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Each of us daily faces stereotypes – gender, racial, social. But the desire to hang labels also has a positive side – it is easier for us to get to know the world, to establish contact with new people.
The desire to label an entire social group has long and rightly been considered a sign of narrow-mindedness. However, the authors of a study* published in the journal Psychological Science demonstrated that cultural stereotypes are born for a reason – it is an inevitable consequence of the transmission of information in human society.
Participants in the experiment were asked to memorize the appearance and character of aliens from books and films, and then retell the learned information to each other in a chain. At the end, everyone took a test, reporting what traits of the character they remembered. The fact that the information changed, as in the game “broken phone”, did not surprise the scientists. Another surprise turned out to be. “As information passed from one person to another, what seemed like a chaotic and random set of associations associated with alien characters began to line up in a simple system of social stereotypes that is easy to remember,” says Douglas Martin (Douglas Martin), Head of the Laboratory of Personal Perception at the University of Aberdeen (UK). By the end of the chain, people were giving out what was very reminiscent of stereotypes. For example, external characteristics such as color were associated with certain personality traits.
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Researchers believe that attitudes towards stereotypes need to be reconsidered. Yes, stamps and labels play the role of a breeding ground for the emergence of prejudices, but at the same time they help us explore the world, organize, store and use information about other people. “For example, when we meet a stranger, stereotypes give us a framework on which we can quickly build our impression of him and understand how we should communicate with him,” says Martin.
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It is interesting that people often confuse their hated acquaintances if they belong to the same social group – they merge for them into a certain collective image: “all you intellectuals are freaks with glasses”, “they are the same as the Chinese”.
It seems that stereotypes are the product of evolution. A person as a species has a limit of knowledge and a tendency to draw conclusions based on “common sense”, that is, a set of pre-established concepts about people and the world around.
Scientists hope that their work will provide a clue to understanding how not only observations close to reality, but also false clichés fall into the number of stereotypes. “Let’s say people believe that Scots are red-haired and wear a kilt, and that’s not entirely true,” says Martin. “But often they are credited with qualities that have no real basis, such as stinginess or a gloomy character.” In his opinion, when there is a connection between a certain social group and the quality attributed to it, people usually find and remember it very well. But if there is no such connection, the stereotype is born from an observation made once and preserved due to certain patterns of transmission of cultural information. “If we understand how social stereotypes form and evolve, we may be able to change their content for the better,” Martin dreams.
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* «The Spontaneous Formation of Stereotypes via Cumulative Cultural Evolution Psychological Science», A Journal of the Association of the Psychological Science, June 2014.