According to social scientists, people cannot help but learn about stereotypes because these prototypes are in the very culture of every country.

Every country has its own set of simple and complex stereotypes and gradually, these stereotypes are passed on to the next generation through institutions like the press and the family. Social exposure is a key factor when it comes to learning stereotypes.

A person would only be able to use a stereotype when processing information if he has learned about the stereotype. If not, he will create his own stereotypes based on subjective experience.

Social class also plays a role in the learning and propagation of stereotypes. While there will be similarities in some broad social categories, there will be differences in the stereotypes used by people from low-income earning families and people who have been brought up in the wealthiest parts of the city.

Social groups propagate stereotypes and different social groups will propagate different stereotypes. And this is when it can get messy. Because of the variations of stereotypes spread across an uneven national population, a bias called the illusory correlation emerges.

Illusory correlation is actually a kind of belief that two or more factors or variables are connected when in objective reality, the variables in question have no real association or connection. What is the implication of illusory correlations?

Well, according to some foundational studies, it appears that people were more likely to assign negative attributes to minority groups. By minority groups we refer to social groups or categories that are rarely visible and therefore, are almost never in the consciousness of people.

Visibility of a social category is equivalent to immediate informational availability and if a social category is not clearly visible unless there is a cue, then people would more likely assign negative traits to the group if they were given a chance to assign positive traits and negative traits to a majority group (a social category that was highly recognizable) and a minority group (a little known social category).

It is important to note that illusory correlations rarely produce accurate representations or inferences.

For example, if you were invited to attend two book launches, you would most likely attend the book launch of your favorite author and you will just discard the other author’s invitation and regard him as being ‘one of the lesser authors of this century’ even if the author has no real connection to other authors in the past one hundred years.

In this situation, hard facts are rarely sought out by people. When a person has already made an illusory correlation, there is no further motivation to verify the illusory correlation. Illusory correlations usually come about when a person uses representativeness heuristics to analyze a situation.

Because highly available information is used, people will use prototypes and whatever doesn’t fit in with majority group will be relegated to a minor group and will be assigned traits that seem to be incongruent with the majority group.

Minority groups and majority groups are almost always binary opposites. If one group of is good, the other has to be bad, one way or another.