At one point he describes typical, responsible Prime-Mortgage customers: man, woman, child, dog. Just before he got to the Sub-Prime customers I briefly wondered how he would visualise irresponsible customers - and got exactly what I expected: lots of children, parents smoking and obviously out of shape, all very disorderly.
This reminded me of how strong our cultural stereotypes are. How else would one draw a pictogram of “irresponsible people”?
How do we picture ourselves? A German design agency - kognito - has sent out a questionnaire to look at cultural pictograms, here is the current state of the vote for different “pictonalities“. The left column shows the country of origin of the voters.
Stereotypes often form the basis of prejudice and are usually employed to explain real or imaginary differences due to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, socio-economic class, disability, occupation, etc.
ReplyDeleteStereotypes can be used to deny individuals respect or legitimacy based on their membership in that group
Ancient Stereotypes