Stereotypes

Stereotypes: a social perception of an individual in terms of group membership or physical attributes. It is a generalisation that is made about a group and run attributed to members of that group. Such a generalisation may be either positive or negative.

  • Stereotypes are acquired indirectly from other people and social norms and not personal experience. They are schemas that help us understand the world around us. Stereotypes can be either positive or negative. They tend to be very general in nature and individuals acknowledge that they cannot be applied to all members of a group.

  • Prejudice is when we make a judgement about individuals with very little information about them except for their group membership. Prejudice is an attitude which means that cognition is combined with emotion in this case often liking or disliking the individual, prejudice is usually negative.

  • Discrimination is a behaviour based on stereotyping and prejudice.

How are stereotypes formulated?

  • Hamilton and Gifford (1976) argue that stereotypes are the result of an illusory correlation - that is people see a relationship between two variables even when there is none. An example of this is when people form false accusations between membership of a social group and specific behaviours.

  • The illusory correlation phenomenon causes people to overestimate a link between the tow variables. Culturally-based prejudice about social groups can be classifies as illusory correlations.

  • It is an example of ‘cognitive bias’

  • The relationship between 2 variables is over generalisable.

Martin and Haverson (1983)

Aim: to investigate if gender stereotyping would influence recall in 5 and 6 year old children.

IV: gender of child in picture

DV: Recall of the image

RM: lab

Method:

  • 48 participants

  • Each child was shown 16 pictures, half of which depicted a child performing gender consistent activities and half showing children displaying gender inconsistent behaviours.

  • One week later, they tested the recall of the children to see how many of the photos that they could recall accurately.

Results:

  • the results showed that children easily recalled the sex of the actor for scenes in which actors had performed gender consistent activities.

  • But when the actors behaviour was gender inconsistent , the children often distorted the scene by saying that the actor’s sex was consistent with the activity they recalled- that is, they would remember that it was the boy playing with a truck, when in fact they had been shown a photo of a girl playing with a truck.