Stereotyping is Incomplete, Not Incorrect -Kimaya Shahi

Categorizing people is essential for human survival. Stereotyping is categorising to an extreme. Stereotypes aren’t necessarily incorrect, but are incomplete stories.

Envision this. A new girl and her friends from South Africa join a school in the US. As the girl is introduced in her new class her fellow pupils come up to her, fascinated, and ask her if she can teach them how to tackle lions, and if she needed help learning how to basic technology like her phone and laptop. Offended and confused, the girl tries to distance herself from anyone associated with her stereotypical group, including her friends in South Africa, growing unnecessarily and increasingly self-conscious every day.

This isn’t just a story. It’s an everyday reality. People all over the world look at what’s on the surface and interpret things about a person, unaware of the consequences this causes. They spread a single story that goes around about a place, a certain race or a group of people, over and over again, without realising that people are 3 dimensional, not 2d. This unfortunate reality is known by society as a stereotype.

A stereotype is represented best as being thought of as a blurb at the back of a book. It makes you think that you know what the story’s about, but you can never be sure until you actually pick up the book and read it. A blurb will only show you an exciting excerpt from a story, but never the entire thing. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are not true, but that they are incomplete,” says novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. People’s minds, especially children, are very impressionable. Their thoughts, like play-doh, can be moulded - twisted and shaped to form a long lasting opinion.

Psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, who is studying unconscious bias, has come to the conclusion that we are subconsciously using and believing in stereotypes. “Our ability to categorise and and evaluate is an important part of human existence, without it we couldn’t survive.” she stated in an interview held by Psychology Today, “But Stereotypes are categories that have gone too far, [...] as our minds are tricked to respond with messages that say ‘hostile’, ‘stupid’, ‘slow’ and ‘weak’.”

Children and teenagers are especially prone to not seeing the full picture or thinking it through. Stereotyping their peers has become a colossal issue in a student’s everyday life. Grade 8 student Nayanika Gunvante says, “When I see a person with glasses, I automatically assume they are super smart or nerdy, and then I remember that I have glasses and am nothing like that.” When asked why, Nayanika stated that “It’s probably because all the TV shows and books shown and read to kids represent smart people by a person wearing glasses.” Nayanika and well as 63 other Grade 8 students believe that stereotypes are established in books, TV shows and movies shown to children. They say the “Stereotypical characters linger” in the back of their minds, forming opinions about races and cultures in their heads.

Furthermore, research indicates that children in the United States come to understand race and ethnicity concepts between the ages of three and four. Many children have definite and firm, rooted stereotypes about race, gender, culture and all other social groups by the age of 5. At around 6 years old, children become accurate at sorting people by ethnicity and by the time they’re 7 years old, children are convinced that they fully understand race and ethnicity.

Additionally, some stereotypes that were created several generations ago still haunt us to this day. For instance, the stereotype about people with glasses being extremely smart was initially created because people usually had glasses when they were bookworms, and would constantly be reading, even if it meant staying up late, reading in the dark. However, nowadays, people have glasses usually because they’re on their phones or laptops very often, which could mean it’s because they have several friends and are very sociable. Nonetheless, if someone has glasses they are immediately thought of as ‘nerdy’.

Using stereotypes to represent people is a form of prejudice that leads to incomplete and often incorrect presumptions about people based on the way they look, act, dress or interact with society. Based on research done by the University of Toronto, Scarborough, stereotyping has long lasting negative impacts on people’s behavior. It can cause aggression, lack of self-control, issues focusing and/or cause eating disorders.

A simple solution would be increasing exposure to diversity. Befriending a number of different kinds of people, whether they seem like someone who fits into your friend group or not, would give you the opportunity to learn more about people unlike you. Whether a person is a regular teenage student, an adults, or even the president of a country, categorizing people is human nature, however, avoiding judging a book by it’s cover, or the back of the cover, as much as possible would help decrease the unawareness of an incomplete story.




Sources:
"The Danger of a Single Story." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Social Psychology Network." Mahzarin Banaji

"Stereotyping Has a Lasting Negative Impact." University of Toronto Media Room