Ethnic Stereotypes – Impediments or Enhancers of Social Cognition?
Ethnic Stereotypes – Impediments or Enhancers of Social Cognition?

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a brief summary of the recent literature on stereotypes according to social iden tity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1986). It offers a comparison of related concepts such as prejudice (Gadamer 1984) and attitude (Cseresnyési 2004) and relies on stereotype definition developed by Hilton and Hippel (1996). It gives a survey of stereotype manifestation, formation, maintenance and change, focusing on social and ethnic stereotypes, their background variables, transmitting mechanisms and mediating variables. The last part of the paper discusses different linguistic means of expressing ethnicity concluding that stereotypes act as ever-extendable schemas as opposed to prototypes, defined as best examples of a category.

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