The Many Lazy Boxes We All Live In.
Neuroscience & Evolution are NOT why we stereotype each other.
A few years back there was a movie entitled, Crash. It was riddled with racial, gender, and economic stereotypes — on purpose. It followed a few different people through their lives and showed how each of their perceptive lenses on the world impacted the world around them — and how they were all interconnected through these socialized assumptions on people should act.
HERE is a definitive clip of dealing with stereotypes and how they propagate certain expectations that lead to behaviors that people live out. It’s a great movie with really bad social science.
The tendency when we try to understand why humans stereotype is to run to neuroscience and argue that we are all simply trigger-happy hardwired beings who fear our environment. Although there is evolutionary truth to this, this is a one-dimensional view of our experience of differentiation. The lazy assumption is that we are beings who naturally fear what we don’t know — again, very bad science propped up by a history of misrecognizing human behavior as only habitually inclined to repeat itself.
Let’s explore some of the scientific reasons why we have been conditioned to understand why we seem to romanticize categorizing each other into neat little boxes.
We are hardwired toward stereotyping.
Neuroscientific hardwiring is the go-to explanatory raison d’etre for why humans romanticize the behavioral categorization of others. It’s plain —misinformed. We have to really get down to what we mean when we say we are hardwired.
All human ‘hardwiring’ does not happen naturally. What does this actually mean? It’s important to understand that as beings we are not just impacted by our environment, but we are created by it. We are containers for culture. Voids for the world around us. This drives home the point that if the culture around us romanticizes safety, we are prone (NOT hardwired) to do the same.
According to some research, we are more conditioned by cultural values, than we are by neurochemicals and evolution, than we once thought.
So while there may be some universal truths to these behaviors, we are malleable enough that culture may trump some of these so-called hard-wired behaviors.
What does this tell us about stereotypes, biases, and relied-upon beliefs about others, ourselves, and the world around us?? Well, it demonstrates that if a culture values certain beliefs about how to act in the world, we tend to follow along. Not because we are predisposed to, but because we want to belong. Our group affiliation is much more powerful than our neurochemicals. Society tells the neurotransmitters what to do, NOT the other way around.
Categories only protect us insofar as much as we believe they will.
If they actually protected us, we wouldn’t need war, aggression, or violence. Categories don’t protect us, but we have been made to believe that they somehow can give us some secret knowledge of other people’s behavior. It doesn’t, and it can’t. Ever.
Don’t look to evolution to tell you how to act, look to the cultures (i.e., your childhood, memories, parental values, group affiliations, and things outside of you to tell you what you are meant to believe—and by extension, how you should be in the world). Your neuroscientific hardwire, history, or a fabled mysticism around ‘human nature’ is not at fault for why things like racism, misogyny, indifference, violence, and xenophobia exist — it’s down to culture and its reinforced control around how we should act if we want to stay in the group.
Human nature, neuroscience, and any other science cannot be blamed for our fetishization of putting others in boxes — ironically, science disagrees with itself, because, culture seems to be at fault for why we THINK we need these categorical cages.
Evolution designed us to protect ourselves from threats in our environments.
Although there is surface-level truth to this claim, it doesn't go far enough. We’ve discovered we are cultural beings first, and neuroscientific beings second — but, what about evolution? Well, in short, this is just a lazy understanding of scientific stereotypes. A stereotype of a stereotype.
The quick definition of evolution is something that changes over time. People change. Cultures change. Behaviors and even values change over time, not just chimpanzees! In this, we can already see the fundamental error in this type of thinking that has us performing stereotypes without thinking about them.
To understand our misunderstanding of using evolution as an excuse for a load of biases — we have to turn to another evolutionary idea: Genetic fitness.
When science reinforces stereotypes, they are not reinforcing their innateness, they are pointing out their own short-sighted conditioning around the illusion of some hardwired human desire to categorize everything. The problem is we have placed so much control of our understanding of human behavior in the hands of scientists, we also forget their own cultural influences impact what they themselves understand. Biases only beget more of themselves.
Genetic fitness is just a cool way of saying that we want something like our gene pools to continue on. It’s about reproduction. Mistakes like genetic fitness. Misunderstandings do as well. This is simply where we are today with our very limited understanding of human stereotyping. We have simply perpetuated a false narrative around human behaviors.
Mainly, because we think we have pinpointed a rational linear path that can explain away why humans do what they do. Evolution is not enough. Neuroscience is not enough.
They can help in their own limited ways. But, the father of all of these is: Culture. Culture guides them all. It’s the one ring to rule them all.
SO, if not evolution or neuroscience, how can we better understand what it is that attracts us humans to our neat little boxes? Well, we have to turn to phenomenology to fully grasp why we live in a world where we like our biases more than we like other people.
What is phenomenology, you ask? It’s about first-hand experience. What does it mean to experience ice cream? What is the color red? Why do we cry when something sad happens in a movie? It is the subjective experience of being a species living on the third-rock-from-the-sun.
One of the elements that can help us to get to the root of our addictive stereotyping is a term from this field known as PROXIMITY. Yes, it means nearness. It means closeness. It means all the things you think it means about someone’s relationship with another object. BUT, and here’s where it’s important to distinguish it from a typical definition of nearness — it’s about an awareness of nearness. However, our awareness of this nearness primes us for readiness.
What does that mean? The priming compels us to be aware of certain characteristics, differences, and set-apartness of an object/person in our environment.
This is key to understand; priming is only ever determined by one’s own cultural values - if a culture values the individual, for example, the priming mechanisms in the brain will be formed (not innately) to see and perceive what makes us each individual.
What makes us different is the most important thing to notice. Then, on top of that, if a culture prizes the accumulation of consumer things (i.e., houses, cars, raises from your boss, kids and etc.), then this typically breeds another culture — competition. See where this is going?
Stereotyping is a many-layered cake from the outside that we think is part of us but is only a lens we take on and is reinforced by things like neuroscience. We only become aware of what we’re told we should become aware of — our parents, our childhood memories, our environments and a host of other mechanisms entrench themselves into us and become a series of ways in which we interpret the world.
We think we are those things — we are not — this is the ultimate failure of science — it promises something that it can never give: a full understanding of what drives us to reify the not-so-neat little boxes given by everyone else, other than ourselves.
THIS is part 1 of a 3-part SERIES on why we STEREOTYPE. Part 2 and 3 are only available to PAID SUBSCRIBERS. Plus, I share even more science-backed research on these new hot-takes on human behavior. Would love to have you!
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Love this- “we are containers for culture”. Great article!