Stereotyping

As you learn in Chapter 5, stereotypes can lead to discrimination in which your thoughts about an individual or group lead to specific behaviors. So if you believe that all sorority members are poor students (and you dislike them for this belief), you may discriminate against a Zeta Tau Alpha member in your study group, believing her incapable of handling the workload.

Schemas can be dangerous in a diverse society if we rely too much on them to make generalizations about groups of people. For example, stereotyping is the act of assuming that individuals, because they belong to certain groups, have a set of attitudes, behaviors, skills, morals, or habits. It is applying a type of group schema to people that is fixed or set, so that when you meet an individual from this group, you apply your set of perceptions of the entire group to that individual.

Stereotypes may be positive, negative, or neutral; they may be about a group to which you belong or one that is different from your own. If you have a negative stereotype about corporate executives, for example, you may think that they are all greedy and unethical, even though many (if not most) are hardworking, honest men and women who have climbed the corporate ladder. On the other hand, a positive stereotype might blind you to bad behaviors that don’t conform to your ideas.

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STEREOTYPES OF DUCK DYNASTY’S cast members might lead some to think they’d feel out of place in a New York City hotel—but they actually feel right at home. Gurney Productions/ © A&E/ Courtesy Everett Collection

Such stereotyping plays a role in the way we perceive individual behaviors. In a study of the effects of friends’ posts on Facebook (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008), researchers found that for men, negative posts about their “misbehavior” (such as excessive drunkenness and sexual exploits) resulted in perceptions of greater attractiveness. But the same kinds of posts produced very negative judgments when posted about women. These negative impressions can reinforce double standards about the acceptability of certain behaviors among men versus women (Baile, Steeves, Brukell, & Regan, 2013). Gender stereotypes, indeed, run deep across contexts. Participants in one research study viewed only the heads of two social robots, one with longer hair and curved lips (feminine) and one with shorter hair and straight lips (masculine). Participants perceived the long-haired robot as more suited for household chores and caring for children and the elderly and the short-haired one as ready to repair technical devices or guard a house (Eyssel & Kuchenbrandt, 2012).