And does this mean there are too few people of higher intelligence? Or is stereotyping and generalizing simply human nature and not determined by intelligence?
Based on your personal belief
Let’s see. You’re asking me whether I can generalize about whether people who generalize have lower intelligence?
No way I’m falling into that trap!
People who rely on stereotypes are unsophisticated. There is sizable overlap between low intelligence and lack of sophistication, but they aren’t the same thing.
Making generalizations is important and necessary; it’s how our minds work. We categorize things, we make sense of chaos by observing commonalities and making generalizations.
I think, however, that there are a lot of unimaginitive people who buy into a way of seeing the world that they then cease to question; they embrace the easy first-tier generalizations and do not look at the exceptions in any meaningful way.
Generally, yes.
Most of the people I know who get things wrong all of the time doso because of excessive lumping. One of these people has an IQ of 149 though; so I don’t as of yet have a solidly formed opinion on the matter.
How so?
I generalize that if i see a black man with sagging pants based off of his appearance he is most likely not of high intelligence or he would not be dressed like that.
People who stereotype are quite probably of lower average intelligence than those who stereotype less frequently, because the ability to handle comprehension is a mark of higher intelligence. With that said, stereotypes and caricatures are just probabilistic judgements of group behavior and their usage where no other evidence is available is perfectly rational.
There is a substantial group of people (radical leftists) who signal their virtue to other people in their in-group by declaring their complete refusal to use stereotypes and who judge everyone solely on the basis of their actions. Such behavior is profoundly irrational by any reasonable metric and results in worse life outcomes for those who genuinely do it. In fact, I think I’ll add “refuses to use stereotypes” to my list of irrational leftist beliefs, including organic foods, non-GMO foods, astrology, opposition to nuclear power, and the blank slate fallacy.
Stereotyping and generalizing can be very useful depending on a given situation. I believe part of this applies in situations where there could be a potential threat to yourself or others. For instance I was in a semi-bad part of downtown in a parking lot with my son and a guy whose clothing and demeanor suggested to me he was a homeless guy but his body language seemed aggressive, eyes shifty, darting back and forth and the fact that he was also out of place coming into the parking lot of a gated parking lot also made me think he was up to no good.
He came up to my car and kept trying to coerce me to open my window but I refused because I didn’t want to put my son at any risk if the guy was looking to rob or carjack someone. Did I stereotype or generalize the guy based on his appearance? Absolutely but this would be a useful form of stereotyping, it’s completely possible he was a guy looking for spare change, an upstanding citizen whose clothes were dirty cause he just got off work and needed directions or something but I was willing to categorize and stereotype him in a neat little box inside my brain because the welfare of my family is more important than the chance that I misjudged this person unfairly.
But if you let your stereotypes, prejudices, etc. inform all your actions and opinions in every given situation that’s when you start to act foolish and realize that many times these thoughts are invalid.
nm
Then the same could be said for Donald Trump for the way he wear his hair .
Based off some of the moronic and outlandish things he’s said and done recently and the way he wears his hair i WOULD assume things about him.
Think he might have the zheimers with how he wears his hair and some of the shit he says.
Can you explain exactly why refusing to use stereotypes is irrational. I agreed when you said sharing that with your friends and making it a point is irrational, but the simple act of refusing to use stereotypes? I always judge a person by their actions. If I find myself lumping somebody by a particular trait on first sight, I stop in my tracks because I feel it is wrong. It’s not due to any political belief and I am in fact moderate. Hell I’ll even knock down stereotypes having to do with rednecks or pickup trucks, for example.
I wouldn’t call this completely stereotyping. You acted reasonably on a possibly dangerous situation. I don’t care if it’s a man dressed in a suit, a woman dressed like Susie Homemaker, a doctor in a lab coat or scrubs, or even a 10 year old kid. If a person came up to my car and demanded that I open my window, I would think there is something wrong and take precautions.
It becomes a problem when people are locking doors or pulling guns because someone walks by or approaches them in a friendly manner due to their preconceived notions.
I never stereotype or generalize because those are things complete ignoramuses do.
Last night I was walking down the middle of the road when two headlights came at me. I said to myself, “Self, could be a car, could be two motorcycles, could be a guy running with two lights. Don’t stereotype! If it’s two motorcycles they’ll pass on each side of you.”
It was a semi. I broke every bone in my body. But at least I’m not a moronic stereotyper!!!
I think walking down the middle of the road is something only an idiot, drunk/high, or suicidal person would do, but who am I to generalize?
No…that guy is brilliant. In his world it signifies exactly the image that he wants to present…generally speaking.
This +1.
Intelligent people make more sophisticated generalizations, but everyone does it. We hold a series of models of the world in our heads, and apply past models to current experience. The universe is too complicated, and it takes too long to approach everyone from scratch.
Generalizations do not have to be 100% accurate to be useful or, indeed, indispensable.
Regards,
Shodan
In my experience, generalizations are a big part of what make people intelligent. That is, the human brain is an amazing pattern recognition machine, that’s what it excels at. What I think best separates the more intelligent from the less intelligent is the quality of those patterns, how quickly they can be made, and one’s willingness to deviate when they don’t fit.
Let’s take a simple example, like racism. It’s a pretty much the simplest of patterns, it’s one layer, based on an obvious trait, and may or may not have some anecdotal experience to back it up. Someone who is unintelligent will pretty much get stuck classifying people on a single later or maybe just a layer or two deep. For example, black people with sagging pants, bad, black people in suits, good.
Someone who is more intelligent still makes judgments about people, but they’ll have a more sophisticated model, likely one that is difficult or impossible to articulate because of it’s complexity. An intelligent person will likely observe that correlations between race and certain characteristics are weak; in fact, correlations between any one or just a few are quite tenuous.
Ultimately, it’s all about being able to make judgments that have meaningful values. And this is really what makes people intelligent or not. If you have bad models, you make bad judgments, and your ability to make meaningful predictions or suss out other properties is only slightly better than chance.
But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that intelligent people don’t sometimes have bad models too. There are intelligent people that are racist, for instance. One can even make a pretty sophisticated model that supports racism, but the problem is, in order to do that, it means one has a preconceived notion of what the output of the model should look like and then will massage or ignore various criteria to maintain that. But that someone does that in one or a few areas, doesn’t mean they they do it in the rest either.
As such, I think the most intelligent people are really the ones who can make really good generalizations quickly, but also is able to break and reorganize them when new evidence becomes available that contradicts that model.
I’ll add my vote to the “everyone uses stereotypes and it’s impossible not to” caucus. If we believe that Harvard graduates are smarter than high school dropouts, that’s a stereotype.