How Does Stereotyping Affect Communication?
Stereotyping can affect communication in a positive or negative way. To examine the effect it is important to look at why stereotyping occurs. Essentially a stereotype is a shortcut for out brain to pick up a relevant set of data, psychologists call them heuristics and they your brain process the crazy amount of information you process daily. By “loading” these heuristics or stereotypes into your brain automatically when you engage someone your behaviour and attitude adjust to the situation. For example you will have a stereotype for “boss”, when you boss greets you you will generally act in a completely different way to how you act when your partner greets you. In this sense stereotypes positively control many aspects of communication, speech, vocab, body language and more, without them every social situation would be as taxing as a new job interview as you would simply not know how to act or what to say. The negative side of stereotypes and heuristics is that negative emotions and co
