9 Posts found for Author: Walter Lippmann

Prejudice can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them, and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior

A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society.

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien… Were … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Relationships

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Thought | Inquiry

Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.

Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:

For the most part we do not first

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge

With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular—not whether it will work … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

It is said that since the invention of the steam engine we live in a new era, an era so different from all preceding ages that the cultural tradition is no longer relevant, is in fact misleading. I submit to you that this is a rationalization, that this is a pretended reason for the education void which we now call education. The real reason, I … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society