1.
Stereotype
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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, some of these definitions share commonalities, though each one may also harbor unique aspects that may contradict the others. The term stereotype derives from the Greek words στερεός, firm, solid and τύπος, impression, the term comes from the printing trade and was first adopted in 1798 by Firmin Didot to describe a printing plate that duplicated any typography. The duplicate printing plate, or the stereotype, is used for printing instead of the original, outside of printing, the first reference to stereotype was in 1850, as a noun that meant image perpetuated without change. However, it was not until 1922 that stereotype was first used in the psychological sense by American journalist Walter Lippmann in his work Public Opinion. Stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination are understood as related but different concepts, although related, the three concepts can exist independently of each other. Studies of stereotype content examine what people think of others, rather than the reasons, early theories of stereotype content proposed by social psychologists such as Gordon Allport assumed that stereotypes of outgroups reflected uniform antipathy. For instance, Katz and Braly argued in their classic 1933 study that ethnic stereotypes were uniformly negative, by contrast, a newer model of stereotype content theorizes that stereotypes are frequently ambivalent and vary along two dimensions, warmth and competence. Warmth and competence are respectively predicted by lack of competition and status, groups that do not compete with the in-group for the same resources are perceived as warm, whereas high-status groups are considered competent. The groups within each of the four combinations of high and low levels of warmth, the model explains the phenomenon that some out-groups are admired but disliked, whereas others are liked but disrespected. This model was tested on a variety of national and international samples and was found to reliably predict stereotype content. Early studies suggested that stereotypes were only used by rigid, repressed, stereotyping can serve cognitive functions on an interpersonal level, and social functions on an intergroup level. For stereotyping to function on a level, an individual must see themselves as part of a group. Craig McGarty, Russell Spears, and Vincent Y, Yzerbyt argued that the cognitive functions of stereotyping are best understood in relation to its social functions, and vice versa. Stereotypes can help make sense of the world and they are a form of categorization that helps to simplify and systematize information. Thus, information is easily identified, recalled, predicted. Stereotypes are categories of objects or people, between stereotypes, objects or people are as different from each other as possible
2.
Comedy
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In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, and stand-up comedy. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece, in the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a Society of Youth and a Society of the Old, a revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. Satire and political satire use comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, parody subverts popular genres and forms, critiquing those forms without necessarily condemning them. Similarly scatological humour, sexual humour, and race humour create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comic ways, a comedy of manners typically takes as its subject a particular part of society and uses humor to parody or satirize the behaviour and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms. The adjective comic, which means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage. Of this, the word came into usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time. The Greeks and Romans confined their use of the comedy to descriptions of stage-plays with happy endings. Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of men worse than the average, however, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others, the mask, for instance, in the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings. It is in this sense that Dante used the term in the title of his poem, as time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter. During the Middle Ages, the comedy became synonymous with satire. They disassociated comedy from Greek dramatic representation and instead identified it with Arabic poetic themes and forms and they viewed comedy as simply the art of reprehension, and made no reference to light and cheerful events, or to the troubling beginnings and happy endings associated with classical Greek comedy. After the Latin translations of the 12th century, the term gained a more general meaning in medieval literature. Starting from 425 BCE, Aristophanes, a playwright and satirical author of the Ancient Greek Theater wrote 40 comedies,11 of which survive. Aristophanes developed his type of comedy from the satyr plays
3.
Exaggeration
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Exaggeration is a representation of something in an excessive manner. exaggerating. It is the opposite of minimisation, inflated praise in the form of flattery and puffery has a similarly lengthy history. Exaggerating is also a type of deception, as well as a means of malingering – magnifying small injuries or discomforts as an excuse to avoid responsibilities, character assassination typically involves deliberate exaggeration or manipulation of facts. Cognitive behavioral therapy views magnification as unconscious, unrealistic mental processing or cognitive distortion and this is better known as making a big deal out of nothing. Whereas probability overestimation refers to exaggerating the likelihood of an event, closely related is overgeneralizing, where one takes a single negative event and see it as a never-ending pattern of defeat. Another form of exaggeration is inflation of the difficulty of achieving a goal after attaining it. Psychoanalysis considered that neurotic exaggerations were the products of displacement – overvaluations for example being used to maintain a repression elsewhere, thus a conflict over ambivalence may be resolved by means of exaggerating ones love for a person so as to keep an unconscious hatred in further check. Alarmism is excessive or exaggerated alarm about a real or imagined threat e. g. the increases in deaths from infectious disease, the alarmist person is subject to the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing – of always expecting the worst of possible futures. Some theoreticians of the comic consider exaggeration to be a comic device. It may take different forms in different genres, but all rely on the fact that the easiest way to make things laughable is to exaggerate to the point of absurdity their salient traits, catherine Tate is an example of a comedian who uses exaggeration. Catherine Tate creates characters who are so over the top as to be almost cartoon-like and her comedy is never meant to offend any viewer and is always based on satire and grotesque exaggeration. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics, slapstick is the recourse to humor involving exaggerated physical activity which exceeds the boundaries of common sense. These exaggerated depictions are found in childrens cartoons, and light film comedies aimed at younger audiences. Paradoxical laughter is an expression of humor which is unwarranted by external events. It may be uncontrollable laughter which may be recognised as inappropriate by the person involved, freud considered the compulsive laughter which so often occurs on mournful occasions the by-product of ambivalence. The boastful soldier or Miles Gloriosus has for thousands of years formed part of the Western stage, the original miles gloriosus in Plautus is a son of Jove and Venus who has killed an elephant with his fist and seven thousand men in one days fighting. In other words, he is trying to put on a good show, overacting is the exaggeration of gestures and speech when acting. It may be unintentional, particularly in the case of a bad actor, or be required for the role, for the latter, it is commonly used in comical situations or to stress the evil characteristics of a villain
4.
Offset printing
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Offset printing is a commonly used printing technique in which the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. The modern web process feeds a large reel of paper through a press machine in several parts, typically for several metres. Development of the press came in two versions, in 1875 by Robert Barclay of England for printing on tin, and in 1904 by Ira Washington Rubel of the United States for printing on paper. Lithography was initially created to be a method of reproducing artwork. This printing process was limited to use on flat, porous surfaces because the plates were produced from limestone. In fact, the word lithograph historically means an image from stone or printed from stone, tin cans were popular packaging materials in the 19th century, but transfer technologies were required before the lithographic process could be used to print on the tin. The first rotary offset lithographic printing press was created in England and this development combined mid-19th century transfer printing technologies and Richard March Hoes 1843 rotary printing press—a press that used a metal cylinder instead of a flat stone. The offset cylinder was covered with specially treated cardboard that transferred the image from the stone to the surface of the metal. Later, the covering of the offset cylinder was changed to rubber. As the 19th century closed and photography became popular, many lithographic firms went out of business, photoengraving, a process that used halftone technology instead of illustration, became the primary aesthetic of the era. Many printers, including Ira Washington Rubel of New Jersey, were using the low-cost lithograph process to produce copies of photographs, Rubel discovered in 1901—by forgetting to load a sheet—that when printing from the rubber roller, instead of the metal, the printed page was clearer and sharper. After further refinement, the Potter Press printing Company in New York produced a press in 1903, by 1907 the Rubel offset press was in use in San Francisco. The Harris Automatic Press Company also created a similar press around the same time, charles and Albert Harris modeled their press on a rotary letter press machine. One of the most important functions in the process is prepress production. This stage makes sure that all files are processed in preparation for printing. This includes converting to the proper CMYK color model, finalizing the files, Offset lithography is one of the most common ways of creating printed materials. A few of its common applications include, newspapers, magazines, brochures, stationery, compared to other printing methods, offset printing is best suited for economically producing large volumes of high quality prints in a manner that requires little maintenance. Many modern offset presses use computer-to-plate systems as opposed to the older computer-to-film work flows, advantages of offset printing compared to other printing methods include, consistent high image quality
5.
Folklore
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Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. These include oral traditions such as tales, proverbs and jokes and they include material culture, ranging from traditional building styles to handmade toys common to the group. Folklore also includes customary lore, the forms and rituals of celebrations like Christmas and weddings, folk dances, each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact. Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next, for folklore is not taught in a formal school curriculum or studied in the fine arts. Instead these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another either through verbal instruction or demonstration, the academic study of folklore is called folkloristics. To fully understand folklore, it is helpful to clarify its component parts and it is well-documented that the term was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms. He fabricated it to replace the contemporary terminology of popular antiquities or popular literature, the second half of the compound word, lore, proves easier to define as its meaning has stayed relatively stable over the last two centuries. Coming from Old English lār instruction, and with German and Dutch cognates, it is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, the concept of folk proves somewhat more elusive. When Thoms first created this term, folk applied only to rural, frequently poor, a more modern definition of folk is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. Folk is a concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. This expanded social definition of folk supports a view of the material, i. e. the lore. These now include all things people make with words, things they make with their hands, Folklore is no longer circumscribed as being chronologically old or obsolete. The folklorist studies the traditional artifacts of a group and how they are transmitted. Transmission is a part of the folklore process. Without communicating these beliefs and customs within the group over space and time, for folklore is also a verb. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously, the folk group is not individualistic, it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, in direct contrast to high culture, where any single work of a named artist is protected by copyright law, folklore is a function of shared identity within the social group. Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs, for these cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group
6.
Confirmation bias
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Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms ones preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, the effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position, biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization, belief perseverance, the irrational primacy effect and illusory correlation. A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs, later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias peoples conclusions, explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts, confirmation biases are effects in information processing. Others apply the more broadly to the tendency to preserve ones existing beliefs when searching for evidence, interpreting it. Experiments have found repeatedly that people tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, rather than searching through all the relevant evidence, they phrase questions to receive an affirmative answer that supports their theory. They look for the consequences that they would expect if their hypothesis were true, for example, someone using yes/no questions to find a number he or she suspects to be the number 3 might ask, Is it an odd number. People prefer this type of question, called a positive test, would yield exactly the same information. However, this does not mean that people seek tests that guarantee a positive answer, in studies where subjects could select either such pseudo-tests or genuinely diagnostic ones, they favored the genuinely diagnostic. The preference for positive tests in itself is not a bias, however, in combination with other effects, this strategy can confirm existing beliefs or assumptions, independently of whether they are true. In real-world situations, evidence is often complex and mixed, for example, various contradictory ideas about someone could each be supported by concentrating on one aspect of his or her behavior. Thus any search for evidence in favor of a hypothesis is likely to succeed, one illustration of this is the way the phrasing of a question can significantly change the answer. For example, people who are asked, Are you happy with your social life, report greater satisfaction than those asked, Are you unhappy with your social life. Even a small change in a questions wording can affect how people search through available information and this was shown using a fictional child custody case
