life on planet earth on Stereotypes

Did you know that we are more or less likely to act with prejudice according to the time of day? Daniel Pink, in his excellent work, “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” draws from recent...

Why is it so intimidating to talk about Jesus in contemporary western culture? One obvious reason might lie in the ubiquitous negative portrayals of Christians in mainstream media. Sam Chan makes this...

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, bu...

Did you see the “Smiling Selfie in Auschwitz”? An American teenager touring Auschwitz stirred up a firestorm of criticism when she posted a picture of herself smiling amid a concentration camp (and ev...

September 2018 The Millennial Stereotype There is perhaps no stronger stereotype of the millennial generation than that of “entitled.” For those of us who were born between 1981-1996, we’ve been lab...

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

When I went to seminary to prepare for the ministry, I met an African-American student, Elward Ellis, who befriended both my future wife, Kathy Kristy, and me. He gave us gracious but bare-knuckled me...

As long as we continue to live as if we are what others think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to the need to put peopl...

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come wi...

Doubts are suppressed by groups... But remember that the internal incentives that shape how the group perceives risks and rewards may be very different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the...

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come wi...

We are what we believe we are.

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of dis...

I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought; in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.

It’s been said that our identity is that which is identical about us in every situation. Identity. Identical. Yet that doesn’t help much because we are composite people, bundles of competing desires a...

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

For most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some political scien...

Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and th...

I am programmed to expect that the world is what I can see, touch, and measure.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

“The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Core beliefs can be hard to change because they’ve generally been with us for a long time, and we assume that they’re true. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to changing our core beliefs is that they are s...

Attitudes are more important than facts