ENG 105

The error of perspective I am most guilty of committing is poverty of aspect or as we all refer to as tunnel vision. This week in our weekly discussion board the question was asked about falling into the trap of overgeneralizing a group. I immediately thought of the stereotype everyone has towards certain people of the same ethnic group to include myself. We humans often develop tunnel vision and only see what we choose to see not realizing that by doing this latter we might be committing bigger errors such as overgeneralization and stereotype. I recently took a sociology class called multicultural diversity. It really opened up my eyes about different stereotypes towards certain ethnic groups. According to Ruggiero (2012), “ a stereotype is an overgeneralization that is especially resistant to change. The most common stereotypes are ethnic and religious” (p. 119). I fell into the trap of stereotyping the people using welfare. I came to believe that the only ethnic groups on welfare were Hispanics and Blacks. I’ve heard it my whole life from all types of media. I never really bother to do research because I had never heard otherwise and in all actuality, some of my family members to include my parents were using welfare. This is where my most common error of perspective came into action by giving me tunnel vision. In Dunker’s view, poverty of aspect is “the chief characteristic of poor thinking” (p.103). My poor thinking, disinterest and maybe the fear of proving this to be truth kept me from wanting to learn about it. The class I mentioned above provided me with very interesting facts. As I mentioned before everyone is being led to believe the recipients of welfare are mostly Hispanics and Blacks when in reality the higher percentage of welfare recipients are white. Most of them live in the suburbs and not the ghetto or projects, and the majority of them don’t want to be on welfare for more than two years (Davidson, 1997). Another stereotype about