Psychology Of Stereotyping Summary

The book The Psychology of Stereotyping by David J. Schneider focuses very deeply on stereotypes and perception, while going into what makes stereotypes arise and what relates to the act of stereotyping. First and foremost, Schneider asks: What is a stereotype? In this book, he gives his definition, stating that stereotypes are qualities perceived to be associated with particular groups of categories of people. Next, he points out two problems, one being that people may have incorrect generalizations about groups, and the second is that they may use some generalizations to make incorrect judgments. With this, he says that generalizations have to be taken as both the good and bad, because it seems to be difficult to get rid of stereotyped

One easy way would be free responses, which is simply to ask people what traits or features they associate with a given group. However, these methods are good in theory, but they may not pick up essential content of stereotypes, meaning that people may forget a certain trait they stereotype of a group. To solve this problem, there is the method of attribute checking, or the Katz-Braly method, which is essentially giving a list of a number of traits and having people rate certain groups on those traits. This assigns the trait to a person or group, and all those traits are already there for people to choose from, allowing for a solution to the free response issue. Within this, there is the stereotype differential extension, where subjects rate groups on various scales, like on the scale of “clannish” to “not clannish,” and the mean is calculated for each scale and group to better assign the stereotypes. A lot of the time, stereotypes are distinguished by the highest percentage of discriminating features that were noticed or a consensus on those features. There are also reverse stereotypes, where people are asked if a feature would be associated with a group. This can be done through photos that would help someone correlate it to a group. Lastly, there is the idea of schemas, which is drawing inferences from categories.

One is that stereotypes have negative content, are based on faulty reasoning, are rigid, and don’t encourage thinking about individuals. This also shows that stereotypes promote a negative evaluation (prejudice), which justifies discrimination. He also describes categories and the types of categories that exist: social (seeing people; ingroups and outgroups) vs. nonsocial (seeing objects), compound categories, and psychological essentialism (every object/person has an “essence”- defines its purpose in life), and primary categories (which tend to be race, age, and gender). Also, there is a thesis that people assign things to appropriate categories when they are similar enough to other category members on important features. Categories are a very large part of stereotypes, and people do a lot of categorizing when it comes to other groups or individuals. Another thesis is that people seem to have stronger and more negative stereotypes about groups to which we do not belong than to those to which we do, which relates to ingroups and outgroups. The most influential modern theory of in-group bias was developed by Henri Tajfel who claimed that social groups are important sources of identity, and that people generally want to feel positive about themselves so they accomplish this goal by joining groups do that for their identity. They may identity with group goals,