Coping with stigma
To simplify the many things we encounter in the world each day, people tend to categorize things. This categorization process is also applied to people, such that we very quickly and easily classify someone according to what we perceive to be their gender, race, age, and sexual orientation. While this cognitive heuristic makes processing people easier, it also tends to result in stereotypes, or, overgeneralizations about the characteristics of certain social groups. Women, for example, are generally perceived to be more emotional than men, while men are perceived to be more assertive than women.