What is a stereotype?

That girl must be dumb, she's a bitch. She must be a geek. So often teenage girls get stereotype​d because of how they get portrayed in the media. And so often they get judged before they have the chance to show who they really are. The dictionary definition of a stereotype is... A widely held but over simpli​fied image or idea of a particular type of person. It is used to categorise a group of people or person, making them simplified and easy to identify with.

This image is a perfect example of how the media uses the stereotypes that we have all grown up with. In this image of 5 school girls from the movie St Trinian’s we immediately look and can say the blonde on the right is the pretty, posh and ditzy blonde who is also the popular one. Whereas next to her we see a girl with black hair and dark eye makeup and automatically class her as emo. This movie’s director has used the common stereotypes we have to create easily recognised characters that people can relate to. We look at how they look and can guess the basic personality traits of the character. The media use this to make the development of the character quicker during the short time they have to portray the person.  

Automatically stereotyping has both advantages and disadvantages; by stereotyping we have the ability to rapidly respond to situations because we have had an identical or similar experience before. But in doing this we can ignore the differences and uniqueness in individuals and come to assumptions that are not true.

The reason we inevitably stereotype someone sitting with glasses and reading a book as a geek or need is basically because us as humans are lazy, we use stereotypes to simplify our social world so we reduce the amount of processing we do when we meet someone new. And by doing this we clump the person with a group and assume that they have the exact same characteristics and abilities as the members in the group. When in all honesty the person with glasses reading a book might actually be visually impaired and have to read the book for class or work. 

A lot of research has been conducted into how the brain processes stereotypes and how we detect our lazy mental habits in order to avoid harming others by automatically stereotyping. A website about phycholoical science wrote this in an article. 
"Psychologist Wim De Neys of Leuven University, Belgium, decided that the best way to explore these questions was to actually look at the brain in action. Past research has shown that a particular region of the brain’s frontal lobe becomes active when we detect conflict in our thinking—between an easy stereotype, say, and a more reasoned and complex view. But actually overriding stereotypical thinking requires another part of the frontal lobe. De Neys basically wanted see if stereotypical thinking is a detection problem or a self-control problem. To see, he watched these two brain regions during stereotypical thinking, to see what lit up.

He used a classic psychology problem to make people summon up the stereotypes residing in their neurons. Here’s how it works: Say there’s a room with 1000 people in it, and we know that 995 are lawyers and the other five are engineers. We get to meet just one of these people, named Jack, picked randomly from the group. We learn that Jack is 45-years-old and has four children. He has little interest in politics or social issues and is generally conservative. He likes sailing and mathematical puzzles. Is Jack a lawyer, or an engineer?
De Neys watched volunteers’ brains as they puzzled through this and similar problems. He found (and describes in the May issue of the journalPsychological Science) that the brain’s stereotype detector lit up regardless of whether the subject answered stereotypically or rationally. So apparently we all detect the stereotype and recognize that it is out of sync with reality. But the brain’s inhibition center—the part of the brain that says, “No, I am not falling for that simplistic idea”—lit up only when the subjects actually reasoned that Jack was a lawyer—that is, only when they overrode the stereotype and made a calculation based on probability. Apparently some of us find the ready caricatures too tempting and use them anyway, against our better judgment." 

This study is an interesting one that reinforces the idea of us automatically stereotyping but its also saying that thinking it through is what a lot of us do and its what we should do before coming to judgement on someone with little infomation.