Stereotyping And Its Effects On Our Social Lives - 1766 Words

Stereotyping can be a useful tool in how human beings navigate the world, however it can have negative impact on our social lives. Stereotyping was an important evolutionary tool for our ancestors to learn to adapt and survive. Stereotyping creates general rules that we can access through memory when we are presented with something that we need to interact with, and people use stereotypes to interpret their surroundings. However, when people use stereotyping against groups of people who may be different from them, it can create negative prejudices. Many social psychologists have studied prejudices and what types of psychological tools that can be used to bypass prejudices. Stereotyping is a cognitive process of several prejudiced attitudes†¦show more content†¦(Devine, 1989, p. 5-6) One main question about stereotyping is how much of it is in our memory, and how much it effects how we see other people. Patricia Devine, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin focused her studies on the different components of stereotypes and prejudices. In her first study, she had 40 white psychology students put into groups of 4-6, isolated to control for anonymity. They were told that the experimenter was not looking for their personal beliefs, but was looking for their knowledge of cultural stereotypes. The participants were told to keep their biased beliefs aside, and were then told to write lists of stereotypes to identify what they knew of the topic. Then they completed a seven item Modern Racism Scale, which is used to measure negative Black attitudes in an unresponsive way. The scale predicts behaviors such as voting patterns and other racial based decisions. After they were finished, they were rated as high-prejudice or low prejudice. They found that there was no di fference in stereotype knowledge and their prejudices. (Devine, 1989, p. 8) This suggest that people with high and low prejudice have equal amount of knowledge of cultural stereotypes, but interpret them in different ways. In Devine’s second study, they were looking at automatic processes and stereotype priming effects for people with high and low prejudice beliefs. Duncan (1976) hypothesized that that people’s stereotype belief that African American’s