Essay On Stereotyping

Stereotyping Automaticity and Possible Life Effects

A stereotype is defined as “an often unfair and untrue belief that many people have about [an entire group of] people or things with a particular characteristic” (stereotype, n.d.). While not all stereotypes are necessarily negative, the word “stereotype” itself has a negative connotation that it has earned over the course of human history. Stereotyping has been a mental phenomenon that has intrigued psychologists and others alike for many years. There have been questions to whether or not it is an automatic response or a controlled cognitive belief. More specifically, this study addresses the question if a person’s perception of another person or subject influences the automaticity of stereotyping. This is an important subject because it approaches the issue of whether we as humans can control our immediate, initial thoughts, positive or negative, about a person or thing; which ultimately determines our attitude toward the individual or thing, which effects our behavior.

This experiment is a replica of the Blair and Banaji’s (1996) experiment. This experiment is aimed to specifically find that reaction time would be quicker with names that have been preceded by a gender priming word (e.g. “baseball” for male, and “dress” for female) that is thought to have a gender relationship to the name than names preceded by a neutral gender priming word (e.g. “foot”). There are many other past studies that have revolved around the idea of stereotypes that have reaction time and priming words followed by semantically related target words as some factor in the experimental design. Such an experiment is the Clow and Esses (2007) experiment. The testing procedure and research design of that ...

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...ies and questions about stereotyping, that it encourages psychologists, scientist and others alike to continue to learn about and examine this cognitive process.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, stereotyping plays a role in our daily lives. Results from multiple studies show how exactly it can play an important part. The question at hand in this study is whether stereotyping is an automatic process or a conscious process. With the use of gender and gender neutral priming words, gender names, and measurement of reaction time of the participants’ classification of the names, this experiment expects to find that the reaction time after the target words preceded with a matching gender priming word will be faster than the target words preceded by a neutral or opposite priming word. Thus, advocating the idea that stereotyping is, in fact, an automatic cognitive process.