This inconsistency is caused by the need to categorize large groups of people, even though they seem completely unrelated. This may cause a dilemma for interracial people who must choose a single race from the choices given. This person might feel as if they must identify with the race they circled on the application. Interracial people tend to feel secluded from certain racial social groups, because no matter what the circumstances, they will always be an outgroup. The boundaries of acceptance in racial groups are hard to diffuse when you are half ingroup and half outgroup. With unyielding categories over all aspects of society, it is not difficult to see how stereotypes came about. .
For example, if a dog traumatized a child, the child would later have a preconceived notion that all dogs are evil. Perhaps at that certain point in time the dog had been provoked or riled up before attacking the child. The child however, is too young to understand this, so he lives his life with the stereotype of all dogs being evil, when in actuality it was only this one dog. The only way to modify the original perception is to persuade the child into believing that all dogs are not evil. This illustrated the fact that after one occurrence we label those people or objects thereafter. That means that with pleasant occurrences we can develop positive stereotypes and with bad occurrences we can develop negative stereotypes. The surrounding people however, can influence stereotypes. .
The origin of stereotypes is drawn from the idea of social categorization. When we classify people, we assume that there are certain similarities and differences among the groups. When people expand on these similarities and differences, they have then created stereotypes. With different categorizations surrounding us, people accept the idea of "us" and "them". Us being the ingroup and them being the outgroup (Brehm, Kassin, and Fein 133).