The British drink tea, the German eat sausages, and the Spanish play bullfighting; but, at the end, we are all humans.

The British drink tea, the German eat sausages, and the Spanish play bullfighting; but, at the end, we are all humans.

David Santos Martinez

Who has never stereotyped? I would dare say no one. We are surrounded by stereotypes and conventionalisms which have a great influence on the decisions we make in our daily lives: standing in a queue, buying a certain product, overacting in some situations… and in the last place, but not less important, we analyze people before knowing them, a phenomenon more commonly known as prejudice.

The appearance of a person, his personality, the way that he talks and moves… are, for us, an incredible source of data that lead us, unconsciously in most cases, to assign a group of features to that person. Furthermore, we base our conjectures in our intuition, or even worse, we don’t have any justification. But the question is, why do we act like this? Apparently, the answer may seem to be easy, but it is, in fact, anything but shallow and simple.

Men have always tended to generalize. Since the beginning of time we have been trying to classify everything: animal, plants, matter… There is an innate quality in our minds that make us search incessantly for a common natural pattern; and while we are still looking for it, what we do is to collect information from our experience and then formulate some kind of general statements. To put it simply: we need to explain everything; and, as it is so, we want even to find a rule for the almost unpredictable behavior of people. We are curious by nature; and sorry, we can not help it. We are always looking forward to find an answer, and we will not stop until we have explained every single process in the universe. How right were the Greeks with the Pandora’s Box myth!

Now we can appreciate that something so usual and mundane as stereotypes and prejudices shows, in the last part, one of the most complex aspects of humanity. Thanks to it we evolve and progress everyday getting, hopefully, closer to a better future.

Remembering the beginning of the text, we can conclude that humans do not stereotype or prejudice to criticize or highlight some negative points, we just do it because we need to organize every into categories, we need to turn the disorder into order; but what we definitely want is to predict how things are going to be.

I can not neither assure nor deny if the British drink tea, the German eat sausages, or the Spanish play bullfighting, but, after almost four months in New Zealand I can say that Kiwis eat fish and chips!