Seeing someone you think of as “like you” represented in media as a person with agency helps you believe in yourself.
But seeing someone you think of as “unlike you” portrayed sympathetically in media can help reduce prejudice.
Both good reasons for increasing diversity in media.
From what I’ve read, combatting implicit bias through intellectual argument doesn’t work well because bias is not an intellectual process. We may understand intellectually that its wrong but we still react with implicit bias despite our best intentions. But engaging emotions does work to change bias. That would seem to fit with this article’s ideas. Engaging people emotionally with fictional characters combats bias where it lives, in the emotions not in the reasonable part of us.
From what I’ve read, combatting implicit bias through intellectual argument doesn’t work well because bias is not an intellectual process. We may understand intellectually that its wrong but we still react with implicit bias despite our best intentions. But engaging emotions does work to change bias. That would seem to fit with this article’s ideas. Engaging people emotionally with fictional characters combats bias where it lives, in the emotions not in the reasonable part of us.
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