What are stereotypes? 4 ways they affect us

Stereotypes are one of the fundamental elements to understand how we perceive others and ourselves. Part of our social life is influenced by them and, although we do not realize it, they act from the margins of our consciousness and predispose us to adopt certain attitudes and make certain decisions in our coexistence with the rest of the people.

In this article we will see what stereotypes are, and we will review some examples that help to understand the way in which they are expressed through our actions and thoughts.

• Related article: "Stereotypes, Prejudices and Discrimination: Why Should We Avoid Prejudging?"

What is a stereotype?

The human brain is a very difficult set of organs to understand and study, but if there is one thing clear about it, it is that one of its main functions is to simplify reality. Make it easy to understand what is actually complex and convoluted.

This idea may be common sense, but at the same time it has very important implications for how we think and perceive reality.

Specifically, it tells us that the human mind is not made to give us access to the truth, but to give us insight. minimalist and simplified version of it, faithful enough to reality to allow us survive. And the stereotypes are one of the ways in which we unconsciously and involuntarily achieve that simplifying effect.

Specifically, stereotypes are beliefs that affect our perception of a specific group or collective. There are stereotypes that serve a socioeconomic criterion, such as the difference between rich and poor people; others that are based on the gender distinction between men and women, others that apply to our preconceptions about ethnic or racial groups, and so on.

In fact, these beliefs may arise from any categorization of human groups, however arbitrary they may seem. Stereotypes about the inhabitants of a town or a larger region may arise that are not even understood. corresponds to an administrative entity, and may even appear due to simple physical characteristics chosen almost at random.

And a prejudice?

If stereotypes are fundamentally beliefs, prejudices are attitudes linked to stereotypes; namely, have a clear emotional component. A person can adopt a stereotype about the Scots, for example, without this causing him to position himself clearly emotionally before this group; but another may be emotionally positioned with respect to them, showing more friendly or more hostile for this reason.

Of course, the boundaries between stereotypes and prejudices are never clear, and in fact it is difficult to hold stereotypes and not express any type of prejudice. This differentiation is always relative, as is the intensity and power that prejudices and stereotypes have in each person.

• You may be interested: "The 16 types of discrimination (and their causes)"

Examples of the expression of stereotypes

These are several ways in which stereotypes can manifest themselves.

1. Hate bias application

This is possibly the most negative consequence of the existence of stereotypes: the possibility to build, through them, negative prejudices that lead us to hate groups of people not because of what they do as individuals, but because of the fact of being something, of wearing a label.

The case of racial hatred promoted by the Nazis, capable of taking root in a mass public among the inhabitants of Germany, is one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon, but it is not by far the unique. Long before Hitler, hate campaigns directed at ethical minorities have been a constant in the history of mankind.

2. Adoption of paternalistic attitudes

Stereotypes do not have to always predispose us to adopt a hostile attitude towards the members of this group that they try to “summarize” us in the form of generalizations. Sometimes, they can even lead us to adopt an attitude of condescension and paternalism that, although it is usually annoying, does not arise from the desire to harm the other.

These kinds of stereotypes are relatively frequent in the treatment that many men have with women. women, for example, among other things because historically women have not had access to studies superiors.

3. Emergence of undeserved admiration

As we have seen, stereotypes do not always go hand in hand with ideas that lead us to hate a specific group; sometimes, they lead us to adopt a positive attitude towards it.

In some cases, even facilitate the emergence of a kind of admiration and feeling of inferiority, since stereotypes define others, but also define us by contrast: if we believe that the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are very good at mathematics, it is because we implicitly consider that the group we belong to performs worse in this ambit.

4. Emergence of errors due to erroneous assumptions

Another of the ways in which stereotypes are expressed has to do with misunderstandings and errors typical of contexts in which a person is treated following wrong patterns of behavior based on myths or exaggerations of the culture or the way of being of the members of a group.

Conclution

In short, stereotypes are a practically inevitable element in our social relationships, although that not to say that they must be strong enough to fully determine how we deal with the rest of people. Nor, of course, as to lead us to hate individuals for generalizations based on the collectives to which they belong.

Bibliographic references:

• Amossy, R., Herschberg Pierrot, A. (2001). Stereotypes and clichés. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.