Stereotypes Warp Your Judgment

In the article “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgment” by Robert L. Heilbroner, Heilbroner argues that we, as people, are too quick to judge others. He makes a point at the beginning of his article that we judge people based off of stereotypes that society produces. We don’t realize that we are making these judgments, but based on statistics, most Americans would describe “suspicious characters” as “dark and foreign-looking”. We as Americans treat stereotypes similar to gossip. We spread stereotypes around the country and world and plant prejudices in people’s heads. A large majority of the stereotypes that we spread around are very harmful and irrational to others. Heilbroner says that this is due to our childhood visions that taught us …show more content…
There was a study that was conducted where the most popular children in an elementary school were asked to purposefully make mistakes in gym class. The other children were asked at the end of class if they noticed any other children making mistakes, they replied saying that the “bad guys”, or the unpopular children, were the ones who made mistakes. Another topic that Heilbroner focuses on is that the reason that we stereotype is because it helps us to make sense out of things confusing and define the world as we see it. One point that he puts strong emotion behind is saying that we are becoming mentally lazy by stereotyping. By stereotyping, we are lumping things into categories. Whenever we meet someone who doesn’t fit the description of the stereotype that we know, we are unable to change our judgment in order to see the true personality of that person. In order to get rid of these injustices, Heilbroner says that we must become aware of the standardized pictures in our heads, become suspicious of judgments, and we can learn to be chary of generalizations of …show more content…
I think that in today’s society we are so quick to judge one another before we meet or get to know the other person. We judge these other people based off of stereotypes that society creates and jump to conclusions about people too quickly. One time I personally experienced these stereotypes first hand was on a basketball team. I was the only white girl on my basketball team, including my coaches. My coach obviously favored the other girls on the team more and never gave me the opportunity to prove that I could play basketball as well as the other girls. There were only six people on our team and the other girls were always the five starters. It was a hard year because my coach was obviously basing my playing time off of the stereotype that African-Americans are better at basketball than others. Another topic Heilbroner brought up in the article was that we could be given a picture of men or women from all over the world and asked to express how beautiful that person was. If we were given a specific name that could be linked to a country, we would be more likely to rate those with American names higher in beauty. I think that advertisements and upbringing naturally shape us to be judgmental of others. We watch television and see the different way that people look and act and are so quick to judge people based off