(24) 글의 제목으로 가장 적절한 것은?
Douglas Hofstadter is a scholar who writes about stereotypical thinking. He discusses what he calls default assumptions. Default assumptions are (a)
preconceived notions about the likely state of affairs — what we assume to be true in the absence of specific information. Given no other information, when I mention “secretary,” you are likely to assume the secretary is a woman, because “woman” and “secretary” are associated stereotypically. In the absence of specific details, people rely on the stereotype as a default assumption for filling in the (b)
blanks. Default assumptions have a tendency, in Hofstadter’s words, to “permeate our mental representations and channel our thoughts.” For instance, given the words “cat,” “dog,” and “chases,” you are likely to think first of a dog chasing a cat. This line of thought (c)
reflects a default assumption that, all else being equal, the dog is more likely to chase the cat than the other way around.
Default assumptions are rooted in our socially learned associative clusters and linguistic categories. They are (d)
useless in that people cannot always afford the time it would take to consider every theoretical possibility that confronts them. Nonetheless, default assumptions are often wrong. Default assumptions are only one type of language-based categorization. Hofstadter is particularly interested in race-based and gender-based categorization and default assumptions. For instance, if you hear that your school basketball team is playing tonight, do you assume it’s the men’s team? Most people would assume so unless a qualifier is (e)
added to provide specific information. In this case, the qualifier would be “the women’s basketball team is playing tonight.”
* permeate: 스며들다 ** cluster: 무리 *** qualifier: 수식어
① Quest for Novelty: Our Survival Instinct
② Gossip as a Source of Social Information
③ The Bias Behind Stereotypical Assumptions
④ The More Information, The More Confusion
⑤ Creativity: Free from the Prison of Our Assumptions