Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture

Dr Perry R Hinton

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317798163
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

What are stereotypes and why do we use them? Are all stereotypes bad? Can we stop people from using them? Questions such as these have fascinated social psychologists for many years.Perry Hinton provides an accessible introduction to this key area, giving a critical and concise overview of the influential theories and approaches, as well as insights into recent work on the role of language and culture in stereotyping.

Chapter 1
Introduction

▪	Introduction
▪	Categorizing people
▪	What is a stereotype?
▪	The psychology of stereotyping
▪	Lippmann's view
▪	The commonly-held contents of stereotypes
▪	The ‘faulty thinking’ view of stereotyping
▪	Why are stereotypes false?
▪	If stereotypes are false why do we hold them?
	Frustration and aggression
	The authoritarian personality
	Intergroup competition
	Our thinking is faulty
▪	Telling people to stop stereotyping
▪	The cognitive approach to stereotyping
	Categorization and schema
	Cognitive processing and stereotyping
	Stereotypes in explanations
▪	Intergroup perception
▪	Stereotypes and language
▪	Stereotypes and culture
▪	Summary
▪	Further reading

Introduction

OFTEN THROUGH OUR OWN experience, or through the media, we learn of people being stereotyped. A young black man who witnesses a crime is treated as though he is a criminal rather than a witness. A middle-aged man applying for a job is not judged on his experience and wisdom but is regarded by the interviewers as 'too old', and they appoint a much less qualified younger person. A woman taking her child to a doctor is treated as a 'fussy mother' and her concerns are dismissed, only later to be proved correct when the child nearly dies. The advice of a young woman chemist is ignored in favour of less informed opinion, and she is treated in a condescending manner by her colleagues who focus on her youth and good looks rather than her first-class knowledge of chemistry. A child is not encouraged in school because the teachers judge him as uninterested and unintelligent, yet when he transfers to another school he blossoms into a high flyer.

It is clear that stereotyping can lead to a person being treated unfairly. Indeed, in the examples above, all of the people suffer from the prejudice that results from the stereotyping. Notice that the people doing the judging may also lose out as a result of their misjudgement. A witness who is treated badly may not choose to help the authorities again. The best candidate is not given the job when the experienced man is ignored due to the irrelevant characteristic of age. It is a doctor's failure to misdiagnose and nearly lose a patient. Ignoring the good advice of the young woman chemist may lead to problems for the company. Finally, the goal of teachers is to help children reach their potential not to restrict it.

In these cases it seems strange that people stereotype at all when the person being judged is unfairly discriminated against and the person making the judgement does not appear to gain any advantage. Not surprisingly we hear people saying in the media that stereotyping is wrong and that we should try to stop it. What if we tell the employers that the best candidate is not being given the job and the advice of the best chemist is being ignored due to judgements based on stereotypes of age rather than more sensible criteria? It certainly would be nice to believe that we only had to point out the errors in judgement and people would stop. However, as we shall see in this book, stereotyping is more complex than that. It is quite possible that, despite what we say, people will continue to believe in the stereotypes they hold.

Another problem is that we are 'people' too. If we need to convince others of the errors of their stereotyping, what about us? Do other people need to convince us of the errors of our judgements? Also, how can we distinguish between a 'sensible' judgement and a stereotypical one? If you are walking home late one night and you see a young man with short hair and boots coming towards you carrying a baseball bat, is it sensible to slip down a side road to avoid him or should you walk on unconcerned (convinced that your judgement of him as a potential violent attacker is simply a stereotype and therefore a misjudgement)? Which is the sensible judgment here? Is there an element of truth in some stereotypes?

The question is: when is our everyday understanding of people a stereotype and when is it not? Take, for example, what we know about ageing. Unfortunately, as we get older we do become physically less able - arthritis and other ailments can affect many people. So it is not a stereotype to see older people as less physically able than younger people. But this is not true for everyone; the effects of ageing are different for different people. There are many physically fit and active older people with mental and physical fitness far outstripping people many years younger. So the first thing we should note is that in reality older people differ in their physical and mental abilities just like any other age group. A stereotype of older people arises when we assume that all older people have the characteristics of physical and mental frailty. Perceiving all the members of a particular social group to be the same on certain characteristics appears to be a key feature of stereotyping. Stereotyping ignores the variability within a group of people.

Yet we do encounter examples that indicate the variation in people, such as the 80-year-old running a marathon. How do we deal with this information? Does it dispel the stereotyped view that all older people are frail? Interestingly, as we shall see in the book, counter-evidence is not always going to lead to a change of view. Pointing out evidence to counter a stereotype may not lead to it being abandoned. Surprisingly it may even be taken as support for the stereotyped view. If the runner is seen as 'the exception that proves the rule', then it may simply confirm the stereotype. The fact that an eighty-year-old marathon runner is seen to be noteworthy might lead people to see that as confirming their belief that older people are usually frail, with this being the exceptional case. Thus, we need to examine how people make sense of the information they learn about others before we can decide why and how they might change their stereotypical views.

Consider the example of the child failing to learn in school. If asked why this is, the teachers might say it is because the boy is uninterested in learning. They might even say that he is from a particular ethnic group that is seen to be less able than others. This gives us a second insight into stereotypes: they provide a particular explanation of events. The boy's failure to learn is located in an assumed characteristic of his personality, or his ethnic group, of lack of interest or ability. Thus, the stereotype places the cause of the boy's failure to learn squarely on his shoulders, not on the teaching style and methods of the teachers or the institutional system of schooling. Stereotypes may not be simply a view of the world that is either right or wrong, but linked into a person's understanding of why people are as they are. Viewing a child as incapable of learning (due to an inferred characteristic in the child) then allows the teachers to avoid seeing themselves as culpable in the child's failure to learn: it is the fault of the child (or his genes), not that of the teachers or the school or the education system. So stereotypes can provide people with explanations they may be happy to accept. Also the explanation may appear to work. The child does fail, apparently confirming the teachers' view of him. Even when the child changes school, it is quite possible that the teachers never find out that the child did well in the new school.

Categorizing people

Much of this book will focus on the view that stereotyping involves judging people as category members rather than individuals. In stereotyping a woman as a redhead we are not treating her as an individual called Mary Jones but as a 'typical' redheaded person with the expectations of a fiery temper. Rather than judging Pierre Duchamps on his individual characteristics, by categorizing him as French we may stereotypically view him as cultured, a good cook and a good lover.

In many of our everyday encounters with people we learn very little about them, but what we do learn is often information that can be used to categorize them. We notice the physical features of passers-by, such as the colour of their skin or their age or gender. The clothes people wear and their style of hair are all to be seen. We can use this information to make stereotypical inferences about what they are like. Many occupations, such as police officers and firefighters, wear uniforms to identify themselves. We observe a man wearing a smart suit and carrying a leather briefcase striding into an office block. What sort of a man is he? What occupation does he have? A young woman in jeans and T-shirt passes by with books under her arm. Can we predict her interests or activities?

Much of our social perception 'goes beyond the information given' (Bruner, 1973). We make inferences, we hold assumptions about certain categories of people. An arts student might be disappointed to learn that a blind date is a science student. The arts student is making an assumption about the character and interests of the blind date based on category membership ('science student') rather than any knowledge of the individual person. Furthermore the disappointment is due to the expectation that the person will be stereotypical of the category and hence not someone they will get on with. They may have a great time on the date and the expectations are disconfirmed. But the expectations may be confirmed, particularly if the arts student starts the date with a negative attitude towards the science student. But it might not get to that: the arts student may simply pass on the date.

A lot of the time we are judging other people, both formally, such as in a courtroom, or informally in our everyday lives. Who do we stop in the street to ask the time? Which colleague at work do we trust to get a report done on time? If we view someone as a category member (e.g. a nurse) and evoke the stereotype of the category (e.g. caring) we no longer have an unknown person but now have a range of assumptions and expectations about that person. Much of the study of judging other people has emphasized the view that we see people as members of a particular category of people based on certain characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity or occupation. The central aspect of this book is analysis of why and how these categorical judgements take place.

What is a stereotype?

There is general agreement within psychology as to the key features of a stereotype. However, there are differences in the explanation of how and why stereotyping takes place. But to start with a definition: essentially a stereotype has three important components.

1. A group of people are identified by a specific characteristic. This can be anything from a nationality such as English, a religious belief such as Jewish, ethnicity such as African American, gender such as women, age such as teenager, an occupation such as tax inspector, hair colour such as redhead - in fact any characteristic that has meaning to the people doing the attribution. So we might identify a group of people on the characteristic that they are supporters of a specific football team or owners of a particular make of car, as well as on more obvious physical attributes, such as age, ethnicity or gender.
   What this identification does is to separate from an undifferentiated set of people a particular identified group on the chosen characteristic. By identifying the group on this characteristic we are able to distinguish them from other groups on this characteristic. In identifying redheaded people we are separating them from people who do not have red hair (blondes, brunettes). In identifying a group as English we are distinguishing them from other national groups, such as Greeks and Italians,
2. We then attribute a set of additional characteristics to the group as a whole. Thus redheads are seen as quick-tempered and the English as tradition-loving. Notice how these characteristics are usually personality characteristics, but they need not be. Some stereotypes include physical characteristics, such as grey-haired for the elderly or tall for Scandinavians. The important feature of a stereotype is the attribution of these additional characteristics to all members of the group. Interestingly, it has not always been seen as the role of psychology to discover why a particular set of characteristics is applied to a certain group. Tajfel (1969) argues that it is for the social historian to determine why, within a particular culture, certain attributes get assigned to certain groups. Rather it is the task of psychology to explain why we stereotype at all.
3. Finally, on identifying a person as having the identifying meaningful characteristic (we discover someone is English), we then attribute the stereotypical characteristic to them. So we will infer that this English person, like all English people, is tradition-loving.

The psychology of stereotyping

The question why we stereotype has occupied psychologists since the 1920s. It is clear from the definition given above that stereotypes are generalizations and therefore do not reflect the individual differences within a category of people. Why do we make these categorical judgements? Why do we assume that a person has certain characteristics due to their group membership rather than viewing them as an individual? These are questions that have been considered in the research into stereotyping.

Lippmann's view

The study of stereotyping within the social sciences is commonly agreed to have begun with the book Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, published in 1922. In this book Lippmann introduced the concept of a stereotype and gave his views on how and why stereotypes are used. Stereotypes are simplified 'pictures in our heads' (Lippmann, 1922, p. 3) of people and events in the world. Lippman argued that our actions are not based on a direct knowledge of the 'real' world because the 'real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance' (Lippmann, 1922, p. 16). To cope, we construct these 'pictures' of the environment (including the people and events within it), and our actions do not arise from a 'direct and certain knowledge' (p. 25) of these people and events, but are based on the simplified 'pictures'. We act on the basis of what we imagine to be the case, not what is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The categorical perception of people
• 3 Cognitive processing and stereotyping
• 4 Stereotypes as explanations: attribution and inference
• 5 Stereotyping and intergroup perception
• 6 The language of stereotyping
• 7 Stereotypes and culture
• 8 Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index