navigate. When it’s done inappropriately, we distort our perceptions, sometimes with results harmful to others, and even ourselves. That’s especially true when our tendency to categorize affects our view of other humans—when we view the doctors in a given practice, the attorneys in a given law firm, the fans of a certain sports team, or the people in a given race or ethnic group as more alike than they really are.
A CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY wrote about the case of a young Salvadoran man who had been the only nonwhite employee at a box-manufacturing plant in a rural area. He had been denied a promotion, then fired for habitual tardiness and for being “too easy-going.” The man claimed that the same could be said of others but that their tardiness went unnoticed. With them, he said, the employer seemed to understand that sometimes a sickness in the family, a problem with a child, or trouble with the car can lead to being late. But with him, lateness was automatically attributed to laziness. His shortcomings were amplified, he said, and his achievements went unrecognized. We’ll never know whether his employer really overlooked the Salvadoran man’s individual traits, whether his employer lumped him in the general category “Hispanic” and then interpreted his behavior in terms of a stereotype. The employer certainly disputed that accusation. And then he added, “Mateo’s being a Mexican didn’t make any difference to me. It’s like I didn’t even notice.”5
The term “stereotype” was coined in 1794 by the French printer Firmin Didot.6 It referred to a type of printing process by which cookie-cutter-like molds could be used to produce duplicate metal plates of hand- set type. With these duplicate plates, newspapers and books could be printed on several presses at once, enabling mass production. The term was first used in its current sense by the American journalist and intellectual Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book
Lippmann recognized that the stereotypes people use come from cultural exposure. His was an era in which mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, as well as the new medium of film, were distributing ideas and information to audiences larger and more far-flung than had ever before been possible. They made available to the public an unprecedentedly wide array of experiences of the world, yet without necessarily providing an accurate picture. The movies, in particular, conveyed a vivid, real-looking portrait of life, but one often peopled by stock caricatures. In fact, in the early days of film, filmmakers combed the streets looking for “character actors,” easily identifiable social types, to play in their movies. As Lippmann’s contemporary Hugo Munsterberg wrote, “If the [producer] needs the fat bartender with his smug smile, or the humble Jewish peddler, or the Italian organ grinder, he does not rely on wigs and paint; he finds them all ready-made on the East Side [of New York].” Stock character types were (and still are) a convenient shorthand—we recognize them at once—but their use amplifies and exaggerates the character traits associated with the categories they represent. According to the historians Elizabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen, by noting the analogy between social perception and a printing process capable of generating an unlimited number of identical impressions, “Lippmann had identified and named one of the most potent features of modernity.”8
Though categorizations due to race, religion, gender, and nationality get the most press, we categorize people in many other ways as well. We can probably all think of cases in which we lumped athletes with athletes, or bankers with bankers, in which we and others have categorized people we’ve met according to their profession, appearance, ethnicity, education, age, or hair color or even by the cars they drive. Some scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even categorized people according to the animal they best resembled, as pictured on the facing page, in images from
A more modern illustration of categorization by appearance played out early one afternoon in an aisle of a large discount department store in Iowa City. There, an unshaven man in soiled, patched blue jeans and a blue workman’s shirt shoved a small article of clothing into the pocket of his jacket. A customer down the aisle looked on. A little later, a well-groomed man in pressed dress slacks, a sports jacket, and a tie did the same, observed by a different customer who happened to be shopping nearby. Similar incidents occurred again and again that day, well into the evening, over fifty more times, and there were a hundred more such episodes at other nearby stores. It was as if a brigade of shoplifters had been dispatched to rid the town of cheap socks and tacky ties. But the occasion wasn’t National Kleptomaniacs’ Day; it was an experiment by two social psychologists.10 With the full cooperation of the stores involved, the researchers’ aim was to study how the reactions of bystanders would be affected by the social category of the offender.
The shoplifters were all accomplices of the researchers. Immediately after each shoplifting episode, the thief walked out of hearing distance of the customer but remained within eyesight. Then another research accomplice, dressed as a store employee, stepped to the vicinity of the customer and began rearranging merchandise on the shelves. This gave the customer an easy opportunity to report the crime. The customers all observed the identical behavior, but they did not all react to it in the same way. Significantly fewer of the customers who saw the well- dressed man commit the crime reported it, as compared to those who had watched the scruffy individual. Even more interesting were the differences in attitude the customers had when they did alert the employee to the crime. Their analysis of events went beyond the acts they had observed—they seemed to form a mental picture of the thief based as much on his social category as on his actions. They were often hesitant when reporting the well-dressed criminal but enthusiastic when informing on the unkempt perpetrator, spicing up their accounts with utterances along the lines of “that son of a bitch just stuffed something down his coat.” It was as if the unkempt man’s appearance was a signal to the customers that shoplifting must be the least of his sins, an indicator of an inner nature as soiled as his clothes.
We like to think we judge people as individuals, and at times we consciously try very hard to evaluate others on the basis of their unique characteristics. We often succeed. But if we don’t know a person well, our minds can turn to his or her social category for the answers. Earlier we saw how the brain fills in gaps in visual data—for instance, compensating for the blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. We also saw how our hearing fills gaps, such as when a cough obliterated a syllable or two in the sentence “The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city.” And we saw how our memory will add the details of a scene we remember only in broad strokes and provide a vivid and complete picture of a face even though our brains retained only its general features. In each of these cases our subliminal minds take incomplete data, use context or other cues to complete the picture, make educated guesses, and produce a result that is sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but always convincing. Our minds also fill in the blanks when we judge people, and a person’s category membership is part of the data we use to do that.
The realization that perceptual biases of categorization lie at the root of prejudice is due largely to the psychologist Henri Tajfel, the brain behind the line-length study. The son of a Polish businessman, Tajfel would likely have become a forgotten chemist rather than a pioneering social psychologist were it not for the particular social category to which he himself was assigned. Tajfel was a Jew, a category identification that meant he was banned from enrolling in college, at least in Poland. So he moved to France. There he studied chemistry, but he had no passion for it. He preferred partying—or, as one colleague put it, “savoring French culture and Parisian life.”11 His savoring ended when World War II began, and in November 1939, he joined the French army. Even less savory was where he ended up: in a German POW camp. There Tajfel was introduced to the extremes of social categorization that he would later say led him to his career in social psychology.
The Germans demanded to know the social group to which Tajfel belonged. Was he French? A French Jew? A Jew from elsewhere? If the Nazis thought of Jews as less than human, they nevertheless distinguished between pedigrees of Jew, like vintners distinguishing between the chateaus of origin of soured wine. To be French meant to be treated as an enemy. To be a French Jew meant to be treated as an animal. To admit being a Polish Jew meant swift and certain death. No matter what his personal characteristics or the quality of his relationship with his
