How is it possible that even though we sometimes know, and hopefully accept, a person belonging to a certain group, we can still be prejudiced against that group as a whole? This discrepancy is a result of the fact that our brains process specific individuals and information about groups differently.

Our heads have a vast but limited capacity to process incoming information. Because of the media and technology today, we get far more of information than we can successfully assimilate. Our brains work like crazy to make the best use of their resources. There are however situations when our brain chooses to take some shortcuts – and that’s how stereotypes are born.

According to the definition in "Social Psychology" by Professor Bogdan Wojciszke, "a stereotype is a schema representing a group or type of people singled out because of some easily noticeable (...) characteristic, such as gender, race, nationality, age or occupation. (...) It is usually oversimplified, over-generalised (all members of the group 'are' the same), and not susceptible to change as a result of new information..."

Stereotypes are socially shared; they are part of a given culture. They are the way some groups think about other groups. We all without exception use them regularly. When we meet a person whom we know belongs to a stereotyped group, we automatically attribute to them the characteristics we consider "typical" of that type of person.

Stereotypes can be both positive and negative. So when we meet, for example, a firefighter, we to identify them as courageous and willing to make sacrifices. If a homeless person comes across our path, we are unfortunately very likely to assume that they are repulsive and lazy.

Different groups may also use different stereotypes to "pigeonhole" representatives of the same groups of strangers. The content of our stereotypes depends on the views held by the group with which we ourselves identify. For homophobes, non-heteronormative people will be 'weird and threatening', but from supporters the LGBTQ+ minority representatives may get credit for being 'authentic and open'.

The problem, of course, is that the content of stereotypes that fires back at us automatically has nothing to do with the actual characteristics of the people who stand in our way. That particular firefighter we met may in fact be an adrenaline-seeking arsonist, while the homeless person may be a former physics lecturer who ended up on the streets due to unintentional mental health problems.

The only thing that saves us from completely drifting away from reality is that the information we get about a particular person is of greater value to the brain than stereotypes about groups. Therefore, a dissonance like the one in the title of this article may form.

We can simultaneously like and respect "our gay friend" while maintaining negative stereotypes about the non-heteronormative community. Such phenomenon is called "cognitive dissonance". This is a situation in which our brain gets two (or more) contradictory packets of data to process. Sustaining such a contradiction requires more energy than processing coherent information. And energy needs to be conserved, so our head will try to "smooth out" these bumps.

In the aforementioned example, "our gay friend" can be "transferred" so that he becomes a member of another group. We will detach him from the "gays" (wrongly, his sexual orientation does not change that way, after all), and pin him to the "mates". On the other hand a similar process is possible: "Our friend is gay, but he's cool, maybe these non-hetero people aren't so scary?" This second possibility is, according to the research, the easiest way to get rid of hurtful, negative stereotypes.

Getting to know representatives of a stereotyped group in person is the best antidote to cure prejudice. This is why the results of the recent ipsos.com study on the visibility of non-heteronormative people in our country are so worrying. Poland stands far apart from the rest of Europe in terms of how many of us declare to know LGBTQ+ people. This is, of course, due to the fact that revealing one's identity or orientation can have a number of, to put it mildly, unpleasant consequences in our country.

A consequence of the low social visibility of LGBTQ+ people is that manipulation of our emotions is possible, such as the one warned about on 16 June by the Miłość nie wyklucza (pol. Love Does Not Exclude) Association. We have already written about how representatives of the ruling political party try to demonise sex education and the non-heteronormative minority in order to create fear, which they will then "look after", suggesting that they are the ones who will "defend us" from what they themselves have frightened us with.

This is sewn with thick and embarrassing threads, and would not be possible in a society where the visibility of non-hetero people is at a level closer to reality. As a reminder, according to the aforementioned Ipsos study, the LGBTQ+ minority in Poland is around 9 per cent of the population.

It is unlikely that there are people in Poland who do not know any gay, lesbian, non-binary or transgender people. If we think we don't know them, it most likely only proves that these people around us don't trust us enough to reveal this part of their identity to us.

Returning to "our gay friend’s" aversion to equality parades, it itself may be related to the fact that belonging to a group about which he has acquired negative stereotypes from his environment will lead to him not identifying with the group. This is an example of internalised homophobia. On a similar note, Polish women and men who have become "encoded" with negative stereotypes about being Polish will be the first to criticize the country.