Don't Let Stereotypes Wrap Your Judgement

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Bianka Moore English 101 October 17, 2011 Unit 3 Prompt Don't Let Stereotypes Warp your Judgment Has there ever been a moment where you caught yourself judging someone? Or were you the one being judged? You have just fallen victim to a little thing we call stereotyping. The article Don't Let Stereotypes Warp your Judgment by Robert Heilbroner is Heilbroner's feelings on stereotyping and why we should not take part in it. Heilbroner started off by talking about different scenarios on where you would would typical tend to judge a person. Heilbroner talks about how boys would prefer to take a "Gloria"(pg. 242) over a "Bertha"(pg. 242) just because her name sounds better. He then starts to talk about how people describe a suspect and the most given description is "dark and foreign-looking"(pg. 242) or "swarthy"(pg. 242) even though most of them turn out to look just like regular people. Heilbroner goes on to talk about how he did a study to see if Nebraska students could match faces and nationalities to fifteen countries and they scored wrong ninety-three percent of the time. Heilbroner then goes on to tell us that stereotyping is like gossip which makes us pre judge people before we get a chance to even meet them. Once we stereotype a person then we tend to see them in the manner in which we pre judged them. Heilbroner goes on to tell us about another study he did in a gym class in middle school. He told the "cool" kids to mess up on the exercises. When he asked the children who messed up on the exercise, they said the children who were considered "bad" were doing it wrong instead of identifying the "cool" kids as the children who did it wrong. Heilbroner talks about the last study he did which consisted of showing people pictures of beautiful women and asked for them to be placed under the categories "generally good looking" (pg. 243) , "intelligent" (pg.
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