Title: Stereotype Accuracy: A Displeasing Truth | Psychology Today
Headings: Stereotype Accuracy: A Displeasing Truth
Noam Shpancer Ph.D.
Stereotype Accuracy: A Displeasing Truth
Stereotypes are often harmful, but often accurate.

Content: Stereotypes have a bad reputation, and for good reasons. Decades of research have shown that stereotypes can facilitate intergroup hostility and give rise to toxic prejudices around sex, race, age and multiple other social distinctions. Stereotypes are often used to justify injustice and discrimination, validate oppression, enable exploitation, rationalize violence, and shield corrupt power structures. Stereotype-based expectations and interpretations routinely derail intimate relationships, contaminate laws (and their enforcement), poison social commerce, and stymie individual freedom and achievement. Research has shown, for example, how individual performance may be affected adversely by heightened awareness of negative group stereotypes, a phenomenon known as "stereotype threat." If I show up for a pickup basketball game, and I know that all the young players around me hold a negative stereotype about the athleticism of middle-aged Jewish guys, the knowledge that I’m being thus judged could adversely affect my confidence and concentration, and with that my overall performance on the court (thus perpetuating the stereotype). But you don’t even have to go to the research to develop your distaste for stereotypes. Looking around, most of us have seen with our own eyes the harm that can come from stereotyping, from stuffing complex human beings into categories at once too broad and too narrow and using those to justify all manner of unfair and vicious conduct. Looking inward, most of us resent it when our deeply felt complexity is denied; when we are judged by those who don’t know us well;