All Girls Like Ponies: The stereotype that girls like horses.All Girls Want Bad Boys: The stereotype that women are only attracted to rude and rebellious men.All Gays Love Theater: The stereotype that gay men enjoy and are well-informed about musical theater.All Gays are Promiscuous: The stereotype that a gay man will want to have sex with everyone who is male.All Gays Are Pedophiles: The belief that gay men are willing to satisfy their sexual urges by molesting younger boys.All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: The stereotype that anime is only about women getting raped by tentacled creatures.Albinos Are Freaks: The stereotype that people with albinism are weird.Africa Is a Country: The belief that the entire continent of Africa is just like one large country that is culturally homogeneous.Stereotypes at their very best are a small grain of truth about some people in some groups that are most often taken from Small Reference Pools (and very rarely from generalities drawn from group norms as observed by outsiders), and then erroneously applied to everyone in the group/people/culture/ethnicity/etc, never mind that cultures have a wide variety of differences, and individual people within them can be even more varied, and even at that very best are often still tokenization (even when "positive", fetishization, or objectification. The term came to mean the readily available phrase itself before broadening to include any overused element. Such ease of use ended up with authors over-utilizing them to save on costs. When each letter had to be individually set, a common phrase would often be cast as a single block piece called a Cliché (after the sound it made) the blocks were also called stereotypes. The term refers back to older printing presses. This is very useful when you're writing fiction, because it lets you save a lot of space and time that you'd otherwise have to spend describing something in detail, when it isn't really important to your story. Most of the time, nobody notices, as in the case of birds. But even here, it would be an error to say that use of a stereotype is 'wrong' just because there exist exceptions to the generalization upon which it is based.When a set of such assumptions about something becomes " "Common Knowledge"", it forms a stereotype. Many generalizations, like those based on race or gender or religion, are rightly subject to special scrutiny because of their historical misuse. Is important, as is determining when some alternative, like individualized testing, is appropriate. Second, working out the ways in which the use of a stereotype can go wrong How, then, should we think about stereotypes?įirst, it's naive to say you can't use a generalization about a class of people unless it's universally valid-we use such stereotypes all the time and would be paralyzed without them. Who would be trusted to design such a test? Even for something like driving skill, if we are con dent that the vast majority of 12-year-olds would be poor drivers, is it worth the costs of giving all 12-year-olds the opportunity to take some test that most will fail? Imagine the controversies that would attend any individualized test for voter competence. Testing is expensive and not without its own errors and abuses. Nor is individual testing always a workable solution to such problems. Some 12-year-olds could reasonably drive a car. Neither is based on universally valid generalizations: Some 25-year-olds shouldn't be voting and some 16-year-olds would be competent to do so. Most accept that a person should be a certain age to vote or drive a car.
The real question is: What makes some uses of stereotypes inappropriate and others appropriate?Īge requirements. It's quite another to say we should ignore an accurate generalization just because there are exceptions to it. Say a person wants to make a decision by relying on a generalization that "Children reared by single parents are more likely to be involved in criminal activity." Someone else may respond, "What about the single-parented children who don't fit this generalization?" It's one thing to challenge a generalization as inaccurate or to suggest a different generalization for use in the particular context. Many believe we shouldn't make decisions a ecting an individual based on a stereotype, even if it is statistically accurate. It may be statistically accurate but not universally valid. But a stereotype is simply a generalization about how a group of people behaves. Why? Stereotype has a negative connotation. Many people shy away from the idea of making decisions based on stereotypes.
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