14 Where Do Stereotypes Come From And How Do They Survive?
As discussed, we naturally categorize things: Biologists categorize plant life into floral regions / kingdoms / species. Academics divide subjects into disciplines. Linguistics divide divide language into branches. As humans, we categorize others by gender, race, age, eye colour and the like. Such categorizations are adaptive as they allow us to quickly process an immense amount of social information.
With such quick classifications based on minimal information, we often make mistakes. But do we correct our mistakes? Where do the categorizations come from in the first place? We will ask and answer these questions in this section.
Our brain is phenomenal (except for when you are trying to sleep and it does this).
Our brain is wired to process information at lighting speeds as well as thinking deeply and slowly about information. For instance, while reading over the material written in these pages, you’re thinking abstractly, hypothesizing, and scrutinizing the information. Now, when you type out the information that you’ve synthesized through slow, deliberative, motivated thinking, for Part 1 of the assignment, your fingers move seamlessly across the keyboard; you type without thinking about where the keys are or how to necessarily spell words. It happens seemingly automatically.
The first slow route is known as the reflective system (Kahneman, 2011) and is a relatively recent development in our evolutionary history (Evans, 2003). It involves slow, motivated, deliberate thinking. As such, it is effortful and takes time.
The second fast route is known as the reflexive system (Kahneman, 2011) and is old in evolutionary terms (Evans, 2003). It relies on automatic associations and procedures. Contrary to the slow effortful thinking of the reflective system, thinking in the reflexive system is fast and requires little effort.
These two systems show distinct neural structures (Lierberman, 2007; Satpute & Lieberman, 2006). While the slower, reflective system is involved with social interactions (thinking what to say, when to say it and the like), often, the reflexive system can influence subtle behaviour leading to biases that creep into interactions.
[NOTE: you do not need to learn each of these brain regions. Just be familliar and comfortable with the reflective / reflexive systems]
Why is it important to first distinguish between the two systems? Well, often, our stereotypes are picked up as we walk through the world by the reflexive system. This is where neurocognition and socio-cultural explanations of stereotypes intersect.
Where do Stereotypes Come From?
SOCIO-CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS
Our brain, the reflexive system, and stereotypes are all incredibly adaptive and useful; they are well equiped to pick up associations that appear in our environments. If these associations are negative, however, these useful systems can create severe negative biases.
Case study – Islamophobia
While there has been a long history of Islamophobic attitudes (the term islamophobia dates back to France in 1925; Allen, 2010) the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the USA (known colloquially as 9-11) saw an unprecedented rise in Islamophobia (Kaplan, 2006; Love, 2017). After the 9-11 attacks, President George W. Bush launched a “War on Terrorism” which quickly became conflated with a “War on Islam” (Tessler, 2003; Sides & Gross, 2013). As such, Muslims around the world were (and still are) stereotyped as violent and untrustworthy (Sides & Gross, 2013). This is despite the fact that between 1970 and 2016, of the total 170 000 terrorist attacks that were committed world-wide, 465 were done under the guise of Islam (Global Terrorism Database, 2018). As a percentage, that is 0.27% of all terrorist attacks in the past 40 years. This is also despite the vast majority of Muslims holding negative views of terrorist organizations like ISIS (Lipka, 2017).
News media is not soley to blame. Shaheen (2012) analyzed around 1000 films between 1896 and 2000. He found that Muslims were depicted negatively in 936 films and were only shown in a positive light in 12 of the movies (in 52 movies, the depictions of Muslims were neutral).
Between popular media and news media, the relationship between Muslims and violence is repeatedly reinforced despite the scant evidence to suggest such a relationship. Even despite the fact that several prominent Muslims are Nobel Peace prize winners. Our brains pick up negative associations in our environment around us which gives rise to the negative stereotype.
ROLE MODELS AND GROUP NORMS
People don’t only learn stereotypes (and prejudices – see next module) through mass media, but they also learn them through their parents, peers, role models, group norms, and culture at large (e.g., Pettigrew, 1958). We find that stereotypes are also often passed down from our parents (e.g., Eccles, Jacobs, & Harold, 1990; Fagot, Leinbach, & O’Boyle, 1992; Tiedemann, 2000). Not only do parents play an important role in shaping our prejudices, but research shows that overhearing a stranger make a racial remark increases expressions of prejudice (Greenberg & Pyszezynski, 1985). That is just a stranger. So you can imagine the damage that is done when a celebrity mutters prejudicial remarks. For instance, Thom Brennan, a Major League baseball commentator with over 30 years of experience recently uttered a homophobic remark live on air (see Levenson, 2020). Similarly, TV shows set social norms. One of my favourite TV comedies, Community (Harmon & Russo, 2010) would often use the term “gay” in a derogatory way to signal that something was uncool. This creates the association that being gay is something bad and that it is okay to express such an attitude openly.
How do Stereotypes Survive and Self-Perpetuate?
AVAILABILITY BIAS
In the case study above, we looked at how Muslims have been stereotyped as violent. This is the case in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. So, why are Muslims so stereotyped and stigmatized?
What would your answer be to the question, “Are you more likely to die from a terrorist attack or from falling out of bed?”. Most likely people will choose the terrorist attack. The website Ergoflex (2011) estimates that each year, you have a 1 in 2 million chance of being killed from falling out of bed. The chance of being killed in a terrorist attack (any attack, not just a terrorist attack ostensibly motivated by Islamic beliefs) ranges from 1 in 3.6 million to 1 in 10.9 billion (Nowrasteh, 2016; see also Norwasteh, 2018). In other words, you have a MUCH lower chance of being killed in a terrorist attack than you do from falling out of your bed. Why?
Research shows that when a terrorist attack is linked to Islam, it receives more media attention compared to other terrorist attacks not linked to Islam (Kearns et al., 2019). This leads to the availability heuristic (or bias)
an event that is easily available in memory is judged to have happened more frequently or as more likely to happen again
Because terrorist attacks committed under the guise of Islam receive so much attention on the media, it is easier to recall instances of terrorist attacks than it is of people falling out of their bed and dying; so we judge it to happen more frequently and the stereotype that Muslims are violent is solidified.
CONFIRMATION BIAS
Let’s return to our accounting stereotype we talked about earlier. Imagine you meet an accountant who wears a brown suite, is good at math, but is pretty fun. So here they are stereotypical on two stereotypes but they defy the stereotype that accountants are boring. What happens in this instance? We pay attention to information that is consistent with our stereotype while ignoring information that is incongruent (Johnston & Hewstone, 1992). This bias is called a confirmation bias:
“the seeking and interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand”
(Nickerson, 1998, p. 175)
Johnston and Hewstone (1992) showed that participants who read up on an outgroup member who disconfirmed some of the stereotypes of the outgroup were still rated as stereotypical outgroup members. The participants had ignored the stereotype-inconsistent information and only paid attention to the stereotype-consistent information. In other words, the participants had demonstrated a confirmation bias.
Research does show, however, that if we pay attention to stereotype-inconsistent information, we do start seeing the outgroup as a whole as less homogeneous (Garcia-Marques & Mackie, 1999). In Experiment 3, however, Garcia-Marques and Mackie demonstrated that when under stress, participants failed to process the stereotype-inconsistent information. If we think in terms of group conflict, which happens and causes significant stress, we can see how easily group stereotypes remain intact.
SUBTYPING
Lets stick with the accountant example. Earlier on in the text, when introducing outgroup homogeneity, I asked you to imagine that “you are going to meet an accountant called Shaun. What comes to mind?
1. Good with numbers
2. Probably boring
3. A man
4. Dressed in a brown or black suit”
Lets imagine now that you are about to meet Shaun the accountant.
Open the door to meet Shaun
Here we see that Shaun is good with numbers, but is not a man, is lots of fun, and is not dressed in a black or brown suit. What happens to outgroup members when they are soo stereotype-incongruent that they defy most or all stereotypes? Do we abandon our stereotypes of the outgroup altogether because of this single, instance? Allport (1954) offers one explanation of what might happen, “There is a common mental device that permits people to hold prejudgments even in the face of much contradictory evidence…By excluding a few favoured cases, the negative rubric is kept in tact for all other cases” (p. 23).
This process that Allport is describing is called subtyping:
“The tendency for observers to think of targets who disconfirm stereotypes as “exceptions to the rule”
(Schachter, Gilbert, Nock, Wegner, 2020, p. 525)
Recall in the confirmation bias section above the study performed by Johnston and Hewstone (1992) where participants rated an outgroup member who weakly disconfirmed the group stereotype as a stereotypical outgroup member. They also had a condition where some participants read about an outgroup member who strongly disconfirmed the outgroup stereotype. These outgroup members were rated as less typical of the outgroup. Participants’ ratings of the outgroup did not change despite reading on some outgroup members who strongly disconfirmed the group stereotype. The had subtyped the deviant outgroup members.
MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS
What motivates you in a current situation also matters (Brehm et al., 2008). If you approach a Black person in a police uniform after having been mugged, you are more likely to categorize them as a “police officer” rather than as a “black” person. Similarly, if you are a person in power, you will be motivated to keep your power and will thus categorize others in ways that help you keep your status (think back to our last lecture on Social Identity Theory; see also Operario & Fiske, 2001). Similarly, if you motivated to like or admire a person (say, for their profession), you are more likely to categorize that person as their profession rather than by their race / ethnicity.
