Paper about self deception Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Paper about self deception - Essay Example For instance, there is a tendency to believe that African Americans are generally good basketball players. Although this is a positive stereotyping, this also indicates that people will also indulge in negative stereotypes (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 220). One important influence is the media as often news articles are biased towards certain communities like the blacks, Hispanics or the Jewish. In order to gain viewership from the majority groups, media often focuses on crime committed by the minorities as viewers would better respond to this. Thus, media perpetuates racial stereotyping by indicating blacks are more crime prone than the whites. It is not always true that people consider all the factors before making judgmental decisions in a rational way. Robert B. Cialdini suggests that people are often restricted by time or distance and so they tend to make their decisions based on cognitive shortcuts known as judgmental heuristics. According to Cialdini, â€Å"we must very often use our sterotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger features is present† (Triche, 18). Racial stereotyping occurs not from judging one individual but by attributing certain characteristics to a group of people. It is based on irrational knowledge collected from various sources. Therefore, although stereotyping can lead to cognitive shortcuts they often lead to false results. Stereotyping hinders development of human thought and social progress. Stereotyping involves cognitive component, i.e. ideas that people connect with a certain group or community based on their culture and society. This process of stereotyping includes â€Å"encoding and storage of stereotype concepts, the selection and activation of these concepts into working memory and their