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Misconceptions: Why Do We Create Stereotypes?

907 Words4 Pages

Picture that student that gets straight A’s in every class and seems to pass every single test they take. Immediately, that student is considered to be the nerd who takes numerous Advanced Placement, or AP, classes and has no social life. Assumptions such as these lead to people creating a generalization about each other, or a stereotype, which is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing. Psychologists state that people stereotype because our brains are wired to do so. Unfortunately, making such assumptions comes with a disadvantage. This can lead to people ignoring differences between individuals so false statements are made. From stereotypes often come misconceptions, which are views …show more content…

According to Valley Public Radio’s online interview, Why Do We Create Stereotypes? psychologist Paul Bloom explains why people create these incorrect ideas when he states “...We have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories and we could use our experience to make generalizations of novel instances of these categories…” (Guy Raz 2014). This simply clarifies the fact that society needs to categorize the other social groups to feel more comfortable when approaching either a member of the group, or a numerous amount of members from any other group in general. This applies to the making of misconceptions as well. Since misconceptions derive from stereotypes, individuals seem to make assumptions based off of beliefs or the influence of others. Unfortunately, because a large number of the population creates such beliefs, it is not unusual for one to hear a stereotype or misconception about another group and believe it. People will simply ignore the individuality of the rest of the population and just categorize them swiftly to avoid having to get to know them. To this day, a majority of the members of society will continue categorizing different individuals simply to try and make personal interactions

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