Role of Stereotypes in Today's Society

Stereotyping is a way of representing other people. Stereotypes can revolve around a certain characteristic of the group of persons to which they are assigned. The persons of that group may even be reduced to being known and understood through a lens based on the stereotype that results from this, rather than being viewed as individuals. Stereotypes may refuse to recognize a distinction between an individual and the group to which he or she belongs. Stereotypes may represent people entirely in terms of narrow assumptions about their biology, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, or any other number of categories.

Sociologist Charles E. Hurst of the College of Wooster states that, “One reason for stereotypes is the lack of personal, concrete familiarity that individuals have with persons in other racial or ethnic groups. Lack of familiarity encourages the lumping together of unknown individuals” [1]. Different disciplines give different accounts of how stereotypes develop: Psychologists focus on how experience with groups, patterns of communication about the groups, and inter-group conflict. Sociologists focus on the relations among groups and position of different groups in a social structure. Psychoanalytically-oriented humanists have argued (e.g., Sander Gilman) that stereotypes, by definition, the representations are not accurate, but a projection of one to another. Sociology is the study of the social lives of humans, groups and societies (Gilman, 78).

For as long as there has been a human species, individuals have been different from one another. Persons have gravitated to groups of other persons like themselves. People create and develop categories of qualities by which to classify the groups; some were based on ancestry. Many of these groupings have become the key factors in determining which groups have political, social, and economic power in the world.

Automatic stereotype activation can be totally involuntary, and is described as ...