Don't we all just love sticking people into boxes? We take one look at someone or hear a detail or two about them and instantly we just know everything about them, don't we? Well, to some extent we actually need these intuitions, to help us deal with the myriad personality types in everyday life by applying to them simplified categories that satisfyingly bring order and sense into the confusion – or at least they seem to. But usually these judgements turn out to be at least partially wrong. People are just often untypical. To put them into a box because of something they do or because they are part of some group might seem at first to provide plausible explanations but will later often prove to have been a mistake.
The real problems start when we ban large groups of people into these boxes and apply general, oversimplified explanations based on this to everyone in these groups, indiscriminately. This results in us drawing lines between groups of people that are completely wrong and causes mistakes, which can end up proving fatal, when this causes us to interpret people's behaviour erroneously and let this in turn shape our own behaviour.
In "Typisch..." ("Typical...") we take a closer look at these mechanisms and examine how we, in everyday life, deal with stereotypes, archetypes, prototypes, antitypes, genotypes, phenotypes, ecotypes – typically for us, through dance.