But people worry about stereotypes, and they are right to do so. Stereotypes have several problems. So, one is, they actually are not always accurate. We often tend to exaggerate them, and in part, this is due to the confirmation bias, that we talked about earlier in this section, which is that once you have an idea in your head, do the processes of a desire for confirmation are more general cognitive or dissonance forces, you tend to look for things that prove your ideas right. So, if you think that African-Americans are aggressive, you'll keep an eye out for cases where you see African-Americans who are aggressive, and say that supports my idea. But when you see counter-examples, you tend to ignore them. Same if you believe that librarians are quiet, or unattractive, or that male homosexuals are aggressive and pushy, Jews are greedy and conniving. Once you have a stereotype in your head, it's like the confirmation bias, is like the first impression, it's hard to shake. This could lead to getting things wrong. A second consideration is that a lot of information we get about groups, isn't from an unbiased statistical sample. It's not like we're scientists looking at the data, and accumulating information to lead to reliable statistical conclusions about a group. Often for instance, we get our data from the media, or from fiction. If all you know about Jews is from Shakespeare's character Shylock, you're not going to have a very good impression from them. If all you know about Italian-Americans is from the TV show The Sopranos, similarly, that's going to have bad effects. So, people know about this, there's actually considerable pressure or moral pressure, I guess to portray different exemplars of individuals to change stereotypes, make people think differently about what people are, and what people are capable of being. My favorite example is when I was a kid there was a TV show called Battle Star Galactica, and this was a Starbuck who was the brave warrior fighter adventurer. In the remake more recently, they changed the characters of course, and now this is Starbuck. You can see how this could make a difference. How this could change people's stereotypes for the better, and change how they see the world. Also, we're very trigger-happy. We're forming different groups. So, we naturally take group seriously when there really are differences, but we also naturally take group seriously when the groups are arbitrary. The best example is some wonderful research by the social psychologist, Henri Tajfel, who studied minimal groups. In his classic experiment, he had people do a test, and inthe test they were told that they were either lovers of the artwork of Klee, or lovers of the artwork of Kandinsky. This was entirely arbitrary, entirely made up. People were just randomly assigned to different groups, but what he found was, that people imbued their groups with identity. They favoured their own group. If you were a Klee lover, you'd rather give money to another Klee lover than a Kandinsky lover. You might think that Klee lovers are in certain ways better than Kandinsky lovers just by dint of the group splitting up and you belonging to one, and not the other. Other studies have found the same effect through a flip of a coin, and there's been some fascinating work with children, toddlers, and even younger children in some studies finding that the wearing a red T-shirt versus a blue T-Shirt causes the population to schism into two different groups, and to think differently about the groups, favoring the one they belong to, and disfavoring the one they don't. The moral here then is that when we develop ideas about human groups, when we develop stereotypes, we don't just passively absorb the statistics, we actively distinguish between good. We seem to be built with a hair trigger sensitivity to break the world up into us versus them, and to favor the group containing us over the group containing them.
