Media Stereotypes

For second discussion, our lecture want to we watch and comment the second video. the second video is Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. the video show about vice of the Arabian people. They show about sex,  violence, decay of Arabs people and much more. and I think is about racist for Arabian people from maybe people from Hollywood.  For the first, I want to tell about stereotypes 

    A stereotype is a popular belief about specific social groups or types of individuals. The concepts of "stereotype" and "prejudice" are often confused with many other different meanings. Stereotypes are standardized and simplified conceptions of groups based on some prior assumptions. 

    I think much movie from Hollywood is racist for Arabian people and I see is not just for Arab, I see its for India, Negro And much more. Much movie from Hollywood or from west people is show about bad life from people of other races. the secondly I want to tell about media stereotypes. 

    Media stereotypes are inevitable, especially in the advertising, entertainment and news industries, which need as wide an audience as possible to quickly understand information. Stereotypes act like codes that give audiences a quick, common understanding of a person or group of people—usually relating to their class, ethnicity or race, gender, sexual orientation, social role or occupation.

But stereotypes can be problematic. They can:

reduce a wide range of differences in people to simplistic categorizations

transform assumptions about particular groups of people into "realities"

be used to justify the position of those in power

perpetuate social prejudice and inequality

More often than not, the groups being stereotyped have little to say about how they are represented.

This section comments on common media stereotypes and examines some of the root causes of stereotypical portrayals, including lack of diversity behind the scenes in newsrooms and film studios. The section explores the impact of stereotyping on self-image and the development of attitudes among the young, and it showcases efforts to counter stereotyping with alternative programming. It also outlines diversity guidelines for the broadcasting industry, as well as government policies to promote fair and equitable portrayals in Canadian media.

  Stereotypes can have a negative and positive impact on individuals. Joshua Aronson and Claude M. Steele have done research on the psychological effects of stereotyping, particularly its effect on African Americans and women. They argue that psychological research has shown that competence is highly responsive to situation and interactions with others. They cite, for example, a study which found that bogus feedback to college students dramatically affected their IQ test performance, and another in which students were either praised as very smart, congratulated on their hard work, or told that they scored high. The group praised as smart performed significantly worse than the others. They believe that there is an 'innate ability bias'. These effects are not just limited to minority groups. Mathematically competent white males, mostly math and engineering students, were asked to take a difficult math test. One group was told that this was being done to determine why Asians were scoring better. This group performed significantly worse than the control group.

Possible prejudicial effects of stereotypes are:

    Justification of ill-founded prejudices or ignorance

         Unwillingness to rethink one's attitudes and behavior towards stereotyped group

   Preventing some people of stereotyped groups from entering or succeeding in activities or fields

Stereotypes allow individuals to make better informed evaluations of individuals about whom they possess little or no individuating information, and in many, but not all circumstances stereotyping helps individuals arrive at more accurate conclusions. Over time, some victims of negative stereotypes display self-fulfilling prophecy behavior, in which they assume that the stereotype represents norms to emulate. Negative effects may include forming inaccurate opinions of people, scapegoating, erroneously judgmentalism, preventing emotional identification, distress, and impaired performance.

Yet, the stereotype that stereotypes are inaccurate, resistant to change, overgeneralized, exaggerated, and destructive is not founded on empirical social science research, which instead shows that stereotypes are often accurate and that people do not rely on stereotypes when relevant personal information is available. Indeed, Jussim et al. comment that ethnic and gender stereotypes are surprisingly accurate, while stereotypes concerning political affiliation and nationality  are much less accurate; the stereotypes assessed for accuracy concerned intelligence, behavior, personality, and economic status. Stereotype accuracy is a growing area of study and for Yueh-Ting Lee and his colleagues they have created an EPA Model (Evaluation, Potency, Accuracy) to describe the continuously changing variables of stereotypes.