Stereotypes

The term stereotype was first used in the printing industry, where it referred to a cast iron plate used to make repeated impressions of the same image. This sense of an impression that is enduring, fixed, and resistant to change was imported into the social sciences by the journalist Walter Lippmann in his book Public Opinion. This applied the term to refer to the “pictures in the head” that people have of social groups.

A stereotype is an image or representation of a group of people that is widely known and shared within a particular community or group. However, in addition to this, within social research (as in society more generally), stereotypes are typically understood to have a number of negative features, many of which were first identified in Lippmann's writing. In particular, they are seen as akin to caricatures, which, as well as being resistant to change, are also biased, selective, and simplistic.

Consistent with these views, a large body of social psychological research confirms that stereotypes tend to accentuate both the differences between groups and the similarities within them. Their content is also often observed to be ethnocentric in the sense that the stereotypes of groups to which one belongs (ingroups) tend to be more positive than those of groups to which one does not belong (outgroups). For this reason, when most social scientists use the term stereotype, they are implicitly referring to perceptions that are believed to be fundamentally inaccurate—representing members of outgroups as being more similar to each other, more different from other groups, and of worse character than they really are: as if “we are all good” and “they are all bad.” For this reason, holding and expressing stereotypes is often seen as a form of prejudice, and this has contributed to an intertwining of research into these two phenomena.

The history of research into stereotypes and stereotyping has gone through a number of clearly defined phases. As a result, research into this topic has been an important context for key debates in social (and educational) psychology and has been a site for important conceptual and theoretical advances. The earliest research, pioneered by Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly in the early 1930s, examined stereotype consensus and content by asking people to assign adjectives from a long list to members of a range of national and ethnic groups, including their own. This confirmed that some stereotypes were indeed widely shared and that some were very disparaging. Thus, whereas Americans were most likely to describe Americans as industrious and intelligent, they described “Jews” as shrewd and mercenary and “Negroes” as superstitious and lazy.

However, against the view that stereotypes are inherently fixed and prejudicial, later studies showed that stereotype content changed to reflect changes in the nature of intergroup relations. During World War II, for example, Americans' stereotypes of Germans and Japanese became much more negative, but these improved once the conflict was over. Likewise, in Muzafer Sherif's famous studies of boys attending a summer camp, stereotypes of different groups changed to reflect the nature of the relations between them. So, when the groups were in conflict, stereotypes of the outgroup were much more negative than they were when the groups needed to cooperate to achieve a superordinate goal. Later studies also showed that stereotypes of one group changed substantially depending on with which other groups it was compared.

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