I’m asking this question in general but also have Islam specifically in mind, specifically their stereotypically violent nature.
I acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are nonviolent. But for argument’s sake, where’s the line drawn? When does the stereotype turn into the accurate depiction of the group?
Is it at the over 50 percentile mark? Or are discounts given for egregious acts of violent that get more media attention?
Have you ever noticed that stereotypes walk like this while fair representations walk like this?
What is the purpose of the stereotyping?
I would say that stereotyping is never a fair representation, if it leads you to treat individuals on the basis of the group they belong to rather than as individuals.
In hiring situations, stereotyping may have a positive benefit, as long as it is the right kind of stereotyping. For example if you need to hire a smart guy, you would hire the guy from stanford Yale Princeton, harvard - not the guy from state U all things being equal. The guy from state U, may be better, but based on that example your odds of getting the better candidate are better if you use stereotyping and applying the laws of statistics to applicant pools. I think appropriate economic term is “Statistical discrimination” I do not know to what extent the hiring manager who employs this technique will have greater success than the one who does not; I only know of the theory itself.
I’m not sure there really is a line where it’s fair representation until the point that it’s actually a causal link. Running off of your example, it’s a tiny fraction of Muslims that are violent extremists, but at the same time, yet Muslim extremists represent the majority of terrorist acts. Unfortunately, people see this link between terrorism and Islam, assume there’s a causal link, then believe that Muslims are terrorists.
Ignore religion for a moment and run with something like a generic racial stereotype. For example, it’s objectively observable that blacks are over-represented in professional sports in the United States, and as a result, there’s a ton of stereotypes that have arisen related to blacks and athletic ability. It’s still not a fair representation, because there’s no causal link between those two. So, it would be awfully silly of me to assume that a random black person I ran into was likely to be a professional athlete.
Ultimately, in both cases we’re drawing from a large group as having a causal link with a group that is several orders of magnitude smaller. If there actually were a meaningful link, the two groups would probably be of similar sizes, at least from a Fermi estimation perspective. As it stands, whatever there might actually be there is completely lost under noise.
Stereotyping is more or less a form of heuristics. It involves making educated guesses based on statistics (or supposed statistics) to find a result that is supposedly “good enough” for the current situation. E.g. many employers will refuse to hire a person with a violent felony conviction based on the fear that a prior violent felony conviction implies that the person is probably still violent, or at least is more likely to commit an act of violence than someone who hasn’t thus been convicted. In theory, one could do an ultra-thorough background check with extensive psychological testing to come up with a more individualized risk assessment saying that John, who has convictions for Aggravated Assault, Rape, and Aggravated Second Degree Mopery with Intent to Possess a Dangerous Weapon, is no longer a meaningful risk because of changes that he has made in his life, while Bill, who has no convictions, is a significant threat because he has serious untreated anger issues that are getting worse every day. Since companies can’t afford to do that, they try something that they can afford as a compromise.
The OP’s question, then, is how accurate does the heuristic need to be in order for one to be morally justified in using it?
Fascinating question, really, if you get past the knee-jerk reactions.
Obviously the number of Muslims who are not terrorists is so astronoimically high that stereotyping Muslims as terrorists is unjust and, frankly, self-defeating; since 99.99% or so of Muslims are not terrorists, a company refusing to hire them would almost certainly just be hurting its own talent base. That is a very, very easy example.
Conversely, it is a rather easy example in the other direction to say that it is okay to discriminate against women if I am hiring baseball players to fill out the minor league affiliates of a major league baseball team. It is rather indisputably the case that almost all women lack the physical strength, speed, and talent level to play even the lowest levels of professional baseball. That stereotype - heuristic, if you will - is clearly an efficient one and it is fairer to everyone that it be broadly applied. To insist on trying out just as many women as men would be a waste of everyone’s time and money.
But try some harder ones on for size:
We should prohibit gay men from donating blood because they are likelier to have HIV
I should not allow my children to be in the presence of a Catholic priest without supervision
As a waiter, I should try to get tables with white, working class customers, who tip well, instead of black customers orelderlys customers because they don’t tip as well (Note; old people really are very likely to be horrible tippers.)
Ooooooh. Are the stereotypes justified? Take the priest one… is that fair or unfair? Probably unfair to most priests. But given the enormous consequences if I don’t apply the stereotype, is it justified?
To me stereotyping is defined by inaccuracy. It’s the practice of defining a person by a purported group characteristic and rejecting his/her individuality. And I don’t think it’s usually about individual traits. It creates an entire false identity for people based on one characteristic or a few characteristics.
People suck at evaluating risks like this, though. We tend to focus on high-profile or terrible-sounding risks (pedophile priest) that are very unlikely to affect us without knowing about things that are much more likely to happen (molestation by a family member). The classic example is driving vs. flying, but you could also apply it to, say, terrorism vs. many things in our daily lives that are far more likely to kill us.
So to bring it back to the larger picture, what are you gaining by stereotyping in general? Accepting generalizations uncritically? I don’t think that does you a lot of good. We’re prone to stereotyping because our brains try to generalize from experience as quickly as possible. Your brain essentially wants everything to be predictable. It wants to focus on unknown elements in your environment that could be threats, so it dismisses things that already seem familiar. This doesn’t get you the most accurate picture of your environment - just one that in general has been good enough to keep the species alive. So what do we have to gain by signing off on this behavior?
The other aspect that seems to elude people making stereotypical judgements is their lack of recognizing the supposed negative trait present in their own identity group.
Muslims are “violent”, OK, not all, but enough to make it seem like a group trait. Whereas us Americans? Nah, we’re not violent, not at all, never, and certainly not against innocent people - what? Well, OK, maybe some bad apples have been, once in a while, but you can’t say that we all are - as a group trait!
Once you start thinking of all the times WE exhibit whatever trait THEY exhibit, then it really all falls apart, yah?
That’s a sad question for me, because as a kid, my friends and I DID hang out with our neighborhood priests. We played roller hockey or stickball in the schoolyard with them. We played chess with them in the rectory. As far as I know, none of us had any bad experiences.
I have a lot of good memories of those days. I wish my son could have similar memories. But even though the percentage of priests who’ve molested children is small, I probably WOULDN’T let my son hang out with a priest unsupervised.
I assume someone who abuses children wouldn’t let you know they had unsupervised access to your children in the first place. That’s another one of the problems in trying to prevent things like this: it’s hard for ‘regular’ people to anticipate the behavior of people who are really warped.
Is there any factual reason to believe a given priest is any more likely to molest a kid than any other randomly selected person? As I understand it, the big issue with that scandal was that the church covered over for molestors (possibly also priests are being held to a higher standard in that it’s more of a “story” if priests are molestors than if ordinary people are) but it doesn’t follow from that that a given priest has a higher likelihood of being a molestor than anyone else.
Which brings to an important point here, in that there are 2 separate issues in play. One was raised by the OP, which is that assuming the stereotype is true, then what level would warrant recognition. The second is whether the stereotype has any truth to it to begin with.
The basic story I’ve heard is that the Catholic priesthood appeals, or has appealed, to young men with sexual issues. At least historically, a Catholic guy in his 20’s was expected to get married pretty quickly. If he was, say, a pedophile who didn’t want to end up in an unsatisfying marriage with a woman his age, he would have a lot of explaining to do to his parents on his 30th birthday to explain why he hasn’t gotten married yet or provided any grandchildren. So there was a temptation to become a priest since required clerical celibacy provided a convenient moral excuse to remain single. And since becoming a priest was an honorable calling, mom and dad wouldn’t really have any cause to complain.
Yeah, I was aware of that theory, but that’s why I wrote the word “factual”. Meaning are there any studies, stats, or something along those lines.
I think what the OP is asking if at what point does a generalization become a fair representation. A stereotype, by definition, is always a distortion of reality. But some generalizations can be good approximation of the truth.
I’d say a generalization becomes a fair representation even when members of the group agree with it. Not everyone in the group will personally identify with the generalization, but they will recognize that it is probably closer to true than not. So if it ever gets to the point where everyone, including Muslims, knows at least one Muslim who is an angry violent terrorist, then it won’t be a stereotype anymore. It will be a generalization.
I was really addressing Colibris’ statement regarding the complete uselessness of stereotyping, I agree with with your approach to the OP though.
Personally, I do not think for one person to sit in judgement of another is morally justifiable, I suppose since that is an unusual stance I would need to explain it more - but that’s really diverting from the OP too much.
If I remember correctly what I read during the first priest scandal in the '80s , part of the problem was the reversestereotype- the parents didn’t even imagine that the priest could be a danger so they allowed all sorts of unsupervised access ( sleepovers at the rectory, camping trips) that they wouldn’t have allowed to the guy down the street.
As far as when a stereotype becomes a fair representation, I think it depends on what the stereotype is and what it’s being used for. It’s one thing to say I won’t hire women to load trucks because men are stronger. It’s quite another to give a red envelope with cash rather than a punch bowl as a wedding gift to a Chinese friend -even though the friend might prefer the punch bowl.
I’m not sure that one is ever justified in using it.
The essence of equal opportunities practice in employment (and elsewhere) is that you assess people according to the qualities which they themselves possess, and not according to qualities stereotypically assigned to a group to which they belong. This is so even if the stereotype has a signficant degree of accuracy.
So,to take Mr Nylock’s example, if you want to hire the smart employee you should be testing the candidates for smarts, not for having been to Harvard, Yale or Princetom. Testing for the latter is only appropriate if having been to Harvard, Yale or Princeton is genuinely an objective requirement for the position you are filling.
Or, to take another example, it is a fact that, on average, female employees take more sick leave than male employees. But if you are considering hiring or promoting a woman, the only relevant consideration is how much sick leave she takes or is likely to take, not the amount of sick leave that other workers take or are likely to take.
I like this at first reading, but the more I think about it, the less satisfied I am with it. Doesn’t everyone know at least one Black person who likes watermelon and fried chicken? Of course we do. Watermelon and fried chicken are awesome, and well liked. But still the stereotype of Black people liking watermelon and fried chicken is widely considered an offensive stereotype, not a generalization.
Funny, all last week I had a potential thread starter running through my head that I was too scared to post: What stereotypes about your group are actually true for you? I decided I didn’t have the balls to post it, but I’m curious about it. Stereotypes don’t have to be false to be stereotypes. They don’t even have to be offensive to be offensive stereotypes. Stereotypes are weird.
But you’re forgetting the most important part of what I said. “Members of the group would agree with it”. Most black people like watermelon and fried chicken, but I don’t think most black people would agree that these are solidly “black” things.
A certain style of church worship, however, would be harder to wave away as a mere stereotype, even by black people who’ve never stepped foot in a church.