April 15, 2007 Progress Report For Term Project

A lot of the work that I have been doing on my project so far has been trying to figure out exactly what I want to talk about in my final paper. I made the mistake of starting out with an extremely broad research topic and because of this it’s taken me a while to narrow things down to what I am actually interested in. A lot of what I have been trying to do is come up with a working definition of a stereotype and differentiate between stereotypes and prejudices. I have learned that a stereotype is defined as a “gross, often mistaken generalization.” This is different from a prejudice which Webster’s dictionary defines as “an unreasonable attitude for or against something.” In other words, these two things are different because although a stereotype may be correct- a prejudice is, by definiton, wrong.

After I discovered the differences between these two words I decided to start to try to look at how stereotypes exist in or society. My end goal is to talk about and discuss how stereotypes affect the lives of teens. I most especially want to see how important stereotypes are to Oyster River culture. But before I can do any of this I have been trying to figure out how stereotypes came to be such a big part of our society. I have been making a lot of connections between different units in my UNH class Cultural Anthropology Introduction to Global Perspectives and my research for this project. Another connection that I have been making lately is between the Sociology and Psychology classes that I took last semester and my research topic.

One of the things that I have been really trying to consider a lot is what the function of stereotypes is in our school, community, country and world. I have come to the conclusion that although stereotypes have a lot of negative effects on different groups of people and are sometimes responsible for discrimination, they are also important tools in society. Stereotypes are a sort of defense mechanism. They allow us to figure out what sort of person someone is without even talking to them. Although stereotypes are often incorrect certain kinds do have some truth in them. If you see a person dressed in a certain style of clothing you can assume that they choose to dress this way for a reason. I have been coming to the conclusion that it is often safe to judge someone by what they wear. It is not a good idea to judge someone based on their race, religion or sexual orientation because these are things that a person does not generally choose themselves.

I have been reflecting a lot on my psychology notes lately and I have been reading about a film that we watched. This film explained that you make your first impression of a person within the first 1/10 of a second of seeing them. This is just one example of why stereotypes are a very important thing to try to understand. They play a huge part in this instantaneous judgement and thus have a huge effect on how we view others. I also learned that once you make a negative first impression (within the first 1/10 of a second) you must do 8 positive things to cancel out that negative impression.

Although I have not gotten very far in my research I have been learning a lot of things about my topic and what exactly I want my topic to be. I have also been learning about how very important stereotypes are in our society. Stereotyping can even mean the difference between life and death- that is how strong of a role it can play in our lives. I hope to continue to make new discoveries about the importance of stereotyping in our world and our school.