Fast Thinking Discrimination Is Destroying Our Society

A girl sits alone in her room, late on a wednesday evening studying, wishing and hoping she has done enough to live up to the racial stereotyping implemented from her family that she has to be smart and get good grades because she’s Indian.

“I am expected to get high grades by both my peers and parents” Says an Indian Grade 8 MS student “I have to push myself to the limit to prove to live up to expectations and stereotypes” Says a Asian MS student.

Underlying these words is the issue that racial stereotypes still exist in our everyday life. In this day and age especially in developed countries such as Singapore we believe there is no racism. We've eradicated slavery and racial segregation, but in truth According to A harvard online test most people show some sort of Racial Bias. This affects how we treat people of all colours.

According to Psychologist Daniel Kahneman We think both fast and slow, We weigh very few factors deliberately and the hundreds of other factors on intuitive judgement. Our intuitive judgement is called fast thinking. Our fast judgement relies on accustoms we have. “Mainly from Fictional Television shows to news reports” Says a New york Times article. These platforms rely on stereotypes both accurate and inaccurate. The key to “Fast thinking” discrimination is that we all share it.

Fast thinking discrimination doesn't only affect people of Majority Groups. Mahzarin Banaji as a woman and a member of a minority group had felt the firsthand sting of discrimination, yet she showed a very strong racial preference. She said “it was a truly disconcerting experience” As a psychologist she was one of the first person to label what is now known as fast thinking as “Automatic and Implicit stereotyping”.

Our ability to categorize and recognize is a vital part of our survival, but we have taken stereotyping too far. “When we stereotype we take gender, the age, and the colour of skin of the person before us, now our minds respond with messages that say hostile, stupid, slow and weak, these qualities aren't in our environment, they don't reflect reality” says Dr.John Borough, of New York University. And so it becomes even more clear that our mind will match general things such as gender, age and skin colour with hostile words because society has taught us to label people in such a way. Furthermore this ostracizes people from groups and leads to societies creating and grouping with people of similar race, skin colour and gender.

A study conducted in 2003 by the University of Chicago proved that employers with job openings were 50% more likely to callback the person if they had a white name. The girl who spends hours studying in school to help her get a good job will face trouble getting work because she has a “black” name but another girl who may not have worked as hard or be adequate for the job will have an arbitrary advantage because her parents decided to give her a “white” name.

A study conducted in 2009 by Harvard Research Institution in 2009 found that African- American applications with no criminal record were offered the job at a rate as low as white applicants with criminal records. How would you feel if you didn't get a job that you were highly qualified for but instead a white male with a objectionable criminal record did. Why should a qualified black male man have to suffer because our society has stereotyped him to be dangerous and incompetent.

How can we combat “fast thinking discrimination”? We can train ourselves to not hold implicit biases on race, gender, sexuality, class or any form of identity. The change is not going to be instant as these stereotypes have been put into place over hundreds of years. And it will take another hundred years to remove these stereotypes from our society. It will take generations before our brain change and stops relating negative words with people of specific people,cultures, genders and skin colours. It will take personal as well as united perseverance to change long-held and stereotypical ideas of race, gender, sexuality and ability.

Wouldn’t you want to live in world where everyone was treated equally and fairly. Where young girls are not staying up till late and night to live up to stereotypical expectations, where everyone has a chance to be equal and weren't discriminated against based on things they can't change.

By Anisha Sullivan

The Stereotype Station Shouldn’t Be This Popular

The half-Chinese student goes to summer camp in Canada, people ask her where she learnt to use a knife and fork. Her peers tell her to get some chopsticks. They ask her how she can speak english so well, how she has an american accent.

If only these were genuine events of curiosity. Instead, they represent the way in which stereotypes still exist. Assuming everyone who fits into a certain ethnic group all have the same strengths and weaknesses, act the same, are the same. But nevertheless they are deceptions. “Stereotypes are fast and easy because they are lies, and the truth takes it’s time.” claims author Deb Caletti.

Stereotypes are the way that we try organize everything in our brain because one similarity isn’t enough, they are just attempts at over generalisation in a world where there is nothing but diversity. Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” This offers evidence to support the idea that stereotypes aren’t always false, they just fail to account for natural differences in humans

The truth is stereotypes create pressure. They create standards even when they are posed as jokes, the comedy doesn’t outweigh the seriousness. According to one UWCE kid who chose to remain anonymous, “My friends have been extremely rude and critical when I got a grade that was not very high. They told me that it was really rare just because I was Indian.” This indicates that this stereotype has created pressure for her and shaped her. It made her actually feel bad about herself because of some stereotype that applies to some people but not all. But, it’s not only the mental capabilities, it also in the physical appearance. When the japanese child smiles, and his friends say that he has small eyes, that doesn’t help him. Now, whenever he smiles, he’s insecure, he’s scared that they are going to comment about his eyes, again.

These kind of comments might seem uncommon but that isn’t reality. 100% of people surveyed in a private survey admitted that people had commented about them based on stereotypes and 80% of people said that these comments were posed as jokes, from that only 40% of people said that they were offended compared to 100% when they were serious. What this exemplifies is that even when the commentor believes they are making a harmless joke, people still get hurt just the same.

The issue is that not only do stereotypes bring people down, they can actually weaken normal performance. “The idea is that when a person’s identity has a negative stereotype attached to it and that person engages in important activities that are relevant to that stereotype, he or she will become distracted and anxious and then underperform in a manner consistent with the stereotype”, remarked Claude Steele, psychologist and current Executive Vice Chancellor at University of California, Berkeley. And so it becomes clear that the pressure created by stereotypes even when they are fiction can subconsciously transition into our actions and we unknowingly, unwillingly make ourselves stereotypes.

An experiment performed by Steele and his colleagues proved this theory. The experiment consisted of 4 groups, 2 of equal mathematical intelligence of men and 2 of women. They all completed an exam in which because of the stereotype that women are naturally worse at math than men, women placed a whole standard deviation lower than men. Then, when the women were told before the test that “you may have heard that women are not as good at math, … but that’s not true for this test, this is a test where women always do as well as men …,” the women got the same results as the men. The difference has disappeared simply because of the fact they were told that usually they do the same as men, the creation of a non-negative stereotype improved their performance, it made them feel like they could do it and they therefore were a lot less anxious and stressed.

Stereotyping people can have a huge impact on people, not only their ability to mimic them because of mental stress, but they can also cause decreased self esteem, aggression, inability to focus, lack of self control and the incapability to make rational decisions. And Michael Inzlicht, professor of psychology also claims that these impacts stay with the people forever, they carry around this baggage for the rest of their lives.

But, there is a solution, there is a way to break the stereotype. “Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart” said lawyer and politician Ed Koch. We simply need to embrace diversity, embrace uniqueness and understand that everybody is different, everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, everyone has different hobbies and everyone is different. One common similarity like race doesn’t make everyone the same and understanding that, is the key to solving this issue.

Try thinking about yourself and the stereotyped comments people have said to you, did they make you a better person or insecure? How about the stereotyped comments you have told other people, 60% of people admitted they had made comments and the other 40% responded that they don’t think they had, but might have. These comments even when posed as jokes are harmful for your health and future. Of the surveyed bunch, 54% believe that there is never a time where it is okay to make stereotyped jokes but all admitted to having made them before. Keeping a double standard for such a serious topic like this, isn’t the way to go.

So before judging, before making a stereotyped comment, think it through. Annie Murphy Paul stated that “We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us.”