Cultural bridges

Unit 2 Stereotyping
Discussion
Work in pairs and discuss the following questions with your partner.
How do you define the term “Stereotyping”?
Why should we be aware of stereotypes about people and nation?
What can happen if we stereotype someone or nation? Share some stories when stereotyping caused misunderstanding?
 Read the text 
Stereotyping
(Taken from http://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/Stereotypes.jpg)
What is a stereotype? In order to understand different examples of stereotypes we should first define what a stereotype is. When we group races or individuals together and make a judgment about them without knowing them, this is a definition of a stereotype. According to Wikipedia, “stereotyping is any commonly known public belief about a certain social group or a type of individual”. Racial remarks, gender remarks and cultural remarks are the biggest stereotypes. Stereotypes sometimes are confused with prejudices, because they are based on a prior hypothesis. They are often created about people of specific cultures or races. Some examples of cultural remarks are:

• 
  All white Americans are obese, lazy, and dim-witted.
  
• 
  All Mexicans are lazy and came into America illegally
  
• 
  All people who live in England have bad teeth
  
• 
  Italian or French people are the best lovers
  
• 
  All Jews are greedy
  
• 
  All Asians are good at math.
  
• 
  All Arabs are rude.
  

Prejudice-an unfair and unreasonable opinion.
Hypothesis- an idea or explanation of something that is based on known facts but has not been proved.
Obese-extremely fat
Dim-witted - stupid

One of the more common racial stereotypes is saying that all Africans are good at sports. They think that everyone of that race is a good athlete. For gender stereotypes there are also some common examples:

• 
  Men are stronger and do all the work
  
• 
  Woman are not as smart as men
  
• 
  Men who spend too much time on the computer or read are geeks
  

Research has shown that stereotypes can be developed by a cognitive mechanism called llusory correlation. If two events co-occur, observers misjudge the frequency of co-occurrence of these events. Illusory correlations lead people to misinterpretation rare behaviors or traits at higher rates.
Stereotypes can affect self-evaluations and in a result this leads to self-stereotyping. Some specific stereotypes affect women’s and men’s evaluations of their abilities. For example, women cannot be good leaders. Here men assess their abilities higher than women. The effect of stereotypes on self-evaluations is mediated by the degree which close people in someone’s life give their approval to these stereotypes.
References:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/Stereotypes.jpg
http://examples.yourdictionary.com/stereotype-examples.html#tFZkoxicbjxM16xc.99
Stereotyping.(2017, June 20). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. retrieved 4:11, July 11, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=696057408
 Do the task 