The Most Peace-Loving Nation? Our Own Of Course

Te Ao Hou, March 1959, Page 41

The Most Peace-Loving Nation? Our Own Of Course The “self-image” is also revealing. The British saw themselves as peace-loving, brave, hard-working, intelligent; the French saw themselves as intelligent, peace-loving, generous, and brave; the Americans saw themselves as peace-loving, generous, intelligent and progressive. All the groups agreed on one item: their own nation was the most peace-loving of all! Few people realize how much the existence of stereotypes may colour our relations with other people, even to the extent of seeing them differently as a result. What we see is determined in part by what we expect to see. If we believe, for example, that Italians are noisy, we will have a tendency to notice those Italians who are indeed noisy; if we are in the presence of some who do not fit the stereotype, we may not even realize that they, too, are Italian. If someone points that fact out to us and says: “Look, those people are Italians, and they are not noisy”, we can always dismiss them as exceptions. Since there is no limit to the number of cases that can be so dismissed, we may continue to cling to the pictures in our heads, in spite of all the facts to the contrary. This does not always happen. Stereotypes do sometimes change in the light of new experience, and evidence for this is presented later. If we have had them for a long time, however, we surrender them with great reluctance.