"Pinker (2002) stated that "....people's ability to set aside stereotypes when judging an individual is accomplished by their conscious deliberate reasoning. When people are distracted or put under pressure to respond quickly, they more likely to judge that a member of an ethnic group has all of the stereotyped traits of the group. .............. Our network of fuzzy associations naturally reverts to a stereotype when we first encounter an individual. But our rule-based categorizer can block out those associations and make deductions based on the relevant facts about that individual. It can do so either for practical reasons, when information about a group-wide average is less diagnostic than information about the individual, or for social or moral reasons, out of respect for the imperative that one ought to ignore certain group-wide average when judging an individual" (p. 205). This quotation I feel was so true when we completed the Harvard quiz online. When we were under pressure to quickly associate people or certain things into categories. We were most likely to go with our stereotypical views because we were not given the time to use the rule-based categorizer where we would required more time to consider other things such as facts about the items or individuals. Our rule-based categorizer seems to be a sort of filter for our fuzzy associations.
Reality is in the eye of the beholder it seems. Ones reality according to Pinker (2002) seems to be based on our experience and affected very heavily by our perceptions of how we view or categorize external stimuli. Skinner (1987) in his article Whatever Happened to Psychology as the Science of Behavior? would agree with Pinker when he stated even though we are in touch with reality we have to recognize how this reality can be influenced and cause us to go against ourselves (Pinker 2002 p.217). Skinner repeated showed how all of our behavior as well as information that we selectively store are influenced by the external stimuli. As a result, the things that influence reality are things of our environment like Pinker (2002) stated i.e. the media and theory.
Pinker mentioned in this chapter that many stereotypes are statistically correct. Then would it mean that some stereotypes can be considered truth? If this is so, should we then say that it is a reality that some stereotype are truth?
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