Essential Psychology

Here you can read a short excerpt about stereotypes.

Excerpt:

“Stereotypes are related to prejudice and have a negative connotation, which is not necessarily correct. Stereotypes are very useful in our everyday life.

As a matter of fact, we would probably not survive without prejudice or stereotypes. From likeness to other members of the same group we infer meaning that is often correct. For instance, if we see an apple, we are not likely to have ever seen this particular apple, and maybe not even this species of apple, but we recognize it as part of the group of fruit which are apples. From this likeness we infer that we can eat the apple and that it will be sweet and tasty. It might be a poisonous apple, but that is not very likely. We see a piece of furniture that resembles a chair and we infer from its likeness to other furniture in the group of chairs that we can sit on it. The chair might collapse, but in all likeliness, we can sit on it. If we’d have to investigate and test every chair before sitting down, meetings at work would take even more time than they already do. Instead, our prejudice about chairs is probably right. The stereotype of a chair as a piece of furniture you can sit on will be correct most of the times throughout your life.”