Stereotyping- my thoughts.

This is one of my favs.. I have been mulling over this since.. I dunno when. I thought of reading some stuff, watch, interact, give sometime for my thoughts to solidify before I jump to conclusions. (some insights from Malcolm Gladwell's blog as well).

Lets start it in my fav way, lets define stereotyping.

Stereotyping: a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group.(ref:http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=stereotyping).

First, lets look why people tend to stereotype.

1. Ease of decision making:

Humans have a tendency to bring order in everything around them. This enables them to simplify their decision making. So, as a part of this they take many approaches, prominent ones being, minimizing the variables that affect one's thought process and another being making assumptions upfront.

So, stereotyping helps humans in both the approaches by minimizing their variables to make a decision and another thing is to provide higher level of confidence in their decision by making some assumptions ( these assumptions later become strong opinions).

2. Sense of Affliation/security:

We, humans, always feel secured in a group, thats nature. So, we tend to affliate ourselves with a particular group, based on various factors like, religion, caste,region, institution, teams etc etc..... (umpteen such) , some are by chance and some by choice. One way of rationalising the affliation is by associating the other group with some bad illusions and this is nothing but stereotyping.

Lets look at it from the angle of statistics. Statistics to me is a science of deriving some meaning out of given data. This helps you to generalise the characteristics of the given data elements. So if we take stereotyping, for some, its closer to statistical generalisaiton. For me, ITS NOT. Because, Human behavior is so complex to generalise.

Why should'nt we stereotype?

To me stereotyping is forming an opinion about behaviourial pattern of an individual based on the averaged out behavior of individuals belonging to that particular group. Behavior is a function of (mainly) the environment in which the individual is exposed to, for over a period of time. This environment is a result of certain parameters that are by virtue of certain variables say, like availability of space, climate etc which are more natural and cannot be changed. In short, an individual tends to behave the way he does because he can AFFORD to do that because of some intrinsic factors in that point of time and space. Once, both of these change, his or her behavior changes. That is why we have generation gaps with in the same groups. There are hell lot of examples I can quote supporting this.

How do we tackle this?

By

• First and foremost you come out of every kind of affliation you love to associate yourself with and EMPATHIZE with other person.
• Treating each individual as one single entity and not part of a group.
• Considering all the variables while trying to asses an individual's behavior or thought process. (Taken from gladwell's blog), if you need to asses one's thought process.

All opinions are my own and are open to discussion. This is just to trigger a thought and not a directive or a deep rooted opinion.