Stereotyping various groups of people based on social group, ethnicity or class is something nearly all of us do, even if we make an effort not to -- and it can lead us to draw unfair and potentially damaging conclusions about entire populations. NYU psychologist John Bargh's experiments on "automaticity of social behavior" revealed that we often judge people based on unconscious stereotypes -- and we can't help but act on them. We also tend to buy into stereotypes for social groups that we see ourselves being a part of. In one study, Bargh found that a group of participants who were asked to unscramble words related to old age -- "Florida," "helpless" and "wrinkled" -- walked significantly slower down the hallway after the experiment than the group who unscrambled words unrelated to age. Bargh repeated the findings in two other comparable studies that enforced stereotypes based on race and politeness.
"Stereotypes are categories that have gone too far," Bargh told Psychology Today. "When we use stereotypes, we take in the gender, the age, the color of the skin of the person before us, and our minds respond with messages that say hostile, stupid, slow, weak. Those qualities aren't out there in the environment. They don't reflect reality."