iBigotry

On this campus where capital-d Diversity is bludgeoned over our heads with a stick also reserved for online tuition reminders, it’s hard to remember a time when social hierarchies were defined by a single extracurricular activity such as, you know, high school. Those were simple times – we all knew, for example, yearbook was controlled by people who didn’t matter and had to validate their existences by placing themselves throughout the book. But in our diversity-rich paradise of openness and embracing each other’s differences, it’d be foolhardy to offer such simplistic categorizations of the student body, yes? \nOh sweet, delicious sarcasm.\nTwo professors at the University of Texas at Austin confirmed what we’ve known about stereotypes but which we tend to deny for the sake of not being, say, bigots. The professors conducted a study linking personality traits to music preferences, illustrating the tendency for people to socialize based on common interests, such as music. \nFor instance, fans of country, pop and religious music tend to be “helpful” and “outgoing” and consider themselves “physically attractive.” Shocking. It’s even more shocking when you compare those listeners to people who prefer funk, hip-hop, soul and electronica. They happen to be “talkative, energetic and forgiving,” according to The Independent Florida. Not surprisingly, they also consider themselves beautiful.\nWhile there are exceptions to every stereotype and in most cases more exceptions than reiterations, we know music majors primarily live in Read and Forest and this mostly has to do with their proximity to the music school. Likewise, students who intend to make pilgrimages to the fraternities and the stadium live in the northern neighborhood, while middle ground (boretown) Arts and Sciences majors occupy that central space. They all just want to be dull together. \nThen there’s Collins, whose residents insist they’re different from everyone else, and we all nod because we don’t want to be the bearers of the news that they are as homogenous and predictable as the next dorm. Excepting, of course, the fact that no other residence hall has a gnome mascot to fetishize.\nAnd as it turns out, the majors themselves overlap interests because generally you don’t go into computer science unless you already have a faint idea that a motherboard is not carved out of a solid piece of wood. Likewise, anyone who attends Kelley had that path prophesied millennia ago by an ancestry that inked the plan into sealed tomes: MBA, loveless marriage, fatty wallet, gold-plated casket.\nSo Professors Samuel Gosling and Peter Rentfrow, you’ve assigned people who listen to specific musical genres especially vague attributes, la-di-da. Name any major, scholarship or activity and your average IDS columnist could give you an equally broad personality trait. After all, we’re just a bunch of pretentious writers steeped in academia, cordoned from reality, belittling everyone with cyclopean and usually supernumerary colloquies (excuse us, big words). \nSo now that we have even more concrete evidence that people will naturally associate with others who have similar interests, let’s take advantage of it and further isolate ourselves from truly genuine experiences.