- [Voiceover] Okay, so
what do you think about people who wear glasses? I think people who wear glasses
look incredibly intelligent. In fact, I think just
wearing a pair of glasses can add 10 points to your IQ. What about people who live in cities? I find people who live
in cities to be abrasive, to be rude, to be terribly impolite. What am I doing by making these comments? Well, what I'm doing is I am stereotyping, and what stereotyping means
is that I'm attributing a certain thought, a certain cognition to a group of individuals. I'm overgeneralizing. And stereotyping doesn't just
involve a pair of glasses, what people wear, or where they live, but it can also involve race, gender, culture, religion, even shoe size. So it can be pretty all-encompassing. Doesn't stereotyping
have some disadvantages? Yeah, and it should be somewhat obvious. A major disadvantage is
it's pretty inaccurate. On the other hand, does
stereotyping have an advantage? The answer is yes. Stereotyping actually
allows us to rapidly assess large amounts of social information. So in that regard, it's
actually a useful tool, even though it does have its drawbacks. What I want to do now is to talk to you about a different
concept, and this is again perhaps a negative
characteristic of stereotyping and this is the concept
of stereotype threat. Let's take two groups of students. One, the red students and
two, the blue students, and these students are two equally capable group of students, and now
let's make them sit an exam. How do they score? How do they test? In this situation, their scores are equal. They're the same. Both red and blue get the same score. Now let's do something else. Let's make them sit the exam, but this time let's expose the students to some negative stereotypes
about the blue students not being good at exams,
not being academic. But what happens now? Well, the red students score the same, but this time we notice the blue students take a hit in their performance. Their performance drops. Well, this is what we see as
being a stereotype threat. This is when the exposure
to a negative stereotype surrounding a task can
actually cause a decrease in the performance of an individual when attempting that task. So here the stereotype
actually threatens performance. Now since I've been
talking about city folks, city dwellers being so rude,
let's put that down here. So when we put that down here, what are we really thinking about? So this is a thought
process or a cognition, and what we said before is
when we think about cognitions we're actually stereotyping. So if I think city dwellers are rude, then I may say that, hmm, you know what? I don't like them, and you know what? If I don't like a group of people, I'm probably not going to
spend a lot of time with them. I'm going to probably avoid them. Well, let's have a look at
these two other statements. I don't like them. I'm attaching an affect, which is an emotion that
can be positive or negative, to these city dwellers. So now there is an
affective component to this, and when we have an affective component, we move from stereotyping to prejudice, and then moving from
the affective component we start to avoid them. What happens there? When we avoid them we are actually demonstrating a behavioral component, and when we demonstrate
a behavioral component, we're actually moving from
prejudice to discrimination. So as we can see here, the difference between
stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination is one of cognition, affect, and behavior. Well, let's go back to
these city dwellers. If I avoid them, what do you
think's going to happen then? Well, you know what, let's
take their viewpoint. If I avoid them, maybe they're
going to start thinking that I am rude. So notice that may become
their cognition now, and then if they think I am rude, they might not like me,
and if they don't like me, they may try to avoid
me, and if they avoid me, then I may start to
think that they're rude. This actually feeds back here. This positively feeds back on itself, and suddenly we have this circle that can continuously feed back on itself, and notice that they
have done the same things that I did to them. The cognition, in that
they think I am rude, an affective component, in that they may start to not like me, and a behavioral component, in which they start to avoid me. Well, what are we actually seeing here? Well, what we're seeing
is the development of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that's to say that our
initial thought or cognition, that city dwellers are rude, becomes more true and
more affirmed over time, either directly or indirectly,
because of our own actions. To us, our initial stereotype
that city dwellers are rude becomes more true as we perceive
them to be ruder and ruder over time in response to our own behavior. This is the positive feedback that we see in a self-fulfilling prophecy.