Robert Heilbroner's Article Analysis

Today stereotypes have taken over our lives in America. Sometimes we believe stereotypes without knowing that we do. Stereotypes are all around us and people must choose to believe them or not. Robert L. Heilbroner wrote an article that explains how stereotypes have consumed most of our lives. The main ideas of this article are how stereotypes have affected many people minds, how people judge others before observation, and how to change the mindset toward stereotypes. I will further explain each main idea with quotes from the article and a summary of each quote. The first main idea that Heilbroner mentioned was how stereotypes have affected many people minds. People let stereotypes control their minds by believing in false information. In the article, he expresses, "We tend to stereotype because it helps us make sense out of a highly confusing world" (Heilbroner 341). This quote means that we make up stereotypes to make things more …show more content…
We need to change how we look at people without judging others before getting to know them. Heilbroner gave three ideas of how we can slowly get rid of stereotypes. First, he stated in the article "First, we become aware of the standardized pictures in our heads, in other's people heads, in the world around us" (Heilbroner 343). This quote means that we need to understand what we see of other with just one glance. Next, Heilbroner said, "Second, we can become suspicious of all judgments that we allow exceptions to "prove" (Heilbroner 343). This quote explains that we should only believe things that can be proven right. Lastly, he says, "Third, we can learn to be chary of generalizations about people" (Heilbroner 343). The quote means that we need to cautious when judging another persons' character. If we follow these three steps, I believe we can slowly change our mindset from believing stereotypes instead of observing