Social Stereotypes: Beneficial, Detrimental Or Neutral?
Social Stereotypes: Beneficial, Detrimental Or Neutral?
...age groups, gender, sexual orientation, people with mental disorders and anything else to do with different groupings in society. However are all stereotypes negative? Men have traditionally been seen as the “stronger” sex. When they excel at things like business or jobs where you have to be stern and have a strong resolve they are depicted as being strong leaders. However when a woman does the same, like Hilary Clinton, they are seen as too stern and not “feminine” enough. Donatella Versace even said that Hilary Clinton should wear skirts more often to appear more feminine. In my personal opinion there are more negative stereotypes than positive stereotypes and even positive stereotypes can have an adverse effect; for example: all Asian people are good at math. That would seem to be a positive stereotype because it’s “praising” an ethnic group. However, when a member of an Asian ethnic group does not excel at math, people say things like “but you’re Asian! How could you be bad at math?!”. A supposedly positive stereotype could have an adverse effect because they still group all people into a category that not everyone fits into. Another example would be all Black people are good at basketball. A friend of my mother’s son tried playing basketball and he continued playing it even though he wanted to play soccer. I asked him why he didn’t switch sports and he said “because I’m Black and soccer is for White kids”. How do children internalize these ideas? Fredrick Williams, Robert LaRose and Frederica Frost suggest that children get these ideas from television (1981). During the lecture on the media and internalizing ideas we discovered that we are affected by television far more than we think we are. So do stereotypes stem only from the media? Do stereotypes have a detrimental, neutral or beneficial effect on society?
Ethnic stereotypes can come from religion and the...
