Personal Account and Reflection on Stereotyping
People encounter stereotypes in their everyday life. Every now and then we label other persons with some positive or negative characteristics, make general assumptions about them, based simply on their image and knowing nothing about them. For this reason, very often our ungrounded assumptions appear to be wrong. For example, Americans are believed to be friendly, tolerant, and generous, but also impatient, arrogant and linking to domineer. Asians, on the other hand, are generally considered to be alert and shrewd, but, as well, reserved. However, in real life, not all Americans are tolerant and friendly, and not all people from Asia are necessarily reserved.
Unfair stereotyping of persons very often results in cultural or some other sorts of conflicts. After all, all this attribution of specific features or behaviors, in most cases, is not made on purpose. Very often stereotyping takes place without conscious awareness of this fact. Regardless of whether stereotyping is made unintentionally or on purpose, people, in general, feel themselves justified in their prejudices and, as a rule, show their unwillingness to reconsider their behavior or conduct towards people, who find themselves discriminated. This problem is really big and needs to be addressed from all possible perspectives, as stereotypes make an enormous impact on people’s social lives, their emotions, feelings, picture of themselves, and on the way they interact with the environment.Personal accountI have personally experienced stereotyping in school. In other words, stereotyping is real, and it is happening in real life. This is what happened to me. My personal account here is that I really like to study and spend most of my time learning the subjects I am really interested in. For this reason most of my classmates have stereotypical view of me, as of someone who does not like being involved into other social activities, which my peers consider to be cool. But this is definitely not true. Despite of my love to studying I really like spending time actively in a company of other people. However, due to this totally unfair stereotype about students who just like me are into studying, I went through a lot of hardships when I first went to school. During my first days in school, I tried my best to make some new friends, but I could not. The problem was that I did not understand what my peers expected me to say or how they expected me to behave in order to fit in their company. Before school, I did not have much experience of getting alone with other kids, as I used to spend most of my time at home.
But I really wanted that to change at school. It turned out to be an extremely hard task. I always felt like I say or do something wrong, because all the time my peers reacted to my comments with laughing or staring at me as though as if I had just drooped down from heaven. …
