Timothy McVeigh. The black man was Harvard University professor Roland Fryer.
The children in this experiment were not being mean by pegging the black Harvard professor as a criminal and the white mass murderer as a teacher.
Their comments were undoubtedly the result of conditioned responses brought about by the stereotypes, in this case the racial stereotypes, they have learned thus far in their young lives. And it does not end there.
Stereotypes are present in all age groups and are at work in all aspects of social interactions, which are too numerous to count. They can be positive or negative. True or not true. They can be based on a person’s race, social class, gender, the way a person is dressed, involvement in a certain organization; the list is endless. One thing is for sure, stereotypes have a strong influence over the way people think and consequently, the way they act and it is unlikely that they will be going away any time soon.
So what are stereotypes anyway? Where did they come from and how did they come to be such a powerful, influential force in our society? Stereotypes are “over-generalized beliefs about people based on their membership in one of many social categories.” Stereotyping is a way of categorizing things and has both psychological and cognitive roots. From a cognitive standpoint, “quick and ready categorizations, even from momentary encounters, help us process huge amounts of information we receive about the people we
encounter.”