My take on: we may live in a dollhouse, but this doesn't make us any less real

Spring is in the air, and we at UofR know what this means: beautiful people strewn across the lawns and crowded into the gym, toning their bodies and perfecting their tans.

Pastel polos and flowery sun dresses speckle campus in such a way that the man in the moon mistakes our dear school for a field of blooming flowers.

As sophomores, juniors and seniors already know (and as first-years are finding out), this is the time of year that defines our student demographic; as spring outfits and attitudes unite, there is no time of year here that more emphatically depicts our student population as homogeneous.

Most of us have heard or said the statements that resound throughout campus based along this vein of homogeneity, and we know they usually tend to be negative (i.e. every person here is equally shallow, materialistic, wealthy, fake, and/or generally Barbie-esque).

These statements logically lead to a conclusion that makes many people here a little bit sad and feel a little bit isolated: that, therefore, no one here is worth getting to know. Everyone here must either "stand out" (unappealing) or "fit in" (even worse), because the existence of a majority is conspicuous and cannot be ignored.

A girl quoted her Orientation Adviser from her freshman year as saying, "My favorite day of the school year is the first day, when incoming freshman comprise a population of such diversity and difference from one another. My least favorite day is the last, when everyone has separated into one [the majority] or the other [the minority], and gets lost in the crowd."

Judging people based on their appearance is something we do. Psychological researcher Joel Schrag stated in 2000: "Psychological research indicates that people have a cognitive bias that leads them to misinterpret new information as supporting previously held hypotheses."

Writers have addressed this tendency numerous times in "Psychology Today," and various companies in the image-making business cite the statistic that a first impression takes less than 30 seconds to make.

More than half of a first impression is based on appearance alone (with only 7 percent being what is actually said, or the interaction semantics themselves). Impression-making time is reduced in group settings, where group associations or feelings of competition are added into the formulation of conclusions.

The issue of group associations was a large part of the Civil Rights discourse (with which we are or should be quite familiar), and the issue of competition was shown in the results of a 1954 psychological experiment now referred to as the "Robbers-Cave Experiment" (among others).

Simply because this judgment-making process appears to be instinctive, we cannot render it harmless. Damage is done when people note how they are being perceived, because it is more than likely they will start to act correspondingly with these inaccurate initial interpretations, according to Nathan C. Hopkins of Northwestern University.

People may (or very fairly may not) all dress alike, look alike, even (as time goes on) begin to speak alike, but this doesn't mean by any standards that they are alike. It doesn't mean anything except that an environment can have a profound impact on its residents.

So what does this all mean? Perhaps everyone is not as similar as they seem, and "seeming similar" is nothing but a surface trait we need to dig beyond if shallowness is truly something we wish to avoid.

Perhaps we have all been a little bit deceived by J. Crew and Ralph Lauren disguises into believing that everyone is the same when deep down, we know that even two people could not be the same if they tried.

Perhaps we should all remove our sunglasses and look people in the eyes when we ask them how they are, waiting for an answer in hopes that it is real.

We are all busy, we are all a little fed up with homogeneity and we have all been disappointed by past interactions; none of this means anything important.

It's time the student body of Richmond started talking, started trying to get to know each other and to figure one another out. We are alienating ourselves by deciding we are "one" or the "other," that we must be one way or dismiss those who seem to preach that way is right.

We live in a small community where it's so easy to familiarize ourselves with one another that we rarely ever do. Maybe if we stretch out our arms and reach out to one another more frequently, we will not feel so cramped. That would be a relief.