Stereotype 02. How stereotypes are formed

How stereotypes are formed

There was once a popular topic: how to piss off a profession with one sentence. Some of the answers reveal the misunderstanding of "amateurs" to "insiders": I heard you are a programmer, come to help me fix my computer! You are a psychologist, so guess what I'm thinking right now? You are so introverted, how can you do sales? Designers, are not very good temper, right? These good and funny misunderstanding, in the workplace can be seen everywhere, I do not know whether you have also been hit? But, flirtation is flirtation, we can easily see, behind these flirtations, are hidden on many occupational inertia, that is, we often say stereotypes.

We are born with colored glasses, and at the same time suffer from various prejudices. Stereotypes are everywhere, they become our hallmarks, they become our burdens, sometimes making people try too hard, sometimes killing their own nature. Stereotypes are already a popular psychological concept, often manifested in society as geographical, gender and racial prejudice, and can be said to be the main cause of prejudice in social interactions. Fortunately, it is not invincible.

Researchers claim that people have similar cognitive limitations and biases, as in Figure 2.1, which is why stereotypes form and evolve. We know exactly "what others think" and we know it. Any behavior consistent with such stereotypes further confirms them. We are equally aware of the ensuing evaluations and treatment. In an environment where there is a lot of information, especially in today's Internet age with its explosion of information, individuals always simplify the cognitive process as much as possible in order to save cognitive resources, even to the point of not using what they shouldn't and not even using what they should. It is worth mentioning that the latter is an excellent ground for cultivating irrationality. While a knifeman may be able to integrate how to wield a knife by wielding it a thousand times, the automatic processing of social cognition only requires multiple consistent responses to the corresponding feature, which allows individuals to pattern and automate their responses to that feature.

When confronted with several individuals from the same social classification, it is easier to confuse the identities of these individuals than when they come from different social classifications. Likewise, it is wrongly assumed that individuals from the same social category will have the same characteristics. Because we all have a "class-based" memory bias, social information becomes more and more structured as it is transmitted, eventually evolving into categorical stereotypes. Why do individuals form stereotypes? Subliminally, it is a convenient and easy way to simplify and accelerate the individual's perception of things by simple reasoning with generalization. In deeper terms, it is the cognitive miser hypothesis of social cognitive theory, in which the human brain is extremely stingy in allocating and using cognitive resources when thinking about problems. This is a cognitive mechanism shaped by evolution and gives a place to irrationality.

(2.1)

Reference.

Claude M. Steele. Stereotypes: why we discriminate and are discriminated against Social Psychology Democracy and Construction Press 2021.8