Cultural Dynamics of Stereotypes: Social Network Processes and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes

Culturally shared beliefs, values, and practices are sine qua non of social life; it is a truism to say that society cannot exist without culture. Yet, shared beliefs and ideas can be at the heart of many social issues and problems as well. Whether it be inequality, prejudice, intergroup conflict, terrorism, or other social issues or problem, such phenomena would hardly be a problem or even exist at all if not for the beliefs and ideas that spread and perpetuate within particular groups or communities. Stereotypes are a classic example. Stereotypes are typically shared within a society (e.g., Katz and Braly, 1933), and tend to perpetuate over time (e.g., Schaller, Conway, and Tanchuk, 2002) even when evidence clearly demonstrates that they are often highly inaccurate (e.g., Kunda and Oleson, 1995; Richards and Hewstone, 2001). Although there may be some aspects of stereotypes that are genetically coded (e.g., Hirschfeld, 1996), their specific contents are likely to be socially learned. Stereotypes spread through communities from one individual to another as community members learn the stereotypes of a group, either through conversations or other forms of communication, such as the mass media (van Dijk, 1987), or a general diffusion of information. In other words, stereotypes are prevalent in a large group of people, relatively stable over time, and often transmitted from person to person by social learning. These properties make stereotypes a cultural phenomenon (e.g., Lyons and Kashima, 2001).