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This is a flaw in nearly any pop-psychology article. They find a perfectly valid trend, and then write without subtlety or nuance: "When x happens we [all] thin

This is a flaw in nearly any pop-psychology article. They find a perfectly valid trend, and then write without subtlety or nuance: "When x happens we [all] think y." Well, that's obviously silly ... some people may act the way the article describes, but obviously people are different, and are operating under a number of different incentives and pressures.

coldtea 6y ago
>but obviously people are different, and are operating under a number of different incentives and pressures. Most people are not that different... I'd say, from my experience, there's a limited number of stereotypes most peoples lives/character etc falls into, and most of the variation is in lesser details...
- everdrive 6y ago
  Sorry -- I get what you're saying, and we run into the problem that "different" can be a pretty vague term. 100% agreed that when thinking about measurable traits and bell curves, most people are pretty similar. (I'm not sure as of writing this, but I wonder if there are any human traits which do not have a normal distribution?) When a pop-psychology article makes an overly-broad generalization, I suspect you can encounter a few reasons for this: - The majority of people fit the trend described in the article, however the raw number of people in the minority is large enough a very large number of people feel the article does not accurately describe them. - Alternately, the basic premise may be too broad to be meaningful. Imagine two introverted people -- do they think of themselves a similar? Maybe one likes sports, and the other video games. Or one is a rock climber, while one a computer programmer. Whatever. They may not define themselves as similar, even though they both share the trait of introversion. As noted in my original post, what's missing here is the nuance. If instead this article was a dry scientific paper about "measurable specific traits and the similarity in parents and children with regard to mate choice" (or something like this) then we would avoid this problem.
- imtringued 6y ago
  If there are only two stereotypes then the article fails to cover half of them. It only gets worse the more stereotypes there are.

coldtea 6y ago

>but obviously people are different, and are operating under a number of different incentives and pressures. Most people are not that different... I'd say, from my experience, there's a limited number of stereotypes most peoples lives/character etc falls into, and most of the variation is in lesser details...

everdrive 6y ago
Sorry -- I get what you're saying, and we run into the problem that "different" can be a pretty vague term. 100% agreed that when thinking about measurable traits and bell curves, most people are pretty similar. (I'm not sure as of writing this, but I wonder if there are any human traits which do not have a normal distribution?) When a pop-psychology article makes an overly-broad generalization, I suspect you can encounter a few reasons for this: - The majority of people fit the trend described in the article, however the raw number of people in the minority is large enough a very large number of people feel the article does not accurately describe them. - Alternately, the basic premise may be too broad to be meaningful. Imagine two introverted people -- do they think of themselves a similar? Maybe one likes sports, and the other video games. Or one is a rock climber, while one a computer programmer. Whatever. They may not define themselves as similar, even though they both share the trait of introversion. As noted in my original post, what's missing here is the nuance. If instead this article was a dry scientific paper about "measurable specific traits and the similarity in parents and children with regard to mate choice" (or something like this) then we would avoid this problem.
imtringued 6y ago
If there are only two stereotypes then the article fails to cover half of them. It only gets worse the more stereotypes there are.