In the world, there are a lot of things. Things like penguins and guavas and diamonds and house music and double-decker buses and so on and so forth. Keeping track of all this “stuff” takes time and energy, resources which could be better spent on other things, things like eating or sleeping or hunting or dating or posting cat videos on YouTube. For this reason, when confronted with the vast and ever-widening array of “things” in the world, we place them into groups. Bananas, oranges and apples become “fruit”. Elephants, pandas and walruses become “animals”. Tables, chairs and wardrobes become “furniture”. It’s a lot easier to ask someone to pass the fruit bowl than it is to ask someone to pass the bowl containing bananas, oranges, apples, pears, and maybe a few mouldy grapes. Likewise, it’s a lot easier to refer to “weather” or “jobs” or “sports” or “countries” than it is to list all the thousands of objects, events or concepts that comprise these groups. The brain loves a shortcut, and placing things into groups – categorisation – is exactly that (even if it sometimes gets us into trouble – more on this later).
Categorisation can be defined as “the process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from” (McGarty, 1999:1). In other words, categorisation is about similarities and differences: when two or more things are similar or interconnected, we place them in the same category; when these things are different or unconnected, we place them in different categories. It is important to note that things are not always different or always the same; rather, this depends on the nature of the categorisation. For example, carrots and oranges may be categorised differently (as vegetables and fruits), or similarly (as food, or organic matter, or orange things). Categories are hierarchical: some are very specific, while others are much more broad – just think of the category of “thing”.
Categories are not rigid. Just as human perception is fluid and flexible, so categories may likewise have porous boundaries. Some things are easier to categorise than others. Most people would have no problem identifying a cabbage as a vegetable and an apple as a fruit. But what about tomatoes? Or rhubarb? Or aubergines? The same is true for almost every other category: some members are easy to categorise, while others are more difficult. The more typical a member, the easier it is to categorise, and vice versa. So a dog is a typical mammal, as most people would acknowledge, while a duck-billed platypus is a wholly atypical one. (In fact, when the first European naturalists encountered a preserved platypus, they dismissed it as a fake, cobbled together from bits of other animals.) We call the most typical members of a category (like dogs and apples and cabbages) prototypes. These are easy to bring to mind and quick to categorise, unlike atypical members (like tomatoes and platypuses), which take time and effort.
When applied to social categories, we often refer to prototypes as stereotypes (literally, a solid or rigid type). Stereotyping, like all categorisation, is a heuristic – a mental shortcut that reduces complex judgements to simple rules of thumb. We use stereotypes for two main reasons. First, by “filling in the blanks" for people we know little about, they save us time and energy. And second, by providing a framework for our perception of the world, they help us to predict what others will do, thereby reducing uncertainty. This sort of categorisation is fundamental to the way we, as humans, create meaning.
Categorisation is pervasive, which means it can influence our thinking even when we are trying to think systematically. In other words, some categories are activated without our awareness. For example, categories such as race, age and gender are so common that their use becomes automated, a phenomenon known as chronic accessibility. Similarly, we tend to categorise based on what we encounter first (known as temporal primacy), and what stands out most to us (known as perceptual salience). Imagine, for example, that the first dog you ever encountered was a rabid, ferocious, bloodthirsty poodle – this now forms the basis of your canine template. Likewise, hearing about a rabid-poodle attack can make us more scared of dogs in general, since stories of poodles attacking humans are particularly notable, or salient. In all of these cases, categorisation occurs unconsciously, shaping our judgement without us even knowing it.
We use social categories to form a general impression about the people we meet and interact with. How exactly we do this has been much studied by social psychologists, beginning in the 1940s with the work of Solomon Asch, and continuing to this day with research by Alexander Todorov. There are several troubling consequences of social categorisation. When categories are formed on the basis of race or ethnicity, for example, stereotyping can easily lead to prejudice. Even when such stereotypes are apparently positive – for example, ethnicity X is good at business; ethnicity Y is good at maths – they still reinforce social distinctions rather than transcending them. Similarly, judgements that are inconsistent with negative stereotypes can actually serve to perpetuate such stereotypes. For example, lauding a woman who can drive well or a man who can cook presents these cases as exceptions to the categorical rule, which itself remains intact. Only when enough such exceptions are registered can the overall stereotype be challenged, leading to a shift in the category prototype.
Another consequence of social categorisation is stereotype threat – the fear of conforming to a negative stereotype of a group to which one belongs. This threat can cause one to underperform on tasks in the threatened domain. In the case of the female driver, for instance, being confronted with the stereotype that “women can’t drive” can itself provoke impaired performance. The same is true for other groups, and other negative stereotypes.
It is clear, then, that social categorisation is not an inert or neutral process. Rather, it is variable and value-laden, owing to the countless cognitive factors that determine what we categorise, why, and when. These categories structure our experience of ourselves, and the world around us. Just as we create categories, categories create us.