#Stereotyping

[c4fin4t3d-f1sh]

Reminder not to stereotype kintypes.

Just because one is a fox does not mean they're as happy and playful as one.

Just because one is a rabbit does not mean they're a cute, cuddly, soft bunny.

Just because one is a bird does not mean they're sad to be earth-bound.

Just because one is a wolf does not mean they have "two sides/personalities" while shifting.

Just because one is a cat does not mean they are faking alterhumanity, or in their "Warrior Cat phase"

Just because one is a nonhuman does not mean that we do quads.

Just because one is a nonhuman does not mean we have gear.

Just because one is a nonhuman does not mean we are lean, strong, and Caucasian.

Just because one is a nonhuman does not mean we express our alterhumanity in eccentric ways.

Every nonhuman is valid as fuck. From the smallest mouse, to the largest whale, everything in between, you are valid.

[mothwiingz]

fun fact that’s less funny the more you think about it: my parents were so convinced that i, being a trans man, must be gay, that i had to come out as straight multiple times

really just goes to show how deep the stereotype of “trans guy = has to like men” runs. how we aren’t seen as men, instead assumed to be confused straight girls with short hair who are going through a silly little phase. they see us as straight women, only calling us gay men so they can look progressive from the outside. it’s a horrible mixture of heteronormativity and transandrophobic erasure.

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Examples of Gaslighting

First Things First

[sunshineandlyrics]

Dev talking about his movie Monkey Man (7 April 2024)

[marmot-bee-person]

“you have to like garlic bread or it doesn’t count”

-my entire camp friend group

[damnfandomproblems]

Fandom Problem #4023

Kinda getting tired of every weird/quirky character being headcanoned or retconned into having a mental illness/ be non-neurotypical. Like I get the need for representation but calling any character that doesn't fit in the very narrow view of "normal' autistic or bipolar seems ridiculous. Like, some people are just weird, that's it.

[trekkitkat]

Not stereotyping people includes men too

In a world where stereotyping people because of their colour/race/religion/gender is rightly frowned upon, the "all men" bullshit needs to end.

It is plain stereotyping, passing judgment on a whole section of society because of the category they were born in. If you would not judge someone by their sexuality, by their nationality, if you would not judge a woman just because she's a woman, you should not be against men just for being male.

And notice how when women comment that's it's not all men, and talk about their positive experiences with men, the radfems shoot them down with vengeance. Why? Because their challenging the spew that all "men are monsters" and pointing out that the world is not so black and white. Like every social category in the world, some people will be good and just and kind and some people will be cruel and hateful. But it has nothing to do with their social categories and everything to do with the individual and the choices in life they make.

Now, from my personal experience, I have experienced some bad ones. I've had the creepy guy sneaking into the girls shower at high school, the perves in the bar, the guy who broke all professional protocol to get my phone number and made me feel unsafe. There's a list. But I also know my step-father, who I trust with my life, the men in my extended family, my male friends, classmates, coworkers. I remember being 18 and traveling alone with my male supervisor to work on isolated sites in the hills and later going into the scrubland with four male colleagues, and they behaved with complete respect and professionalism, they treated me with complete equality, as a fellow colleague.

So no, I will never let the "all men" argument slide, because lumping the good people in the world in the same pot with the bad ones is always harmful. It fosters hate and division. We are supposed to be becoming an enlightened, rational, equal society.

[stonebutchooze]

whenever I say I worked at a care home people always assume I mean an OLD PEOPLE'S care home and start talking about dementia, and even when I correct them and say no, it was adults of all ages with disabilities like cerebral palsy, some of them younger than me, people still don't listen and start talking about how hard it is "when you get to that age".

like people who live in 24/7 care for their entire adult lives exist!!!! residential care is NOT something that only comes into play at the end of your life. lack of awareness and funding is, in my opinion, partly why negative experiences of full time or respite residential care are so widespread.

ALSO when I successfully clarify that I worked with people of all ages, people start talking about how SAD it is when young people who have conditions like cerebral palsy can't move or talk or whatever. and I ALSO take issue with that. I think seeing disabled people's experiences as wholly "sad" or "what a shame" pre-emptively dictates what kind of life we expect disabled people to live. people in residential care CAN be happy, largely independent, or happy with their level of control where they are dependent on others. if we assume they can't, we won't even try to help them get there.

some people have high support needs at home and then go into residential care. some people spend their whole lives in residential care. some people won't need it at all with proper support and funding at home. people need support, not pity and people seeing their lives as lost causes.

[mbti-notes]

hi i live in an ethnically divided country and in the process of growing up i too eventually became prejudiced towards other gruops because thats what we were taught that they are responsible for ruining the country etc but as i grow up ive tried to reduce this prejudice by first holding back judgements during conflict and hearing ppl out-not easy i was wondering if you have any other ways to help me tone down some of the prejudicial feelings i have thanks

Combating prejudice is deeply related to personal growth, so it's worth going into detail about it. Prejudice is a complicated topic because it needs to be understood from many different angles. It is a psychologically sensitive topic because of the moral injury and intergenerational trauma it causes. It is a politically controversial topic because there is a lot of disagreement about the best methods of remedying it.

Academically, this field of study is relatively new, so a lot of the research is still in early stages. It is a sad fact that academia has always been dominated by the perpetrators of prejudice, so the topic was not taken seriously until civil rights became a more prominent issue in society. In countries where civil rights haven't mattered or were continually suppressed, prejudice is considered just another form of suffering that people must endure.

WHAT IS PREJUDICE?

The literal meaning of prejudice comes from "pre-judge", to make a judgment without proper logical reasoning and/or before possessing necessary and sufficient evidence (of truth). If you can set aside the moral aspect of prejudice for a moment (whether it's good or bad), the foundation of pre-judgment is actually a cognitive issue, pertaining to how humans think, and the many ways in which their thought process can be flawed. Sometimes it helps to think of prejudice in cognitive rather than moral terms because it can reduce blaming and shaming, which allows for more productive discussion.

As humans evolved, they were often faced with dangerous situations in which they had to make timely decisions without opportunity to gather sufficient information. As a result, pre-judgment got built into the human brain as a survival tool. Pre-judgment relies on "fuzzy" sources of information that are immediately available, such as memories, emotions, and intuitions. The brain automatically uses past experience to formulate "general rules of thumb", which is an unrefined method of organizing and categorizing information. These generalizations can then be used to make quick intuitive leaps and connections when navigating new situations. The word "automatic" is important because most of this information processing takes place instantly, below conscious awareness.

The great speed at which pre-judgment occurs means that certain things must be sacrificed, such as mindfulness, precision, accuracy, and most importantly, the bigger picture, since the past experience of one individual is an extremely limited pool of information. The flaws of this "lower" level information processing are presumably why human beings also had to evolve the so-called "higher" brain that is used for logical reasoning and conscious deliberation.

In other words, humans essentially have two different brains (which have been given various names throughout the history of psychology). Problems arise when the two brains diverge or disagree. The bad news is that it's impossible to stop your "lower" brain from pre-judging because it's a critical brain function. The good news is that it's quite possible to use your "higher" brain to counteract the mistakes and negative effects of pre-judgment. This is a process that may involve several steps:

STEP 1: NURTURE SELF-AWARENESS

The first step is to develop enough self-awareness to realize that there's a lot more going on in your mind than you realize. The reason I go on and on about self-awareness is that you can't address an issue until you become aware of it. Many people aren't aware of their beliefs and values and just take them for granted. To increase self-awareness, reflect on your beliefs and values in more detail. It might help to write them down.

beliefs: what you take as true/untrue about the world

values: how you assign importance, significance, or worth

The fact of the matter is that people pick up their beliefs and values quite passively from their environment. Knowing this can make you more understanding of people when they hold problematic beliefs because it's likely that they haven't had enough opportunity to examine them properly. We all grow up internalizing someone else's beliefs and values. Yet many people treat their beliefs and values as their personal "identity" and are unwilling to let them go even when the beliefs are proven false or the values proven misguided.

In your case, your culture has taught you racist beliefs and values, e.g., that people of a certain ethnicity are bad, inferior, not to be trusted, best eliminated, etc. As a child, you accepted these beliefs and values because i) you didn't know any better, and ii) holding them made it easier for you to fit in. It feels good to fit in. A culture survives and thrives when its members continually validate each other, even when the beliefs/values being validated are problematic.

In adulthood, you can hide behind excuses and continue to uncritically conform with your culture, or you can reflect critically on your culture and actively choose the kind of person you want to be. Do you want these unexamined beliefs and values to define you? Do you want to let these unexamined beliefs and values make you a protector of a prejudiced society and a perpetrator of discrimination? If not, what kind of society do you hope to live in, and what kinds of beliefs and values must you hold in order to help bring that better society into being?

Shining more light on the underlying beliefs and values that underpin your behavior creates an opportunity to change them for the better. There are many things you don't have the power to control in society, but the one thing that is always within your power to improve is yourself.

STEP 2: FACE UP TO YOUR PREJUDICE

The second step is to admit that you pre-judge and acknowledge any problems it has caused. A problem won't get solved by dancing around it. To confront a problem head on means you must see the FULL extent of it. Once again, it might help to lay it all out in writing, for example:

Write down all the times you felt awkward, clueless, or helpless around someone different from you, and explain why.

Write down all the instances where pre-judgment led you to misunderstand, misjudge, or mistreat someone, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Write down all the times you got criticized or suffered negative consequences related to pre-judgment.

Write down what you really thought about the people you've met of that ethnicity, even if it makes you feel ashamed, especially if it makes you feel ashamed. Shame is an indicator that something about your thinking/behavior is morally wrong, so learn to pay attention to shame and you'll discover opportunities to improve.

Were there better ways to approach those situations? It's hard to change negative behavior when you have no positive behavior to replace it with. Generally speaking, a great way to learn and improve in social situations is to be more curious and take more time to listen, rather than make assumptions and trip over your own false beliefs.

STEP 3: IMPROVE YOUR THINKING SKILLS

The third step is to develop better use of your "higher" intellect and its ability to reason, i.e., improve your critical thinking skills. Critical thinking basically means properly vetting your beliefs and values. There are several criteria you ought to use:

Truth: Is your belief really true? Is it based on fact? Human beings are prone to confirmation bias, so did you gather all of the available evidence and give fair consideration to the counterevidence? If you don't know enough to judge truth for yourself, have you consulted with a wide range of experts on the matter? Experts are the people who have already done sufficient formal learning and study. While their word shouldn't be taken as gospel, they are a good source of credible information that ought to be taken into consideration.

Rationality: Is your belief/value reasonable? Can you explain how you came to hold the belief/value? Can you provide a convincing logical argument to prove your belief or justify your value to others? If you don't know enough to judge the quality of information on your own, has your belief/value undergone adequate critique and rebuttal from those who know more? When used appropriately, discussion and debate with others can help you refine your ideas toward greater precision and accuracy.

Coherence: Do you express and apply your beliefs/values consistently in every situation? Do any of your beliefs/values contradict each other? Have you ever detected or been accused of hypocritical behavior? When your beliefs, values, and behaviors don't align or fit with each other, it causes an uncomfortable mental state called cognitive dissonance. It's a sign that there's a problem in your thought process, which you should use as an opportunity to straighten your mind out.

Racial/ethnic prejudice is a form of faulty thinking because it is based on stereotyping. A stereotype is an over-generalization about an entire category/group. For example, Americans are often stereotyped as loud, Canadians as polite, French as snobby, British as uptight, etc.

Stereotypes are difficult to eradicate for two reasons. First, stereotypes are a form of lazy thinking, and laziness often wins out when mental energy is limited. Since they are a form of pre-judgment, stereotypes are a quick and easy way to make sense of the world: Thinking along very general categories bypasses the need to think about all the little details of each individual member of the category. Stereotypes are also lazy in that they do not properly distinguish between race, ethnicity, and culture. How a person looks (biology), where they are from (geography), what group they identify with (culture), and how they behave (psychology) are separate issues, are they not? Yet, stereotypes do not recognize such nuances.

Second, stereotypes are easy to defend because they contain a tiny but heavily distorted grain of truth. Culture is real, and people who grow up in the same culture are more likely to adopt similar attitudes and behaviors. It is true that Americans tend to value extraverted behaviors like assertiveness and outspokenness. Cultural trends make it very easy to find an example of a loud American or a polite Canadian. Humans only require one or two examples and their brain will see a "pattern" and start making generalizations. Generalizations eventually evolve into stereotypes once enough people start believing they are true.

Many people try to debunk stereotypes by calling them false, but that's not quite the right approach. The more important problem with stereotypes is that they are only a very small piece of the picture that has been blown out of proportion and treated as the whole picture. A stereotype is an oversimplification. To debunk an oversimplification is different than just calling out falsity. If the problem is that people aren't taking enough information into consideration, then the solution should be to make them take the fuller picture into account. This can be done in two ways:

i. Seek Counterevidence: For instance, for every loud American you meet in the US, you will find a quiet one that didn't draw your attention. If you actually did this, the number of loud Americans would immediately drop to ~50%. It's much harder to justify stereotyping when you realize that the number of people who fit the stereotype isn't anywhere near 100% or even a majority. This is why an effective way to increase racial and ethnic harmony is to encourage more mixing and mingling between groups. When you're constantly encountering evidence that goes against the stereotype, over and over again, stereotypes will cease to have any meaning.

ii. Respect Individuality: Recognize that not everyone subscribes equally or in the same way to the culture in which they were brought up. Go to a collectivist culture and you'll find plenty of rebellious people. Go to a traditional culture and you'll find plenty of open-minded people. There are plenty of people who suffer because they don't fit in well with their culture. When you stereotype, you are basically saying that every person is just a mindless or unthinking product of their culture. Is it fair to dismiss people in this way, before you've even known a single fact about their personal experience and background? Another reason why mixing and mingling between groups promotes racial and ethnic harmony is because normal everyday interactions force you to connect with each individual's humanity and you can't help but be more empathetic as a result.

Do you hope to be an intelligent person? An important aspect of growing as a person is to develop your intellectual capabilities because they are necessary for having good judgment. Is it possible to make consistently good decisions in life when your mind is riddled with wrong ideas and bad thinking habits such as overgeneralizing and oversimplifying?

STEP 4: UNDERSTAND YOUR PLACE IN HISTORY

The fourth step is to have a better understanding of history and how you fit into the historical context of racial/ethnic divides. People may be born to pre-judge but they aren't born with prejudiced beliefs. Beliefs are learned and passed down from one generation to the next. Prejudice isn't just a problem of one person's faulty cognition, it is also a social and political problem, where faulty beliefs and values build a society that treats people unfairly.

In many places, people of different ethnic groups often claim their own spaces. If too many people from another ethnicity start to move in, conflicts arise. The usual responses to this "invasion" are fight or flight. Fighting involves actively rejecting them, kicking them out, killing them, or passing laws to keep them from power. Flight usually involves moving to a new space once it becomes obvious that the old space is unrecoverable. Either way, the two groups remain separate, which means there are no opportunities to mix and mingle and improve relations.

As long as two groups cannot tolerate and accept each other, conflicts will persist. And some ethnic conflicts have persisted for centuries and even produced wars, haven't they? Whether you like it or not, you come into the world as a part of history. What role have your ancestors and family played in the conflict? What do people see when they look at you, and how does that affect your relations with them? Do you want to mindlessly perpetuate the conflict so that your kids and descendants must suffer forever, or do you hope for something better? What will your legacy be in this history? Can the prejudice end with you?

STEP 5: RAISE THE BAR ON YOUR PEOPLE SKILLS

The fifth step is to hold yourself to higher standards when socializing, communicating, and interacting with others. You have to improve your people skills so that you get the most out of every interaction, rather than doing things that poison or shut down meaningful interaction. You have to be more mindful about how you come across to people. I have already recommended books on the resources page about how to socialize and communicate better.

It is a simple matter to preach tolerance and acceptance, but it is quite another matter to actually try and implement it. The fact of the matter is there are certain values that cannot be reconciled. For example, if you believe that men and women should be equal under the law, how are you going to reconcile with a culture that believes they are fundamentally unequal and should be treated unequally? It seems impossible.

This is where it's especially important to combat stereotypes through real human interaction. Stereotypes are only easy to maintain because they are abstract in your mind. When you merely think about people who are different from you, you don't think of them as real individuals, but as an abstract category or a single superficial characteristic. This must change, and an effective way is to purposely surround yourself with more people who are different from you. I often advocate this kind of exposure to foster understanding between different personality types, and the same principle applies to other human differences as well, including racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and physical differences.

If you are a member of the dominant group in society, you have never really experienced what it's like to be in the minority, and it is an experience you ought to expose yourself to, in order to truly understand the world beyond your own limited experience. The dominant group always holds the freedom to determine their own identity, whereas the minority group never feels free from majority judgment of them. Have you ever experienced such existential constraint and do you understand what negative effects it has on human psychology? Reflect more deeply on how people are bound by social, economic, and political constraints and you might find more sophisticated explanations for the "negative" behavior you observe in people.

In real human interaction, you can better connect with people as individuals, you have far more exposure to the positive side of their culture, you'll have a more nuanced understanding of what really motivates them, and you'll have more opportunity to communicate your way through differences. When two people only see each other as abstractions, stereotypes can easily be proven true, which only hardens prejudiced beliefs. But when you learn how to communicate with empathy, person to person, heart to heart, stereotypes more easily fall away, and people are more likely to soften their stance and be open to finding common ground.

Yes, there are some extreme people you will never be able to see eye-to-eye with, but you have to realize those people are in the minority. The majority of people aren't extreme and don't want conflict. Until you can do away with your abstractions and connect with people on a more human level, you'll just continue dismissing everyone you've lumped into the crude category of "bad" and consider them irredeemable, thus never discovering the majority of moderate people who are open to communication, compromise, and change. If you hope to have an influence on others, it is only fair that you open yourself up to being influenced by them. This is a very difficult but worthy endeavor if two people who would otherwise be enemies finally find some form of mutual understanding or peaceful coexistence.

Counteracting the tendency to pre-judge is hard work, even painful work, which is why many people resist or don't bother. However, if you can take on this challenge of changing your thinking and improving your people skills, you'll be opening the door to tremendous growth. You'll have a much deeper understanding of yourself, others, and the society you live in. And there are many rewards to be reaped from possessing such wisdom.

[i-am-trans-gwender]

"The cartoonist who resorts to stereotypes reveals his own bigotry." - Bill Watterson.

[ultraweathercoremax]

Oh hey, check out this wall. I like how stereotypically “castle” it looks

[bspoquemagazine]

Opening at the Soy Capitán: Talisa Lallai - Still Life

Join the Soy Capitán for the opening of Still Life, a solo exhibition by Talisa Lallai this Friday, November 15, from 6–9 pm in Berlin Kreuzberg.

“I imagine the landscape beneath the water’s surface, mirrored, uneven, at least as deep as it lies above the horizon. A friendly, mossy Atlantis over barren rocks. Or perhaps an impenetrable darkness, or both. It feels as if I am sinking into all the water that surrounds me.” Thea Mantwill About the Artist: Talisa Lallai (b. 1989 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) explores identity and belonging…

[apenitentialprayer]

Stereotypes, Identity Anxiety, and Self-Fulfillment

The theory of "stereotype threat" is {...} fear of "being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one's group applies." As performance anxiety is triggered, the fear often manifests in stereotypes being borne out by reality. The research suggests that awareness of a negative stereotype about one's group can interfere with the performance of the members of that group whenever the stereotype is invoked. {...} Stereotype research warns that members of marginalized ability groups {...} are stymied by their own knowledge of how they're popularly perceived. The threat doesn't even have to be explicit. {...} The combination of familiarity with a stereotype and membership in a stigmatized group impairs performance. {...} One group of researchers hypothesizes that the effect of the stereotype is "to make sure that any sign that they might be confirming the stereotype is identified and suppressed. Ironically, this increased vigilance and control hijacks the same central executive processor (i.e., working memory) needed to excel on complex cognitive tasks, producing the very result —poorer performance— that they are trying to avoid." Stereotype threat research has been carried out over multiple domains, from academic to athletic to affective. The expectations laid out by stereotypes influence results. Research has also found that people engage in self-handicapping to reduce the applicability of a negative stereotype to their performance. That is, they will not try as hard —say by failing to practice a skill— in order to avoid hits to their self-esteem. When they fail, they can attribute their failure to lack of personal effort rather than natural inadequacy. {...} Writing about the potential undoing of stereotype threat, Toni Schmader has noted, "[T]hese differences can be reduced if not erased by changing the nature of these performance environments to encourage more positive views of one's group or one's own abilities, or through greater transparency of the pernicious effects that stereotyping can have. By deconstructing stereotype threat, we can diffuse the damage it can do." What Schmader means is that the power of stereotype threat lies in its invisibility. We can counter it in one of two (not unrelated) ways: by putting a stop to the ways in which we marginalize {groups}, or by shining a light on he fallacy of the stereotype.

Darcy Lockman (All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Unequal Partnership, pages 224, 225, 224, 226). Bolded emphases added. Square brackets original, curly brackets indicate my own editorial changes.

[stillunusual]

No words....

[damnfandomproblems]

Fandom Problem #4028

Being (rightfully) upset about bi people being stereotyped as promiscuous or more likely to cheat, and yet CERTAIN fans acting like a bi character being shown as being in a committed long-term relationship with one person is a "cop out" because they aren't actively getting with both genders. 'Cause it would be sooooo much better for representation if they dumped or cheated on their partner to meet your quota for acceptable bi representation.

[aronarchy]

[image ID: thread by butchanarchy that reads,

A lot of millennial folks who went absolutely feral at things like the avocado toast debacle are now racing to get in on the “broad generalizations about how terrible and ignorant the younger generation is” game.

Seems like the only lesson many people learned from being disempowered young people blamed for long standing social problems is how good it feels once you’re finally old enough to have your turn at blaming disempowered young people for long standing social problems.

/end image ID]