Stereotypes: Where Do they Come From?

How Do They Affect Our

Behavior?

A stereotype is a “”generalized and rather fixed way of thinking about a group of people.
Examples of stereotypes influencing behaviour could be prejudice and discrimination. The
theory of stereotype threat indicates that internalized stereotypes could influence an
individual’s self-perception and behaviour in negative ways.

Dehumanization:

Cardwell (1996) defines a stereotype as a fixed, over-generalised belief about a particular group
of people. The word ‘stereotype’ originally described a solid plate of type-metal that was used
for printing instead of using the original. Over time it became a metaphor for developing a set of
unchanging and often exaggerated ideas about others.

Positive & Negative Stereotypes

Stereotypes can be both positive or negative, but they fail to consider any variations from one
individual to another.

A stereotype can be considered a schema , as we categorise people into a group and apply
general characteristics, forming a schema of how members of this group behave.
If we limit our perceptions of others to the definitions of the stereotypes, and do not add specific
information for each person, then we can develop biases against whole groups of people.

Why People Tend to Stereotype?

Our social world is very complex and provides us with a great deal of information. To avoid
information overload, we use stereotypes because they can easily be applied to people. We all
use categories of people, places and things to understand and make sense of the world around us.

In the course of stereotyping, a useful category – say, women – becomes coloured by additional
associations, sometimes negative. We process the gender, age and ethnicity of others and our
minds respond with messages that say things like ‘weak, sentimental, hostile’. When these
qualities do not reflect reality, a stereotype is no longer an aid to understanding but rather a
source of misunderstanding.

• When the working memory is overloaded people tend to stereotype.

Theories and Studies – How Stereostypes are formed?

One explanation of the formation of stereotypes is Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) social identity
theory. As you recall, this theory proposes that we categorise others into ingroups and
outgroups.

We tend to favor the ingroup which leads to a positive stereotyping of the ingroup. We tend to
see our group in a positive light. Members of the outgroup are stereotyped in a negative way. To
Tajfel, stereotyping lifts the self-esteem of members of the ingroup.
Brigham (1986) conducted a study into stereotyping that supports social identity theory. He
researched eyewitness identification procedures and found that Caucasians were more likely to
stereotype African Americans as criminals than other whites in eyewitness identification. This is
likely due to the tendency to view people that belong to our group more favourably, while we
tend to view members of other groups as having undesirable qualities.

To explain stereotyping, Hamilton and Gifford (1976) developed a theory of illusory

correlations. This theory distinguishes between stereotyping as the encoding of new information
and stereotyping as the application of existing knowledge. They focused on the formation of new
stereotypes which they argued are the result of illusory correlations. These illusory correlations
are triggered when two fairly infrequent situations or events take place at the same time. This
unusual combination captures the observer’s attention and leads to stronger encoding. To test
their theory, Hamilton and Gifford performed an experiment in which participants read desirable
and undesirable trait adjectives about the members of one majority group and one minority
group. Proportionally, there were the same amount of desirable and undesirable traits for each
group. However, they found that participants over-estimated the frequency of undesirable traits
in the minority group. Though Hamilton and Gifford (1976) acknowledged that society and
culture help form stereotypes, they argued that ‘cognitive factors alone can be sufficient to
produce differential perceptions of social groups’ (p. 405).
In the same way that the theory of illusory correlations provides insights into how stereotypes
might first form, the availability heuristic and the confirmation bias help explain why
stereotypes persist. According to the availability heuristic, the more easily an event is retrieved,
the more likely we are to overestimate its frequency. For example, if we see a car driven by a
young man being involved in an accident, we only need to see a young man driving a little
erratically a few days later to become convinced that ‘all young people are bad drivers’. Due to
the confirmation bias, we may ignore examples of good driving and focus more on poor driving
by young people.
Other theories of why stereotypes can arise are the grain of truth hypothesis and gatekeeper
theory. Campbell (1967) states that stereotypes can be formed from two sources: from a
person’s own experiences with that group of people, or they can learn about groups of people
through gatekeepers like the media, parents and friends. In both cases, there is often a small
amount of evidence (‘grain of truth’) that gets exaggerated and generalised. Gatekeepers use
stereotypes to define groups and their members, and these stereotypes become part of the culture
and are seen as ‘true’.
A key question that several psychologists have asked is whether one individual is more likely to
hold stereotypes than others. As early as 1954, Gordon Allport claimed that the cognitive
processes of prejudiced people, who form negative stereotypes about others, differed from the
cognitive processes of tolerant people (1954, p. 170). This means that a person’s stereotyping
and prejudice is probably directed at many groups and is a feature of the prejudiced person’s
personality. Schaller et al. (1995) conducted two studies that confirmed the ‘prejudiced
personality’ existed, but emphasised that the effects of the social context in either mitigating
(mitigate = to make less severe) or increasing the tendency to develop negative stereotypes
needed further research.

Ask Yourself

Do you think there is such a thing as a ‘prejudiced personality’? Why? Why not?

Effects of stereotypes

Stereotypes can have powerful effects on how we view and interact with others. Information
about other groups can be subject to bias and distortion and poor judgements about others can
easily follow.

Focus on Research

Cohen (1981) performed an experiment to determine whether stereotypes can affect people’s
memories. Participants were told that the woman in a video they watched was either a waitress or
librarian. When participants were asked to recall details about the video, they remembered
information more consistent with the commonly accepted stereotypes of these two careers. The
participants who thought the woman in the video was a librarian were more likely to remember
she wore glasses, and those who thought she was a waitress were more likely to remember her
drinking alcohol. Cohen concluded that stereotypes can affect the type of information we focus
on and what information we remember.
Steele and Aronson (1995) were also interested in the effects of stereotypes on behaviour and
they described a phenomenon called stereotype threat. They defined this as a situation where
individuals suspect their behaviours are being evaluated on the basis of a negative stereotype. In
other words, people fear they are being judged as a member of a group and not as an individual
and their performance tends to suffer. This then results in a self-fulfilling prophecy – they
perform badly and that confirms the stereotype.
 To test this theory, participants were asked to take a problem-solving test. Participants were
African Americans and European Americans. When African Americans were told that the test
would represent their verbal skills, they performed worse than European Americans. But when
they were told that the test was just for studying how problems are generally solved, they
performed as well as the European Americans. Steele and Aronson claim that stereotype threat,
due to the knowledge of a negative stereotype, can cause emotional distress and pressure to
perform well. Steele (1997) went on to focus on the poor academic performance of some African
Americans compared to Caucasians. He noted that African Americans were well aware of
negative stereotypes, which aroused deep-seated fears that distracted them from doing as well as
they could.

Inzlicht and Ben-Zeev (2000) investigated if stereotype threat affected females’ performance on
maths problem-solving if they were placed in an environment where they were outnumbered by
males. Seventy-two female undergraduates at a US college were randomly assigned to the
minority condition, that is, one female participant to two males or the same-sex condition, that is,
three women. The participants were not told of the study’s purpose. They were instructed to
complete either a maths test or a verbal test. The maths test was used to invoke the stereotype
threat as this subject is widely considered more challenging for females than males. They were
informed that their results would be shared with their group. Half of the participants were greeted
by a female experimenter and the other half by a male experimenter. The results showed that
females in the minority condition performed worse than females in the same-sex condition. This
deficit was not present in the groups who completed the verbal test as males and females
obtained similar scores. Inzlicht and Ben-Zeev concluded that placing high-achieving women in
an environment in which they are outnumbered by men can cause a decrease in their
performance.

Ask Yourself

Should schools be co-educational or single sex? How does this study contribute to this
contentious issue?