In social psychology, a stereotype is a thought that can be adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of doing things. These thoughts or beliefs may or may not accurately reflect reality. However, this is only a fundamental psychological definition of a stereotype.
Within psychology and spanning across other disciplines, there are different conceptualizations and theories of stereotyping that provide their own expanded definition. Some of these definitions share commonalities, though each one may also harbor unique aspects that may contradict the others.
The above text is retrieved from the Wikipedia article “Stereotype“, which has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply
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