ABSTRACT
Following the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, news reports began circulating that the incident may have been the work of terrorists. The next day a Jordanian American was wrongfully detained and returned from London to the United States in connection with the terrorist attack. A few months later, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a claim against the United States on behalf of Abraham Ahmad. According to the ACLU’s claim, “it [was] wrong to target someone in a criminal investigation based on cultural stereotypes … [and] Arab Americans have been subject[ed] to a great deal of prejudice and discrimination, both before and after the bombing” (ACLU, Freedom Network, 1995, p. 1). Unfortunately, the attacks on September 11, 2001 further reinforced and extended the stereotype that not only are all Arabs terrorists but also that all Muslims or people of the Islamic faith are terrorists. However, such generalizations are without foundation. No particular ethnic or cultural group holds an exclusive trademark for terrorism because other groups have been and are involved in such destructive acts (e.g., Anglo Americans, Europeans, and Latin Americans). In this chapter, the term stereotype describes the seemingly pervasive human tendency to perceive others not as individuals but as members of particular social groups with shared characteristics (Lippman, 1922). In other words, stereotypes are cognitive frameworks that consist of beliefs and generalizations about perceived typical characteristics for certain social groups. Thus, for some people, the term terrorist can be understood in terms of a dominant meaning, which typically includes acts of terrorism, such as bombing and gunfire, and a stereotype meaning that characterizes Arabs or Muslims as people who commit acts of terrorism. A vast amount of research has been conducted on stereotypes, the most recent of which involves examining stereotypes as a specific type of cognitive structure and discerning the processes by which these structures exert influence on behavior, attitudes, memory, social judgment, inferences, and various other perceptual processes (e.g., Banaji & Greenwald, 1995; Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman, 1993; Bodenhausen, 1988; Cohen, 1981; Darley & Gross, 1983; Kunda & Sherman-Williams, 1992; Synder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977). In short, when a stereotype is activated, practically all aspects of social information processing are affected. Clearly, the possession of a stereotype and its activation have extremely important implications for social life.
