ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the social scientific evidence demonstrating how stereotypical images affect media audiences. Psychologists call the cognitive structures schema and believe that schema help simplify a complex social environment by quickly and efficiently processing incoming stimuli based on the presence of a few relevant characteristics. Stereotypes are schema that helps organize our knowledge and beliefs about social groups. P. G. Devine found that there were important differences between knowledge of the stereotype and endorsement of it, and between high- and low-prejudiced individuals. Although relatively small compared to the body of work studying the stereotypes present in media content, a growing area of media studies uses psychological research to examine the effects of such images on audiences. Psychologists D. L. Hamilton & T. K. Trolier defined a stereotype as “a cognitive structure that contains the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies about some human group”.
