Prejudices and Stereotypes

Give yourself a minute and try to think about somebody from an African or Asian country and what you associate with them.

The associations you had are what are generally called ‘stereotypes’.

Literature often says that stereotypes are neither negative nor positive but handy tools for our own orientation. They relieve our cognitive processes by reducing what we perceive and by providing intellectual categories. In this sense a stereotype provides a neutral assessment of value.

A prejudice, on the other hand, is a (more often) negative assessment of a person, group, country etc. and includes (mostly) negative feelings (Mast & Schmid Mast 2007). Please consider that we also have positive prejudices but these lead to critical situations less often.

We can try to avoid stereotypes and prejudices by

• learning to be aware of them and
• counteracting them by analysing the intercultural situation objectively.

(See Mast and Schmid Mast, 2007, who describe it in a similar way)