Stereotypes

The impact of stereotypes on people

Hamilton(2014,p.205)claims that “The issue of stereotyping is, at a deeper level, actually a group cognitive phenomenon, simply put, prejudice.”
Prejudice itself is a heavy topic, and the world in which we live is full of prejudices, such as race, geography and gender (Nelson, T. E., Acker, M., & Manis, M. 1996).Racial prejudice, for example, has actually been a persistent social problem in some Western countries. Then there is geographical prejudice, where we may often say that people from so-and-so places are so-and-so, and have a very biased generalisation about people from that place. Another common problem is gender bias. Often, especially in societies with a strong tradition of male dominance, people may have some obvious prejudices against women, such as thinking that women drivers are “road kill” or that women are less capable of thinking and are not suitable to study science and mathematics, etc.

It is clear that most stereotypes are not positive thoughts, and they all affect communication between people to varying degrees.

My experience

The formation of stereotypes

Here I would like to tell you about a real experience I had about stereotypes, which happened just a few days ago during the Chinese New Year.
My classmate invited me to his house to have dinner with his family during Chinese New Year. When I came in and said hello, my classmate introduced me to his family in a friendly way and said that I was from China. But during dinner, my classmate’s aunt said something about the chairs at the table being a bit unstable and said to me, “Be careful when you sit, this chair is wobbly and probably made in China, watch out for its back breaking.”
I was angry at this comment, because shouldn’t the quality of an item depend on its price and brand rather than the country of manufacture? Imagine if you were willing to pay just $50 for a chair, would it be of the same quality as a $100 chair?

Obviously not.

So my classmate’s aunt bought a cheap product at a low price and had a stereotype of poor quality made in China. So are Chinese products really bad? If it’s not good, why do LV, Chanel, Hermes, etc., turn to China for some of their products? Why does Saudi Arabia buy tens of billions of dollars of arms from China?

Conclusion

Stereotypes have an impact on social life

Stereotypes can solidify our minds and hinder our ability to think independently. There is no doubt that with stereotypes, our social life will not be very exciting and this will have a negative and damaging effect on our social life and on others. Such prejudices can make us unobjective, uncool and strongly subjective. This kind of thinking can eventually lead to wrong diagnoses and wrong decisions (actions).

Reference list

Hamilton, D. L., & Sherman, J. W. (2014). Stereotypes. In Handbook of social cognition (pp. 17-84). Psychology Press.

Nelson, T. E., Acker, M., & Manis, M. (1996). Irrepressible stereotypes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 32(1), 13-38.