STEREOTYPING – THE SUBCONSCIOUS EVIL

Evolution has been taking place from many centuries, yet the human mind is still adamant not to let go of its pre-evolution stages characteristics. The basic human “instincts” remain pretty much the same – food, shelter and survival. In this quest to obtain food and shelter, man evolved but his survival instinct is the same. Human beings do everything to survive sometimes even bad things, rather unknowingly. One such evil thing would be stereotyping.

What is stereotyping?

Stereotypes are generally said to be a set of beliefs ,impression or opinions about a certain group of individuals based on race, ethnicity, sex, economic background and social status. A stereotype is a simplified assumption about a group based on prior assumptions. Stereotypes can be both positive ("asians are good at maths") or negative ("teenagers are lazy"). Stereotypes can lead to faulty beliefs, but they can also result in both prejudice and discrimination.

How does stereotyping occur?

Scientists from all fields such as neuroscience, sociology, psychology have been researching the ways of our brain’s analysis mechanism for many years. Some of their findings can be used to explain why and how stereotyping occurs : 

Sociologists claim that most stereotypes are formed based on a person’s interaction with other people whom he perceives to be belonging to different group than he does. In order to have a basic understanding of their characteristics, our mind/brain forms a small knowledge schema (database) of their characteristics and when people subsequently behave similar to the formed schema, it gets strengthened and becomes a stereotype. While interacting with people of different groups, people tend to analyze their behavior in order to understand them , mainly focusing on the differences between groups and ignoring the differences among the people belonging to the same group, which leads to a very misleading opinion. Stereotypes are also people’s way to categorize the unknown to make sense of it and maintain control over their lives and most people tend to avoid the task of getting to know each person separately seeing it to be tedious. 

Psychologists, on the other hand, claim that a person’s upbringing has a greater effect on their subconsciously forming stereotypes. When a person grows up in a household which looks down on people of certain background, the opinion tends to get imbibed on the subconscious and later takes a status equal to fact and verified opinion in the intellect. Also, childhood incidents and personal experiences also factor in forming stereotypes, for example, if a student has a strict female teacher in school, he/she might believe that women on the whole very strict by nature. 

Neuroscientists, though, have a very interesting scientific explanation for this behavior.Our brain has 8 basic functions out of which 4 are classified to be as “unconscious functions” , that is these functions do not take place with the full awareness of the person. These functions are collectively called cognitive functions and are responsible for perceiving and judging the world thinking", "feeling", "sensing" and "intuition". Isabel Myers, an early pioneer of psychometric testing whose ideas remain controversial within psychology, formalized these ideas and proposed that the mixture of types in an individual's personality could be measured through responses to a personality test she devised along with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

 

Basically, we stereotype because we are victims of our cognitive functions. When we encounter people from various backgrounds , our brain automatically records information about them, our responses towards them and this is stored in our brain for years together. Gordon Allport has suggested possible answers to why people find it easier to understand categorized information which then lead to stereotypes. First, people can consult a category to identify response patterns. Second, categorized information is more specific than non-categorized information, as categorization accentuates properties that are shared by all members of a group. Third, people can readily describe object in a category because objects in the same category have distinct characteristics. Finally, people can take for granted the characteristics of a particular category because the category itself may be an arbitrary grouping. This is fine when people actually adhere to these findings in order to understand an unknown persona but when this hinders in their way to obtain actually correct information about a particular person or group, we have a problem.

If its involuntary, how do we stop it?

The dual-process model of cognitive processing of stereotypes asserts that automatic activation of stereotypes is followed by a controlled processing stage, during which an individual may choose to disregard or ignore the stereotyped information that has been brought to mind. This can happen when a person is sensitized and made aware of the presence of the stereotype and its non-reliability while dealing with individuals.

The sensitization process can be done allowing ourselves to have an open mind while dealing with a person of a different background, and also acknowledging the differences among the people in the same group however small those differences maybe. The presence of these differences in our subconscious will allow us to stop our “opinions” about certain people getting a status of fact in our mind and also let us get to know the person better without any preconceived notions about them.

Acknowledging the uniqueness.

Each person has a unique quality no matter how many social stereotypes they might confirm to. We have to learn to acknowledge their uniqueness so that we don’t give anybody a disadvantage while coming into contact with them.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, sometimes the content may actually surprise you.

-         Wanna-be-Savant