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authored, with loads of love & thought, by Pranjali Pratik
At The Unlearning Playground, we firmly believe that real growth comes from examining the basis of our own opinions. Tackling cognitive biases, which is the tendency of our brains to oversimplify information through a lens of personal experiences, forms an important part of this.
As part of our series on cognitive biases, let us talk about Stereotypes today.
Stereotypes can be defined as “Widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.”
Haven’t we all heard conversations about Women being bad drivers, Santa and Banta being dim witted or Teenagers being irresponsible?
The repeated consumption of such ideas eventually bleeds into our subconscious and affects our judgement towards groups of people that we personally don’t identify with.
In this episode of The Unlearning Playground podcast, I talk about the power of conscious thought in challenging this notion of oversimplification, and how we can avoid prejudging people.
You can also check it out on YouTube! It’s only 8 minutes long.
“A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems:
Nancy Kress, Sci-fi author
They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is.”