Prejudice & Stereotypes

"We confront the challenges of living in a global civilization with a brain that primally attaches us to our home tribe. As a psychiatrist who grew up amid the ethnic turmoil of Cyprus put it, groups that are so much alike move from Us to Them via the "narcissism of minor differences," seizing on small features that set the groups apart while ignoring their vast human similarities. Once the others are set at a psychological distance, they can become a target for hostility.

This process is a corruption of a normal congnitive function: categorization. The human mind depends on categories to give order and meaning to the world around us. By assuming that the next entity we encounter in a given category has the same main features as the last, we navigate our way through an ever-changing environment.

But once negative bias begins, our lenses become clouded. We tend to seize on whatever seems to confirm the bias and ignore what does not. Prejudice, in this sense, is a hypothesis desperately trying to prove itself to us. And so when we encounter someone to whom the prejudice might apply, the bias skews our perception, making it impossible to test whether the stereotype actually fits. Openly hostile stereotypes about a group - to the extent they rest on untested assumptions - are mental categories gone awry."

Goleman, Daniel. "Social Intelligence" (2006). Arrow, New York. pp.299,300.