Robert Heilbroner Stereotypes

In his essay “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments” Robert Heilbroner discusses the many faces of stereotyping. Heilbroner reminds us that stereotyping affects many areas of our lives from how we view the world as a whole to how we view each individual we meet. According to Heilbroner there is nothing positive about stereotyping. He states that it makes us lazy thinkers and that it harms both the people we are stereotyping and ourselves. Heilbroner gives us three ways we can eliminate stereotyping behavior from our lives.

The first suggestion Heilbroner gives to eliminate stereotyping is to “become aware of the standardized pictures in our heads, in other people’s heads, in the world around us” (36). My father believes that all French people are stupid, rude “Frogs.” I don’t know why he believes this; he doesn’t even know that many French people. I have never heard my father say anything positive about a French person. He must have had a negative experience with one French person and so now judges all French people by the same yardstick. This judgment on my father’s part is very unfair. He has not met every French person in the world, so he cannot say that all French people are stupid and rude. He could say

How true this is. I am Canadian and while working in the tourist industry in Canada, many people I worked with looked at Americans as being very rude and opinionated. It was true that some of the tourists we met from America were rude and opinionated, but just as many were not. We cannot make generalizations that include a whole nation of people. If we were to do this, we could say that all Muslims are terrorists, that all Asians are afraid of snakes, (that one was from my neighbor just last week!!) that all Canadians say “eh” and that all Americans are rude and opinionated. These are excellent examples of generalizations to be wary