Gabrielle Hunt - Space Trilogy 1

Gabrielle Hunt

26 March 2012

Space Trilogy 1

Stereotypes and Schemas

“He saw nothing but colours—colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.” – Chapter 7, Out of the Silent Planet

These sentences really struck me as I was reading, and took me back to a class I took at my old college, before I transferred here to CNU. I believe the class was Psychology as a Social Science, where we were discussing the psychological purpose of stereotypes.

                If you’ve spent any significant amount of time with a child, you learn that they’re still figuring out the world they live in, even more than we are. With the child I was a nanny to, every animal is “dogga.” Watching PraiseBaby videos elicited as many excited comments as the Westminster Dog Show might have, despite that PraiseBaby videos have very few dogs; most of the animals shown are farm animals. Abby’s “stereotype”/“schema” for “dogga” was some legs (how many is unspecified), strange skin colors, and non-human (though this is negotiable if the creature in question happened to be in a furry costume). She hadn’t yet learned to distinguish between dogs and cows, horses, sheep, chickens, birds, pigs, and many other creatures. She was still refining her schema.

                As we age, we learn how to more skillfully apply our stereotypes. We can discern between different breeds of dogs. We can quickly read even the most unexpected situations and come to relatively accurate conclusions. Seeing giant faces protruding from a mountain doesn’t confuse us because we’ve learned from experience what stone looks like, the color of the sky, and what trees growing on stone usually mean. We can come to the conclusion that this is not the petrified remains of Siamese quadruplets, but actually enormous faces carved into stone. If you’ve grown up in America, you should be able to label this Mount Rushmore, a national monument.

                When Ransom arrives on this new planet, Malacandra, with only his Earthen stereotypes in mind, he is at first unable to identify what he is looking at. The colors are too soft, the shapes all wrong, the sounds and smells and shadows ‘off’ in some drastic way, for someone only accustomed to Earth’s landscapes. Everything about this new world is so unfamiliar that at first he cannot even judge the shapes of things, all he can see is colors. He must quickly and somewhat consciously adjust his Earth stereotypes to suit this new world. Grass doesn’t have to be green or brown, water and sky don’t have to be blue, mountains don’t have to be low and triangular. By expanding his stereotypes to include more specifics and contingencies, he becomes psychologically more adaptable.