This often works quite well. However, it often fails to work correctly and identify the situation. Take a look at this picture. Who do you think this man is?
Clean cut suit, clean face, gray hair, glasses. Businessman should come to mind. Not only because the keyword I used to find this image is 'businessman", but also because it matches our image of a business man. But there are other possibilities; he could just as well be a fittitng model for a suit, an actor playing a businessman, or even just a man who likes to wear suits.
Apply this mental fault to different situations. You see an African American. He's wearing a oversized hoodie and sagged jeans. Dark circles under his eyes. Seems like it's been a while since he last shaved. Staring right at you. Chances are you'll be quite frightened, because this man is matching your mental image of a criminal or just dangerous in general, becoming a stimulus for the emotion of fear. In other words, you have just stereotyped this man, using representative heuristics. It is certainly not your fault. Afterall, use of heuristics are strategies that have been hardcoded into our brains.
Brent Staples illustrates this quite well in his essay, Black Men and Public Space. He is often mistaken as someone dangerous, which is shown quite well in his many examples, even though he was actually an University of Chicago student.
While stereotyping is a social problem people have been facing for the past century, there is not clear solution since there is not much people can do. Psychologically speaking, we still will make stereotyped generalizations no matter what, since we can't choose to use heuristics or not. One thing that is possible, however, is editing the representative image that we compare the subject to in representative heuristics. Of course, this is not something that happens overnight. People who use heuristics need to be exposed to different images of a certain group, and those who are the certain group need to become different and disprove the stereotype.
Take Native Americans for example. Sherman Alexie, in his short story, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, illustrates the reality, where Alexie is stereotyped as another dangerous, drunk, and violent Native American. This is because the people in Lone Ranger need to identify this Native American stranger. And people make those stereotypes because the representative image of Native Americans is dangerous, drunk, and violent, due to the way a large majority of they way these people act. If there are less of these types of people, and more of media exposure to the mass about these people, we can successfully remove stereotypes.
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Warren, this is a really great example of what we discussed in class. I liked your example of the businessman and connection to Sherman Alexie. All I could think of was "Get Stoic."
ReplyDeleteI like the way you wrote this however, what do you mean by lessening the types of people? I do not think this crux can have such a simple solution. Even if we lessened the way stereotypical people act, I expect that society would come in a label them as something different. If the Native Americans decided to not act as their stereotypical image, and act as something different, I think people would just collectively toss them in another category. Stereotyping is like shelving books. The place, location, cover, color, Dewey decimal might change, but its still being grouped together in another way, even though its different from the first grouping. Overall nice piece though, keep up the good work.
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