[Note: I’m not sure why people actually want to eat pain killers, well, except to kill pain I mean. I’m just taking the equivalent of Tylenol 3 and… well… let’s just say I can’t tell if the following post is profound or profoundly boring. Opiates? Bleah! Just say “no, thank you.” :-) —fl]

I’m too lazy (also analgesic’ed) to find links at the moment but I’m pretty sure you can trust me when I point out that numerous studies over the years have concluded that people often generalize in the direction of stereotype even when most or all members of the stereotyped group they know don’t fit the stereotype at all.

Example: People overwhelmingly think Congress is corrupt but believe their particular representative is an exception; people tend to overwhelmingly believe public schools are bad while also tending to believe theirs is an exception.

And of course we’re probably all familiar with the eternal refrain of bigots everywhere: “some of my best friends are…”

It’s sort of like my joke about Apple Macintosh users (which I say as an — again reluctant but sincere — convert) there are two things every Mac owner believes: First that all Macs just work; second that “mine’s the only exception.”

Often the consequences are relatively benign as when we grumble that traffic would move more smoothly if everybody else would get off the road. Other times the consequences are horrifying as when

- some conservative and middle class consumers of abortion and contraception services support anti-choice initiatives on the assumption that they’re the exceptions to the “vast majority” of service seekers who are really “irresponsible sluts.”

- some “responsible” people, mostly men but sometimes women, who get all worked up about “big black men” who “won’t take no from white women” when in fact most women who are sexually assaulted aren’t assaulted by strangers of other races but by people close to and sometimes quite close to that, often, believe they can trust.

- adherents of a monotheistic religion claiming descent from someone who’s name is spelled, alternately, Abram/Abraham/Ibrahim, believe total war must be declared, and total victory sought, after the adherents of a monotheistic religion claiming descent from the same guy but who insist on a different spelling!

Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo ends with a man, a friend of the now-imprisoned scientist, encountering some small boys who are shouting “witch, witch” outside a cottage door. The man holds the boys up to the window, showing them that the ominous shadows they see on the inner walls are just those of an elderly woman making her supper. They see with their own eyes that it’s only an old grandmother inside, yet when the man puts them down and walks away they again start crying “witch, witch!” Their knowledge of the stereotype overwhelms the evidence of their eyes!

Now of course the boys are characters in a play but even though we’re not we still sometimes find ourselves playing similar parts…

...if at no other point then at the point where someone really does meet the expectations of a stereotype — when the panhandler really does reek of boozy indifference, when the junkie really does mug you, when the Oakie from Muskogee really does whump you because he doesn’t like your bumper sticker.

And it’s right there, right inside that shocked, almost instinctive reflex where we say “Oh my God it’s true…” that we have to ask ourselves…

...if we’re so shocked by that experience then clearly it must be a novel experience! And therefore, rather than confirmation of the stereotype, that “they really are ‘all that way,’” perhaps the shock that we mistake for recognition is really shock at the anomoly!

I mean, really, individuals who matched the stereotype were routine then we’d feel no shock at all, right?