Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteQ: "I'm out to understand what exactly it is that drives people's preconceived notions of hate and prejudice. But I can't even get people to get started on explaining why?"
A: I'm starting to use the term "binary cascade" to suggest how children may acquire language (so: X is not Y but may be related to Z -- the guessing and reasoning eventually find the socially right response associated with the stability of each word / symbol acquired) and with core beliefs -- e.g., if Hutu, within a certain social period, it's okay to hate those Tutsi cockroaches, eh? -- and related behaviors that deeply embedded and essentially forgotten survive to generate a more elaborate rule structure, i.e., a social grammar.
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Imho, language acquisition involves a great deal more than the accretion of the grammatical or sense-making parts and rules of a culture's verbal technology. It involves picking up signals and appropriately playing them back to surrounding others in a creative process that however wild produces normative effects.
I'm not familiar today with the literature on infant-to-early-childhood language acquisition, but we know a lot about in-group and teen language invention and customs and we have come to know a great deal about computer programming and heuristics. It's not too far a stretch to suggest (in English) that the audio channeled "bru" has no first-encounter meaning but a few immediate possibilities -- brew, blew, blue -- that the learner will sort quickly guessing or pairing in context and discovering, perhaps in proximity to a suspended guess, approval.
None in our species can remember how they acquired speech in their first language.
How should any remember how they acquired their earliest beliefs and rules about others?
Those who find themselves reasoning with the seemingly unreasoning may be encountering the presence of "habits of mind" predicated on "binary cascades" of discerned, integrated, and then forgotten language rules than may then persist in guiding the formulation of new rules.
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Facebook and other social media provide both a platform for social speech as well as a laboratory for the observation of the same.
While there's much fun to be had across, say, the arts and entertainment spectrum of chatyping, the conflict arenas may inspire a good look into not only "What could they have been thinking?" but perhaps more important, "How are they thinking or expressing themselves, and how did that come about?"
What are the origins of the social rules in cognition, expression, and perception?
All subjects are fair for inquiry; not all subjects may fare as well from scrutiny, some strategies perhaps proving more thoughtless than others.
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