 | Stereotyping is necessary to a certain degree. As said before, it helps us remember terms for quick recall. However, stereotypes can become dangerous when they are inflexible and relied solely upon for information processing. When this happens, stereotypes lead to prejudice, discrimination, and social-isms. |
In other words, people often take their own mental picture of a type of person, and generalize it to all people in that group, without taking into account individuality or even the errors that may exist in the original mental picture. For example, a person doing the hiring for a company may have the stereotype that elderly people are feeble, absentminded, and unable to keep up in the workplace. Upon receiving an application from a formerly retired person, it is dismissed, because she is relying solely on her negative stereotype of elderly people. In this case, the stereotype is that elderly people are less qualified, the prejudice is against all elderly people in general, the discrimination is failure to hire the person, based on their age, and this is called ageism.
Stereotyping has been called "the dehumanizing process [that] is necessary to feed the oppressors' sense of being justified and to alleviate the feeling of guilt." Stereotyping makes the victim begin to believe that the stereotype is strue, and therefore the oppression is somehow deserved.
Now your turn. Read the following scenarios and try to identify the stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, and social '-ism' present. (Click here for a list of common social '-isms') Once you have decided why each case of stereotyping is dangerous, click on "answer" to see if you're right.
Scenario One:
A young, white, middle class couple walk into a furniture store. They are greeted by a salesman, who appears to be of Asian descent. The salesman offers the couple a good price on a sofa, but they are suspicious and choose to buy a higher priced sofa from another store staffed by white Americans.
A taxi driver sees two people standing on the curb, both trying to hail a cab. One of the potential customers is a well-dressed, professional woman. The other is a shabbily dressed, scruffy man. The taxi driver assumes the man is a bum pulls up to the woman to give her a ride.