Samiul Bashar Samin
Do you think racial stereotypes are false? Are you sure? I’m not asking if you’re sure whether or not the stereotypes are false, but if you’re sure whether or not you think that they are. That might seem like a strange question. We all know what we think, don’t we?
Do we know what we know to be true or what we are told to believe by others what is true. Are people more likely to follow their own beliefs or what the majority of their friends and/or relatives believe??
In the movie Midnight Express, everyone had to walk around a circle in the same direction, when he went against the flow, it upset everyone. It seems when what we believe to be true differs from the accepted belief, regardless of the facts, most people will conform to the accepted belief so as not to upset the good order of things.
It is well established that people sometimes think they have beliefs that they don’t really have. For example, if offered a choice between several identical items, people tend to choose the one on the right. But when asked why they chose it, they confabulate a reason, saying they thought the item was a nicer colour or better quality.
The reason we know our own thoughts better than those of others is simply that we have more sensory data to draw on – not only perceptions of our own speech and behaviour, but also our emotional responses, bodily senses (pain, limb position, and so on), and a rich variety of mental imagery, including a steady stream of inner speech.
Another consequence is that we might be sincerely mistaken about our own beliefs. Return to my question about racial stereotypes. I guess you said you think they are false.People think that the stereotypes are true but also that it is not acceptable to admit this and therefore say they are false. Moreover, they say this to themselves too, in inner speech, and mistakenly interpret themselves as believing it. They are hypocrites but not conscious hypocrites. Maybe we all are.