推荐阅读5. Stereotype(3)

II. 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 don’t know what we are 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.”

最后，我们抱有成见的原因还在于成见有助于我们理解这个纷繁复杂的社会，一个犹如William James描述的“伟大的，极其喧闹的混乱世界”。奇怪的是，如果我们不知道我们正在看什么，那么我们就常常看不到我们正在看的东西。一个失明了一辈子的人，在他恢复视力后一开始是不能区分三角形和长方形的。一个参观者在工厂只是看见乱哄哄的车间和嘈杂的声音，但工厂的管理者却看到了相当流畅的生产线。正如Walter Lippman所说：“大部分情况下，我们不是先看在定义而是先定义再看。”

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.

我们为了看清楚这个世界而先去定义它，这就是一种成见。成见就是把这个世界上数不清的形形色色的男男女女方便地归类成少数的几种人。这样我们就可以根据成见来行事了。如果我们和每个人打交道都是一切从头开始，生活就会变成一个使人令人精疲力竭的过程。成见通过用巨大的，可以辨别的剪图累掩盖这个纷杂喧闹的大千世界，并以此来减轻我们的脑力劳动。它们帮助我们减轻麻烦：在我们试图弄清楚世界是什么样子的时候，它们赋予这个世界惯常的样子。