SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF STEREOTYPING

In 1992 Walter Lipmann coined the term ''stereotype'' and defined it as ''pictures in our heads'', but not until the mid-century explosion of interest in social perception did the concept come into its own. The new look in social perception virtually ignored veridical perception and stressed that what matters is how the individual apprehends whatever is out there. This move focused attention on individuals; what they perceived was considered to result from various cognitive processes and the effect of motives or values on these processes. Moreover, research used impoverished stimuli to represent target persons, in order to isolate contributions from both cognitive mechanisms and effective states. In essence, the concept of stereotyping was assimilated into the cognitive paradigm.