Communicating beyond individual bias

Dennis Tourish

pp. 190-216

in: Ann Long (ed), Interaction for practice in community nursing, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

When we communicate with other people from a standpoint of individual bias, it means that we are failing to recognise the other person as the unique human being he or she is — with all the positive and negative qualities which constitute their own individual personality. Instead, we are viewing them as representative of a broader social category possessed of certain qualities which we dislike, and which we assume are shared by most or all members of that particular social group. In short, we have stereotyped the person concerned ("he or she must be stupid") on the basis of the category to which we have assigned them (he or she may be a nurse, but primarily "he or she is black") and on to which we have projected a number of critical assumptions (such as "all black people are stupid").