One of our fundamental brain functions for navigating in this complex world is to categorise information. We also do this with people, which means that we usually don’t perceive them through their unique, personal identity, but rather through their social identity. We categorise them into distinct social groups, like men, women, friends, teachers, politicians, movie stars, etc.

When we categorise others, we see them as an ‘outgroup’ that is different to our own ‘ingroup’. The way we describe the outgroup is through stereotypes. This usually leads to negative attitudes towards outgroups. Basically, we exclude them from the ingroup and want to maintain a clear social boundary and distance from them. If there are political, economic or other power imbalances, this can result in stigmatising certain outgroups.

Ingroup members are the ones who stereotype and hold the stereotypes, and outgroup members are the stereotyped ones. The above image shows some ingroup-outgroup examples.

But, social categorisation depends not only on how another person behaves or what they look like, but also on the context and situation. This is important for documentary making, because documentaries always have to represent their characters through narrative and aesthetic means. Thus, documentary filmmakers have a lot of control in terms of which social identities of their characters they emphasise or de-emphasise on screen.

Although we have first-hand experience with some outgroups, we usually know and evaluate most outgroups through media representations. For instance, before I made documentaries featuring blind characters, I only knew about blind people through fiction films and documentaries. My knowledge and attitude towards blind people was entirely shaped by media.

For more information about social identity and social categorisation, see Chapter 2.

The next section explains how stereotypes are formed and how they are attached to outgroups.