Good afternoon everybody, here stand Steven and today I’d like to share some of my points of view about stereotype.
The term stereotype actually derives from the Greek words stereos, which means firm and solid, and typos, which means impression, hence solid impression.
You may wonder why i choose this weird topic, and i will tell you that it is the survival game we played yesterday that evokes my thoughts of stereotype. The rule of the game is quite simple: we 9 pairs of different professions are on an isolated island which just came across a devastating catastrophe, and only 3 pairs can survived while the others should be thrown into the sea for lacking of resources. What we need to do is to explain the reason why the pairs we stand for shall be the survival. We had some common professions, such as doctors and teachers, but we had some strange ones also, like businessmen, or even much more weird, like babysitters. What i was interested in was that everyone seemed to forget we were on a deserted island. So why could businessmen buy those daily necessary to support us and how could doctors do surgical care for patients? In fact, stereotype makes that possible.
Just like what i said, negative, or even neutral stereotype may lead you to come up with a bad idea. Just try to think about this question, am i young, or is Mr. Ng old? So virtually how old is really old? What’s more, do you think older people are in poor health, or do you think older people are rigid? Yes. Nobody can give old a definite definition, and the old are not that weak in our mind, all of definitions we define by ourselves and the conclusions we draw on the old come from stereotype. So that's why we have a so-called retired age even though those ready-to-retires are still potential employees.
Seems like the evidence is too abstract so let's see an interesting one. Suppose we have a function p(x) and every coefficient guarantees an integer. Every time you input an X the function will respond with the value of p(x). So how many times will you try at least to get every coefficient? Of course, n times accroding to Viete theorem but obviously it is not the least. Seems impossible but actually only twice will be okay. Look, first time we should try 1, and then we will get p(1), which is also the sum of all coefficients. Let s=p(1). Then we input s+1, we got p(s+1)=an*(s+1)^n+an-1*(s+1)^(n-1)..+a0. So far p(s+1) has nothiong to do with identifying the coefficents but once we change its base from 10 to s+1, then every digits of that number will be the answer to this "impossible" question.
With thinking deeper, i wondered, since negative and neutral stereotype may grow troublesome, what about the positive one? I search it with Google and i found an interesting experiment done by 2 psychologists. They picked up some math and engineering students randomly and divided them into 2 groups, and asked them to take a difficult math test. They told one group that this test aimed at finding out the reason why Asians were scoring better in math. This group performed significantly worse than the control group.
I was confused at the first sight i saw the result. But soon i realized that the positive stereotype can really be harmful. Asians may be supposed to be smarter than the rest of students and particularly good at math, but what about those who just aren't? They're going to have to deal with a lot of false expectations and assumptions. So the pressure will be increased and the scores fall without any doubts.
All in all, though stereotype acquired in our early childhood under the influence of parents, teachers, media, we should always keep our mind clear and try to ask ourselves about why the thing should be like it seems like, so that we can avoid those unwise decisions.
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