Microsoft Word Chapter 1 done doc

Stereotypes : 
Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their 
membership in a particular group. Stereotypes can be positive, 
negative, or neutral. Stereotypes based on gender, ethnicity, or 
occupation are common in many societies. 
Stereotypes have several important functions: 
1. They allow people to quickly process new information about an 
event or person.
2. They organize people’s past experiences.
3. They help people to meaningfully assess differences between 
individuals and groups.
4. They help people to make predictions about other people’s 
behavior.
Nevertheless stereotypes can lead to distortions of reality for 
several reasons: 
a. They cause people to exaggerate differences among groups.
b. They lead people to focus selectively on information that agrees 
with the stereotype and ignore information that disagrees with it.

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c. They tend to make people see other groups as overly 
homogenous, even though people can easily see that the 
groups they belong to are heterogeneous.
One way to simplify things is to organize people into groups. 
For each group, we have a stereotype, a fixed set of characteristics 
we tend to attribute to all group members. Stereotypes enable us to 
make quick judgments, but these are often wrong.
Gender stereotypes : Males are considered more independent, 
dominant, aggressive, scientific, and stable in handling crises. 
Females are seen as more emotional, sensitive, gentle, helpful, and 
patient.
Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that humans 
evolved the tendency to stereotype because it gave their ancestors 
an adaptive advantage. Being able to decide quickly which group a 
person belonged to may have had survival value, since this 
enabled people to distinguish between friends and enemies. 
Some evolutionary psychologists believe that xenophobia, 
the fear of strangers or people different from oneself, has genetic 
roots. They argue that humans are to some extent programmed by 
their genes to respond positively to genetically similar people and 
negatively to genetically different people. 
Now communication is a vital part of human life. It is what 
allows us to share thoughts, feelings, wonderings, and knowledge 
with others and also shapes our social perceptions to a great extent. 
Though we use both verbal and nonverbal communication, the 
vast majority of communication we do is through nonverbal 
channels. The next section deals with nonverbal communication in 
detail.