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The Effects of Stereotypes

In: Philosophy and Psychology

Submitted By mdkirk422
Words 1088
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You are in a restaurant and there is a woman there with six kids of different ages. You automatically think that she is obviously on welfare to support all those children. By making assumptions about her situation, you have just stereotyped her. Stereotyping is when you associate a person with a certain category or group of people based on fallacious arguments (Mosser, 2011, 4.1). As humans, we fall victim to being stereotyped without even knowing it. Sometimes it can be blatant, liken if you hear someone speaking derogatory about you, or you feel the unwanted stares from others. But what we don’t realize is that when we commit these fallacies, we run the risk of hurting the very people we are stereotyping. The stereotypes that we encounter in our everyday lives can have lasting effects on ourselves as well as those around us. As an African American woman in charge of a successful business operation, I am a walking stereotype. A typical stereotype that I face every day is that I am a woman, and as such, am incapable of running a business. Now, unlike the women in the article, “Stereotyping Has Lasting Negative Effect” by April Kemick (2010), I never let peoples’ stereotypical implications affect my success. The article goes on to show that women who are stereotyped are irrational, aggressive, and suffer an inability to focus (Kemick, 2010). The type of fallacious argument used here would be hasty generalization. As with most fallacious arguments, hasty generalizations occur “when the conclusion is based on insufficient information “(Mosser, 2011, 4.2). The problem with this argument is because I am nothing of the aforementioned. I tend to thrive under pressure, and because I am an African American, I work harder than the average manager in my district because I am success driven. I want to be the example that my associates look up to and do my best to make the

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