Beh225 Wk 7 Evaluation and Judgement

465 Words2 Pages
We evaluate individuals through impression formation which includes schemata, attribution, and stereotyping. Schemata are the preconceived notions we have toward others based on appearance, social status, and intelligence. Schemata is a system of beliefs we may have that formulate how we respond to people as our first impression and often affects the way we view others. This primary effect is responsible for the way we treat individuals based on our ideology of whom they should be. For example, many who see a man in a black suit with a flat white collar will automatically relate the man to priesthood and Catholicism. Stereotyping occurs when we have biases and self-proclaimed expectations based on a person’s ethnicity, race, or religion. We may see a woman in a burka and assume she is oppressed when in reality the woman may be perfectly happy taking on a submissive role to her husband. This is stereotyping. Attributions are how we explain the behavior of others and ourselves based on their relation to personal traits or social situations. These factors play a crucial role in how we view the world around us and the people we come in contact with. Unless one is careful to avoid stereotyping it is plausible that we may form a schemata that has biases within it. These biases can be neglectful of realistic attributes. We may stereotype all priests to be pedophiles based on personal experience or a news story and not judge the person by his own merit and actual social characteristics. Thus, we may misjudge others, if we are not careful to examine everyone as an individual instead of grouping people into preconceived categories. We have expectations of people based on our notions of who they should be according to society instead of individuality. The disadvantages of these tendencies are that we may be less likely to access and accept an individual for who they
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