My mistake at the end of the post I wrote last night is almost embarrassing enough for me to edit out the last couple of paragraphs. I mean, there was really no excuse for me not to take the 5 seconds to google “Nagini Asian woman” to save myself the effort of writing two lengthy ranty paragraphs, in an act of laziness(?) directly due to an 11-years-out-of-date assumption that I’m an expert on all things Harry Potter because I know the books back to front.
I think it’s interesting to self-reflect rationalist-style on what I think is a deeper underlying reason for making an error like this, because it applies to a lot of other people’s errors too. I think this is a case of... I want to call it a certain type of confirmation bias, where after having formed a model of someone or some group of people, everything they do thereafter is interpreted to fit that model.
I first started contemplating this consciously back when I was in grad school and deeply immersed in a tightly-knit social group, and it seemed that at a certain point a less-than-flattering model of how I function was cemented (buffoonishly flaky, inexplicably unable to engage properly in movie/TV stories and strategy games, and super nice to the point of being completely ineffectual at being tough). It seemed that after being cemented in this mold, and only after that point in time, a lot of fairly innocuous things I did were distorted to fit it.
It was interesting to note that the effect of this fallacy on my image wasn’t purely negative. For instance, I recall that one time, when at a restaurant with a group of my friends, something I said to the waitress came out very unintentionally rude in such a way that it would have been super awkward to try to apologize for it (instead I left her a very big tip). This caused a reasonable stir on the day that it happened, and we all laughed over it a bit, but it was almost never mentioned again after that. I remember bringing it up a couple of years later to one of my friends who had been there, and after taking a moment to place the event I was referring to, she said something like, “Oh yeah, I’d completely forgotten about your asshole moment that one time.” Now I’m pretty sure that if one of the moderately meaner and ruder people in our circle had made that kind of faux pas, it would have become a legendary, oft-recalled tale illustrating what a jerk they really were*. But because everyone’s model of me is about as non-asshole as it’s possible to get, I can get away with an (unintentional) asshole moment or two without being reminded of it in my circle for years to come the way I was about my moments of buffoonish incompetence.
(This was also around the time of the 2012 presidential election, and I came to see a parallel between fitting my every action into an already-cemented model of me as incompetent and fitting Mitt Romney’s every remark into an already-cemented model of him as a privileged douche and Republican-therefore-misogynist; e.g. his infamous “binders full of women” comment.)
Now in the case of last night’s post, I was fitting something I saw to a model not of an individual person (I’d never encountered the OP before as far as I can remember) but of an online subculture I perceived from their content and tone that irritates me -- that of a millennial-or-younger on the internet very self-assuredly picking on some work of fiction, often which originally came from a period they’re too young to remember, for being Problematic in a self-righteous tone (in this case, I’d characterize the tone as slightly more subtle and sophisticated than self-righteous, but I pattern-matched it to blatant self-righteousness anyway). Evidently I have low expectations of the reasonableness of members of that subculture while practicing their craft of criticizing Problematic things, because I (mostly) assumed that the “Asian woman turning into Nagini” thing must have an explanation that made next to zero sense. (And indeed I still think some of their other bulletpoints were unreasonable.) The moment I learned of another explanation, it immediately seemed obvious to me that of course nobody would come up with that nonsensical of a non-Problematicness-violation even if that subculture can be pretty unreasonable from time to time. I had cemented a model of Problematic Fiction Watchdogs On The Internet and subconsciously tried to fit what I was reading into that model.
I guess that when we’re talking about the version involving models of groups rather than individuals, we can call it just plain old prejudice. Either way, I think it’s something all of us do and should try to be aware of.
*Of course, if they were really extremely prone to incessant blatant nastiness and rudeness, then people would start to tune out most instances of it. Exhibit A: our current president.
