Susan Boyle: Prejudice and Suprise

See the ugly side of humans in this video. (Embed disabled; please click and go to the youtube site to watch)

Humans are often prejudicial in daily lives. Prejudice, in turn, is often a result of stereotyping. Stereotyping is not something bad/fault. It is a way to ease the work of human brains. By stereotyping all humans, billions of people can be classified into several hundreds classes only. Obviously it saves a lot of memory.

I believe I don’t have to give examples of stereotypes; there are already too many. In this story, apparently, when a normal-looking (many say ugly), overweight women stood on the stage and said she wanted to be a singer, everyone scoffed. Everyone stereotyped her as somebody who couldn’t sing (very much like William Hung), and was prejudiced against her. Therefore, when Ms. Susan sang rather well, everyone was surprised, and in the end the three judges gave a big big big approval for her.

I, too, stereotype people. When I see women of Susan’s size standing on stage, I expect them to sing quite well! (unless they were already talking with croaky voices) To be fair, she sang OK and all that, but I’m not sure why the Britains were shouting and clapping half of the time, making so much noise and drowning her voice altogether. So I couldn’t be so sure as to whether she sang GOOD enough to receive such a big approval from the judges.

The conclusion is, when we have low expectations for someone and that someone outperformed our expectations, we feel surprised, slightly embarrassed (for having low expectations for that someone), and we thought that someone did very well! When we have high expectations and that someone barely reached our expectations, we thought it was just acceptable afterall. Below is a diagram illustrating my conclusion.

If you’ve ever had this feel of people only modestly satisfied with you even though you have worked hard, feel free to look at this diagram, and be glad that people are having a lot of expectations on you, therefore placing a lot of trust and responsibility on you. I kindly present this graph as a gift to our new Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

May this graph motivate you (everyone) to work harder! :)