Diversity Q & A

Why do people stereotype and assume things about others?

Ed

We stereotype and assume because we are very talented categorisers.  We put things into groups in our minds so we can avoid investigating each individual instance, and simply hope that all things that look alike, behave alike.  During the many years of our evolution, we’ve been surrounded with humans who look similar to ourselves and to each other.  Only relatively recently (over the last few hundred years) have we encountered many people who look different to ourselves.  I suspect that we are all victims of our innate tendency to categorise everything we encounter.