Introduction (Week1)

In lecture one we had our first encounter with what we would be studying for the rest of the course. The first exercise we looked at first appearances and how they affect our overall judgment on a person. To do this we had a volunteer stand at the front of the class whilst we made a judgement before she even spoke .then we justified our answers and found out that we had stereotyped her before we even knew her and that the stereotype was fairly accurate. This showed that subliminal messages were picked up by people with out them even thinking about it. We found out that the way in which people’s posture, the dress code and the accessories they wear have a big influence on the way we perceived the volunteer to be. After we then had were given object and told to build a character profile from that single object. in this group work it was interesting to see how a single object got people thinking about how it could represent them and relate to them, before we knew it the groups were had started stereotyping the work.
Later on in the class we were given an egg and told to write in the egg about us and this represented the fact that everyone is so diverse and unique that really stereotypes shouldn’t actually exist and that they are a way of companies to target a group of people and know who to advertise to.
We also did an exercise in which we learned about a theorist called Russell w Belk and his “We Are What We Have” theory which consists of both the me and mine theory (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~slaterj/dissertation2.htm) Not only are we what we are seen to be (the ‘me’ concept), we are also what is seen to be ours (the ‘mine’ concept).