This post is going to explore the fundamental process of social categorisation and its influence on thoughts ,feelings and behaviour.
Social categorisation occurs when we think of someone as a man versus a woman, an old person versus a young person, a black person versus a white person and so on… Just as we categorise objects into different types, we categorise people according to their social group memberships, once we begin to be do this we begin to respond to those people more as members of a social group than as individuals.
Social categorisation occurs spontaneously without much thought on our part and they can change overtime and in different situations. Social categorisation is around all the time and it occurs so quickly that people may have difficulty not thinking about others in terms of their group membership.
There are some benefits of social categorisation, it provides us with information about the characteristics of people who belong to certain social groups for example if you find yourself lost in the city you might look for a police officer or a taxi driver to help you find your way social categories can be informative and simply make life easier for people.
However, there are many negative outcomes of social categorisation instead of treating people as unique individuals with their own unique characteristics social categorisation is often very unfair with negative outcomes for those who have been categorised.
Social categorisation distorts our perception and we often look at the differences between people from different social groups and we tend to see people who belong to the same social group as more similar than they actually are and often we judge people from different social groups as more different than they actually are. This perception prevents us from learning about the members as individuals and makes us unaware of the differences among the group members.
Below is a graph from experiment which was conducted students were given a list of 84 traits and asked to indicate for which group each trait seemed appropriate it is very interesting to look at because the participants tended to agree about what traits were true for which group however the respondents were likely to have never met a single member from that 'social category' , as a society we begin to respond to members of stereotyped categories as if we already know what they were like.
Stereotypes become difficult to change and this is often the strongest case for the people who are in most need of change the people who are most prejudiced because they are so important to us they are frequently expressed on TV, movies and in social media and we learn a lot of our beliefs from these sources. Our friends also tend to hold beliefs similar to ours and we talk about these beliefs when we get together with them .
This was really interesting to explore and has really got me thinking about how stereotypes are just built within us and it's scary that we make judgments about people who we know nothing about as a individual. Reading this paper will really help me develop my major project and will help me really understand different users from this communities and backgrounds.
Tx
All the below points were the main findings and the points (which got me most interested and thinking the most) from a mixture of articles from world economic forum = I will attach a link to this website if you would like to give it a read and find out more about these really interesting topic, I found the ones with the themes around social innovation most insightful. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/social-enterprises-can-have-a-big-impact/.
Comments