The Necessity of Stereotyping

I’m all about keeping this blog fresh and new but Susan Boyle is just everywhere. The New York Times ran another article featuring Boyle in its Sunday edition. In “Yes, Looks Do Matter” Pam Belluck asserts that while people have been using Susan’s story as an example of how shallow we have become, stereotypes are necessary. Social Psychologists say snap judgments about people are crucial to how we function, even when those judgments are wrong. NYU psychology professor David Amodio says judging things by appearance means quickly determining whether this four legged creature we are looking at is a cat or a dog. “If we look at a chair, we can categorize it quickly even though there are many different kinds of chairs out there”, Amodio added. Susan Fiske, a psychology professor at Princeton says that stereotyping was of life-and-death importance ages ago, when snap judgments intitially determined if a person appeared to have malignant or benign intent. Thus stereotyping in order to avoid angry, dominant looking people was a matter of survival.
So maybe stereotyping is a necessary evil? If we couldn’t judge people’s appearances initially, we would be vulnerable to deception from the first moment of meeting someone. Plus, sometimes stereotyping serves to give people the benefit of the doubt, although most of the time the people receiving this benefit are already fortunate, privileged, and beautiful. The “what-is-beautiful-is-good” stereotype causes attractive people to be judged to be smart, happy, well-adjusted, socially skilled, confident and assertive. On American Idol attractiveness plays a huge role in the voting process; sometimes superior singers are eliminated before a more attractive, popular contestant. People look at Angelina Jolie and say, “She must be a good mom.” Why? Because she has adopted a gazillion kids? For all we know she may have an army of nannies that do all the parenting while Jolie spends a quarter of her life on the red carpet. Through stereotyping, people translate her attractiveness into other positive qualities. Basically, stereotyping is bad. It allows us to sell talented people short and to give already fortunate people credit for talents they may not have. Nonetheless, stereotyping is a necessary function of human nature and while we may all bow our heads in shame at how we shallowly misjudged Susan Boyle, soon the shame will subside and stereotyping will carry on.


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NYT article:

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