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A scientist studying the accuracy of stereotypes
- api 11y agoI suspect that the idea that stereotypes are inaccurate might be a noble lie to counteract how bad we are at statistics. Let's say we have a stereotype "blue people are quick to anger." Even if there is truth in it, what it really says is that the median for the phenotypic trait "quick to anger" is somewhat higher for blue people. That does not mean that a given blue person is quick to anger since the whole population is not the median. It also doesn't mean that white or black or red people are not quick to anger, etc. People tend to take statistical generalizations about wholes and apply them like facts to the parts. In the case of people it results in great injustice. Given the above imaginary stereotype, does it follow that blue people should be barred from becoming police or caring for children? So I wonder if we haven't made the whole thing taboo and constructed a kind of elaborate ruse to pretend group differences don't exist to correct for this. We have lots of hacks to correct for irrationality. Inflationary currency for instance is a hack to correct for our psychological association of bigger nominal prices with actual progress. Religion is full of hacks to short circuit undesirable social behaviors too. I have also suspected for years that God might be a hack to create a "virtual alpha" to placate our need for an alpha male and allow the emergence of the rule of law.
- mamon 11y agoMy important take from the article: "people apply stereotypes when they have no other information about a person, but switch them off when they do" - so stereotypes are not as bad as previously thought :)
- TulliusCicero 11y agoThe problem is that people often have important interactions, in some form, with those that they don't really know at all. Two politically relevant examples would be police officers arresting someone, or recruiters/interviewers reading resumes and interviewing people.
- Dr_tldr 11y agoI for one will be downvote this link into oblivion, because it's scientifically proven that information like this can have a negative effect on women and minorities in tech.
- TulliusCicero 11y agoAre you seriously suggesting that we suppress scientific knowledge for the benefit of political aims?
- chrisbrandow 11y agoThis sort of thing further reinforces the typical disdain that "hard" scientists have for "soft" sciences. And it's a shame because these are important things to understand with rigor.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoA more academic paper can be found here: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20of%20stereotypes.pdf http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20o... One of the more surprising findings is that ethnic and gender stereotypes are a lot more accurate than social psychology papers (see table 10.4). I haven't double checked the meta-paper that derived the first column, but if true, this is a scathing indictment of social psychology.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y agoCan't check the details since I'm on mobile, but thats quite a bomb they're dropping here. Thanks for the link!
- wslh 11y agoAs a complementary paper, and something that affects everyone doing business with other cultures: "Cultural Biases in Economic http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/finance/papers/cultbiases120804.pdf http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/finance/papers/cultbiases120... We need to talk about this instead of this.
- ballsohardy 11y ago"We need to talk about this instead of this." that is exactly the point of the op's article lolol. plus the paper you linked is filled with massaging and still contains multiple instances of "however, is not statistically significant."
- Ono-Sendai 11y ago“But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was a hoax!” he said. “Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that climate science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a hoax.” So what? This doesn't necessarily invalidate the argument.
- bendbro 11y agoNobody ever claimed it did. The "what" is that it shows the evidence presented in the paper is bad for that argument. That says nothing about the truth of the argument.
- medymed 11y agoCuriously though, it contributes to falsely exaggerated stereotyping, in the sense that given the title and abstract I might expect a far greater percentage (>2.2%) of moon landing disbelievers among climate change disbelievers until until I take time to read through column 8 of table 3 on a potentially publicly inaccessible pdf. Will the journalists report these details? Maybe. Maybe not. Which plays into a larger possible tendency in social psychology: It's a poor choice to publish negative sterotype about groups supported by your social justice allies (most of the field, apparently), but it may be more warmly received to sterotype the political opposition, easiest with the low hanging fruit of conspiratorial right wingers.
- afarrell 11y agohttp://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/22/social-psychology-is-a-flamethrower/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/22/social-psychology-is-a-...
- bonobo3000 11y agoThe bias started out with a good intention - "all people should have the same rights and opportunities". But the official, carefully constructed non-offensive party line reasoning behind it in the US seems to be something like "all people of all types ever are the same", which is just not true. Any one deviating from the party line is automatically labelled bigot, and anyone defending these people is lumped into the same bucket. Its NOT wrong to make generalizations about people. Our brains are pattern finding machines - we generalize all the time. It IS wrong to use them as justification to treat certain people differently - because a statistic computed on a population of millions doesn't really tell you anything about a specific person. So it makes sense to discard the generalization prior - i.e be unbiased and not view someone through stereotypes. Its a hard problem - tolerating honesty but not bigotry, someones right to be offended vs. the offenders right to speak their mind etc etc. But right now US culture is very biased towards not being offensive, at the cost of truth - at the least, this kind of attitude does not belong in research. Research needs to be about truth.
- gleb 11y agoBtw, in areas where it's OK to apply math (like medicine or spam filtering) we have a science which tells us how to determine posterior probability given prior and new information. It's called statistics and Bayes rule.
- bonobo3000 11y agoHahaha yes, absolutely :) This is another thing that makes stereotypes tricky - it takes a little bit of statistical insight to see how they can be both right in some sense but completely wrong in the other, but statistics is very unintuitive, and math doesn't grab headlines. So that kind of argument is difficult to use with non-nerds, but ultimately i think its the only accurate one. That brings up another good point in that its really a perfect opportunity for media outlets that like to turn controversy into clicks. Its very controversial and very broadly applicable.
- j_m_b 11y agoStats can also be used to obfuscate and mislead. P-hacking (mentioned in the article) is the most well known.
- nether 11y agoStereotypes can be accurate but also become false over time. Continued belief in them can also make them self-fulfilling. It wasn't until relatively recently that "women are bad at math" was examined and found to be a product of various cultural mores. Let's not confuse current accuracy of stereotypes with some permanent classification of behaviors innate in a group.
- jamesrcole 11y agoOne point that is often overlooked is that, even if a stereotype tends to be accurate, there's, in many cases, no need to assume that it applies to a particular person. That is, rather than making a judgement, you can, and often should, be agnostic until some definitive evidence comes to hand.
- eximius 11y agoThat is completely contradictory. If stereotypes tend to be accurate, then that is a reason to believe it applies to a person of that group. As the article states, people (rightly) abandon these when dealing with a specific person, but mathematically speaking, a Bayesian approach would assume the stereotype until evidence to the contrary (with varying degrees of conviction depending on the prior). As long as you do not have a ridiculously strong or weighted prior and don't act on this presumed belief before confirmation, it is a useful thing.
- jamesrcole 11y ago> As long as you do not ...act on this presumed belief And how exactly does that differ from what I said? What exactly is "a belief you don't act on"?
- vinhboy 11y agoThere seems to be two points being made in this article 1) stereotypes are accurate and we should study them 2) political bias in social psychology I am not sure why the author is jumbling them together in one article. What exactly is his point? That liberals are less like to study stereotypes therefore we have a gap in that important research area?
- jschwartzi 11y agoEdit: this is an attempt to paraphrase the article's reasoning for moving from stereotypes to their researcher as a subject. Because people will shut down interesting research which doesn't conform to the stated position of the social justice movement. This happens even if the research is high-quality and relatively unbiased. The research on stereotyping is a good example because the research doesn't attempt to cast stereotypes in a bad light, therefore it must be bad research.
- benbenolson 11y agoThat's exactly his point, and honestly, I agree with it. An addition that I would make is a large point that he made by mentioning the paper with the faulty statistical data-- there are a lot of research papers being published that are conforming to the social justice movement, but aren't well backed, yet still accepted because of their motivation. The field is being diluted by this bad research that's trying to "change the world," instead of searching for objective truth.