Stereotypes are good

Stereotypes are a controversial issue. From the time we're young we are trained to believe that judging a book by its cover is wrong. Stereotypes are associated with bigotry, racism, discrimination, and everything that is inherently bad. People are quick to point out the fault of stereotypes, however not many people realize the reason they exist in the first place. Stereotypes exist because human brains work by categorizing and over simplifying information. Definition of a stereotype: "A widely held but fixed and simplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing" Human brains operate by grouping information together. This is how we learn. For example, there millions of different types of vehicles in the world, all of which look different from one and other. All these vehicles are different shapes sizes, models, and colours. Yet when we encounter a vehicle that we've never seen before, we immediately know what it is, and have an idea of how it works. The same can be said about anything. There exists 23,000 different types of tree's in the world. However, thanks to our ability to stereotype, we don't have to memorize every tree in the world in order to recognize any type of tree. We can identify an object we have never encountered before simply by categorizing it into a predefined group. That is stereotyping, the act of grouping and simplifying new information. Without this process, humans couldn't function. Of course this process of trying to generalize everything can cause racism, bigotry and discrimination, but it is how us humans think. It is our nature to categorize and sort information. Imagine life without stereotypes, we would have to treat every situation in our day-to-day lives as if it were brand new. This would be exhausting and is just not practical. The reason we tend to group and oversimplify things is because our minds favor efficiency over accuracy. We perceive so much information every day, and our memory is finite. We cannot possibly remember every detail of every day. So instead we form mental categories. This is a natural process. I argue that the act of stereotyping information is not what leads to racism and discrimination. Rather it is the act of selective perception. As humans we tend to take new information and stuff it into our predefined conceptions of how the world works. The downside of this process is that it leads to perception bias, also known as selective perception. This is the tendency to ignore information that disagrees with our points of view, and amplify information that does agree with our points of view. Information that cannot easily be stereotyped tends to be ignored, and information that easily fits into our mental groupings tends to be remembered. This bias is what causes discrimination. An example: a racist man holds the belief that all black men are evil. The reason he believes this, is because he has ignored information about African American people that were good, however he can easily recall many instances where black people made his life worse. This is not due to stereotyping, rather it is due to selection bias or his inability to take in information that disagrees with him. In summary I argue that stereotypes are a natural and efficient way of sorting information, rather than a bad habit. I also argue that the cause of discrimination and racism is not the act of stereotyping, it is the process of selective perception.