The Uses of Stereotypes

You can’t read, watch, or hear anything about the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin controversy without thinking about the evils of stereotypes. For some, it’s easy to sympathize with Zimmerman’s suspicions regarding Trayvon, someone he saw as a stereotypically threatening African American male dressed in a hoody. For others it’s just as natural to think of Zimmerman as a stereotypically self-righteous, racist vigilante.

But as Mark Twain once said of such thinking, “One gets such wholesale returns on conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact.”

The problem is that generalizations about people, places, events, and other things are the most common way we make sense of a chaotic world. We are all prone to generalizing, all the time, and the downside to this is that we sometimes carry this intellectual activity to excess. “Stereotyping” is a word we use when we accuse someone else (never ourselves) of relying too much on generalizations.

However, academic studies have noted that it’s easier to make negative generalizations than positive ones, and negative generalizations are usually stronger and more resistant to change. Any generalization that arouses fear, anxiety, or hatred will almost always be more pronounced in our minds and more dominant in our awareness than a positive one.

No one really knows why this is, but it might be that our propensity to leap to conclusions more quickly and firmly with respect to negative generalizations is merely one reflection of our natural bias against losses. Behavioral economists call it "loss aversion," and experiments have shown that we are all more eager to avoid losses than to procure gains. You can easily test your own loss aversion with a mental exercise:

• Suppose I offer to toss a coin with you. If it’s heads, I will pay you $20. If it’s tails you will pay me just $10. Would you do it? Almost all of us would. In fact, we’d be happy to do it over and over and over again, provided that the coin toss was fair.
• But what if I change the magnitude of the bet? What if I offer to pay you $200,000 if it’s heads, and if it’s tails then you pay me $100,000? And I’m only going to allow you to bet one time. Would you do it then? Would you be willing to risk a whole $100,000 of your personal savings to make such a bet?

The reason insurance companies exist is because of the loss-aversion bias. We’d rather pay the insurance company a premium every year than take the chance that we lose our house, our savings, or our valuables to some chance occurrence. Across all customers, the insurance company’s premiums always total more than the losses it pays out, or the company couldn’t continue in business. What the company is really selling is relief from the fear of loss.

A few weeks ago, LinkedIn Influencer Cass Sunstein posted a very useful explanation of how governments and businesses might harness people’s loss aversion to secure better outcomes for their policies.

To manage any organization more effectively, it would clearly be advantageous simply to remain cognizant of everyone’s natural tendency – including your own – to generalize more quickly when the matter involves fear, anger, or loss. And the most effective way to resist this tendency is to rely on the principles of evidence-based management.

But above all, you can begin to overcome some of the problems of stereotyping simply by honing your skill at empathizing with others' points of view. Empathy may be the most important management skill of all, and the Zimmerman trial itself, being so highly publicized, offers an ideal set of stereotypes to help you practice developing this skill.

So why not put these stereotypes to good use? You yourself probably already subscribe to one of the views about Zimmerman's case that I described at the top of this post. If you want to improve your skill at empathizing, then find someone who holds the opposite view and spend some time discussing the case. But:

• Don't defend your own view.
• Don't point out what's wrong (in your opinion) with theirs.
• Concentrate totally on "feeling" what they are feeling.

You'll find that having the ability to empathize will not just make you a better manager; it will make you a better person.