Page 330 - The Social Animal

312 The Social Animal

friendly tribes. So the legacy of our survival is that our brains are
wired to categorize people automatically, unconsciously, and imme-
diately along dimensions such as race, age, and sex. Whether we con-
sciously believe these stereotypes when we consider them, express
them, or act upon them depends a good deal on our individual char-
acteristics and the situations we are in, but at a very basic level, we
all are wired to think stereotypically. Because we share a common
culture, most of us have specific pictures in mind when we hear the
words “football player,” “computer geek,” “college professor,” or
“high-school cheerleader.” To the extent that the stereotype is based
on experience and is at all accurate, it can be an adaptive, shorthand
way of dealing with complex events.
On the other hand, if the stereotype blinds us to individual dif-
ferences within a class of people, it is maladaptive and potentially
dangerous. Stereotyping can be harmful to the target even if the
stereotype seems to be neutral or even positive. It is not necessarily
negative to attribute “ambitiousness” to Jews, “a natural sense of
22
rhythm” to blacks, or an “artistic temperament” to gay men, but it
is often unfair and burdensome to be pegged by group stereotypes.
Some Asian Americans, for example, complain of being stereotyped
as a “model minority,” because of the pressures such an unrealistically
positive stereotype imposes. Stereotypic generalizations are abusive,
if only because they rob the person of the right to be perceived and
treated as an individual with his or her own individual traits, whether
positive or negative.
Stereotypes distort the way we interpret people’s behavior; in
turn, we may act on these distorted perceptions, treating the individ-
ual in a biased way. For example, in our culture many white people
tend to associate black people with images of violent and criminal
behavior. So when they encounter a black person, their thinking
tends to be tainted by associations that pop uncontrollably into their
heads. Birt Duncan showed people a film of a black man and a
23
white man in an argument. At one point in the film, one of the men
shoves the other. Duncan found that people interpreted the shove
very differently depending on who did the shoving. If the black man
shoved the white man, they were more likely to see it as a violent act;
if the white man shoved the black man, they were more likely to in-
terpret the action as a playful gesture. This bias—seeing the same
gesture as more violent when it comes from a black man—showed