Cultural Stereotype in Malaysia

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On December 29, 2012, the murder of a young man named Sunando Sen who was shoved and met his end at the railway track had became a headline news. His death was one example of a cultural stereotype. The convicted suspect, Erika Menendez told the police she pushed Sunando simply because he was a Hindu that was mistaken as a Muslim. This hate crime was due to cultural stereotype in which Erika Menendez assumed all Muslims are terrorists since the 9/11 tragedy. What is a cultural stereotype? According to an online dictionary, “Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary”, cultural stereotype is a fixed idea or image that people with the common cultural background are the same, which is often not true in reality. In a research by Hilton and von Hippel (1996) stated stereotypes are born because of certain factors like self-fulfilling prophecies and nonconcious detection of covariation. Self-fulfilling prophecies is an act where a group of people expect a target group to behave in certain ways, and which in turn caused the target group to exhibit the expected behavior. Nonconcious detection of covariation on the other hand is a form of generalization of behaviors of a target group by the other group and perceivers continue to belief in that stereotype even without supportive evidence. Cultural stereotypes are not fixed to only one country. Every country in the world has their own stereotypes towards other countries and within races in their own country. In Malaysia for instance, we too have our own cultural stereotypes between different races, mainly the big three races, Malays, Chinese and Indians. Malays are well known for their laziness, Chinese people are believed to be successful in business and most Indians are considered poor and aggressive. To learn more about the cultural stereotype in Malaysia, we will analysis it deeply, and hence we will explore the history of

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