Boys are BLUE and Girls are Pink

What are the the consequences of using cultural stereotypes in a society and how would our world be without them ?

What are cultural stereotypes ? Stereotypes are patterns for thinking. They are the little boxes in our heads that we arrange everything in. We have a custom of stereotyping our entire society : girls are sensitive, boys are strong, lying is bad, charity is good. Most of out beliefs (if not all of them) are taken from a source that made us agree with it and believe as a fact what was presented. Do you actually have any original idea ? An idea that no one else thought before ? What defines an original idea ? You take someone else’s sayings and merge it into something different. How new is that and how different from the original ? Can we really think for ourselves or is there a third person telling us what to do and when to do it ?

I do not know to what extent we can say people are predictable because the sentence itself is too general and offers little parameters to analyze.

The existence of the stereotypes can be easily explained by the fact that people wouldn’t else be able to understand the reality. We all have to have the meaning of some words in a phrase in order to discover the entire structure. Even we may not know all of them, but we can understand the idea from the context. It is the same with stereotyping : we need it as a foundation for our imaging of the world. But when does it stop being a foundation and we start building a house ?

You can easily notice that I have a lot of questions unanswered and there are a lot more comming into my mind. But it is actually very boring and sometimes frustrating to read a text that rises a lot of problems and solves none. The reason is very simple : I feel I do not posses the theoretical and practical knowledge to have such answers. The need to know more before I can give convincing arguments is holding me back from stating any decisive oppinion.