stereotypes

I would like to talk about the experiment by Snyder which is about examining some changes of men’s attitude after giving them snapshots of women. I found this really fun because even when I feel like I am against the stereotype and try not to prejudge people, in my life, small things like this always happens. It was a refreshing moment when I read this passage because I was thinking about my adolescent memoir. We are all very familiar with an internet these days and when I was fourteen, fifteen, and I was pretty much into a chatting program, which sometimes can make random people as friends. People from different cities randomly talked to me, and what I did was I asked them their picture and I only talked to the attractive ones. When I saw someone who is unattractive, I tried to avoid him because my assumption was he probably has a distant manner and doesn’t have friends to hang out.

Through this class, I could look back my life and find cognitions that I had since I had been socially constructed. The Ralph Lauren advertisement that was shown in class and a white model, who painted herself black, were things that I never doubt. I found it interested thinking about the director’s intention regarding the stereotypes, racism, sexism, etc through the advertisement. There was an advertisement that has been banned recently. It was a bingo website in which a black man repeated everything a white man said, and that was an example of negative racial stereotypes. I think advertisement is a main source encouraging people to develop stereotypes, because when I look back, most of my stereotypes of other minority groups were from watching television and advertisements. Sometimes we could be wrong to assume that the advertisement performed a stereotype, because it is just depends on what things are focused by people when they are looking at the same picture. However, it is true that intention of advertisement is attacking watcher’s subconscious which could turned into a stereotype.