Group Podcast - Science of Bias

The podcast discusses the danger of racial stereotyping in films and how it affects real-world experiences. They talk about the psychological processes behind stereotypes, such as familiarity and social categorization. Each speaker then shares the stereotypes of their own race in the film industry. They highlight the lack of representation for Asians and the homogenization of Asian characters. They also discuss the harmful effects of colonialism on Filipinos and the perception of whiteness as superior. The issue of limited representation for black characters and the portrayal of stereotypes in films is also discussed. They suggest hiring more diverse people behind the scenes and promoting positive role models to challenge stereotypes and decrease hate crimes. They emphasize the importance of reflecting society accurately in films. Overall, they conclude that changing the portrayal of people of color in films can help change societal views. Hello and welcome to the Slack Girls podcast. My name is Rulika. I'm from Montserrat but I moved to the UK when I was nine. I'm Princess and I grew up in the UK but I was born in the Philippines. I'm Kiki. I grew up in China. And today we'll be discussing the danger of racial stereotyping in films and how that manifests itself in real-world experiences. And also, each of us are going to introduce the stereotypes of our own race in the film industry. We think this is really relevant especially in today's world where there's a lot of talk about representation and specifically films. Everyone watches films, everyone consumes films and this gives us a really big idea of the people around us and that can be really harmful in perpetuating cultural and racial stereotypes. So there's actually several psychological processes behind the formation of stereotypes such as familiarity and social categorization. And since film is such an influential medium to gather this information to form stereotypes, it's really crucial to know about these processes. So of course familiarity, a study by Smith, Miller, and Au 2006 found that repeat exposure to information about a target person reduces individuation and thereby increases stereotyping of the target person based on social group membership rather than their individual personality. So I'm guessing when you see characters in film like POC and you repeatedly see this information about them, you start to think that they're like that. And there's also a study by Shaler in 1991 about social categorization and how participants either assigned to a minority, majority, or unaffiliated group found that people unaffiliated to a minority or majority perceived minority groups with undesirable statements and distinctive behaviors. So I'm guessing since social categorization is already natural to humans, you only socially categorize characters in films with these kind of undesirable statements about their social group. Yeah, and then I will first talk about how my race is related to those films. So I would talk about like Asians and especially like Chinese. So like to be honest, like when I first think about this topic and I was kind of like wondering, is that actually an internationally well-known movie that the main characters are Asians? And then I thought like there are actually several ones, yes, like Parasite or Alien, like everything everywhere all at once. But then I realized that these kind of stories actually talk about the society exclusively about themselves instead of expanding it to a more diverse like race background. And then I also like read some studies about the history of racializations of Asians in films. And in one, like in Tong's study in 2016, it says that Hollywood has created the idea of homogeneous Asian identity over time. And Chinese characters will play Korean characters, and Korean characters will play Chinese characters. And as long as the character is the Asian, then it must be all the same according to Hollywood. And I was thinking about this just really vibrate with the nature of the formation of stereotypes that we really take it as a ground truth that we don't really considering about the individual variability, but just think about the whole group as the same, as one trade essentially. And this actually caging these people of color and in the singular roles. And yeah, that's how we ignore them. Yeah, yeah, and that can be really dangerous, especially when we look at the film industry today. It's still quite white, majority-dominated, and even tracing back historically, a lot of Asian characters and even black characters were either played through yellow face or black face, whereby it wasn't just the white. I can't remember the film, but it wasn't just the Japanese character was actually played by a white man instead of a Japanese man. Yeah, I think when you're referring to yellow face, I think you mean the antagonist from Breakfast at Tiffany's? Yeah, that's it. Audrey Hepburn's neighbor or landlord in that film was a white man being portrayed as a Japanese man. He's being portrayed as bossy and having this broken English accent. So I'm guessing if an Asian audience views that, they would be able to assimilate to Western culture, feeling that they're an outsider. Oh, they're just going to be attributed with broken English with their accent. And that's what they're all about. That's what they're attributed to by white counterparts. So it's just really harmful to how, like a sort of identity crisis, even. Absolutely. And I found a study by the University of Southern California in their inclusion initiatives. And it's really shocking because the top 1,300 grossing films from 2007-2019 found that out of 51,000 speaking characters, only 5.9% were Asian or Pacific Islander. And obviously, this is really shocking. And the most reoccurring actor was actually Dwayne Johnson, who was only famous, you know. So it's just really upsetting to see a lack of representation by upcoming people of color actors. And I feel that if they were on screen, it would be beneficial to people of color audience as they're able to see themselves in movies and to combat these stereotypes attributed to them by white men in the industry. Yeah, and that even really links to colonialism, isn't it? And the mentality that that can create, right? Yeah. So Filipinos, like Filipinos from Philippines, because that's where I'm from, they have a history with colonialism and how we're colonized by Americans back in World War II. And I feel like this gives off a white savior, white is good kind of mentality. And we feel inferior to white people, especially because now that our culture is very mixed in with the Americans to the point that we want to bleach our skin and we're kind of losing our native language, it's just very harmful to seeing our own our own representation as being good because we want to be white. Yeah, like and that is also seen in the black community as well. It's kind of like the whiter you are, the better and anything that differs from that is bad and evil. And you can see it in an undertone in films, like a lot of black characters you see are often they're either a villain or if they're good, they usually have lighter skin as well, which is really dangerous. And you can see that this can kind of play a role in perceptions of younger children, even like in the Ken doll study, they found that black children were more likely to attribute good characteristics to darker to whiter dolls in comparison to darker dolls. And that's really dangerous. And even when black people are like shown in lead roles, they're often the first to die, which is really, really dangerous in that it's like, oh, you know, like, they're easily disposable, they're not as important as white people. And that also plays a really bad role. And, you know, now, nowadays, there are more positive, or it seems positive roles for black people, but it's usually often tokenistic. So usually you have like the black best friend role, you know, yeah, exactly from Clueless, where she's kind of like a side character, she doesn't have a main role, but she's bad, she's kind of just there for comedy, and kind of just there as a token rather than as someone with an identity and a story. So I'm guessing how are we gonna solve this problem since it's such a dire problem, and it can like manifest in real life, especially because film is so influential in the information they portrayed? Yeah, I think so. It's not black and white solution to this. But I think the first point of call is to be hiring more diverse people from different backgrounds, and not just the actors, but also behind the scenes, that includes the studio executives, the directors, the writers, the custom directors, because then they can bring more nuances in terms of the POC characters. And that will really reflect different experiences, because it's not just the white producers who are just portraying what they want to portray, but it's actually reality. And I think that will really help with what we spoke about earlier with the whole identity crisis. And it will help POC audiences to see themselves in film, which is so important, because I think film plays a big role in reflecting society. And so if we can reflect society in a more in a better way, that can really help with stereotypes being more challenged and being more adaptable, so that you can understand that it's not just a social category of Asian, black, white, but also there are nuances. And I think that will really help with interactions in real life too. So you know, like hate crime is very common, and it can be linked back to stereotypes. I think if we have more positive role models for different POC groups, that will really help decrease hate crime. What do you think? And I also feel that movies and TV shows with very diverse cast bring in more to the box office and get higher ratings for audiences. So it's beneficial for the industry as well. It's beneficial for everyone, especially looking at the business side of it, because I feel like especially in the film industry, that's what they seem to care about, the money, the profit. But bringing in diverse cast would benefit audiences, stakeholders, producers, so yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think our conclusion really is that stereotypes are very helpful, and they can come to be due to films. So if we can really change the stereotypes and the experiences that are portrayed through films, then we can really change how people view people of colour in society. Thank you so much.