Stereotyping Stereotypes

Manuela Sławińska ' 'Can stereotypes be challanged? ' '

Stereotyping accompanies us in our everyday life, even without realising it. Is it a bad or a good thing? People usually focus on the negative consequences of stereotyping and consider them as an obstacle in the making new relations, which we cannot disagree with. To examine the problem of stereotypes and their impact on people, more information on this topic should be provided. Stereotype, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is „a widely held, but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing”. Studies show that people, who think of themselves as open and free of prejudice, are also the victims of the using stereotypes practice, because they are deeply rooted in our minds. There are, though not many, compared to the negative, possitive sides of stereotyping. Even though challenging stereotypes seem to be pointless, many people try. Oversimplfing is a natural practice for people and it may not necessarily lead to creating prejudices. It is an essential to understand that we simplify things to make the world easier to perceive. As American psychologist Gordon Allport said, it is „the law of a small effort”, which introduces human race as lazy, although, resourceful. He simply describes the world as too complicated to have diverse opinions on every aspect of life. As far as we can prove our observations and they are generally adequate to the reality, the stereotypes are useful way of