We are in the information era. Everything and anything we see around triggers in us an association of vast proportions often linked with the memory of having seen its latest bits on a screen of some sort. A leaf for example, chances are that the image you recollect will be an image seen last on a computer/mobile screen than an actual living/dead leaf. Interesting when i did recollect it just now i recollected a vastly stereotyped image of a very ‘common’ leaf and in doing so skipped over the 1000s of leaves i have seen over in life, even neglecting the dead ones. If i slow down i may recollect how many varieties of leaves i have seen with my own eyes and even then i will be confused if the recollections were of real ones or virtual ones. Why is it that i recollected a certain image and not the others i wonder, more so why not the fact that i have seen so many i should have recollected all of them rather than just one. What is going on here?
Stereotyping is this wonderful thing we do – essentially strip off information that makes things unique and thus help classification. We do so probably to reduce our cognitive loads, because thinking is such a huge drain on our valuable lives on this earth. Probably if we didn’t have this classification skill set/ability, wonder what would have become of us? Imagine an ancient tribe on a hunting party, and it sees an animal in front. Now if this animal is new, no one would know anything about its behavior, whether its approachable and docile for hunting, if its meat is worthwhile the chase, are there chances we will loose one of us in chasing/hunting this animal and so on. There needs to be learning here through experimentation, through attempting to chase/hunt the animal, no other way to answer the questions. There are no precursors or precedents to follow – its new territory and full of risks, full of uncertainty. But once all the exploration is started and concluded to some extent, successfully or otherwise, the tribe would have gained a set of new knowledge. The next time the tribe encounters this ‘kind’ of animal, it wont be asking the very first set of questions again, the questions now will change according to the Q&A of the first experience. Soon enough this ‘kind’ of animal will get a name so that it’s easy to refer to in-between talks rather than describe each and every aspect of its behavior, meat quality, risk in hunting etc, every time this discussion comes up. As the tribes mature and get to interact more and more with the animal and its surroundings, more and more of the various properties of the animal are registered in the tribe’s collective idea of the world, more granularity in knowledge terms to say. The animal will be ‘classified’ by its name and all the new findings will be packaged under it. Its behaviors will be noted as being distinct to other animals which previously followed a similar classification procedure. A new library is created.
For some people concerned only as to how this animal is relevant to tribe’s or self’s survival the exploration will end there. This kind of animal if you encounter, do this and run the hell away or pray, whichever practical. Or go ahead and get it home for food (as a food, not to give it food as that may not go down well with the wife), or let it be and move on. The argument being, why further explore this costly avenue (cognitive workload) if there are other things to worry about. On the other hand there will be some who would desire to go beyond the immediate practical concerns. These visionaries would explore more, put more things under an ever evolving body of knowledge under the title of this animal. The more they explore, the more they realize they know so little. They discover that each animal is different in someways although similar in most ways, that the male and female behave differently, that there is something called a pack and some are in it and some prefer to stay out of it and so on. Serious lunatics, this sect of the tribe will be called by the practical minded, for obvious reasons (this sect got dignity now, called scientists/scholars). If the tribe encounters more and more of such animal, the practical section will get away with ‘stereotypical’ dealings about them, while the ‘scholars’ will keep a notebook and scribble as if each of the animal is unique. What is happening here is that the animal in question has created a divide within the tribe, a tension, while one section wants to move on after stereotyping the animal with simple characteristics, another section wants to setup tent and stay staring in the act of making further detailed prototypes of the animal. Isn’t this absolutely fascinating!