Part 4: Pop your filter bubble

Power: Breaking the Taboo

This is the fourth and final entry in a series of blogs on power. Each blog offers an important lesson about how power works, and I will offer concrete tools to help you navigate and influence your social environment more effectively. The text below is based on a talk at Rabobank on 24 October 2018. Missed the introduction? You can find it back here. Previous blogs can be found here: part one; part two; and part three. I hope you'll enjoy today's post and I'd love to hear if you were inspired or thought-provoked by anything you've learned! Anyway, on to today's topic!

When we hear the word power in a human context, we often think of institutions: the power of political bodies, for example, or the military.

But the most fundamental way that power affects us, is probably on the level of our everyday culture.

Let me ask you: why do you believe what you believe about the world? Is it because you've experienced it for yourself? 

Oftentimes, it's not because we know something to be true from personal experience: it's because everyone around us believes it. (For example, I've never consciously tried to establish for myself that the earth is in fact a globe, but I still think this is common sense!) Because to accept these understandings as truths is a part of our social norms. 

Don't get me wrong: a lot of the time, this kind of shortcut to knowledge is extremely useful. It is a very good thing that we can rely on the wisdom of the crowd, rather than having to figure out every little thing for ourselves. People who've lost faith in this mechanism are especially prone to all sorts of misguided beliefs: the flat-earthers or anti-vaccination folks would benefit much from trusting collective processes of knowledge-production rather than relying purely on their "do-your-own-research" attitude.

However, in every society, there might be very dominant beliefs - even assumptions - that impact the way we see the world in ways that are actually not in our own best interest.

Take a look at this scene from They Live, an American horror film from the 1980s. https://youtu.be/JI8AMRbqY6w

The film offers a criticism of consumerist culture in America. The main character, Nada, walks through Los Angeles and finds a pair of sunglasses that reveal the subliminal messages that surround us in the form of advertising, mass media, and shopping windows. 

Before he found the sunglasses, he was never aware of these messages: they were not explicit. But the use of subconscious messages to influence people's behavior and opinions is extremely widespread, and companies and governments use these methods in all sorts of ways. 

All these messages reach us, too. And they lead to assumptions about other people and the world around us. These messages have power over us, without us being very aware of it. This is what I call cultural power, or what some philosophers have called 'ideology'.

Cultural power is exercised by our parents, the school we went to, our peers and friends, the media, advertising, corporations, but also by ourselves. Much of everyday life is a constant struggle to exercise power by creating a consensus between people about certain facts, ideas, beliefs, perspectives, or even lies.

All of us are influenced by this, to a greater or smaller extent. And when the consensus becomes strong enough, this becomes the birth of a stereotype: a widely believed thought about specific types of people or certain ways of behaving, intended to represent the entire group of those individuals or behaviors as a whole.

Sometimes these stereotypes are (more or less) accurate, but other times, they reflect ideological interests rather than reality itself. And it's amazing to realize how little we are aware of the assumptions that we unconsciously apply. For example, the other day, I was driving and somebody on the road in front of me was moving very slowly. Immediately I felt annoyed at this old lady. Until I realized I had no idea at all who was at the wheel!

Here's another example - one that I hate to acknowledge. But when I look at a picture of people in a business meeting, I'm likely to assume that the chairman will be a man. When it comes to gender, there are so many examples where our unconscious bias leads us to rank men higher than women - men might do it, but women do it to themselves, too. 

This has big consequences for women all throughout the world. Even to just stay close to home: many people have stereotypes of women which are incompatible with leadership positions. They think of women as sensitive, caring, maternal, trivial, elegant, et cetera; men, meanwhile, are dominant, tough and rational. These stereotypes are so strong that those women who don't fit it, like say, Hillary Clinton, are met with tremendous hostility. It's stereotypes like these that lead investors to put significantly less money into start-ups led by women; and it may well be the reason why male students obtain cum laude degrees at twice the rates that women do. In much of the rest of the world, the gender stereotypes may differ slightly, but they are often even more suffocating.

The presence of stereotypes has historically resulted in a very unbalanced distribution of power: just think of the number of older white men on the average company board or in prestigious academic jobs, relative to the number of younger people, people of color, and women. But such stereotypes are not just bad for women; they affect men in negative ways, as well. A sensitive or overtly emotional man is instantly stereotyped as a homosexual or a let-down to masculine norms - and being seen that way comes with an immediate loss of status.

Fortunately, the tides seem to be shifting: in politics and organizations, it's become an increasingly important question how to stimulate women, people of color and other underrepresented groups to attain higher positions. This is not just for the sake of fairness: research shows that organizations which invest in diversity, in gender, but also cultural background, achieve better results.

Remember how I wrote, in the first blog entry, about ranking, the informal attribution of power and authority, in everyday social contexts? You won't be surprised to hear that stereotypes have a huge effect on our ranking in everyday life.

Besides gender, here's some of the other things that are heavily stereotyped in our culture:

-      Cultural background, the color of your skin. I have a friend, for example, who is constantly assumed to be a Muslim, because his father is North African - even though he grew up in a secular Dutch middle class family.

-      Your looks: research even shows that people assume good-looking people are kinder and more intelligent. In reality, there is zero correlation!

-      Social class and cultural capital: one person likes country music, the other likes J.S. Bach. Who is smarter? The truth is: on the basis of that fact alone, it's impossible to say. However, most people will have made up their minds already.

-      Generally, style of expression, for example local dialect or accent. Most Dutch people will recognize the stereotypes of "stupid" Limburgers, for example. Vice versa, the accent from the wealthy Gooi area of the Netherlands will evoke hostility in other areas of the country.

-      Being single or married, young or old, being unemployed versus having a job, having a managerial position or not: all these qualities lead people to assume certain things about us.

For better or for worse, stereotyping is a powerful force of social psychology; we do it subconsciously, and there is no escaping the sources of information that this mechanism depends on, since they're everywhere around us. Sometimes, they save our lives: it allows us to make quick decisions about who to trust and who to avoid. Probably it's not such a bad thing that we take a little detour rather than walking past a group of five agitated-looking skinheads. But stereotypes also often lead us to assume the worst of people who don't deserve that; and they reproduce a structurally unequal balance of power within our companies and societies.

For that reason, it's important for all of us to be aware of the dominant stereotypes in our social environment, in our organizations, and in society as a whole. That allows us to take a critical look at those ideas, to discuss them with others, to influence them, and to challenge them. But to do that, it's often necessary to break the 'filter bubble': to speak to people who don't share your stereotypes (because, perhaps they are the victim of them); to ask them questions, learn about their views and experiences. The best cure to negative stereotypes - and, don't forget, we all possess them! - is the peaceful encounter of difference.

Did this blog make you think about your own stereotypes? Are there any that you've recognized in yourself recently? And if you ever had an experience where one of your stereotypes got challenged, I hope you will share it in the comments. As always, if you enjoyed this blog, please share it with your friends, colleagues and family. This will be the last entry in this series on power, but you can expect more posts in the future. Meanwhile, don't hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any questions about my work. Thanks for reading!

- Inez