How Does Stereotyping Affect Communication?

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Anonymous Profile
Anonymous answered
Stereotyping can affect communication in a positive or negative way.

To examine the effect it is important to look at why stereotyping occurs. Essentially a stereotype is a shortcut for out brain to pick up a relevant set of data, psychologists call them heuristics and they your brain process the crazy amount of information you process daily.

By "loading" these heuristics or stereotypes into your brain automatically when you engage someone your behaviour and attitude adjust to the situation. For example you will have a stereotype for "boss", when you boss greets you you will generally act in a completely different way to how you act when your partner greets you.

In this sense stereotypes positively control many aspects of communication, speech, vocab, body language and more, without them every social situation would be as taxing as a new job interview as you would simply not know how to act or what to say.

The negative side of stereotypes and heuristics is that negative emotions and connotations (such as fear) which cause largely irrational actions.

Hope this helps with your question!
Steven Vakula Profile
Steven Vakula answered
Sometime a person is seen as being something that they may not be, but because of this mis-perception and stereotyping because of the perception attitudes and judgments are made which are based on nothing more than personal issues. This in turn can lead to someone being told or hearing things that are not really being said or heard but are perceived to be said or heard based on the stereotype and not on what in fact is being communicated.

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