Breaking Stereotypes or Creating Them?
By Khaki Audil
17 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org
History is an important source for everything we possess today in terms of knowledge or resources. The earliest records of history exist in the form of engravings on the walls of caves or stone sheets. The famous saying goes, ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history’. Obliteration of historical accounts is one of the trusted tools used during colonialization adventures by power hungry and expansionist rulers and countries, and is being extravagantly used even today. An overwhelmingly considerable proportion of colonialists make use of this tool with subtlety and extreme caution to create confusion and divide opinions of people. Eighteenth century engravings of the people of world depict the Asians and the Africans as savages, whileas Englishmen, Dutchmen, German and French are depicted as Civilized and sophisticated. The fact, however, is that Asians are not savages (nor were they at the time engravings have been carved, at least not all of them), and not all Englishmen are gentlemen.
Without taking a dig at the 18th century remains to prove my argument, I quickly want to emphasize here that these engravings and the engravings extending to the old man’s epoch provides with an interesting example of how human beings develop an impression about the specific types of events and individuals, or certain ways of doing things, known as stereotype in psychology. Stereotype is a psychological process in which humans and even animals form a specific impression about certain events or a group of individuals based merely on their illusory thinking. Etymologically, stereotype comes from Greek and means ‘solid impression’, and is being used since 18th century to refer to a printing plate used to create exact duplicate copies. The use of this word has been extended to so many fields of study and particularly to Psychology. In Psychology, prejudice and discrimination are closely used words; whereas stereotype refers to a prejudiced outlook arising usually without conscious awareness, discrimination and prejudice has some amount of conscious awareness inbuilt.
Stereotyping is regarded as a cognitive process of ascribing certain characteristics to a certain group of individuals and their evaluation accordingly, and with some amount of prejudice leading to racial prejudice and even regional prejudices. Stereotypes can take any scale depending upon the level of competence and warmth, the high competence and low warmth being the most destructive of all. Most of the times people are unwilling to rethink one’s attitudes and behavior towards stereotyped groups. The stereotypes can, however, be minimized and even eliminated by increasing communication and free thinking, evaluating the actions by adopting a proper logic and mechanism rather than allowing correspondence bias to distort the cognitive process. People generally tend to draw dispositional interferences from behavior and acts, and ignore situational constraints leading to such behavior. Research has shown that stereotypes get heightened due to a cognitive mechanism called illusory correlation – in which two random events are connected avoiding the proper logic, to deduce an erroneous inference. This mere illusory correlation of two infrequent events leads observers to overestimate the co-occurrence of these events which strengthens the belief that the events are correlated and thus an even or a behavior becomes to be associated with a group of individuals. It is for this illusory process that minorities, just because of their number, are more likely to be stereotyped than the majority community.
I recall an instance where I was about to close a deal for my apartment in Middle East and suddenly the real estate agent who happened to be from India turned his back to me. Somehow it made me believe that my Kashmiri origin might have influenced the Agent to turn down the deal, Huh! Thanks to the strange cognitive process. And since then I have begun to relate it to my previous experiences as well. During my University days, I remember, some of my colleagues but not all of them used to remain at a considerable distance with me due to my rural origin. The stereotype that rural people are like this and that, now I think, might have been the reason why they liked to flock and herd with their own group rather than with us. True for the rural groups as well, even during formal assignments we had a strong tendency to group with people based on their rural/urban nature. As the level changes tendencies change too; in Delhi all Kashmiris irrespective of their rural/urban divide begin to identify themselves as Kashmiris, outside India, all Indians identify themselves as Indians, and then Asians and so on. The question here I am trying to figure out the answer for is, why do stereotypes tend to vanish or at least get replaced by newer ones as we come in contact with people at a much larger frame? The answer to this question might be simple, but I think the magnitude of warmth and competition makes the older stereotypes irrelevant or at least insignificant. But can we do away with stereotypes by just being educated about them, by creating a free, unbiased wisdom and a logical process of evaluating people, events and behavior? Things are not that simple always, in a world full of competition we often tend to be threatened, and as competition increases, our evaluation becomes more skewed and prejudiced and this time with a considerable conscious involvement. However, the effort should always be in understanding the facts and to be analytic in ones thought process rather than being judgmental and shaded by these tall stereotypes.
Bottom Line: ‘Gaamuk’ and ‘Shahruk’are the most widely used expressions used in our daily conversations and gossips in Kashmir. What is worse is, these stereotypic tendencies are more shown by educated and well-read segments of our society (may be competition). But, does it make our life easy or hard? It is for all of us to think if we can be more progressive by being more free and open to think or by being conventionally disoriented.
Khaki Audil, Assistant Professor, American University of Middle East
Email: [email protected]