The Proper Care and Feeding of Stereotypes
The journey to we, article 2 of 3
When I was growing up, stereotypes were bad. Only prejudiced people used them. The rest of us—enlightened and fair-minded—assumed we could rise above such lazy thinking.
Turns out we were wrong.
One of the few gifts of the social media age—alongside memes and sourdough bread recipes—is a brutal but clarifying awareness: we all stereotype. We all carry biases, often without realizing it. In fact, it's how our minds manage the world.
Did you know the term stereotype was originally a printing term? In the 1700s, printers would cast a metal plate—a mold of movable type—that could be used to reproduce the same page over and over. It wasn’t until 1922 that the journalist Walter Lippmann saw the mechanical process as a cognitive metaphor. In his book Public Opinion, he described how human beings rely on mental templates—what he called pictures in our heads—to make sense of an overwhelmingly complex world. In Lippmann’s words:
“We do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.”
Instead of approaching the world with a blank slate we come armed with assumptions, ready-made impressions. We make molds. And we reuse them. We stereotype.
The word bias would come later when psychologists started to study this habit. And it is now the four letter word responsible for all manner of polarization and stalemate.
The modern dilemma is this:
How do you de-bias yourself when information is hitting you like a firehose? A freight train? A tsunami? Pick your disaster metaphor.
Even back in 1922, Lippmann saw the challenge:
“The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. […] We have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.”
And that was before TikTok.
So yah – for filters. IMO, stereotypes get a bad rap. they’re efficient. They help us categorize, file, and function. They are the mind’s Post-It notes and desktop folders, our inner search engine indexing the chaos.
But, as useful as they are, stereotypes are … inadequate. Pale descriptions of whatever they describe. I think psychologist Serge Moscovici really gets at this when he says – “I do not recognize you. I recognize the category I put you in.” Ouch. Bias is problematic precisely because it risks ignoring the very thing that needs to be taken into account.
So this brings me to what I really want to talk about. In my last article where I talked about my “journey to we”, I referenced the work of neuroscientist Jim Coan and his idea of the expanded self – the idea that we process stress differently when we have a trusted companion nearby. The brain expects support. It assumes community. And when that support is absent, we burn through our internal resources more quickly. The hill looks steeper. The threat feels sharper.
Well there is another expanded self concept at work with the way in which categories and stereotypes and bias work in our world. And for me it has helped me understand “we” in a radically different way.
The Thinking Society
We don’t just share our emotional burdens—we share our sense-making. Serge Moscovici call this the thinking society. And while that sounds elitist – that is not at all what he had in mind.
Moscovici agreed with Lippmann – the world is altogether too complex to navigate alone. And psychology has had a field day demonstrating the extent to which we as individuals miss things, mis-remember, mis-perceive, misattribute. Read any book on cognitive science and you’d expect us to be running into trees we’re so inept.
But Moscovici argues we don’t run into trees because we have each other.
In this altogether too complex world, we rely on others to make sense of things. And when I say things, I mean pretty much EVERY thing. My favorite example - Did you know that babies have to learn poop smells bad? They know what it smells like, but they don’t know what they smell means until they see mommy make a face like - what the???
We work with others to fill in the gaps of our understanding. Conversation is where we test the edges our reality. It’s how stereotypes are formed, yes, but also how they’re challenged.
This, Moscovici argues, is how we create “common sense.” Not common because it’s universal, but common because it’s shared.
And this is also why today feels so unmoored. When fewer and fewer people seem to see the world as we do, we feel unhinged. Alone in our interpretations. It’s sci-fi territory. It’s a Black Mirror episode.
So we dig in. We cluster with those who affirm our picture of the world. Tribalism isn’t a flaw of modern life—it’s a feature of a species trying to stay sane. But here’s the kicker: agreement isn’t the same as truth. All agreement tells you is that you’ve found someone who sees the same picture. It doesn’t mean you’re seeing the full landscape.
I often return to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story. After describing the reductive narratives she encountered as a Nigerian woman in America, she offers this crucial insight:
“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
That line stays with me.
Agreement is comfortable. Difference is disruptive. But it’s in the disruption—where we find the typos, where we find the missing sentences, paragraphs, entire stories.
So by all means, let’s acknowledge our stereotypes. Let’s notice them, name them, even thank them for their service.
And then—let’s get curious. It’s in the curiosity we find something deeper than agreement: we find understanding.