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Deckard
08-15-2008, 03:53 AM
I'm reading a book called Irrationality (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Irrationality-Stuart-Sutherland/dp/1905177070/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218796273&sr=8-1) at the moment. On the whole it's pretty good, covering everything from primacy and availability errors to conformity and obedience. Some of it is obvious, some of it less so.

Anyway this bit on the reasons for the existence of stereotypes interested me, unsurprisingly its relevance to my other thread on Muslims, so I thought I'd post it here as a separate thread for anyone who's interested. It was written over 15 years ago, and frankly some of the phrasing (and use of labels) are uncomfortably dated even for the early 90s, which I'm sure you'll instantly pick up on. But its still absorbing in the context of being written pre-9/11, and has what I feel to be a very strong relevance today.

For legibility reasons, I won't bother to quote or italicize.

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One reason for holding stereotypes is that they are convenient: we do not have to assess the individual case, we merely assume he or she conforms to the stereotype.

A second reason is that we tend to notice anything that supports our own opinions. We notice the Scotsman who is canny about money, but don't pay much attention to one that is generous.

Third, we notice the actions of members of a minority group much more readily than those of a larger group. They are conspicuous ('available') because they are rare. In the same way, bad behaviour is more noticeable than normal behaviour, so we will be particularly struck by a member of a minority group behaving badly. A notorious example comes from the days when women rarely drove. Whenever a woman made a driving error, men would glance at her and say, 'Oh God, there goes another woman driver.' Normal driving by women did not stand out and therefore was not noticed. Compelling evidence for the last two points will be given in later chapters.

Fourth, stereotypes can be self-fulfilling. If blacks are thought to be lazy, they find it hard to get jobs. In consequence, they are seen idling around the streets, thus confirming the belief that they are lazy.

Fifth, some aspects of a stereotype may have a basis in reality. It seems likely that overall professors are more earnest than disk jockeys. But even if the stereotype has a foundation in fact, it is irrational to apply it to the individual case, for doubtless there are some serious-minded disk jockeys and the occasional flippant professor.

Sixth, it has been found that the difference between one set of objects and another becomes exaggerated when labels are attached to them. In a simple experiment, four short lines were each labelled 'A' and four slightly longer ones 'B'. People saw a bigger difference in the average length of the two sets of lines when they were labelled in this way than when no labels were attached. All groups about which stereotypes are formed are labelled by their names, and this may encourage us to see out-groups as differing more from ourselves than they in fact do.

Seventh, as we saw when discussing the halo effect, a person who has one salient quality may be seen as having other related qualities that he does not possess. This also applies to groups. Because some ethnic groups look different from whites, the latter are likely to believe that they differ radically in other ways.

Eighth, a small initial bias in the attribution of prejudicial characteristics to members of an out-group is likely to increase as a result of the social interaction within the in-group that was described at the beginning of the chapter. Moreover, once prejudiced beliefs have been accepted by a person, he may continue to act on them, even when he is not trying to impress members of his own group. A series of studies on prejudice against blacks was conducted in the 'seventies: the results were remarkable. If an American was confronted in public with a black who needed help, he would give it just as readily as to a white. If, however, he was in a situation where the help would not be observed, then he was far less likely to help a black man than a white. This was discovered by leaving in a public place a stamped but unsealed envelope addressed to a university: sticking out of the envelope was an application form on which was a picture of the applicant. Whites more often went to the trouble of posting the application of another white than of a black. These findings were made when, at least in middle-class circles, prejudice against blacks had been strongly disavowed. People therefore did not show their prejudice in public, but it still emerged if they were unobserved.

Finally, do-gooders can reinforce others' prejudices by accepting the very qualities that people are prejudiced about and attempting to explain them away. As Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross put it, when people argue that the laziness of blacks is due to the 'culture of poverty or the father-absent syndrome or anomie born of oppression and powerlessness', they are showing just as much prejudice as do people who believe in the laziness without attempting to explain it away.

For all these reasons, then, prejudicial stereotypes are common, powerful, and hard to eradicate: their irrationality is obvious. They both derive from hostility to out-groups and once formed support that hostility. But stereotypes not based on prejudice can lead to equally irrational thinking. In one experiment, subjects were given a list of sentences like, 'Carol, a librarian, is attractive and serious.' each sentence gave a name, an occupation and two traits, one stereotyped (in this case, 'serious'), the other not thought to be characteristic of the occupation ('attractive' - the prejudicial stereotype for women librarians is that they are mousy). When asked which traits had been used of which occupation, the subjects showed a marked tendency to recall the stereotyped traits and to forget the non-stereotyped ones, They thought that stewardesses had been described as 'attractive' but not that women librarians had been described in the same way, though they recalled that the latter were 'serious'. We remember what we expect to hear: in this case, the stereotype governed the expectation.

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The author then goes on to point out that the dislike of out-groups is likely, to some extent, inborn and reaches back to our tribal history, but that neither justifies it nor does it necessarily mean that it's impossible to control. If I could sabotage the publishing process of our tabloid press one night and swap the latest anti-minority diatribe for this, I SO would! :D

Tiger
08-15-2008, 04:17 AM
If I could sabotage the publishing process of our tabloid press one night

only for one night:D imagine the fun you could have. you could bet disgusted of tunbridge wells would be choking over their cornflakes in the morning and the express switchboard will go into meltdown

IsiliRunite
08-15-2008, 04:54 AM
If you like rational discussions of everyday economics and everyday rationality, read

The Logic of Life

its a pretty new book.

Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

I really enjoy blowing people's minds when I thoroughly mention and exemplify correlation vs. causation fuck-ups that they never would have otherwise thought about... Stereotypes are slightly dependent on this mix-up.

A good deal of rationality happens sub-consciously, but a hypothesis of mine (and possibly others, not trying to take credit if its been published before) is that it must be brought out to the conscious in order to be purified and made precise for certain reasons I can go into later.