推荐阅读5. Stereotype

DON’T LET STEREOTYPES WARP YOUR JUDGMENTS 不让偏见左右你的判断

Robert L. Heilbroner

1.Is a girl called Gloria apt to be better looking than one called Bertha? Are criminals more likely to be dark than blond? Can you tell a good deal about

someone’s personality from hearing his voice briefly over the phone? Can a person’s nationality be pretty accurately guessed from his photograph? Does the fact that someone wears glasses imply that he is intelligent? 2.The answer to all these questions is obviously, “No.”

3.Yet, from all the evidence at hand, most of us believe these things. Ask any college boy if he’d rather take his chances with a Gloria or a Bertha, or ask a college girl if she’d rather blind date a Richard or a Cuthbert. In fact, you don’t have to ask: college students in questionnaires have revealed that names conjure up the same images in their minds as they do in yours— and for as little reason.

4. Look into the favorite suspects of persons who report “suspicious characters” and you will find a large percentage of them to be “swarthy” or “dark and

foreign-looking”—despite the testimony of criminologists that criminals do not tend to be dark, foreign or “wild-eyed.” Delve into the main asset of a telephone stock swindler and you will find it to be a marvelously confidence-inspiring telephone “personality.” And whereas we all think we know what an Italian or a Swede looks like, it is the sad fact that when a group of Nebraska students sought to match faces and nationalities of 15 European countries, they were scored wrong in 93 percent of their identifications. Finally, for all the fact that horn-rimmed glasses have now become the standard television sign of an “intellectual,” optometrists know that the main thing that distinguishes people with glasses is just bad eyes.

5.Stereotypes are a kind of gossip about the world, a gossip that makes us prejudge people before we ever lay eyes on them. Hence it is not surprising that stereotypes have something to do with the dark world of prejudice. Explore most prejudices (note that the word means prejudgment) and you will find a cruel stereotype at the core of each one.

6. For it is the extraordinary fact that once we have typecast the world, we tend to see people in terms of our standardized pictures. In another demonstration of the

power of stereotypes to affect our vision, a number of Columbia and Barnard students were shown 30 photographs of pretty but unidentified girls, and asked to rate each in terms of “general liking,” “intelligence,” “beauty” and so on. Two months later, the same group were shown the same photographs, this time with fictitious Irish, Italian, Jewish and “American” names attached to the pictures. Right away the ratings

changed. Faces which were now seen as representing a national group went down in looks and still farther down in likability, while the “American” girls suddenly looked decidedly prettier and nicer.

7.Why is it that we stereotype the world in such irrational and harmful fashion? In part, we begin to typecast people in our childhood years. Early in life, as every parent whose child has watched a TV Western knows, we learn to spot the Good Guys from the Bad Guys. Some years ago, a social psychologist showed very clearly how powerful these stereotypes of childhood vision are. He secretly asked the most popular youngsters in an elementary school to make errors in their morning gym exercises. Afterwards, he asked the class if anyone had noticed any mistakes during gym period. Oh, yes, said the children. But it was the unpopular members of the class--the “bad guys”--they remembered as being out of step.

8.We not only grow up with standardized pictures forming inside of us, but as grown-ups we are constantly having them thrust upon us. Some of them, like the half-joking, half-serious stereotypes of mothers-in-law, or country yokels, or psychiatrists, are dinned into us by the stock jokes we hear and repeat. In fact,

without such stereotypes, there would be a lot fewer jokes. Still other stereotypes are perpetuated by the advertisements we read, the movies we see, the books we read. 9.And finally, we tend to stereotype because it helps us make sense out of a highly confusing world, a world which William James once described as “one great, blooming, buzzing confusion.” It is a curious fact that if we don92t know what we92re looking at, we are often quite literally unable to see what we’re looking at. People who recover their sight after a lifetime of blindness actually cannot at first tell a triangle from a square. A visitor to a factory sees only noisy chaos where the

superintendent sees a perfectly synchronized flow of work. As Walter Lippmann has said, “For the most part we do not first see, and then define; we define first, and then we see.”

10. Stereotypes are one way in which we “define” the world in order to see it. They classify the infinite variety of human beings into a convenient handful of “types” towards whom we learn to act in stereotyped fashion. Life would be a

wearing process if we had to start from scratch with each and every human contact. Stereotypes economize on our mental effort by covering up the blooming, buzzing confusion with big recognizable cut-outs. They save us the “trouble” of finding out what the world is like--they give it its accustomed look.

11.Thus the trouble is that stereotypes make us mentally lazy. As S. I. Hayakawa, the authority on semantics, has written: “The danger of stereotypes lies not in their existence, but in the fact that they become for all people some of the time, and for some people all the time, substitutes for observation.” Worse yet, stereotypes get in the way of our judgment, even wh …… 此处隐藏：7830字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……