Science Does NOT Explain Why We Stereotype. Here's What Does.

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All human ‘hardwiring’ does not happen naturally.?What does this actually mean? It’s important to understand that as beings we are not just impacted by our environment, but we are created by it. We are containers for culture. Voids for the world around us. This drives home the point that if the culture around us romanticizes safety, we are prone (NOT hardwired) to do the same.

According to?some research, we are more conditioned by cultural values, than we are by neurochemicals and evolution, than we once thought.

So while there may be some universal truths to these behaviors, we are malleable enough that culture may trump some of these so-called hard-wired behaviors.

What does this tell us about stereotypes, biases, and relied-upon beliefs about others, ourselves, and the world around us?? Well, it demonstrates that if a culture values certain beliefs about how to act in the world, we tend to follow along. Not because we are predisposed to, but because we want to belong. Our group affiliation is much more powerful than our neurochemicals. Society tells the neurotransmitters what to do, NOT the other way around.

Categories only protect us insofar as much as we believe they will.

If they actually protected us, we wouldn’t need war, aggression, or violence.?Categories don’t protect us, but we have been made to believe that they somehow can give us some secret knowledge of other people’s behavior. It doesn’t, and it can’t. Ever.

Don’t look to evolution to tell you how to act, look to the cultures (i.e., your childhood, memories, parental values, group affiliations, and things outside of you to tell you what you are meant to believe—and by extension, how you should be in the world). Your neuroscientific hardwire, history, or a fabled mysticism around ‘human nature’ is not at fault for why things like racism, misogyny, indifference, violence, and xenophobia exist — it’s down to culture and its reinforced control around how we should act if we want to stay in the group.

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Human nature, neuroscience, and any other science cannot be blamed for our fetishization of putting others in boxes — ironically, science disagrees with itself, because, culture seems to be at fault for why we THINK we need these categorical cages.

1. Evolution designed us to protect ourselves from threats in our environments.

Although there is surface-level truth to this claim, it doesn't go far enough. We’ve discovered we are cultural beings first, and neuroscientific beings second — but, what about evolution? Well, in short, this is just a lazy understanding of scientific stereotypes. A stereotype of a stereotype.

The quick definition of evolution is something that changes over time. People change. Cultures change. Behaviors and even values change over time, not just chimpanzees! In this, we can already see the?fundamental error?in this type of thinking that has us performing stereotypes without thinking about them.

To understand our misunderstanding of using evolution as an excuse for a load of biases — we have to turn to another evolutionary idea: Genetic fitness.

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When science reinforces stereotypes, they are not reinforcing their innateness, they are pointing out their own short-sighted conditioning around the illusion of some hardwired human desire to categorize everything. The problem is we have placed so much control of our understanding of human behavior in the hands of scientists, we also forget their own cultural influences impact what they themselves understand. Biases only beget more of themselves.

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