Stereotyping Is Not Inevitable?

Stereotyping is Not Inevitable

One very controversial topic in the field of social psychology is the debate as to whether stereotyping is inevitable or not. When it comes to the concept of stereotyping the idea of prejudice often comes up making it very important to understand the definitions of both stereotyping and prejudice. A stereotype is a “widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing”. In other words, it is a prototypical schema of a person or group. When defining prejudice, the definition is “a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience”, therefore, it can be thought of as an unjustifiable/irrational opinion that someone possess. Being that there is no definite

This allowed people to write down all stereotypes they know of African Americans. The results showed that both low and high prejudice groups wrote down similar stereotypes and therefore there was no significant differences between the groups and any category. “High- and low-prejudice persons are indeed equally knowledgeable of the cultural stereotype (Devine, 1989).” Although this is the case for both high- and low-prejudice persons, this does not mean that consciousness of a stereotype equals the influence and inevitability of prejudice. “The inevitability of prejudice approach, however, overlooks an important distinction between knowledge of a cultural stereotype and acceptance or endorsement of the stereotype” (Ashmore & Del Boca, 1981; Billig, 1985). Knowing about versus actually believing in stereotype are two very different things: “Beliefs can differ from one’s knowledge about an object or group or one’s affective reaction toward the object or group (Pratkanis, in press).” Therefore, while stereotypes are automatically activated, beliefs require conscious

In Study 2, high-prejudice participants formed a more negative and less positive impression of the target person after subliminal priming of the category Blacks than did participants in the no-prime condition. Low-prejudice people tended in the opposite direction. (Lepore & Brown, 1997). In Study 3, both high- and low-prejudice people increased negative ratings when valenced stereotype content was also primed. (Lepore & Brown, 1997). The general aim of these three studies by Lepore & Brown, was to assess the possible flexibility among categorization, stereotyping and prejudice.

Study 1 by Lepore & Brown (1997), was congruent with Devine’s study (1989). Both Low and High prejudice groups had the same shared knowledge of stereotypes. Cultural stereotypes are shared widely and don’t indicate prejudice level. (Lepore & Brown, 1997). Study 2 examined how endorsement or priming in category activation leads to differential strengths in stereotype characteristics and group node activation. The links here have to be activated more to be stronger. Resulting in higher prejudice participants having distinguishably higher negative representations of categories. (1997). Study 3 Shows that Devine’s (1989) result of no effect of prejudice