Unit 6. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 523.

Text A Stereotypes and stereotyping

Text В Social pressure and perception

STEREOTYPES AND STEREOTYPING

Stereotyping is a simplificationand generalizationprocess. It helps people categorize and understand their world, but at the same time it often leads to errors.

Stereotypes can be positive or negative, such as when various nation­alities are stereotyped as friendly or unfriendly. We often find people stereotyped around characteristics of age("All teenagers love rock and roll and have no respectfor their parents."), sex("men want just one thing from a woman."), race("All Japanese look and think alike."), reli-gion ("All Catholics love the Pope more than their country."), profes-sion("All lawyers are greedy.") and nationality("All Germans are Na-zis").

Objects can be stereotyped around characteristics of places("All cit­ies are corrupt and sinful." "Small towns are safe and clean." "In Eng-and, it rains all the time.") and things("All Korean cars are cheaply Ipade.").

The term "stereotype" initiallyreferred to a printing stampwhich was used to make multiplecopies from a single model, but the great journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann adopted the term in his 1922 book "Public Opinion" as a means of describing the way society is setabout categorizing people — "stamping" human beings with a set of characteristics — as well. In his pioneering work, Lippmann identified four aspects of stereotypes. A brief look at them will serve as a summary of this valuable popular cultural tool. Lippmann wrote that stereotypes are:

1) Simple:certainly more simple than reality, but also often capable ofbeing summarizedin only two to three sentences.

2) Acquired secondhand:people acquire (and absorb) stereotypes fromsomeone else rather than from their own experience. The culture distills" reality and then expresses its beliefs and values in stereotypical images.

3) Erroneous:all stereotypes are false. Some are less false than oth­ers, and (more importantly) some are less harmful than others. But all are false by their very nature. They are attempts to claim that each indi­vidual human being in a certain group shares a set of common qualities. Since an individual is different from all other individuals by definition, stereotypes are a logical impossibility.

4) Resistant to change:during the last twenty-five years the diffi­culties with racialand gender inequalitiesin American life have alertedmost people to the tragic consequences of popular stereotypes.

Despite the fact that stereotyping is a natural method of classifica­tion and despite the fact that stereotyping has some useful functions un­der certain circumstances,it can be problematic.

Stereotypes can reduce a wide range of differences in people to sim­plisticcategorizations, transform assumptions about particular groups of people into "realities".

1. What is stereotyping?

2. What is the main function of stereotyping?

3. What characteristics are people most often stereotyped around?

4. What does the term stereotype initially refer to?

5. Who adopted the term in its modern meaning?

6. What are the four aspects of stereotypes according to Lippmann?

7. What does it mean that stereotypes are acquired second-hand?

8. Are all stereotypes false?

9. What is negative about stereotyping? > ***

What is a stereotype of a real woman in our culture? What other stereo­types about behaviour, tastes, ways of dressing, hobbies of men and women are there in our society? Discuss these aspects of stereotyping in pairs, if possible.