'Dumb American'
This is part of a series of posts of my reflections or projections (or both) upon completing my first year of living in Munich.
This year I had the experience of having someone express they thought I was a ‘Dumb American’ (not to me but behind my back) without our having spoken for more than two minutes. Essentially, we met for a minute or two, I offered her coffee, tea or water (she declined), sometime in these moments she judged me to be a Dumb American, and an hour or two later she felt her judgment with enough certitude to express to our mutual friend that she judged me so. I learned this the next day. To note: she was an educated refugee to the US and professed a love for our country; I have barely been called American (naturalized in 2017), let alone dumb, though of course I often do and think many dumb things.
[To give a full and more honest picture, there are potential motivations why else she may have wanted to share negative judgments of me to our mutual friend: she has been involved with him for a few years, and I was at the time very close friends with him. There is even the possibility that he may have said something bad about me to her since he was trying to assure her that there was nothing between him and me to make sure she would be willing to be with him during her annual visit. I have reason to doubt this latter chain of events, though, because he insisted to me that he defended my intellect and character to her, and I have no prima facie reason to suspect he was lying to me.]
I think these external motivations to negatively judge me entails only that she formed a negative judgment, not which one in fact formed. I think that a significant contributing factor as to which negative judgment she formed of me has to do with me and how I behave: my stereotypically American (though many of my American friends are very shy), garrulous (and extreme) extroversion and (in her perception, probably superficial) warmth with which I greeted her into my home.
As an extrovert in every of the various ways of defining the term and a flamboyant one at that, it was always difficult being labeled nerdy in school because it comes associated with shutting up and being an aside. In my personal narrative (which is likely flawed given that everyone’s personal narrative seems to cut many corners for themselves, but), I broke out of this label upon attending Princeton where we were mostly all nerds, and the people with whom I chose to surround myself accepted the authenticity of my vivacity and interpreted the content of what I said instead of the way in which I said it to gauge my intelligence. It was rather a shock to me that a US-American would stereotype me in such a way and so quickly without sufficient or substantial evidence, if any. This experience triggered conversations between me and several of my friends (mainly Ainsley, Celina, and Mauricio).
Certain qualities associated with extroversion have positive consequences. For example, being personable, agreeable, making jokes to make others laugh-these often contribute to social cohesion and are also traits highly associated with being successful in school and business settings. They certainly are the paradigmatic traits that allow one to be good at networking (though I am not good at this due to my moral objections to having thoughts conducive for networking, e.g. accepting the proposition “using people primarily as means to an end is an acceptable form of social interaction”); all in all, the current social order encourages extrovert qualities for a successful person in academic and professional settings which entail social behavior. Introvert qualities lose out in these settings. For example, as a paradigmatic introvert, social events and their social demands are supposed to exhaust you and thus your internal state prevents you from a full sort of social performance because you need alone time for yourself either to recharge or to feel more at ease. What have I to complain about being so thoroughly an extrovert?
As was alluded to already, it seems as though each branch of this dichotomy has taken up in their helms another division in mental associations. Let’s contemplate the social butterfly, the class buffoon, the quiet nerd… you get it. Despite all the negative stereotypes that introverts face (antisocial, anxious, depressed, boring, etc.), they are also assigned the stereotype of being intelligent as opposed to the extrovert who, naturally, receives the converse: being stupid. While I certainly believe that it is important for us to fight the negative stereotypes we hold of introverts, I set aside introvert issues as outside the scope of this post.
The experience with the Dumb American label is the most striking example of the few instances this past year wherein people have negatively stereotyped me as an idiot without any substantial evidence other than my mannerisms. A few of my good friends have told me a few weeks after our introduction that they have been surprised by my intellect because their initial impression of me was that of a jokester. There was no need for them to further explain the association between being a jokester and being unintelligent. {An aside: I find it also interesting that saying jokes that make people laugh is in our society associated with idiocy, given that cultivating the skill to make people laugh often requires a high aptitude.}
These experiences and conversations suggest to me that there is a not insignificant cost to my personality-one that makes people take me less seriously at the beginning of their acquaintance with me and occasionally allows them even to feel justified in insulting me behind my back. Here I find myself with the need to make a decision.
(1) EITHER I can adjust my behaviors that particularly contribute to these negative consequences so as to prevent people with strong stereotypes in their cognitive framework (this particular girl was a Ph.D. candidate at a good school, by the way) from finding any reason to think of me this way,
(2) OR I can not do that and accept that there will always be people who form negative opinions of me from evidence they deem relevant, background assumptions, or other conscious or subconscious motivations.
Given how I honestly do care how I rub off on people and do care to keep behaving freely, I don’t know how I ought to proceed. If there were a serious problem (e.g. moral offensiveness) with my personality I would not hesitate to change the ways in which it manifests. The analysis has, however, nothing to do with morality but on practical or personal identity concerns. Thus, I have no immediate conclusions and your suggestions are welcome.
The immediate conclusions I do have are that it seems as though everyone, including my friends whose opinions and intellect I regard highly, is susceptible to making quick judgments on others based on unsubstantiated impressions. Therefore, I in all likelihood am also susceptible to the same faulty cognitive process. Thus, I should be more careful in the ways in which I formulate my thoughts and opinions so that I don’t commit the same epistemically irresponsible mistake with others like the girl did with me.
