ABSTRACT
Psychologists, along with other researchers including neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers, have in recent decades called into question old notions of how our minds work. Stereotyping is a process by which individuals are mentally associated with such simple binary groups. Generic statements, which mark off a priori mental categories, it turns out, have a somewhat convoluted relationship to statistical regularities, based on observations of the world. Classifying people, things, ideas, traits, and even abstract concepts as either "masculine" or "feminine" seems to be something that our brains tend to do, just to make all of the information we are bombarded with easier to handle. This has been demonstrated through both experimental research and through linguistic analysis. Research also indicates that the propensity to essentialize is so strong and basic that a statement phrased as a generic and accepted as true predisposes people to believe that individual members of a class will have the stated property.
