Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero.original_ [39]
FACTS DON'T MATTER
It is pleasant to assume that when the facts are known, stereotypes disappear. However, that is seldom the case. The late Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, in The nature of Prejudice, pointed out that "it is possible for a stereotype to grow in defiance of all evidence…"2 People who stereotype don't dust accept the facts that are offered to them. They measure those facts against what they already "know." That is, they measure them against the stereotype itself. Instead of seeing that the stereotype is false and therefore dismissing it, they reject the unfamiliar facts.
People who think in terms of stereotypes tend to be selective in their perceptions. They reject conditions that challenge their preformed judgment and retain those that reinforce it. Thus a person can notice the Jewish employer promoting another Jew but ignore a dozen occasions when that employer promotes a gentile. Where the risk of embarrassment or criticism prevents them from ignoring details that challenge, they can, as Bruno Bettleheim and Morris Janowitz point out, employ the exception-to-the-rule argument.3
On occasions, though, stereotypers can be surprisingly flexible. They can move from the most narrow oversimplifications to remarkably fair and sensible judgments and then back again. An example of this phenomenon was given in a series of interviews Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles had with a police sergeant. At one point the sergeant made this statement: "I'm not prejudiced when I say that colored people have a lot of violence in them, like animals. The Irishman will get sloppy drunk and pass out. The Italian will shout and scream his head off. The Jew will figure out a way he can make himself a little more money, and get even with someone that way. But your nigger, he's vicious like a wild leopard or something when he's been drinking or on drugs. They throw lye at each other, and scalding water, and God knows what."4
Despite a generous helping of stereotypes in that passage, at other places in the transcript the same man who uttered those judgments is revealed as balanced, thoughtful, capable of insights even in areas where he is given to stereotyping. He can say things like, "I believe you should know the man, not where his grandfather came from" and "Most Negro people are too busy for demonstrations; they go to work, like the rest of us."
CONTRADICTORY STEREOTYPES
Robert K. Merton has noted that the same set of characteristics can be used to support opposite stereotypes. He observed that though the identifying terms differ, Abraham Lincoln has been loved for precisely the same attributed qualities for which Jews have been hated: his thrift (their stinginess), his hard working perseverance (their excessive ambition), his zeal for the rights of others (their pushiness for causes).5 And James G. Martin comments on the ease with which a person can invoke the stereotype with the least of details. If we wish to have it so, he observes, the minority group member who is quiet is 'conceited' or 'unfriendly'. And if he is talkative he is 'aggressive' or 'brash.'"6
Stereotyped thinking often reveals a technique common to all forms of prejudice: shifting responsibility for its judgments from the judger to the judged. "The pattern of prejudiced judgment," as Martin explains, "is to ascribe a certain trait to a group with little or no evidence to support it; to judge the trait to be undesirable; and to hold the object-group responsible for the trait, and therefore blameworthy." When the prejudiced person says, "I dislike them because they are…," Martin concludes, "he really means 'Because I dislike them, they are… .'"7
CAUSES OF STEREOTYPING
Among the most significant causes of stereotyping is "mine is better" thinking, especially in its extreme form, ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism – the belief that