Post No.: 0985
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Our brains seek associations between things, and form generalisations from them as cognitive shortcuts e.g. one experience of seeing and smelling poo on a pandanus fruit (or something else you’ve never eaten before) could put you off wanting to try any other pandanus fruit due to the association made between poo and pandanus fruits now. Even just imagining the fruit could stimulate a vomit reaction. And if you’d already associated the name ‘pandanus’ with a panda’s anus then it only serves to illustrate the power of associations even more – even though it’s just a close word association!
Regarding people and their character traits, it might be the particular shape of someone’s nose or the distinctive way they dress that becomes associated with their personality. And if we dislike this person, anyone else who reminds you of their nose or clothing will have a head start at being automatically disliked too.
Whether it’s an unfavourable or favourable association and generalisation though, it’s unfair because it’s often nothing meaningfully to do with the individual we despise or cherish. (It’s meaningful like a trinket that’s sentimentally linked to someone but not in any constitutional sense.) Therefore an association of a character trait with someone’s skin colour, ethnicity or country would be a bigoted stereotype. Yet we’re prone to forming cognitive shortcuts like these to save us time and effort when making judgements. Thinking ‘everybody in that group are x’ is less demanding than thinking ‘this individual is x, that individual is perhaps y, this other individual is unknown, etc.’. But Post No.: 0977 propounded that every individual should have their own reputation.
These stereotypes, labels and preconceptions can subconsciously or unconsciously prime us to behave in prejudiced ways e.g. standing a tiny bit farther away from someone whom we’ve been merely told is ‘dirty’ or ‘dodgy’ – even if this information was false.
Even on an individual level, if the only thing we knew about a particular person was that she/he fell into a river when young, we might struggle to get that fact out of our mind even though this person has done a million other things since but that we’ve not personally witnessed. This would speak of how little we know about them rather than them being someone who constantly falls into rivers!
Similarly, whenever we stereotype entire groups in any way – it doesn’t necessarily reveal the truth of those who are being stereotyped but will more reliably speak the truth of how little we know about the diversity within that group. The problem is, we probably won’t think we know too little about them because we don’t know what we don’t know e.g. we might feel highly confident about knowing that all giant pandas are obviously black and white. But this confidence is only because we’ve never seen a brown and white one before – which do exist. (I cannot confirm the colour of this panda’s anus though!) This demonstrates that we must never become arrogant in what we think we know because we don’t know what we don’t know until and unless we later learn it.
Even positive stereotypes or discriminations are wrong e.g. a coffee entrepreneur playing on their ‘I’m from Guatemala hence I know everything about coffee’ heritage – as if everybody from Britain knows everything about roast beef(!) (I doubt most Brits can name all the cuts of cow.) Yet most foreign investors and consumers will automatically conclude ‘this obviously makes them more credible’. Investors have in mind the easy marketing angle but if a coffee or whatever is good then it’s good, whoever makes it. There shouldn’t be any such automatic discriminations, whether negative or positive.
Those who are Islamophobic can even over-generalise and target Hindus and Sikhs! The less we know, the more we over-generalise without knowing that we’re over-generalising. A ‘Russian hacker group’ doesn’t mean that all Russians are our adversaries. It wasn’t and isn’t ‘Germans’ but ‘Nazi sympathisers’, or perhaps ‘violence-inciting Nazi supporters’ more specifically. The extreme don’t represent the rest. There are so many unrepresentative national clichés, like the Japanese minimalist interior design style when the reality for most people who actually live in Japan is cramped, cluttered living. Not all Brazilians care for football hence the remonstrations in their country against holding the World Cup there in 2014.
The propensity to cognitively place things into over-generalised categories could be down to mental efficiency (and even if they’re crude sweeping over-generalisations, or even wholly incorrect – if it doesn’t kill the bearer of the belief then they and their behaviour aren’t ultimately going to get selected out). Put another way, humans (some more than others) are lazy, cognitive misers because they don’t have sufficient brainpower to mentally hold more refined cat-egories, as it were. Life is far more complex and nuanced than a simple mind would believe. One could argue that it’s about erring on the side of caution. But not all crude stereotypes relate to threats.
It’s maybe down to a lack of personal experience with diversity, a poor education, or listening to rightwing or divisive propaganda. The genocide against the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda was fomented after the Belgian colonial masters stirred an ethnic divide between them. (Interference in Africa by certain western countries and enterprises has led to much bloodshed and the pillaging of natural resources historically.) Genetically-close groups can therefore become divided or enemies too i.e. we’re more about what we learn and do, not what we’re born with, hence propaganda is insidious.
Whatever the case – although stereotypes are often useful and appropriate – they’re frequently over-generalised, with adverse consequences for society and peace because people get clumped together based on quite tenuous, shallow or irrelevant associations, like the colour of their skin. They can deepen any divisions that needn’t have existed if only people didn’t generalise ‘the other side’ as being homogenous and extremely hateful and violent towards ‘our side’ – because ‘they’ and ‘we’ are overwhelmingly not hateful or violent towards each other. Well unless pushed into being so because ‘we group them all into one big pot that hates us’ and ‘they group us all into one big pot that hates them’.
If you meet one disabled person – don’t say ‘they’ are like this or that when you should be saying ‘that individual’ in ‘that situation’ was like this or that. If we personally don’t know any better though, we’ll believe that our over-generalisations aren’t over-general. We’ll then naïvely state these over-generalised conclusions as if they’re tremendous ‘deductive’ insights about the world.
If you’ve only tried one or two instances of a particular foreign dish, either at home or in that country, and hold a firm negative opinion on it – it’s like if a foreigner tried a particularly bad example of a sausage roll they ate while in England and then deemed all English sausage rolls (or even all of English cuisine) as squicky. We know there are varying examples of our own national dishes in terms of quality and even recipes, and something eaten when freshly cooked can taste vastly different to the same thing that’s been standing around for even a short while – so why over-generalise foreign dishes, or people, manufacturers, or anything else, from such small samplings? Try far more before coming to a strong opinion. The less we know, the more we over-generalise, and this applies to anything. What is ‘the’ quintessential British accent when there are dozens? Some knowledge and experience can therefore be worse than having none – although we ideally want to reach a lot of knowledge and experience.
In 19th century Western Europe, any painting with subject matter that was east of Western Europe was regarded as ‘Orientalism’, including some North African art! Many of these pieces depicted phoney patronising scenes of ‘oriental life’ too, to make ‘the West’ appear far more civilised and superior to the rest of the world (i.e. propaganda). It’s not just internationally but any arbitrary ‘ingroup versus outgroup’ categorisation. Some English people who’ve seldom or never been north of London perceive the entire area north of the M25 as ‘the north of England’, and that ‘it’s grim up north’.
Some cities can have their citizens stereotyped, even quite wrongly, like how Liverpudians were stereotyped after the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in 1989 because the corrupt police deflected blame onto football fans to cover up their own monumental failings, and then the media latched onto and spread this propaganda. People trust the words of ‘obviously trustworthy’ police, especially against football fans (or let’s already label them as ‘drunken hooligans’). But gross inaccuracies can propagate and persist from relatively small initial seeds. Those already with an agenda will employ everything they can, including false evidence, to further their own beliefs. Millions of people can all be wrong. And the consequences can be unjust.
Note that in this cover up – reams of documents were manipulated, with hundreds of whole lines and paragraphs altered. Meanwhile, regarding the anthropogenic global warming ‘conspiracy’ – the conspiracy theorists only found one ambiguous word within stacks of found private emails to base their beliefs of a conspiracy on – the word ‘trick’(!) It’s almost like how several independent people all claiming to have been sexually harassed by a particular celebrity makes for a far more compelling case than a single vague allegation.
Stereotypes, or rumours or mere hunches, can prime us to interpret any ambiguous thing we perceive a person do under confirmation bias. People from other places steal too (as a statistical fact – trust in impartially-derived figures over impressions) but they’re rationalised as individual one-offs. Yet if anyone from somewhere where the people are stereotyped as thieves steals something, they’re rationalised as being ‘how they simply all are over there’.
The police were corrupt in this instance and many others. We mustn’t however stereotype all police as being corrupt otherwise we’ll be making the exact same error. Meow.
Ill-thought-out names can provoke associations too, like MERS or the ‘Middle East respiratory syndrome’ coronavirus. Speaking of pandemics, after the COVID-19 outbreak, which did originate from China – some people from other parts of the world started to attack random Chinese (well oriental-looking) people in the streets, their stores and homes as if they personally had anything to do with the cause! It would’ve been like attacking any random white person for causing Spanish flu (which actually more likely originated from Kansas, USA) – which was a far deadlier outbreak!
You can criticise the government of a country that a person’s ethnicity belongs to and this person probably won’t be bothered because it’d be erroneous to presume that they necessarily support that government. It’s just like hardly every British person actually living in Britain voted for or supports the current UK government – thus if the UK government does something unconscionable, it’s not the fault of every British citizen.
Just pondering – if a country’s government is committing barbaric acts, like in Myanmar, will this mean we’d be unprincipled to visit that country on holiday and support or even promote a part of that country’s local tourism industry? It’s unclear because the poor local businesses and workers may have little to do with what their government decides and does, yet their taxes will indirectly benefit their government. Although better than jumping straight to violent resolutions, economic sanctions aren’t therefore precision tools. They’ll even affect citizens of the country that imposes such sanctions on another (if businesses from country A cannot export something into country B, then businesses from country B cannot import that thing from country A).
What remains definitely incorrect is to assume that every single citizen supports their government or is culpable for the behaviours of their leaders. Governments and their citizens shouldn’t all be generalised as one. Again, hardly every British citizen agrees with what the UK government does, even though the UK is a democratic country and the party that’s in power ultimately resulted from our collective votes.
Meow.
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
