Lorna Salomon once told me that "the Detective Marbury incident"* still gives Rundle a twitch. It wouldn't still give her a twitch if it had been an aberration but it wasn't.
The Detective Marbury incident was a template.
Rundle engaged in stereotyping, a useful cognitive tool to conserve brain energy by allowing us to take a short cut in evaluating a situation, or person, with our experiences with a general "type." In this way stereotyping aids in understanding efficiently. But unless we have the brain power, or discipline to resist it, in many situations it produces the opposite result: misunderstanding. That's what Rundle did in this incident.
The stimuli her brain received was: large, African-American, male. Her brain processed the stimuli with the shortcut provided by her experience and generated the response, "This is a cop." There is a lack of experience here as there is with the law.
But there is more than a lack of experience evident in the Detective Marbury incident. There's a lack of intelligence. Rundle had a 50-50 chance of getting it right and she got it wrong. This lack of intelligence is a trait. It also is a template.
The setting: It is moving day at the Rundles and Chris and Kathy have some friends from the office over to help with the heavy lifting.
During a break one of their friends, a known practical joker, goes up to Chris and Kathy, and with his head bowed in embarrassment says,
"I found the pictures."
Without thinking, or without the ability to think, Kathy immediately turns to Chris, hits him on the arm and says in a hushed tone of guilty humiliation,
"You told me you destroyed those!"
-David Ranck
* Politics & Justice III, August 17.
