On Being Particular About Generalization

As our freedom of expression gains alarmingly greater significance with each passing day, people have been increasingly likely to shun being 'labelled', being 'typecast' or...God forbid...being Stereotyped ! It is this intense disdain for stereotyping that makes people turn away from personality testing in high dudgeon, even to question possible patterns among the results of IQ tests and to add highly creative politically correct terms to our lexicon every year (relax, you're no longer ugly, you're just 'visually challenging')

Human beings are 'cognitive misers', as Fiske put it. It has been demonstrated experimentally that the complexity of stimuli from the social environment leads people to systematically ignore chunks of information in order to be able to process it with ease, by aiding the brain in storing data based on similarity. Racial and gender based stereotyping have been extensively studied. There exists some evidence that stereotyping is, to an extent, automatic or implicit, rather than being subject to a person's conscious control. (the Implicit Associations Test sheds some light on the phenomenon). Furthermore, the tendency to stereotype is heightened in certain situations; experiments involving greater time pressure have been seen to increase subjects' tendency to stereotype. Also, the more accessible the information regarding a particular category (say, Indians or lawyers or blondes), the greater is a person's propensity to stereotype. Information regarding a category can be made more accessible to a person's brain, by sub conscious 'priming' (for instance, there are experiments, where subjects are asked to read or view material containing very subtle hints about a particular stereotype and this, in turn, leads them to apply the information in making their own judgements).

Does this mean, that human beings have an innate, non conscious tendency to stereotype? To a certain extent, yes. But is that such a bad thing, anyway? We all love to label each other and more than anything else, we love to label ourselves. It's only when the labels do not conform to our preferred self image, that we begin to carp about stereotyping. From shoes to phones to status updates, a lot of what we wear/say/use has the intended or unintended purpose of labelling ourselves. Labelling is our way of making sense of the social world.
Of course, like every innate tendency, this tendency needs to be tempered and like every freedom, this freedom cannot be exercised with abandon. But, it helps to understand the source of stereotypes before mindlessly dismissing them. And as much as try not to crack HR jokes these days (even to actively and fervently oppose them), I will be the first to admit that the world is a much more fun place with them in it !