Factors That Affect Perception: Stereotyping

 Now let's talk about how our perception plays tricks on us!

image credit: creativereview.com

Stereotyping is one of the most common factors that affect and distort perception.

We have the tendency to classify our experiences and encounters, our feelings and thoughts, the people we meet and the things we see into groups and categories. We peg them to other, similar types of experiences and encounters, thoughts and feelings and people and things we have heard of or known or seen in the past. Thus, we label stimuli according to our own peculiar frames of reference.

The problem with this is that we tend to impose our opinions and feelings about a "class" to the individual experience, event or person. The moment we peg and label an individual experience to a category, we think we know its essence from our general impressions about that category. We no longer try to get an in depth, independent and personal knowledge of that object, experience or person as an exclusive and disparate entity that is to be evaluated and valued for itself.

Hence all darkness is evil and scary; women are emotional beings; a person with a disability cannot travel alone; white skin is better than black skin; fat people are lazy: our perceptions are constantly affected and distorted by the thousands of stereotypes we carry within ourselves.