A final way to form impressions is to categorize people into a social group (such as their race, age, or gender) and then evaluate them based on information you have related to this group. This is known as stereotyping (Bodenhausen, Macrae, & Sherman, 1999). Stereotypes take the subtle complexities that make people unique and replace them with blanket assumptions about their character and worth based solely on their social group affiliations. Stereotyping is difficult to avoid because it’s the most common way we form impressions (Bodenhausen et al., 1999). Why? Social-group categories can be the first things you notice about others when you meet them. So you often perceive people in terms of their social group before it’s possible to make any other impression (Devine, 1989).

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Stereotyping often leads to flawed impressions. In one workplace study, male supervisors who stereotyped women as “the weaker sex” perceived female employees’ work performance as deficient and gave women low job evaluations—regardless of the women’s actual job performance (Cleveland, Stockdale, & Murphy, 2000). A separate study examining college students’ perceptions of professors found a similar biasing effect for ethnic stereotypes. Euro-American students who stereotyped Hispanics as “laid-back” perceived Hispanic professors who set high expectations for classroom performance as “colder” and “more unprofessional” than Euro-American professors who set identical standards (Smith & Anderson, 2005).

Despite claims of being the most democratic and equalizing mass medium, the Internet actually enables stereotyping. During online communication, people don’t have the nonverbal cues and other information that can distinguish someone as a unique individual. As a result, people communicating online are more likely than those communicating face-to-face to form stereotypical impressions of others (Lea & Spears, 1992; Spears, Postmes, Lea, & Watt, 2001; P. Wallace, 1999).

Though stereotypes are used to form impressions, they should not reflect rigid attitudes toward groups and their members. This is known as prejudice and can cause you to communicate in destructive and unethical ways. See Chapter 4 (pp. 94–96) to learn more about prejudice and how you can overcome it.