Stereotyping is both an irrational political bias and an unavoidable cognitive necessity.

Evidence

Lippmann identified stereotyping as a serious problem in opinion formation and expression. He conceived stereotypes in two opposed ways (see Pickering, 2001 for a full account). On one hand, he emphasized a ‘political’ sense of stereotypes, viewing them as inadequate and biased, endorsing the interests of those who use them and as obstacles to rational thinking and impervious to change. On the other hand, he regarded stereotyping as a necessary mode of processing information, an inescapable way of creating order out of the ‘great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world’ (Lippmann, 1922 , p. 81). — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 170

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Lippmann’s two opposed conceptions of the stereotype, which social psychologists largely ignored.
• XREF: Lippmann’s ‘pictures in the head’ and complexity-reduction connects to Kahneman’s System-1 heuristics and to framing theory in media studies.

Related

• Stereotypes protect personal status and social position, not just simplify thought. (similarity 0.82)
• Post-1954 cognitive research treated stereotyping as a byproduct of simplifying social information (similarity 0.81)
• Stereotypes persist both from cognitive limits and from identity-serving motivations. (similarity 0.79)
• Stereotypes function as cognitive structures rather than mere descriptions. (similarity 0.79)
• Stereotypes function simultaneously as both causes and consequences of prejudice (similarity 0.79)