Question

What are the two large approaches to understanding human categorization (why have the categories we do) what’s an example

Answer 1

• Social categorization occurs when we think of someone as a man (versus a woman), an old person (versus a young person), a Black person (versus an Asian or White person), and so on.
• Two large human categorizations we use are race,religion and culture or even ethnic differences.Racial categorization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in our judgments and perceptions of ourselves and others.The human races were invented by anthropologists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach back in the 18th century in an attempt to categorise new groups of people being encountered and exploited as part of an ever expanding European colonialism.
• From the very beginning, the arbitrary and subjective nature of race categories was widely acknowledged. Most of the time races were justified on the grounds of cultural or language differences between groups of people rather than biological ones.
• Today, the idea of classifying people based on their skin color is still a popular belief, though political correctness has become a serious issue.
• Ethnic groups are commonly used when categorizing people. Ethnic groups may be used as categorizations, even if race is a stereotypical characteristic of the ethnic group, e.g. with African-Americans or Anglo-Indians.
• An example of race is brown, white, or black skin (all from various parts of the world), while an example of ethnicity is German or Spanish ancestry (regardless of race)
• You are much more likely to think it is necessary to classify people based on race if you grow up in a politically conservative environment than if you grow up in a politically liberal environment.
• The reason that this type of classification matters is that classifying people into a group brings along the belief that the members of that group share some essential characteristics.
• Categorizing groups of people is a way to minimize processing resources. According to evolutionary psychology, humans do things - unconsciously - that take the least energy, but has the most benefit. The easier it is to process stimuli, the more we like it because it signals that our environment is safe and familiar. In general, grouping people is a way to organize the world to make it easier to process and is essentially a mechanism to determine friend or foe.
• It is detrimental in the long run for a developed society, which is why I believe education is important to expand our processing resources. Also, dialogue and posing critical thinking questions for people who do tend to group others are important.