Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
I love a good lecture.
This is also what I’m talking about whenever I mention the racist influence US media has on countries where the percentage of black people is extremely low. I see more black people on tv every day than I do on the streets in a decade. If you keep showing me that they’re mostly angry, uneducated thugs…
Representation matters globally when your media has a global reach.
Tag: brains
so i fell asleep at my desk for a few seconds and woke up abruptly to the thought “WHO CARES!? THESE ARE ASSLESS CHAPS!!!” burning through my mind
i dont understand
It’s ok, I woke up two weeks ago to slapping my knuckles over my desk, and swore loudly. Only problem was that I suddenly had a thick Brooklyn accent, and thought I was a 1940s mobster for 30 seconds upon waking.
I LOVE STUFF LIKE THIS?
I did the same thing once, where when I woke up I seriously thought I was Superman for at least a good minute or so. I was reaching for my phone thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve been hiding it this whole time, I’ve gotta tell my boyfriend I’m superman.” And as I was very tiredly and sloppily writing the text I stopped what I was doing and was like, “What the fuck.”
Yes. More. I need more stories.
one morning i woke up absolutely convinced that my mom had faked her husbands death for tax purposes and i was so mad cuz i had to go to his stupid funeral with his dumb family and i thought we had finally gotten rid of him all for it to be a lie then like half an hour later im like “wait…” I told her about it later and she told me faking his death wouldnt have done much for her tax wise at all
Mine are always like “Oh fuck someone I love has died.” which is pretty scary to wake up to. But my favorite wtf one is that I woke up and I expected to wake up like at 12pm, I’d set an alarm for it etc….
I woke up at 8pm.
My immediate reaction to it being dark outside?
“Oh fuck it’s nuclear winter”
I once dreamed that I was a pirate tying a lot of knots for sail-hoisting purposes. Woke up to find that I’d wrapped our kitten in about three blankets. He wouldn’t sleep within arm’s reach of me for two years after that.
Another time, I was woken up by lightning striking a tree in our yard, and I genuinely thought I was somewhere to do with cannons for about 10 seconds.
And then there was that time I was dreaming about boring house things, walked outside, found a canyon in our yard, woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, went outside, saw a flying saucer, woke up, got out of bed, had breakfast, and spent the whole day quietly expecting that I was about to wake up.
Brains are weird and sometimes they forget how to reality.
Oh my god I love this.
My sister once went and woke up or dad to ask for lunch money and he asked her if she’d gotten the rubies yet and she said no and he told she had to get the rubies first and so she left and came back a little while later to ask again and he asked her if she’d gotten the rubies yet and she said yes and he told her okay and that she could take the $10 in his wallet.
I once had a dream that my house (and everything in it) was being claimed by loan sharks because I was so poor/in debt/or something, in my dream. I then woke up panicking/crying and looking around, confused as to why everything was still in my room. It took at least 20 seconds for me to figure out why.
I came out of like 1 second of microsleep with the idea that Plants vs. Zombies had introduced a Charging Mooseflower.
I once woke up, and very deliberately bashed my head into the wall. For some reason I thought that was really important to do.
mine are always like weird random phrases that are just in my head and seem vitally important like one time i woke and thought to myself “a dead man’s mouth must taste like cabbage”
once while in a hotel room i had a nightmare about trying to escape from a nuclear apocalypse. i failed, and got asploded. my mental movie screen went black for a long moment, and then i woke up to see the words SHIT HAPPENS written on the hotel room wall in cheerful birthday cake cursive.
i stared at this for what felt like a good 15 minutes, checking that yes i was definitely awake, my spouse was snoring behind me, i was in the hotel room where i was supposed to be, and yet the words were definitely right there… until suddenly they weren’t, and it was just the shadow of a tree outside.
being wide awake in every way except the shadows are randomly making fun of your cold war PTSD… that was the weirdest goddamn morning.
I have woken up and punched the nearest wall to my bed on several occasions
Another time I woke up and head butted a wall
I woke a friend up for work once and she was just like “so it’s time to make the shields for the invasion?” She didn’t understand why I was laughing for like 3 minutes
I was on holiday in Japan about three months after I finished my masters degree, and woke up at about 4am absolutely convinced I had an assignment due in the morning that I’d not yet started or submitted… to the point that I got out of bed, turned my laptop on and was about to start it. It only then occurred to me, when staring at the backlit screen, that the degree ended months ago, that I was not in my bedroom, and I was in another bloody country trying to relax.
I once woke up to the fire alarm and a room filled with smoke, only to realize five panic stricken seconds later that it was a car alarm outside and I was staring at my white wall.
i woke up in my hotel room in australia to someone having pulled the fire alarm but i was completely convinced it was a tsunami alarm and that I could see the wave right outside the window and i just fuckin bolted out that room and left my family behind and i almost ran straight out the from door until some people in the lobby were like excuse me miss what the hell are you doing
I distinctly remember waking up once and my first, instant thought was the specific phrase “wait…aliens aren’t allowed to ride bicycles…”
I once had a very involved dream about defending a castle with a very large, oddly shaped moat. I woke up with the word “Caerphilly” in my head and the absolute certainty that I needed to get to the castle. My mom thought my subconscious was telling me “carefully,” but I was convinced it was the name of the castle. I googled it. Caerphilly Castle is in Wales. And it has a very large, oddly shaped moat. I have never been to Wales.
I once woke up one morning to see a man’s big hairy leg sticking out from under the covers in my bed. I flipped out for a good few seconds before I realized that it was, in fact, my own unshaven leg.
Incredible
When I was on speech team at my school, they’d make us wake up at exorbitant hours and trek out to schools for tournaments on Saturdays, leaving me with the mental fortitude of a soggy Ritz cracker.
One such day, I was in the room and waiting for the round to finish up, having just performed my own speech. I began to doze when my brain wandered a bit and I started to find myself in a series of half-dreams.
Most were inconsequential. Forgettable. But like an omen, a great warning from the sky, a vision came to me, clear as day. Two men, of indiscriminate build and stature, jumping enthusiastically, their chests slamming together with a mighty thunk, and yelling SALT MEAT.
I wrote the revelation down in my speech notebook immediately.
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