How Messaging Builds Stereotypes About People and Pets

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Stereotypes Series 2 of 5

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“If you show a person as one thing over and over again, this is what they become… If all we see is how poor people are it becomes impossible to imagine them as anything else, their poverty becomes the single story… The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. ” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) from her TED talk, The danger of a single story

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Stereotypes show up in everyday messaging and storytelling - writing and images.  They do not come with a warning label - Stereotype alert! They swirl around us and fuel our mindsets about people and pets in unconscious ways.

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Four Factors Driving Stereotypes

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1- Personal Experiences

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We have interactions - positive or negative - with a few people that lead us to generalize about a whole group.^, For example, if we interact with one or two people from a particular neighborhood who do not like community cats, we may think it’s not a “cat friendly” neighborhood. Then we make assumptions about which kinds of programs, like TNVR, may or may not work.

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Or, if we’ve seen families with young kids behave badly with animals, we may worry about placing pets in homes with kids. Then we turn away caring adopters just because they have children and drive those families to get a pet from somewhere else, including places that may not have good animal welfare practices. Assumptions can influence policies and entire program strategies. Individual experiences can lead us to assume everyone that shares a characteristic will think and act the same way.

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2 - Media Influence

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Mass media, including movies, television shows, news outlets, and social media, often portray exaggerated or simplified characteristics of certain groups. We often tune into media that reinforces the stereotypes we believe in rather than those that challenge our assumptions. These portrayals can reinforce existing stereotypes or create new ones.

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For example, in the media, Black men are overrepresented as criminals and prone to violence and underrepresented in positive social roles. The result is that frequent negative stories about Black men have negative consequences such as increased prejudice and decreased support for ideas and policies that would be beneficial for many  people. If most stories we’ve seen about Black men are negative, these feelings and ideas can unconsciously influence how we think about adopters, staff, and members of our community. We don’t even realize these negative associations are happening. On the flip side, more accurate portrayals of Black men, especially those that directly counter negative stereotypes, have been shown to result in more positive outcomes and attitudes.

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3- Family & Peers

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Stereotypes can be passed down through generations within families or learned from peers. People learn stereotypes from those they trust or respect, not realizing they are stereotypes and assuming they are a well-known truth. For example, if we start working or volunteering at an organization, we learn a lot of stereotypes from management and trusted colleagues – like “people in that neighborhood don’t take care of their animals”.  Or “no one who works at that shelter really cares about saving animals.”

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Our organizations often pass down stories of people as facts and reasons for certain policies. For example, because someone in the Military was deployed and came in to surrender their pet, we have a rule about not adopting to service members. Or we’ve had older adults surrender their young, energetic dogs saying they were “too much” to handle, so now people of a certain age can’t adopt young animals from us. As new staff and volunteers enter the animal care workforce, we can easily pass on stereotype thinking and perpetuate the harm it causes.

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4 - Influential Personalities

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There are people we don’t have direct contact with that we admire, trust, and respect. These influential individuals may be celebrities, political leaders, or well-known people in our sector. We have come to trust them and when they say something, we believe it is true.

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This can be a big problem when influential personalities lie or get the facts wrong. For example, if we don’t get to know people from certain groups, we are left to believe what we hear from someone else. Because we don’t know the alternative, we don’t realize that the “facts” being shared are wrong.

For example, organizations have been labeled as “good” or “bad” because of their euthanasia rates. The reality is that an organization’s rate of euthanasia is based on many factors like local budgets and legislation, the demographics of the animal population, whether pet families can access care for their animals, and the decisions that are made about programs and services provided in a community. In addition, closed intake or managed intake organizations may have a lower euthanasia rate than organizations that are open intake, depending on the number and type of animals taken in. When compassionate, hard-working people are labeled as “evil” because of a single statistic, entire organizations can be demonized, and good people are forced out of jobs. Wrongly attacking people and organizations hinders our ability to care for animals and ensure community safety.

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For all these reasons stereotypes run deep, and getting to the root of changing narratives about them requires ongoing work.  Replacing stereotypes is not a one and done effort - it is an ongoing practice of repeating and reinforcing better messaging and stories.

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Keep Reading

This blog is part 2 in our 5 part series on stereotypes. Check out the next one...

--> The Real Harm of Stereotypes in Animal Work

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Acknowledgement

Thank you to our content reviewers and SPARC Advisory Committee, especially Dr. Azalia Boyd of the Critters & Cultures podcast, for ideas and insights contained within this blog and other blogs in the series on stereotypes.

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