Research on stereotypes has long been dominated by political correctness and the fight against social prejudice.

Only recently has social psychology raised scientific issues such as the durability of stereotypes and their role in human cognition. Even here, the problem of the identity or structure of stereotypes is not tackled. We take classic examples to argue that stereotypes appear as descriptions of the world, but, lacking quantification, they are not. Adding quantifiers make a stereotype either trivially false or trivially true. What are stereotypes and why do they persist? We show that stereotypes are linguistic statements that formulate heuristics for social interaction. Rather than describe people, they transmit instructions to human beings for going about with each other. Some consequences of this hypothesis are: stereotypes are neither true nor false; stereotypes are also present in personal relationships and self-understanding; and that they are dominant in the Western culture.