Psychologist James Breckenridge says humans are wired to stereotype.

Rich or poor, urban or rural, educated or not, most of us still watch our backs. Hundreds of thousands of years have not bred that out of us—we still want to be ready just in case some beast jumps out from behind a rock. That’s why we respond so strongly to news that seems to warn us about perceived danger.

Thanks to advances in brain research, we now have proof that “the brain devotes more attention to anything that appears threatening,” says psychologist James Breckenridge. Our automatic vigilance for threat has given us an enormous survival advantage throughout the ages, he explains, and we now do it continuously, subconsciously, and at lightning speed.

“People can determine emotions on a person’s face even if they only see a part of it, like a part of an eyebrow,” says Breckenridge. In order to process the wealth of information before us on a daily basis, we have developed “a rapid, efficient, intuitive understanding of all sorts of concepts to which you have very little direct exposure.”

The problem with this necessary skill is that it leads us to assume what we cannot know for certain. Stereotyping and “essentializing” – reducing a person, population group or culture to some simple, dehumanized concept – becomes the way in which we define our vast and complicated world. And when we try to simplify something that is complex, we open a Pandora’s box of potential misinformation.

Recent studies show us that we can count on the human brain to do most of the following with the news we receive:

---We perceive negative information as more credible than positive (nonthreatening) information.

---We seek confirmation of our views, which are often negative.

---We have a better memory for what takes place after we hear negative news than for what took place before we heard/saw it.

---Once exposed to negative or hostile stimuli, we tend to perceive some related ambiguous event or behavior as negative or hostile.

---We revert to “us vs. them” thinking, which tends toward the belief that “they” act intentionally in all situations and are therefore fully responsible, while “we” simply react to situations which may not be able to control.

Despite such gloomy revelations, there is good news to report: These well-honed tendencies can be counteracted. The prefrontal cortex continues to develop well into middle age; this is the part of the brain that empathizes and considers consequences. This means that if we are repeatedly encouraged to challenge stereotypes, eventually we will begin to do so.

Breckenridge says one powerful way to “decontaminate” the in-group/out-group bias is to “witness a successful relationship with someone from the out-group.” The news media can be particularly effective at this by telling a story through the eyes of one person, known by psychologists as “the single person effect.”

Breckenridge also emphasizes the increased effectiveness of presenting information in an artful or clever way. He uses the example of a good April Fools' joke, where we end up getting something we weren’t expecting. “If people are really taken in by it, the effect causes them to look at themselves in a different way,” he points out. Consequently, a story that artfully challenges a stereotype will cause people to re-evaluate their opinion about a particular situation, culture or nation.

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