I set up a SharePoint list yesterday, and needed to isolate the audience that is able to view items in the list. I went into the permission settings for the specific list I needed to change the settings for, and my options for managing the permissions were "Manage Parent" and "Stop Inheriting Permissions". I selected to Stop Inheriting Permissions because I wanted the permissions on the list to be different than the parent permissions. However when I changed the list permissions after stopping inheriting permissions - the permissions appeared to have changed across my entire sharepoint site. Why would this be? Now I've got to go through my entire site and my pages and redo the permissions. 

Note: the permissions changed for "Team Site Members", "Team Site Owners", "Team Site Visitors" and "Viewers".