Stereotyping: That blinding human folly

Some of us are blinded by our own personal stray experiences, comforting or otherwise, to arrive at our personal stereotypes. The generic stereotypes at least are public and can be challenged

K. Ramkumar
Updated: Mar 15, 2013 05:31:42 PM UTC

I often wonder why we group people in terms of attitude, aptitude, capability or proclivity. We do not even realise this is stereotyping. Even when someone points out to us the fallacy of grouping people together, we use perverse logic to justify our position. These are beliefs. Yet, we fool ourselves and others that these have strong logical and empirical grounds. We draw support from perverse statistical analysis to legitimise what is otherwise irrational.

Some of us are blinded by our own personal stray experiences, comforting or otherwise, to arrive at our personal stereotypes. The generic stereotypes at least are public and can be challenged. The personal stereotypes, unless articulated, cannot even be challenged. The more socially powerful someone is and the more personal the stereotype is, it manifests as biased policies, judgements and discriminatory denials or favours. The problem here is that what otherwise would have been condemned as personal prejudice, gets the protective systemic cover.

Journalist Oliver Burkeman, writing for The Guardian, observes, “Stereotypes are bad even when they’re good.” He goes on to say there are no negative or positive stereotypes. He uses the racial stereotyping of black athletes as less intelligent, more prone to violence and better at sports, as an illustration for this. The striking contrary evidence of Martin Luther King, Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama would be made to appear an exception.

Psychologist Annie Murphy Paul, in her article “Where bias begins: The truth about stereotypes”, states that stereotyping is not always about biases that are conscious. She states that it is what we have invented to feel good about the identity group to which we belong to or the identity group to which we identify the most and want to belong to.

Conversely, it is also about the identity group that has to be denigrated in order for us to feel good about our identity. Stereotyping is one of the root causes for social inequality or disproportionate social benefits being garnered by select groups. It is also a power tool to build loyal political or ideological constituencies.

Stereotyping is driven by our need for counterposing one against the other, so that we can create a contrast for perceiving the complex world around us. In its absence, we need to discern individually the discrete and distinctive attributes of every human we encounter. Hence the old bipolar good and the bad, strong and the weak, capable and the not capable, culminating into the virtuous and the non-virtuous, is invented and propagated. Stereotypes are a product of the lazy mind and self-centredness.

Stereotypes by themselves are harmless. It is the decision-making on privileges and resource allocation it leads to in a society that creates discrimination of one kind or the other. In some cases, it is denial and in others, patronage.

Most people find themselves in a negative stereotype bucket. Over a period, they are forced to accept the discriminatory consequences of this. Some try to break out or at least defy this but are quickly pushed back to conform. Sadly, most give up and adopt the attributes that are thrust on them for survival and a relatively trouble-free living.

On the other hand, the beneficiaries of the positive stereotypes go from strength to strength within the social power structures. This becomes another kind of self-fulfilling consequence. They get to enjoy positive attention, the lion’s share of the resources, privileged support structures and sometimes even custom designed environment to succeed.

The data from both these groups are rehashed and bandied as proof of why this is not stereotyping, but indeed are randomly occurring consequences in a perfectly fair and equitable society.

Now let us examine briefly three classical stereotypes that the corporate world indulges in:

• Gender • Age
• MBA and others

Gender stereotype:
We stereotype women as fit for some roles and unfit for others. The raging debate in armed forces on the compatibility of women in combat roles is an example. So too, we have our combat roles in the corporate world. Women are supposed to be not fit and not having aptitude for out-bound sales roles or, for that matter, factory work. Many assert that they are more suited to office-bound roles. Many women themselves propagate this stereotype gullibly and walk into the trap set by the vested interests. The aircraft, armaments and the tanks that won the world war for the Allies were all manufactured by American women.

The less talked about stereotyping is what high-placed corporate women have about non-corporate women achievers and the numerous gifted women who have chosen to be homemakers. The obsession with the corporate glass ceiling results in our reluctance to dignify women achievers in athletics, liberal arts, business, academics, journalism, etc.

Age stereotype:
We all search for the eternal youth. The Mahabharata beautifully illustrates Yayati, the ancestor of the Kauravas and Pandavas, borrowing youth from his own son Puru. Paradoxically, the young-old stereotype gets played conveniently. We psychologically back the young or the old stereotype positively or negatively depending upon the one we identify ourselves with the most. Unlike gender or caste, this is not a static stereotype where one is born into. Do we realise that Gen Y and Gen X are stereotypes, which have no rational basis?

Most young achievers positively stereotype the youth, even when they grow old. This is their Yayati fixation. Similarly, those who matured late and achieved in their later life see youth with a negative stereotype and celebrate the “Bhishma wisdom” of the older and experienced. This is despite the many judgement errors of Bhisma, which led to the annihilation of the Kuru Vamsa (the Kuru clan).

The belief that technology orientation and innovation can be only driven by the youth is one such stereotype. Guglielmo Marconi, John Baird, Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Rudolph Diesel, Oppenheimer, Graham Bell, Christian Barnard, Charles Babbage…. Not one was a 27-year-old, who changed the world. Equally, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Steve Jobs are no young garage techs, who cannot be trusted with building institutions. True, there is a “greater” orientation the young have for technology and the older for building institutions. But to believe that only the young or the old is good at something is classical stereotyping.

MBA and the others stereotyping:
For thousands of years, creating an enterprise or running it well has had no relationship to someone’s academic proficiency. In fact, the earliest stereotyping of castes placed Brahmins as academics—preachers and teachers—and Vaishyas as entrepreneurs. Jews as traders and Christians as humanists are more stereotypes in this domain. Vishwamitra and Drona defied the Kshatriya and the Brahmin stereotypes, respectively.

Yet, the last 60 years have given rise to the new stereotype—the MBA as the only one who can be a manager. The belief that “only” MBAs make good managers or entrepreneurs is what makes it the stereotype, thus a discriminating one. Though there is no empirical evidence to suggest that MBAs make better managers, corporate leaders or entrepreneurs, we have adopted this stereotype without questioning it and have made the workplace a discriminating one. Two years of a generalised education, we believe, cannot be offset by even 10 years of learning by working hands-on in a practical world.

There are at least two more dominant stereotypes at the workplace: The “Hindi medium type versus the English medium type” and the “quiet understated type versus the aggressive flamboyant type”. I leave it to you to examine these two and a few more in our comments section.

Any positive or negative stereotype blinds us to human ability. As Annie Murphy Paul asserts, in the end all of us use and propagate our stereotypes. But, she says, the ones who are aware of it and consciously seek to re-examine it, end up being richer, because they are able to leverage the full human potential from all around them. More than anything else, by challenging our stereotypes, we will dignify all people around us.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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