Texans. Toddlers. Cheerleaders.

Each of those words likely conjures some kind of image in your head. Large belt buckles and Stetsons, spit and sippy cups, short skirts and pom poms. I don’t know. Whatever the image, it is based on a stereotype, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Stereotypes, for all the negative hype, can actually be useful.

Stereotypes are our minds’ way of processing information more quickly. According to Iowa State’s International Community Resources Web site, “Generalizations are a necessary part of the way our brain functions. We are bombarded with a tremendous amount of information on a daily basis, and our brain, to function effectively, creates categories to help us organize all the data being received.”

We can’t look at each individual detail about each individual person and thing. It would take too long and we’d spend all our lives looking, so we take certain traits a group of people shares and use them for a quick reference whenever thinking or talking about that group. That gives us shortcuts we use every day, whether we realize it or not.

Insurance companies use data gathered about groups of people to determine which insurance rate to charge. According to Mark Power, a university professor of finance, there are certain groupings an insurance company cannot use. These include race, which is protected by the Constitution. However, race is not the only place stereotypes exist. Far from it.

Young adult males are charged more for automobile insurance than their female counterparts. What’s the stereotype there? Every young man is reckless and, therefore, gets in more accidents. And according to a New York Times article by Robert Pear, women ages 19 to 55 have higher health insurance premiums than men. Actuaries wiggle their magical brains and come up with numbers to base these premiums on. But that doesn’t mean they’re not stereotypes. All the numbers do is show us that stereotypes really come from somewhere. According to the Iowa Department of Public Health, “average young males aged 15-24 had the highest car occupants death number” from 2000 to 2006. These numbers give the base for the stereotype that helps the insurance company determine its rates. Without that, everyone would have to pay higher rates to cover the money lost when young men get in car accidents.

Another example: As much as we hear how horrible profiling is in airports, it does have its place. I’m not even talking about race or country of origin. Past experience, which is like the numbers in the previous paragraph, shows that certain groups need to be searched less often than others. Babies, for example. There may be — heaven forbid — the occasional diaper bomb, but it’s not the norm. Or the 80-year-old woman with the walker and oxygen tank. She is far less likely to be carrying a weapon than most of the rest of the passengers. But we can only know that through our past experience with older women and the numbers that prove relatively few grandmas have committed violent crimes. The stereotype here is that elderly women aren’t strong and aren’t destructive. That’s not true of every single one. However, it’s a trait they’ve been observed to share. And most of the time, it’s right.

Most of us don’t work at insurance companies or with airport security. So here’s one more, broader, instance of stereotypes’ usefulness: Every time we face a situation involving others, stereotypes help us determine the correct way to behave. Most of us are going to act differently in a group of professors than we would in a group of our peers. That’s because of the basic assumptions — stereotypes! — we have about professors and college students. They’re based on our past experiences and, to some extent, even statistics. According to Jennifer Grossman of the Dole Nutrition Institute, one out of 10 college students consumes 10 or more alcoholic drinks per week. Well, there may be some professors who do that, too, but numbers like that affect the stereotypes our minds make about groups of people and therefore how to deal with them. And it works because stereotypes often hold quite a bit of water.

Of course, some stereotypes are wrong and, ultimately, vicious. You know which ones I’m talking about. But, ultimately, they come from somewhere. If we lived in a perfect world, stereotypes wouldn’t influence how we treat others. But we don’t and they do and they always will. Stereotypes are determined by our culture, but they are part of our human psychology. Life and the decisions we have to make every day would be a lot harder if we didn’t have them.

— Bailey Lewis is a senior in English from Indianola