A Comfortable Expectation

"Our stereotyped world is not necessarily the world we should like it to be. It is simply the kind of world we expect it to be." (Walter Lippman p. 57)
I love this passage from Lippman. It makes sense to me and speaks to the world I live in and percieve. It reminds me of that old idea that going into something with a negative attitude probably lends to having a negative experience. I think this basic idea is there, but something deeper as well. What we have seen, experienced, or been told dictate (in part) what we expect from the future. For example if a toddler throws his spoon on the floor and his mom picks it up, he throws it again to see if she will do it again (I am stereotyping right now assuming that it would be the mother feeding this child instead of its father, brother, grandfather, grandmother, social worker etc.). It becomes a game. He knows his mom will go to pick up the spoon. If she keeps the spoon instead of giving it back as before, the toddler may make a fuss. Okay, so that is a bit of a stretch, but things that are unexpected often throw us for loops and we try to rationalize and fit these events into the formula of past experience. We get fussy when things do not fit in that box of expectation; when things do not fit into the pictures in our mind. To me, Lippman's idea of stereotype is the same idea. It is comfortable to fit people and events into a rubric. Like when you are reading and you see the first few letters of a word and assume that you know what that word is and continue reading, sometimes needing to return to that word and realize that instead of "whole" it said "whore" changing the meaning drastically.