixed up, and that everything people thought they knew about the groups was completely backward. To no avail. The original views of the two groups persisted. The things we hear create stereotypes: What we learn from other people and the broader society. We also pick up stereotypes from the world around us.