Variety is more important than you think.
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Discriminate, prejudge, get carried away by stereotypes... all are useful strategies to address the complexity of a world full of information when we do not have the keys and necessary information.
These strategies would be something like compasses or even more or less accurate signs of the place where some paths end. We will discover reality when we tread those paths. Furthermore, although these strategies are not the best way to get to know someone (it is better to do it through a long interaction), given the limited time we have to form an idea of the other, they can be very effective strategies: It would be enough, for example, for the other person to say seven words.
The 7 words
Given that there is an enormous amount of information around us and processing it would require more time than we have in our own existence, we allow ourselves to be carried away by hunches, by prejudices, by emotional inertia. This is not necessarily bad (it allows us to live), what is worrying is that we use wrong or too superficial shortcuts. Or that we get stuck in those first impressions and are unable to overcome them when new information arrives..
When classifying social class, ethnicity, age or gender, in fact, little is needed. Just seven words, as suggested This studio of 2019.
In one of the five experiments carried out, a group of 27 people were asked to pronounce 7 words chosen at random. On the other hand, other volunteers were asked to listen to them and classify the speakers according to these four categories, obtaining the following success rates:
- 55.5 % for social class
- 64.1 % for ethnicity
- 66.3 % for age
- 92.4 % for gender
Additionally, college-educated volunteers They correctly identified almost all of the people in the experimental group with university studies.
As you can see in the following video, which details this study in more detail, these heuristics can also feed a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; It is inevitable to prejudge, it is inevitable to make mistakes. The avoidable thing is that, once we know the other person, we are flexible enough to adjust our opinion of them based on these new input data (by the way, the thumbnail image is from Ivana Trump):
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The news
You only have to say 7 words to be classified according to your social class, ethnicity, gender and age
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
It's certainly too expensive for us to visit them.
«
Mens sana in corpore sano
». Así al menos lo han creído muchos científicos a lo largo de la historia. Entre ellos se encuentra el matrimonio Curie que dedicó el dinero que les dio uno de sus primos, como regalo de boda, para comprarse dos bicicletas….
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We should have paid more attention.