Can we chunk people that way, though? I have difficulty even seeing two people as a unit in my head ... it's easier for me to assign a single trait to many individuals separately than to create a mental category.
While I can say to myself that X, Y, Z, A, B, C are all, say, "coworkers," that doesn't mean that I can assign "coworkers" to a slot and view them as a unit. Almost immediately there will be subcategories -- coworkers I like, coworkers I don't like, coworkers I enjoy working with, coworkers who need to be suspended by a rope over a pit of spikes, and so forth. The category breaks down, and turns from a top-down category into just one more bottom-up trait.
I'm frankly suspicious of the notion that we truly can take an entire category and feel the same emotional strength towards every member of it that we can towards a single person. Remember, throughout history revolutionary movements have had to have an enemy figurehead because people just can't stir up as much hate against anything as nebulous as an organization.
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Date: 2005-04-07 11:35 pm (UTC)While I can say to myself that X, Y, Z, A, B, C are all, say, "coworkers," that doesn't mean that I can assign "coworkers" to a slot and view them as a unit. Almost immediately there will be subcategories -- coworkers I like, coworkers I don't like, coworkers I enjoy working with, coworkers who need to be suspended by a rope over a pit of spikes, and so forth. The category breaks down, and turns from a top-down category into just one more bottom-up trait.
I'm frankly suspicious of the notion that we truly can take an entire category and feel the same emotional strength towards every member of it that we can towards a single person. Remember, throughout history revolutionary movements have had to have an enemy figurehead because people just can't stir up as much hate against anything as nebulous as an organization.