Words: 1968
Another example is that in the ass’s all gay men were associated with AIDS and that was where the disease came from. Thankfully due to work of Princess Diana and Mary fisher in America the stereotype was changed. We often stereotype someone because of lack of information and knowledge or given incorrect information, which was the case with AIDS. Another example is that door to door salesman are unreliable and trying to sell products what we don’t need or are not trustworthy. Examples. Negative Stereotypes All blond women are dumb. All red heads are sluts. Christians are homophobic.
They are blinded by God and will recruit you if you go near them. All politicians are philanders and think only of personal gain and benefit. If I wear Goth clothing I’m a part of a rock band, depressed, or do drugs. Girls are only concerned about physical appearance. Guys are messy and unclean. Men who spend too much time on the computer or read are geeks. Men who are not into sports are termed as gay. All librarians are women who are old, wear glasses, tie a high bun, and have a perpetual frown on their face. Girls are not good at sports. All teenagers are rebels. All children don’t enjoy healthy food.
Only anorexic women can become models. Women who smoke and drink do not have morals. Men who like pink are effeminate. Positive Stereotypes All Blacks are great basketball players. All Asians are geniuses. All Indians are deeply spiritual. All Latino dance well. All Whites are successful. Asians have high Sis. They are smarter than most in Math and Science. These people are more likely to succeed in school. African Americans can dance. All Canadians are exceptionally polite. French are romantic. All Asians know gung. All African American men are well endowed. Italians are good lovers.
Racial Stereotypes All Muslims are terrorists. All white people don’t have rhythm. All Blacks are lazy. All Asians are sneaky. All Hispanics don’t speak English very well or not at all. All Jewish people are greedy, selfish money hungry people. Caucasians can’t dance. Russians are violent. All Americans are cowboys. All Italians are stylish and sophisticated. They are usually painters, sculptors or fashion designers. Germans are Nazis or fascists. All Asians are Chinese. All Asians speak Pidgin English. All Native Americans love to gamble. All Middle easterners hate America.
All Italians are good cooks. The people of Netherlands are all promiscuous and drug addicts. All Italians are mobsters or have links to the mob. All white people are all racist. Chinese will eat anything. All Asians are Communists. All Australians are bullies, racists, drinkers and constantly uses swear words. They are also portrayed as lazy and stupid morons. People from the Indian subcontinent are generally portrayed as shopkeepers and motel owners. All Egyptian women are belly dancers. The Japanese are engineering geniuses. All South Koreans are gaming nerds. Irish are alcoholics.
All Hispanics are all illegal aliens. All Indians and Chinese are cheap and live a frugal life. All Latino are on welfare. In the SIS all South Koreans are stereotyped as dry cleaners and all Mexicans as gardeners. Gender Stereotypes Women Women always smell good. Women take forever to do anything. Women are more brilliant than men. Women are always moody. Women try to work out problems while men take immediate action. All women like the color pink. All women like dolls. Women become cheerleaders. Women take 2 hours to shower. Women hog the bathroom. Women love mirrors. Women like make-up.
Women are fussy about their hair. Women work in department stores. Women like fashion magazines. Women are discrete about intimacy. Women do not drive well. Women never take chances. Women always talk too much on the phone. Women actually use only 5% of what’s in their purse. Everything else is junk. Only women can be nurses. Men Only men can be doctors. Men are stronger and more aggressive. Men are better at sports. Men hate reading. Men always have an “l don’t care” attitude. Men don’t get grossed out by scrapes and bruises. Men are tough. Men are thickheaded. Men like cars.
Men become socks in high school. Men take 2 seconds to shower. Men like hats. Men could care less if they become bald. Men wear whatever is clean. Men usually work in messy places. Men like car or porn magazines. Men brag about intimacy. Men take too many chances. Men always lose all arguments against girls. Every race, culture, country, religion and a community has a stereotype. It is a way of oversimplifying groups of people. It is one of the easiest ways of establishing identity. By conforming to a fixed or conventional image, the identity can be recognized and understood.
And, herein lies the problem. It’s hard to be objective if one doesn’t reject stereotypes. So, it is better not to use any stereotype and pass judgments only when you are familiar with others. As active participants in the global information flow, media audiences are heavily exposed to messages from the mass media, accumulating, directly or indirectly, large amounts of images, sounds and news bites??so much so, that very little of what media consumers believe constitutes social reality, particularly about people, events, and issues of a global nature, is based solely on personal experience.
In this context, social reality might be thought of as mostly composed of a large portion of unverified information that is shared by “in-groups,” that is, “us” and by “out-groups,” or those seen as “others. ” This information serves as a convenient and easily accessible foundation for categorizing generalizing and organizing the enormous mount of information we consume on a daily basis. One cognitive technique that accommodates this process is the use of stereotypes??a particular set of social beliefs and understanding of outsider groups, both culturally and socially remote from the insider groups (McCarty et al. 002). The word “stereotype” originates from the Greek words “stereo” and “type” and means a printing-plate cast from a matrix that is molded from a raised printing surface such as type. As Lifespan (1965) stated, stereotypes are “pictures in our heads” that mark traits and help us distinguish quickly social groups from nee another. In figurative speech, it is a conventional, formulaic and usually oversimplified conception, opinion and belief about a person, group, event or issue considered to typify that object (Lifespan 1965).
In their function, stereotypes can be viewed as useful devices for organizing large amounts of information, providing stability and abstraction. However, more Often than not, stereotypes are used as mental shortcuts, which instead of facilitating communication hamper it because they oversimplify the complex network of political and cultural disparities and oppositions a social structure embodies Pickering 1995). This is more likely to happen in the case of social structures that involve representation of outsider groups.
The social experiences we accumulate, directly or through various channels of mediation, cultivate a sense of belonging to a certain group to which we develop individual and social attachment and by which we learn to define social reality. Those who do not share these experiences become outsider groups. Stereotypes, then, as expression of both cognitive processes and social experiences become instrumental to building a sense of belonging and a degree of distinction teens inside and outside groups. As such, they have also become central concepts in studying inter-group and intercultural relations.
As Bar-Tall (1997) contended, with the emerging cognitive revolution within the larger field of social psychology, the study of stereotyping has increasingly focused on the interpersonal coin dative processes in general and on the specific process of categorization (e. G. Teasel 1969; Hamilton 1981; Stephan 1985; Fiske and Number 1989). This becomes particularly important when we acknowledge that individuals are not born with specific stereotypic contents (About 1988) UT learn, as well as change them, through the colonization and mediation process that takes place during their life.
Therefore, stereotypic content is not a given universal content, but is one learned through interactive processes with interpersonal sources and social institutions which participate in the process of colonization. One such critically important social institution is the mass media. Presentations in the media, then, might have a lasting impression on the insider groups’ perceptions of the social positions and characteristics of members of outsider groups who are in social, political or ultra opposition to the insider group, particularly in a global scenario.
In the process of stereotyping, the mass media are seen as major sources of easily accessible and widely available information, possibly as powerful information channels and image factories, creating and sustaining stereotypical beliefs about foreigners (Lester et al. 1 996; Lifespan 1965; Gorham 1 999; Shoemaker and Reese 1996). Walter Lifespan is quoted as saying: “The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses Of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less insistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves.
They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense or our own value, our own position, and our own rights. They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy. When you read the quote it seems that stereotyping people is alright to do and it makes us feel comfortable in our own little world, knowing that other people around us are feeling and thinking the same thing We first learn stereotypes from our parents, our peers and the media. Always hearing as we grow up ‘ watch him, he looks dodgy’ or ‘ . Influences our thought process and we start to believe the same thing. We put the people into boxes and that’s the way all those people behave. Another explanation on how we form stereotypes comes from the research into cognitive psychology and the categorization process.
This has found we all need to and want to put things into boxes, categories the physical and social world ,into little groups. We do this for a number of reasons. Firstly putting things into groups , it is cognitively effective because then you no longer need to think about them as an individual and can apply the same information to many people, thus saving thinking time. It also helps us to think that we understand the world, which is a need in us all and we feel eater in control of our thoughts when we do. It is important to us to think we can understand the social world better.
Social cognitive theory, used in psychology, education, and communication, posits that portions of an individual’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences How and why do people form stereotypes? The common sense answer to these questions is captured in social learning theory. Simply put, we learn stereotypes from parents (our first and most influential teachers), significant there (e. G. , peers), and the media. True enough. Research supports common sense here but also indicates that common sense does not tell the whole story.