Foreign language educators generally agree that an important objective of foreign language instruction is the lessening of preconceived stereotypical images regarding the target culture, and a broadening of perspectives regarding humankind and its cultural diversity in general.1 One would hope that with increasing fluency in a language, and increased exposure to German speakers, authentic texts, and culture-specific contexts and information, students would also develop an increasingly sophisticated and critical perspective of a country and its people a perspective which is based more on knowledge, observation, and critical analysis of present-day phenomena than on preconceived, simplistic stereotypical notions. Stereotypes, however, are part of the human information processing system and as such are hard to avoid. In the following, we will outline various theoretical explications of formation, and then present the results of a study which investigates stereotypes held by U.S. students vis-a-vis Germany and Germans. We will conclude with a brief discussion of the pedagogical implications of formation based on insights from social psychology. The term stereotype2 was first introduced to the social sciences by the American journalist Walter Lippman in 1922. According to Lippman, stereotypes are employed to help impose order onto a complex world. They present a shortcut in the processing of data, which, in his words, precedes the use of reason(98). Lippman also observed a social function of stereotyping, namely, as a projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights (96). In sum, the journalist defined stereotypes as necessary overgeneralizations and oversimplifications that are rigid, resistant to change, undependable in their actual content, and produced without logical reasoning. According to Brigham, subsequent researchers often selected only one of these characteristics as the hallmark of an ethnic stereotype (15). Earlier theoretical approaches to the study of stereotypes focus on the socio-cultural and psychological aspects of formation and application. Social learning theory claims that education, communication, and direct observation (Stroebe and Insko 17) are responsible for the processes involved. The acquisition of stereotypes is considered to be no different than the acquisition of any other kind of knowledge. While socio-cultural theories focus on the interpersonal aspects of stereotyping, psychological theories investigate intrapersonal processes which motivate the division of people into ingroup and outgroup. As mentioned by Fiske and Ruscher, Adorno's theory of the authoritarian personality, for example, considers stereotypes to be the result of an inner conflict, the manifestation of characteristics which people detest in themselves. The Bettelheim and Janowitz account of the scapegoat theory claims that stereotypes are the result of repressed frustrations which cannot be voiced directly to the source of frustration. These frustrations are therefore often redirected to powerless minorities, who, in this process, are identified as possessing negative attributes (Stroebe and Insko 18). In other words, the minority groups are stereotyped. In 1969, a landmark article by Tajfel initiated a re-evaluation of formation along cognitive lines. Tajfel maintained that then prevalent research wrongly focused on motivational issues as the basis for formation. He criticized the blood-and-guts model (80) which did not allow for reason as a factor in the process.