Psychology of Media & Technology

A  lesson in the prevalence of cognitive bias and stereotypes.  This is both hilarious and humbling.  How easy we forget that stereotyping isn't borne of malicious intent.  It is a product of the human's brain's efficiency as it tries to sort and categorize information based on experience (i.e. the information that the brain has received to date) so we can make decisions and function.  The problem of traditional audience targeting is that it leads to superficial stereotyping.  The danger of stereotyping is when we assume that our perspective is a shared rather than a work in progress that adapts when (or if) you let new information in.  Marketing stereotypes have a bad habit of becoming a social heuristic, caught like a fly in amber.  They are insidious and ultimately harmful as they start to create unchallenged standards--not just for a generation of 18 to 34 year olds (which ought to be offensive in its own right) but for gender, race, and other categories, like "farmers," "bankers" or, I suppose, even "politicians."   They all dehumanize the members.