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Humans are wired to generalize. Evolved to make snap judgments rooted in familiarity or the lack of it, and the comfort or fear that often accompany each. It’s how we survived in the early days of our species, by sizing up danger and protecting ourselves and our tribe from harm.
But the instinct that responds to the unknown often leads us astray. It’s an imperfect mechanism for discerning threats, vulnerable to faulty assessments of those with whom we come in contact, and of course, social conditioning.
In the latter case, this can take the form of biases picked up from the cultures in which we live: against racial, ethnic, or religious others, for instance.
And since we tend to remember negative experiences with so-called “others,” more so than similar experiences with members of our own group, such interactions are magnified in our minds, especially if they line up with social stereotypes for which those interactions serve as a kind of trip wire.
You can often see this play out when discussing an issue like racism in America.
The all-too-common interaction goes like this:
