Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Simplifying, Categorizing, & Stereotyping – Very Human Behavior 2-21-25
Fri, 21 Feb 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker explores the natural human tendency to simplify complex issues through narratives, categorization, and stereotypes.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. And this is again going to be a somewhat non-business podcast. It's somewhat of a takeoff of somebody's Twitter post. The Twitter post by Keith McCullough says, the need, want for humans to have a narrative to attempt to simplify the complex remains our community's behavioral opportunity.
Chapter 2: Why do humans simplify complex issues?
And I don't know if it's our community's behavioral opportunity. When you talk about simplification and stereotypes, It's very important to sort of understand why a lot of this happens. It's not necessarily stupidity. It's that people can't handle too much information. So we're constantly trying to simplify and dive towards a narrative.
Chapter 3: How do stereotypes affect our perception?
It's why so many people in our country religiously watch one set of cable networks, MSNBC, or another set of cable networks, Fox, you know, the Fox, whatever it might be. Because it's very hard as a human being to sort of juggle through all these different conflicting thoughts. And so you have people more and more trying to simplify, categorize, and stereotype.
Chapter 4: What role do media networks play in simplification?
And again, that's not a defense of simplifying, stereotyping, and categorizing. Certainly a defense of simplifying and categorizing, not of stereotyping. but it's a very human behavior to need to understand the narrative that you're in, the spots that you're in, to sort of simplify things, because you can only handle so many conflicting thoughts at one time.
Thus, what happens is we end up in a situation where the right and the left for all I can tell, are largely screwed up, at least on some of their positions, some of their situations. At the same time, we're very much in a position where people almost have to adopt, as a litmus test, all the right positions or all the left positions. Now, I'm not an anti-Trump person particularly,
though I might be getting there, I'm not sure. I'm trying to watch this administration. But I certainly think RFK is a moron. So can I hold in context these two different concepts? I love some of the policies that he has. I do love cutting some of the blowouts out of government, but I don't want a recession.
I do love some of the other things he's doing, but I certainly think RFK and Dr. Oz are morons. But can you hold these different thoughts in place and make that work? Today's discussion, again, is simplifying, categorizing, and stereotyping of very human behavior. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast.