Forming Impressions of Others: Ethnic Stereotyping

Finding Out About Forming Impressions of Others: Ethnic Stereotyping

In one of the earliest studies of ethnic stereotyping, Daniel Katz and Kenneth W. Braly (1933) discovered that white Princeton undergraduates regarded blacks as mucial, lazy, and superstitious; Jews as shrewd, mercenary, and industrious; Germans as scientific and industrious; and Americans as shrewd and materialistic. More recent studies of these ethnic stereotypes suggest that people are less inclined than they once were to lump people in these extreme categories, although the tendency toward stereotyping clearly persists.

                A Scot psychiatrist, Morris Fraser, has studied the development of bigotry in Northern Ireland. As reported in the New York Post (October 4, 1972), he found that by the time a child has entered elementary school, stereotyped views of others are firmly entrenched. Protestants (all Protestants) are seen by Catholic children as members of a “master race” that is attempting to suppress the “inferior” Irish; the British army is an armed aggressor similar to the forces of Nazi Germany. Catholics, in turn, are viewed by Protestant children as reckless, lazy, dirty, and oversexed—traits not unlike those sometimes attributed to blacks in our own country. In fact, Protestant children sometimes refer to the Catholics as “niggers,” and they even have a song that begins, “I’d rather be a nigger than a Taig [a Catholic].” According to Fraser, this frightening process of indoctrination begins at home, is strengthened in the rigidly segregated schools where there is almost no contact between Catholics and Protestants, and is encouraged by the presence of overt hostility and fear.

(Source: Raven, Bertram H., Rubin, Jeffrey Z. (1983). SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: United States of America.)

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