We not only grow up with standardized pictures forming inside of us, but as grown-ups we are constantly having them thrust推进 upon us. Some of them, like the half-joking, half-serious stereotypes of mothers-in-law岳母, or country yokels乡下佬，土包子, or psychiatrists精神病医生, are dinned into us by the stock jokes陈腐的笑话 we hear and repeat. In fact, without such stereotypes, there would be a lot fewer jokes. Still other stereotypes are perpetuated by the advertisements we read, the movies we see, the books we read.

我们不仅在成长的过程中在内心形成各种标准化的看法，而且长大后还不停地让它们攻陷我们。它们中的一些模式，比如那些关于丈母娘、乡巴佬、精神病医生的半开玩笑半认真的模式化看法通过那些我们听到然后转述的陈腐笑话呗我们吸收了。事实上，如果没有这些陈见，笑话便会少很多了。还有其它的一些模式化看法是从我们读的广告、看的电影、读的书中打入我们脑海的。

And finally, we tend to stereotype because it helps us make sense out of a highly confusing world, a world which William James once described as "one great, blooming, buzzing confusion." It is a curious fact that if we don’t know what we’re looking at, we are often quite literally unable to see what we’re looking at. People who recover their sight after a lifetime of blindness actually cannot at first tell a triangle from a square. A visitor to a factory sees only noisy chaos where the superintendent sees a perfectly synchronized标准？ flow of work. As Walter Lippmann has said, "For the most part we do not first see, and then define; we define first, and then we see."

最后，我们选择模式化还因为它帮助我们认识让人高度困惑的世界。威廉·詹姆斯曾将世界描述为“一个巨大的、茁壮成长的、膨胀的谜团”。一个奇怪的事实是如果我们不知道我们看的东西，我们通常压根就看不懂它。那些一直失明的人在恢复视力后一开始时甚至不能区分三角形和正方形。一位工厂的游客只能看到混乱的景象，而管理者看到的则是工作在完全标准化的进行。正如李普曼先生所言：“在大多数时候，我们不是先观察再定义；我们先下定义，再去观察”。

Stereotypes are one way in which we "define" the world in order to see it. They classify the infinite variety of human beings into a convenient handful of "types" towards whom we learn to act in stereotyped fashion. Life would be a wearing 磨损process if we had to start from scratch with each and every human contact. Stereotypes economize on our mental effort by covering up the blooming, buzzing confusion with big recognizable cut-outs图案. They save us the "trouble" of finding out what the world is like—they give it its accustomed look.

模式化正是我们我们为了观察世界而给其下定义的一种方式。它们将各种各样的人类划分为常规的几种类型，然后再对这几种类型进行模式化的对待。如果我们和每个人交往时都要从零开始，生活将变得疲惫不堪。模式化通过用大而易识别的图案覆盖发展、膨胀的谜团来使我们的精力付出有效率。它们免去了我们发现世界是什么样的麻烦，它们给出了世界的常规样子。