Stereotype: Cognition and Biases

Stereotypes can be considered as certain mental sets or cognitive schemas developed by an overloaded brain for the ease of categorisation. In the general sense of the term, this process appears to apply certain attributes of a group to its individual members thus leading to drastic generalisations. While stereotyping can be considered as a cognitive bias, it also appears to serve a cognitive function, which is to ease the computational load on information processing. This is done with the aid of a set of cognitive processes such as that of categorisation, differential attention to feature salience and pattern recognition. These processes are interrelated and interdependent often leading to stereotyping along with other factors such as that of one’s cultural schemas. It is important to understand the types of biases that play a role in the formation of stereotypes. These are the implicit bias, explicit bias, confirmation bias, in-group and out-group bias. While confirmation bias appears to be an intrapersonal bias, the rest are interpersonal which shapes the manner in which social relations are perceived. While stereotyping leads to prejudice and discrimination, it appears to be a process that could lead to near- to- accurate predictions of human behaviour by attributing their physical and behavioural characteristics to a group, often learned from personal or vicarious learning.