Penelope J. Oakes – författare

Stereotyping and Social Reality combines a comprehensive review of the field with a new theoretical perspective. Stereotyping is an issue that lies at the heart of social psychology, and our understanding of the stereotyping process has implications for many general issues, including social cognition and perception, group processes, intergroup relations, prejudice, social conflict and cooperation.The book is organised around a theme which has always been the central issue of stereotyping: what is the nature of the relationship between stereotypes and the features of the social world that they purport to represent? Is it true that stereotyping necessarily involves a perceptual or cognitive distortion of social reality? Most students (and many other researchers) embark on the topic with the assumption that in stereotyping the perceiver activates fixed images (eg: 'women are passive', 'the French are arrogant') which both reflect and bolster prejudice through the misrepresentation of people's 'true' character.This book aims to challenge this view and, in doing so, it presents a significant new theoretical analysis of stereotyping based on research the authors have been conducting over the past decade. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive review of previous research on the topic, including the often neglected but fascinating work carried out in the years before the modern cognitive approach was developed. Stereotyping and Social Reality will therefore be of interest to a wide student audience as well as to researchers in the field.

Stereotyping - the process of perceiving and reacting to people in terms of their group membership - is a widespread phenomenon, and one of the most widely investigated topics in social psychology. This new book is about the causes and consequences of stereotyping. It begins from the premise that, in order to understand the nature and function of stereotyping, it is essential to understand its role in, and relationship to, the activities of social groups. In so doing, it provides an alternative to more cognitive approaches that regard stereotyping primarily as a bias produced by the limits of individual information processing.The contributors debate and challenge a range of traditional beliefs about stereotyping by exploring its social functions in intergroup contexts. They also tackle a range of thorny problems in sterotyping and related literatures: including the question of sterotype accuracy, why stereotypes develop and are widely shared, and how stereotypes and sterotyping impact upon people's self-esteem and self-definition. In short, this book examines how stereotypes are structured by social identities and the relations between groups.