Lippmann coined the term stereotype to describe simplified narratives.

Evidence

What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough “stereotypes” (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the “consent” of the governed had been, in his phrase, “manufactured.” Hence, as he wrote, “It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 165

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘stereotype’ as a coined term here, and introduces Lippmann’s ‘manufactured consent’ framework.
• XREF: Manufactured consent directly connects to Chomsky’s later work of the same name, and to the reader’s attention-industry history through the idea that public attention can be engineered. — connects to: Post-1954 cognitive research treated stereotyping as a byproduct of simplifying social information — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2375; Stereotypes are fixed ideas accompanying categories, driven by cognition and culture; Stereotypes function as cognitive structures rather than mere descriptions. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 112
• DEEPTHINKING: Lippmann’s challenge to the ‘original dogma of democracy’ — that governing knowledge comes spontaneously from the human heart — is a paradigm-shifting claim about what democracy presumes and how propaganda subverts it.

Broader Connections

• Post-1954 cognitive research treated stereotyping as a byproduct of simplifying social information #expands (0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2375
• Stereotypes are fixed ideas accompanying categories, driven by cognition and culture #expands (0.72)
• Stereotypes function as cognitive structures rather than mere descriptions. #expands (0.70) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 112