THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON STEREOTYPES HOW SCIENCE IS TACKLING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS TANYA LLOYD KYI DREW SHANNON Kids Can Press
Introduction Our brains constantly sort and label the world around us It begins when we're babies Those four legged barking things They're dogs The bouncy things are balls Toys are different from food and food is different from milk We need these categories Without them we'd open our closets each morning and wonder which items of clothing go on our legs and which go on our arms We'd stare into our desk drawers trying to figure out which items write and which ones erase But our brains don't only sort things They sort people And that's where life gets complicated When we group people into a category and assume they all share certain traits that's called a stereotype Some stereotypes seem to be based on facts For example imagine a group of kids playing video games Are you picturing boys If so you're not wrong About 60 percent of regular gamers are male But not all gamers are male and not all stereotypes are true By relying on people categories in our brains we can make false assumptions We can even act unfairly toward certain people all because we've jumped to bad conclusions When a large majority of people or even a whole society holds the same unfair stereotypes real people pay the price
In the United States young black men are nine times more likely than white men to be killed by police Girls do just as well as boys in high school science But in countries ranging from Belgium to Sweden and Australia to Germany far fewer girls graduate with post secondary science degrees In Canada kids living on First Nations reserves receive less government money for education and health care than other Canadian kids American LGBTQ+ youth are twice as likely as their peers to be bullied at school None of this is fair And much of it results from the ways we categorize minority groups So here's an idea Let's stop sorting people based on their race gender or sexual orientation Let's end stereotypes Let's change laws school rules and our own brains Quick Unfortunately it's not that easy Stereotypes are hard to recognize and even harder to erase People simply don't know how to fix these problems That's where science comes in For more than a hundred years scientists have been trying to figure out how we classify people and why Recently they've kicked their research into high gear They're exploring the ways neural pathways inside our brains affect how we create and react to stereotypes They're delving into the reasons we continue to sort and judge others even when we're trying to improve And slowly but surely they're finding ways we can rewire our minds and our societies It's going to be a long process But hopefully these scientists plus activists doctors teachers politicians and even readers like you can help make the world more fair for everyone
