Читать книгу The Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 68

Two other factors, stereotypes and prejudice, also influence our reactions to people whose cultures differ from our own. Stereotypes, again, are mental images we carry around in our heads. They are shortcuts, both positive and negative, that we use to guide our reactions to others.²³ Stereotypes can generate unrealistic pictures of others and prevent us from distinguishing an individual from a group. Racial profiling is just one example of how stereotyping affects us.

Why do we engage in racial profiling? Consider these facts: The human brain categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans suggest that, even when asked to categorize others by gender, people also categorize them by race.²⁴ Could this be a factor in racial profiling? Racial profiling is indicative of prejudice. Prejudice describes how we feel about a group of people whom, more likely than not, we don’t know personally. A negative or positive prejudgment, prejudice arises either because we want to feel more positively about our own group or because we feel others present a threat, real or not.²⁵ Thus, prejudice leads to the creation of in- and out-groups with out-group members becoming easy targets for discrimination.

Because of the negative expectations that stereotypes and prejudice produce, we may try to avoid interacting with people who are the objects of our prejudice (perhaps those of another race) or attack them when we do. (We discuss stereotypes and prejudice again in Chapter 3.)