Heuristics

Reference Post

The human brain is impeccable. All you have to do is open your eyes, and about 60 percent of it launches into action. Parts of your brain will actively search out movement, look for faces, and try to determine whether any stimulus is innocuous or foreign, without your consent. Automatic processes like this are essential for not only survival, but everyday living as well.

One remarkable automatic process is the brain's ability to take any new stimulus and instantaneously try to identify it. Using previous exposure to anything remotely similar, the brain will make its best guess at what the new stimulus is, and then immediately file it away, seemingly repeatedly, with everything that it shares attributes with. That way, the observer can attempt to react in an appropriate manner. These mental categories for filing are called heuristics.

For example, if you were to run into a bear in the woods, you would take in all information until you identified it as a bear. Mind, you've never met this bear before, but it will be categorized with all previous bear heuristics, and you will attempt to appropriately react, though I really don't know what the appropriate action is, play dead or run downhill or something.

While heuristics are incredibly useful, the problem is that they are also incredibly insensitive. Well...kind of.

First Impression

The instant you meet a new person for the first time, your brain will do what it does with everything new. That person will be assessed on every scrap of information they give you, and then compared. Age, race, gender, build, hair, dress, posture, speech, and so on will be used so that your brain can file this new person away as quickly as possible. An old person will be filed away with old people. This is good and bad in how it guides your response. While you won't treat the old person in the same way you'd treat a child, they will still be held to the sum of facts you know about the elderly in most everything they do.

Stereotype

The few years I lived in Germany taught me a lot about stereotyping. As a foreigner, I underwent a fair amount of culture shock, because Germans, in some significant ways, did not think or behave in ways that I considered normal. When I finally managed to determine which of these differences were commonplace, I was able to fit in and get along more easily. I was able to create a German heuristic(type of person) and apply it to the whole scope(stereo) of Germans I encountered.

Any group showing noticeable similar traits is stereotyped, without our consent. We do it to everyone, from those who are unlike us, to those who we share much in common. Stereotypes are our best guesses at understanding and socializing with a group.

The Individual

The real problem is that your brain really hates re-filing something it has already assessed. It takes a lot to erase false stereotypes and heuristics; it takes even more effort to erase negative ones, because your brain sees those as important survival information.

Seeing an individual as a stand-alone being is therefore incredibly inefficient; seeing them for who they truly are requires heavy analyzing of information that is never readily available; keeping your brain from lumping them with those similar to them is nearly impossible.

It takes a lot of patience to overcome these biological tendencies, and those attempting to overcome them should be treated with patience as well.