Stereotypes are adopted, imprinted knowledge and impressions that you have about specific types of people and about specific ways of thinking and doing things. More precisely, stereotypes are socially imprinted knowledge helping you fulfill your needs, knowledge that you acquire and propagate directly or implicitly. When they are successful and in demand, stereotypes propagate themselves to all individuals of any group, and then to all interacting groups, offering the people the possibility of sharing all the necessary subconscious successful information needed throughout fulfillment, and offering the subconscious information needed in coping with society and with the environment, fulfilling needs, and overcoming problems.
Stereotypes offer you a way to do things mostly subconsciously, anything that anyone does, anything necessary for you, anything successful. Even more, all stereotypes offer you valid ways of fulfilling needs, only that these particular ways may or may not be efficient, harmless, legal, or moral, yet they all work for others and for you too, and therefore, you manage in this manner to fulfill your lower-level needs, through stereotypes only, and not through your own reasoning. Yet you are always in control of your decisions, rationally or stereotypically, and therefore, you may choose to have an accurate, accepted, moral behavior, or a stereotypical one instead, based on everything good and bad that you learn knowingly or unknowingly from your colleagues and friends.
Throughout this book, you understand how stereotypes integrate within your cognitive system, how you acquire stereotypes and how you imprint them in those around, how society uses stereotypes to manage your thinking and behavior, and how you may identify, discard, modify, or adjust your stereotypes, increasing accuracy and success throughout life.
