Stereotypes are good
Cliches, tropes, and stereotypes (oh, my).
Branding leverages this stuff to steer first impressions.
Smart people have even identified and named the psychology behind this: the Representativeness Heuristic:
This heuristic describes how you might misjudge the probability of an event by finding a similar known event and basing your judgment on their similarity...
For example, if you meet someone who is shy and likes reading, you might think it is more likely that they are a librarian than a farmer because these traits fit the stereotype of a librarian, despite the fact that there are many more people with these characteristics who are farmers than librarians.
Under the influence of the representativeness heuristic...our judgments are skewed by how much an individual resembles our mental image of a certain category.
We're talking about mental shortcuts. That’s all.
This is the reason a ton of chicken shops have a chicken mascot in their logo. When you see a logo like this, you know they're cooking up some fire chicken.
You don't fall into an introspective spiral thinking about the logic behind a business wanting you to eat their mascot and why don't they use a mascot that makes more sense?
It doesn’t need to make sense. It doesn’t need to be based on logic because a lot of the shit we do just ain't logical.
It just needs to work.
✌️Rvw
P.S. Leveraging mental shortcuts totally opens the door for misrepresentation. So maybe we talk about that another day?
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