Would Age Affect A Person's Response To Stereotypes

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Stereotypes are harmful things that hurt people. It takes away a person’s individuality and leave them only with a label that is, more often than not, affiliated with negative traits. The person feels worse about themselves and may lose motivation. They may also leave a bad impression on people despite doing nothing to support that assumption. In that case, there is nothing the person can do about it. Someone’s personal beliefs, no matter how nonsensical, is something that another person can’t manage. However, the response to mistreatment from stereotypes is something the person can managed. Though you cannot control another person’s actions, you can control your own. This leaves one question in mind. Would age affect a person’s response to stereotypes? A person who has dealt with stereotypes for a longer time may react different from someone who isn’t used to it. In gathering the information for this experiment, the freshmen of Health Careers Academy first interviewed each other. Once everyone had given a response, all the results were smashed together then organized. Answers were tallied, the exact amount of inputs for each question was carefully counted, and percentages were made. Then, each freshman was to interview an upperclassman, from sophomore to senior, about their experiences with …show more content…

What strategies do you have for dealing with those stereotypes?”, 46% of freshmen and 42% of upperclassmen responded with ‘ignore’. However, 20% of freshmen and 15% of upperclassmen responded with ‘get mad, offended, talk back’. Then, for ‘insult back’, 9% of upperclassmen claimed they would while only 6% freshmen did. 17% of upperclassmen and 16% of freshmen answered with ‘correct the other person’. For ‘laugh it off’, 8% upperclassmen and 6% freshmen chose that response. 5% of upperclassmen responded with ‘get into fights’. Fortunately, no freshmen responded with the same