Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 3, 2 (2011) 134-155 Ethnic Stereotypes – Impediments or Enhancers of Social Cognition? Zsuzsanna AJTONY Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania Department of Humanities
[email protected] Abstract. This paper presents a brief summary of the recent literature on stereotypes according to social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1986). It offers a comparison of related concepts such as prejudice (Gadamer 1984) and attitude (Cseresnyési 2004) and relies on stereotype definition developed by Hilton and Hippel (1996). It gives a survey of stereotype manifestation, formation, maintenance and change, focusing on social and ethnic stereotypes, their background variables, transmitting mechanisms and mediating variables. The last part of the paper discusses different linguistic means of expressing ethnicity concluding that stereotypes act as ever-extendable schemas as opposed to prototypes, defined as best examples of a category. Keywords: linguistic and social categories, ethnic identity, schema theory, prototypes vs. stereotypes 1. Introduction This paper is dedicated to a deeper insight into the nature of stereotypes – as forms of social cognition. First the nature of stereotypes is explored, in their generic sense, defining them from a cognitive approach, experimental psychology. In order to do that, they need to be clearly distinguished from prototypes, as defined by prototype theory (Rosch 1975, Lakoff 1987). This is the contents of sections 2 – 5, also including a short