> However, this doesn't say anything about individuals That is an often-repeated line but as an absolute statement it is not true. Statistical differences do h

> However, this doesn't say anything about individuals That is an often-repeated line but as an absolute statement it is not true. Statistical differences do have predictive power. It's just that they are weak predictors and trumped by concrete information. But you don't always have that information at hand and in that case those heuristics may be better than nothing. The problems arise when people stick to their heuristics (stereotypes) even when better information is available. > so emphasizing differences between groups will lead people to make unwarranted assumptions about members of those groups. Yes, that may be a problem. But denying the existence of heuristics and demanding that every single person you ever interact with should be treated as a carefully analyzed individual seems unrealistic.