Definition
Negative stereotypes are traits and characteristics, negatively valenced and attributed to a social group and to its individual members.
Description
From an etymological point of view, the term stereotype refers to a rigid and stable model. In printing activities, it represents a duplicate, fixed copy of a typographic element. These aspects of fixity and replicability inspired Walter Lippmann (1922) in applying the term stereotype to the field of social perception and, in particular, to the mental images that are generally referred to a social group. In the following years, the concept was defined in a more precise way and progressively lost its stability feature. In particular, social cognition considered stereotypes as characteristics of a group included in its mental representation. Thus, stereotypes are stored in individual memory and often endorsed automatically to group members, but they could also be changed and abandoned.
According to social cognition (Devine, 1989;...
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Voci, A. (2014). Negative Stereotypes. In: Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_1926
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_1926
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