RHETORIC & STEREOTYPES

Rhetoric & Stereotypes

Rhetoric & Stereotypes

Stereotypes are beliefs about the characteristics of a group of people, which lead to expectations about what individual members of that group will be like and how they will behave. Stereotypes are usually formed on the basis of membership in visible social categories such as race, gender, age, and disability status. Although the content of the stereotypes about groups varies, the process by which stereotyping influences how people are perceived remains the same. Stereotyping is a cognitive process that occurs when individuals are judged and evaluated on the basis of group memberships, rather than information about them as individuals.

People rely on stereotypes for cognitive reasons. Stereotyping simplifies the task of observing and understanding people. When a new person is encountered, it is expected that he or she will have characteristics that are consistent with the stereotype and will behave in a manner consistent with the stereotype. This process usually occurs automatically, outside of conscious awareness. Once activated, stereotypes influence the information about a person that is attended to, how that information is interpreted, and the impression that is formed about that individual. While stereotypes result in more efficient processing of information, they have potentially deleterious costs in terms of fairness and accuracy of judgments. Relying on stereotypes of a group to make judgments about an individual's behavior results in the perceiver glossing over the individual's actual characteristics and behavior.

Stereotyping of workers in organizations is a well-researched phenomenon. In the workplace, people are frequently called upon to make judgments and evaluate others for hiring decisions, promotions, job assignments, and salary increases. Research has demonstrated that stereotypes play a role in these decisions and result in biased evaluations of certain groups. The manner by which many of these decisions occur in an organizational setting is through a matching process in which the attributes of an individual worker are compared to the attributes thought to be required for a specific job. When the worker's perceived attributes match the attributes thought to be required for a job, then that individual is expected to succeed. However, if the worker's perceived attributes are not seen as matching the attributes thought to be required for a given job, that individual is expected to fail. The perceived attributes of workers have been demonstrated to be heavily based on stereotypes, rather than information about them as individuals. This can then lead to erroneous expectations of success for some groups and failure for others. For example, it has been shown that high-level managerial, executive jobs are thought to require typically male attributes such as achievement orientation and aggressiveness. Thus when women (or the elderly, or African Americans) are evaluated for these types of jobs, they are not seen as a good match because the stereotypes of these groups are not seen as matching the typical male attributes required for the job. This perceived lack of fit between the attributes of the individual and the requirements for the job result in expectations of failure and biased ...