 Murdoch’s failure to theorize passive forces in moral formation is also expressed in a striking absence of attention to the distinctly social sources of negative moral formation. An important part of how moral formation is, as she says, going on all the time, how our fabric of being is always being constructed, arises from social rather than intrapsychic factors, for example, representations of categories of persons that block or hinder agents’ abilities to see the reality of persons in those groups. As a member of a given society, or particular subcultures within that society, we are subjected to stereotypes and other misleading representations of different groups of people, with whom we do or do not come in contact. The stereotypes are attached to race, gender, class, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, gender expression, professions and occupations, residence in certain neighborhoods or regions, and other social groups. These “figurations”, as Diana Meyers usefully calls them, are almost always evaluative in character (Meyers 1994). Thus they contribute to social agents’ evaluative take on the world and to the formation of their moral being. They affect whether we do, or try to, have loving attention, respect, compassion, and even mere acknowledgment toward individual members of those groups. In this respect figurations are comparable to the fantasies and other forms of egoism that Murdoch points to that block loving attention—except that they affect our responses to people unknown to us much more than these Freudian intrapsychic forces do. Social stereotypes are not the only form of socially-produced barrier to loving attention, but they are important and can represent the larger category for our  purposes.[8]