Effects of Stereotypes

As humans in our society, we are categorized by stereotypes everyday, I never considered that just mentally identifying with these stereotypes can unconsciously affect my performance. Researcher and author, Shankar Vedantam, in his article suggests that reminding people of their stereotypes can negatively affect their academic performance among other things. He supports this claim by providing data collected from experimental trials, statements from scientists studying the theory and finally real life situations where the theory applies. Vedantam’s purpose is to use the information he found to give notice to the phenomenon. He adopts a didactic tone for the readers of the Washington Post.

After reading this article, my class decided to conduct our own study about stereotypes at PLHS. We planned to collect data from our fellow students by interviewing and recording what they reported about stereotypes. In finding this data, myself and my classmates had to perform several steps in order to accurately collect the information. Upon receiving a specific set of questions from Ms. Roberts, we interviewed a fellow classmate from our English class about stereotypes using the questions. We followed that by interviewing another student at PLHS from any grade. After we collected the data, we entered the information into a google spreadsheet. Using the spreadsheet, we reviewed at the summary data charts and then sorted the data by categories such as gender and race in to uncover patterns or similarities in the data.

After interviewing a total of 165 students, we added the information together and the results were summarized into the following. 79% of the people we interviewed were in 9th grade. The rest were made up fairly evenly of 10th, 11...

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...hey will start to view each other more equally and fairly. How to carry out this theory is unknown to me; every possible strategy I can think of has either divides or conforms the student body too much, both physically and immaterially. Although, there aren’t concrete solutions to stop stereotypes, there are things that everyone can do to help reduce the effects of stereotypes. For example, by educating people further about cultures, genders, ethnicities, and other categories people identify with that have well known and specific stereotypes, we can help them to understand and therefore disregard the stereotypes we apply. Knowledge is power; and if people know more about something, then have less of a tendency to make false assumptions about them. This theory may be far-fetched, but if it is in the interest of our community, then I’d say it is worth a try.