ABSTRACT
Journalists often do more than report on society. They also provide valuable insights into its fundamental nature. Walter Lippman, one of the great journalists of the twentieth century, gave the concept of stereotypes. Stereotypes are one of the simplifying mechanisms people use to make a complex social world more manageable. Stereotypes are frequently useful in everyday social interaction and often perform a valuable function. For intergroup relations stereotypes are important primarily when they are negative, overgeneralized, or incorrect, because then they have detrimental effects on intergroup interactions. The cognitive basis of stereotyping is categorization. Negative stereotypes are used to justify discrimination and to maintain current relations not only between racial and ethnic groups but also between the social classes and the sexes. The cognitive nodes in stereotype networks are also linked to affective reactions. Actively processing social category information can set in motion a sequence of related events that confirms the existence of the stereotyped traits associated with the group.
