Stereotypes exist because the human brain is a meaning making machine. It creates patterns, even where ostensibly, none are to be found. This ability to recognise and retain patterns allows us to recognise faces, understand language, read, and appreciate music.
The reptile brain, the basal ganglia, is in charge of our basic automated response systems, and functions pretty much without our conscious by or leave.
“The primal brain is also in charge of, what are often referred to as, the four Fs: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and… Reproduction,” according to The Interaction Design Foundation, effectively maintaining the bodily operating system on autopilot.
This is quite helpful for the more absent-minded of us. Some days, remembering to breathe and metabolise and keep the heart beating may be too many balls to keep in the air.
This basal ganglia region of the brain is, in a very real sense, responsible for our survival, for every breath we take. Identifying the familiar and unfamiliar is a central part of the Fight/Flight response. Our ancestors, by definition, were pros at fighting and flighting.
As winners of the human race, our very existence depends on our brains’ ability to read the room and respond accordingly.
One way by which the brain categorises and processes information is by stereotyping; to typecast, label or tag stimuli in a fixed or oversimplified way.
Because, in fairness, when a saber-toothed tiger was thundering towards you, a calm and considered response was not optimal to survival.
This can still be seen today on the web, with a glut of Cats vs Cucumber videos providing hours of mirth to procrastinators across the globe. Quite simply, while Snowball is filling her furry, feline face in a food bowl, the owner sneakily places a cucumber on the floor behind her. Once Snowball’s six senses perceive something long, green and snaky near her hind quarters, she proceeds to shoot into the air, inflated like a helium cat balloon, before streaking to safety. The response is ballistic. Instinctual. Reptile brain.
“A stereotype is an exaggerated belief, image or distorted truth about a person or group—a generalisation that allows for little or no individual differences or social variation. Stereotypes are based on images in mass media, or reputations passed on by parents, peers and other members of society. Stereotypes can be positive or negative.” [Learning for Justice].
As humans, we still go ballistic when our snaky stereotypes get too close to our hindquarters as well.
I’ve done the “imaginary-bug-in-my-hair” dance a few times, for sure, I’ve crawled across the parapets of Blarney Castle when vertigo made my head spin and my brain gag. I have cried in pain and laughed in pleasure.
Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection means that favourable genes and traits are reproduced, whilst less favourable ones, like the Tiger Whispering gene, are lost forever.
There’s nothing inherently wrong, then, with stereotyping and categorising, on one level. But in a world which is increasingly globalised, connected and interdependent, and struggling to redress an unconscionably unjust power balance between race, gender and class, to name but a few, an instinctual bent towards defining the unknown as “other” and the “other” as bad is not good. Say, what?
This phenomenon, known as, “Othering”, occurs when the group excludes those who are perceived as not fitting within the social norms of said group, or whereby negative characteristics are attributed to the “them” who are not the ‘us.’
And this is where the tendency of our central operating system to label and tag and compartmentalise, becomes problematic. No more than I can sneeze with my eyes open, nor Snowball can stay chill and just back slowly away from the cucumber, neither can Humans, as a species, resist the biological imperative to pigeonhole and stereotype.
Othering is a result of reptile brain survival functions. These functions have survived who knows how many billions of others? If it’s still part of our neural suite, it must serve some purpose? Or are stereotypes the cultural equivalent of an appendix? A relic from meaner times. Intellectually, this would make judging people based on stereotypes as passé as eating grass.
Snowball cannot hack her feline brain: she cannot reason with herself that it’s only a cucumber and remember to leave a nice, fresh mouse on her owner’s pillow to return the favour. She cannot go online and explore different perspectives or the most recent findings on responding to primal instincts with circumspection.
She cannot do anything but launch into orbit and somersault across the room, at the whimsy of million-year-old response systems.
And neither can we, in terms of first response. But we can ferret out implicit bias and preconceptions. We can become aware of thought patterns embedded within our culture and begin to actively question those. Awareness is the first step towards rectification.
One nifty tool to get a glimpse into the murky writer’s room of our brains is Project Implicit, The Implicit Associations Test, (IAT), which “can tap those hidden, or automatic, stereotypes and prejudices that circumvent conscious control.” Scientists from The Universities of Harvard and Virginia have been gathering data since 2011 online, and the tests take no more than ten minutes or so to complete.
I was curious to find out what are the cucumbers to my Snowball, so I took them all. Physician, heal thyself!
Prejudices, formed by the human need for love and acceptance, are inherent. We all have them. Project Implicit tests for implicit bias across a broad range of race, gender and class spectrums with a view to better understanding bias and disparity.
An awareness of what subliminally launched us into somersaulting orbit can allow us to also moderate responses to situations where we may otherwise be operating on autopilot, or reptile pilot, which sounds far more dangerous.
So perhaps, as the year draws to a close, and dark evenings usher in more reading time by the fire, it is time to put down the grass sandwich and take an implicit bias test or two. Make friends with the reptile and negotiate a more equitable crisis management system.
Knowledge is power. Understanding the implicit biases that undermine each and every decision we make is the only way towards building a more equitable future, for cats, cucumbers, reptiles and all.
