Decategorisation

Abstract

As noted in Chap. 2, when we encounter a new person in real life or in media content, top-down and bottom-up processes interact to determine whether what we observe about that person (bottom-up processing) matches any categories with which we are familiar and that we can deploy (top-down processing) (Hall and Crisp, 2005, pp. 1436–1437). When presented with a film featuring a female wheelchair user holding a baby—both attributes being equally salient—the viewer will probably deploy two categories into the joint category of ‘disabled mother’ with correspondingly joint dispositions. This joining may be additive or surprising, as discussed earlier. However, if the character has salient attributes that appear to match too many different categories, the reliance on categories will become too complex to process and no longer viable, thus obliging the viewer to rely on the bottom-up process of observing the character’s uniqueness in the current situation (ibid.). If perspective-taking is added to that perception, decategorisation will ensue. This chapter discusses the key aspects of decategorisation, which are the rendering of the character as differentiated (i.e. unique) and personalising them to induce perspective-taking.