Type or stereotype?
The jock. The cowboy. The rebel. Stereotypes have gotten a really bad rap over the years. But what does stereotyping really say? It says that people look like who they are. In other words, that inner reality is accurately reflected by outer appearance. In itself, this is not a bad thing. The dispositional properties of a thing illustrate that form reflects composition. Stereotypes are only bad if they are inaccurate. In which case, they are not really stereotypes at all....
Comments (13)
None are completely accurate so they're not all good, on that point. I was reading a book just now that talks about stereotypes and one thing pointed out is that they always contain negative attributes, somewhere in the rang of 30%.
How do you know if you're in an Asian home? The dog is missing and the kids are doing their homework.
Maybe that is a negative stereotype of stereotypes.....
In Hawaii the Portguese guy was always the butt of the bar joke, portrayed as a total idiot. It seemed so bad as to convey that the only reason for creating a bar joke at all was to shit on a whole ethnicity. The elementary school yard was rife with these.
Now ponder the historical cause of portraying the Portuguese this way:
[quote=Frank De Lima...] they (the Portugese) were second in command after the white people on the plantations. And they always referred to themselves as Pawdagees. They were under the haoles (white man) but above everyone else. They were the luna (boss), the paniolo, the guys on horseback who made everyone work. And with someone strict over them-some of them were really mean-the workers made jokes about them. That's why a high percentage of the jokes in Hawaii are directed towards the Portuguese community.[/quote]
No it does not. Stereotyping is the process of assigning a "type" based upon a preconceived concept of the appearance, behavior and mannerisms of that type.
In old movies, the bad guys nearly always wore black. It was the concept of what bad guys should look like.
English people drink tea. When you go to a cafe or restaurant in some places around the world and ask for tea the waiter might ask you if you are from England. Even if you are Dutch you would have been stereotyped as English.
Quoting Pantagruel
Yes it is. I had a friend with a slight lisp caused by a deformation of the tongue. He missed out on several good jobs that he was over qualified to do, because people thought de was either mentally ill or gay.
Black lives matter did not appear because cops treat everyone equally either.
Yes, that's right. It is the expectation that inner and outer mutually correspond.
I'm not saying that there are not bad stereotypes, certainly that's the most usual connotation. And certainly stereotypes based on physical characteristics like a lisp are not accurate. But that was also my point. The "loving mother" is also a stereotype (a positive one) but it's an oversimplified characterization. Not all mothers are loving.
Well, the alternative is apparently suggesting that we intuit some people or things as perfect. That would be a case of excellent drugs, I think, and have noting to do with sterotypes. Stereotypes are necessarily shared culturally and not an individual or esoteric type of categorization.
Stereotypes are of course useful. We can usually get a useful picture of a complete stranger instantly, for example. They can also mislead, however, with disastrous results. They also promote biases, to the detriment of 'out-groups' and can even be self-defeating to ourselves.
In the book I mentioned earlier, Blindspot, by Mahzarin Banaji, it goes over research that shows how IAT (implicit association tests) results correspond to everyday life behavior, affecting everything from law enforcement, the judicial system, medical care, to government policies, and by people who consciously hold no biases.
My favorite was the one about a group of kids who were stealing mangos from a neighbors tree. When the neighbor heard something in his backyard and went out to investigate the kids quickly climbed the tree to hide. Looking around by the tree the man saw some branches moving and said, "Hey, any kids take'n mangos gon get cracks!"
Thinking quickly, the Chinese kid hiding in the tree tried to make the man think it was a cat moving the branches by saying, "meow"
Following his lead, the Hawaiian kid went, "chirp chirp"
The Filipino girl squawked like a mynah bird.
The Portuguese kid said, "moo"
And yet they are not explicitly defined, so one person's version of a stereotype may differ considerably from another's. And as you say, they are a kind of heuristic. So maybe it is just convention to call negatively slanted preconceptions stereotypes. They exist in a wide range. The stereotypical baby-boomer could be identified in the context of technical skills, financial security, etc. Someone could just as easily be the "prototypical baby boomer" or the "archetypal baby boomer."
Moo.
Stereotypical, prototypical, and archetypal denote substantially different things.
They are quite different words, each with a variety of meanings, but variations on "type." A stereotype was originally a kind of relief printing plate cast from an original, and one meaning of archetype is the original which has been imitated. So the stereotype might be cast from the archetype. And I could be a stereotypical baby-boomer. Or, if I am old enough, I could be an archetypal or a prototypical baby-boomer. If you just met me, you wouldn't know and might use any one of the terms. The words do indeed cover a range of meanings of typology, but the accuracy of the usage depends on the degree of knowledge of the person applying them in a given context. Which is really what is in question. An interesting study in typology.
ar·che·type
/?ärk??t?p/
1. a very typical example of a certain person or thing.
"the book is a perfect archetype of the genre"
You seem to have a somewhat restrictive view of the definitions of words. Especially one whose origins and essence are literary. Literary usage can be quite 'relaxed,' by its very nature.
I tend to think of an archetype as a recurring natural pattern. Something that may be recognized in literature but not coined by it. Baby-boomer is a term used to distinquish a particular generation, for the most part, and not even particularly categorical in nature. For instance, no one ever says things like, "Don't be such a baby-boomer."