Forming Impressions

Central and Peripheral Traits

Primacy and Recency Effects

Implicit Personality Theories (Including personal constructs, the halo effect, and the effect of names)

Stereotyping

Social Categorisation

Pros/Cons Of Stereotyping

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Generally, steotyping has been studied in hopes of finding methods to eliminate it, seeing it as the direct cause of prejudice and discrimination. However, with the research of Tajfel implying that it is a cognitive process, it becomes slightly less clean cut.

Stereotyping has several advantages, in that:

1. It is a simple way of organising and remembering information about other people
2. It reduces the amount of cognitive effort we need to make
3. It enables us to respond quickly and appropriately when we meet new people
4. It helps us to interpret ambiguous information about someone else
5. It provides us with a sense of belonging to a group, because of our shared beliefs about people in other groups.

However, stereotyping also has several disadvantages:

1. It leads us to make assumptions about other people when we know very little about them
2. It encourages us to make mistakes when given ambiguous information
3. It affects what we remember and forget about other people
4. It leads us to view members of outgroups in a negative way, leading to prejudice and discrimination
5. It may be very persistent if encouraged in young children.

In conclusion, although there are criticisms of virtually all research on stereotyping, results do indicate our willingness to categorise others. This means that we should be constantly on guard against cognitive laziness, and be willing to think over matters in depth. In addition, research suggests people are becoming increasingly uncomfortable about the idea of stereotyping, implying that there is hope for improvement on matters such as discrimination and prejudice in the future, since views *can* be changed.