Not everyone is willing to shoot themselves in the abdomen just to create a plausible alibi.
The evidence upthread generally points us in a distinctly different direction.
It’s almost as if prejudice is rooted in some combination of race, ethnicity, class, and a host of other things.
It’s also almost as if the UK has it’s own set of prejudices that anyone that’s watched UK television and movies set in the UK would be more that familiar with.
They do, however, say things like: There’s no sense trying to teach these Black kids the same things that White children learn; it’s too hard for them and unfair to them to expect them to learn what the white kids do.
(And I’m not in the least surprised that nobody says the Black population should use time machines.)
You’re correct that people use the stereotypes to damage members of outgroups. What you’re wrong about is thinking that the stereotypes are true.
What the IQ tests are testing is how good people are at taking IQ tests. If they were testing only something innate, training in how to take the tests wouldn’t improve scores. It’s not too surprising if the results line up with doing well in schools which require the same sort of skill.
You’ve got to do it, some of the time. There is in no way time enough in a human lifetime or room enough in a human mind to research in thorough detail absolutely everything one runs into in one’s lifetime.
Why would your experience in the UK lead you to think that you understand the hundreds of years of USA history influencing what’s happening in the USA?
One aspect of stereotypes that I think indicates how useless they are, is their contradictory nature:
“This group is a bunch of dirty, disease-ridden peasants, who are secretly controlling the world with their wealth”
“This group is inherently servile, born to obey the will of their betters, and naturally violent and predatory.”
“This group is overly-emotional and incapable of logical reasoning - and everyone of them is coldly plotting to exploit someone for the rest of their life”
If you want to express a negative opinion about someone in a group that is disparaged, there’s always a stereotype handy to grab - not because they’re right, but because they are so all-encompassing. It’s a form of the Barnum/Forer effect
On average, the students rated its [the supposedly personalized personality test] accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Only after the ratings were turned in, it was revealed that all students had received an identical vignette assembled by Forer from a newsstand astrology book
Yeah, that’s kind of nonsensical, since what counts as criminal behaviour is clearly dependent on culture.
What are people blaming Trump support on these days? Genetics, or pathological subculture?
All you’ve shown upthread is your own lack of knowledge. (Had you really never heard of the five factor personality model? I thought that was pretty well known.) Google ‘replication crisis’ - actually, never mind. Read this:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aac4716?ijkey=1xgFoCnpLswpk&keytype=ref&siteid=sci
Read this too, it gives some of the background:
Are you seriously dismissing all the scientific evidence on the validity of IQ tests on the basis of a single anecdote?
Another anecdote. Do you have any evidence this is a widespread phenomenon, let alone widespread enough to be more than a rounding error in the homicide statistics?
All people have offered in this thread to ‘disprove’ the core of truth in stereotypes is anecdotes and speculation. No data, no attempt to calculate even ballpark figures for how much difference your proposed explanations could make. The bias in standards of evidence is mountainous.
This is true, but choosing not to look at contentious areas for fear of what you’ll learn is simply cowardice. And if you’re not willing to put in the effort to research a particular area, you shouldn’t go on a message board and debate it.
It doesn’t, but it can nonetheless contradict proposed explanations of those events. And it’s still relevant to the overall topic, which was not limited to the USA.
For what feels like the three hundredth time:
It is not a “core of truth” in a stereotype to find a small proportion of people of the stereotyped group who fit the stereotype, when most of the people in that group do not fit the stereotype.
No. And I think that further arguing that specific issue is counter to the terms of these boards. Go look up the old threads.
https://boards.straightdope.com/tos
Tired topics. The following subjects have been beaten to death on this board and are cIosed to further discussion. If you feel new information has come to light that warrants reopening of a tired topic, you are free to petition the staff, but be aware that you face a high bar:
- Scientific racism - any argument about why a particular group of humans is objectively better or worse than any other group.
the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Pseudoscientific claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have played a central role in the history of scientific racism.
You have it backwards, the proponents of applying bigoted stereotypes are the ones that have to bring the big fat cites.
BTW, it happens that most of the time, no data will work with many that follows harmful stereotypes to realize how harmful a bigoted stereotype is.
Wrongful convictions disproportionately affect Black Americans, report shows
WISE: So the report found that Black Americans are about seven times more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted of three major crimes. So that’s homicide, sexual assault and drug offenses. Reasons for that range from things like deliberate police misconduct to the fact that a lot of times, people have a really hard time identifying individuals who are of a different race than they are.
Yes, that is “wrongfully convicted” and mind you, that is based on the times justice eventually did work. As it happens in the US, there is also the realization that many times there are still others who are wrongfully convicted, and never see justice done.
Huh, it’s almost as if the crime stats I posted above do not account for the confounding variables that anyone with a brain knew to expect. But clearly that can’t be right since we all Black loves them some murder almost as much as they loves them some insert stereotype that’s actually a thing that almost all people have in common here.
It depends on the stereotype. Obviously most people are not Nobel prize winners, or Olympic athletes, or published authors, but you can still have stereotypes that a particular group are better at one or other of those things, and that group being overrepresented would be the core of truth that inspired the wider stereotype.
I wasn’t referring to ‘scientific racism’, something for which as far as I know there is little evidence, but to the validity of IQ tests in general, something for which there is plenty of evidence. You seemed to be denying the latter based only on an anecdote. Was that not what you meant?
As I said earlier: we seem to be arguing about what “truth” means.
I don’t think anything whatsoever that either I or anyone else says is going to convince you that what you’re calling “truth” here is obvious nonsense. Nor are you ever going to convince me that ‘some tiny handful of Jews have won Nobel prizes, therefore there’s truth in the stereotype that Jews in general are extraordinarily intelligent’ isn’t obvious nonsense.
The below is the context in which we started talking about IQ tests.
If that’s not the context in which you want to defend the accuracy of IQ tests, why are you so defending them in this thread?
Again – the accuracy of IQ tests in this particular context has been judged done to death on these boards. Go read the old threads.
This raises the good point that some groups are more subject than others to being stereotypically conflated with specific subcultures within their group.
To take an example from a minority group I happen to belong to, namely Jews: About 12% of American Jews and about 17% of Israeli Jews are Haredi or so-called “ultra-Orthodox”. Haredi culture tends to valorize studying Torah as a lifework for men, and also encourages large families, which often limits career opportunities for women. They also participate less in secular formal education, meaning that their math, science, etc. skillset tends to be more limited.
Consequently, disproportionately high numbers of Haredi families rely on various forms of government assistance for low-income families. In Israel over one-quarter of all income in the Haredi community consists of government benefits. In the US, for example, the Satmar Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, NY, which houses nearly 1 in 200 of US Jews, is notoriously one of the poorest cities in the entire US, and correspondingly reliant on government benefits like Medicaid.
Yet there aren’t any popular stereotypes that “Jews are more likely to need government handouts” and “Jews have a higher poverty rate than some other minorities”. The subculture of Haredi customs isn’t being conflated with the group “Jews” as a whole. (Some other Jewish subcultures, particularly those of highly educated urban economic-elite Jews, do get stereotypically conflated with “Jews” as a whole, as DemonTree’s Nobel-Prize stereotyping illustrates. But Jewish “welfare dependency” subcultures don’t.)
Black American populations, by contrast, include some subcultures such as urban gangs in which crime rates are very high, and those subcultures do get conflated with their larger group in popular stereotyping.
When the “average American” of stereotype thinking sees a Haredi family getting food stamps, they don’t link that to stereotypes of “Jews are more likely to be on welfare”. But when they see a Black gang member dealing drugs, they do link that to stereotypes of “Blacks are more likely to commit crimes”.
And when you consider that there are about 48 million Black Americans in the US and about 1.5 million gang members of whom about one-third are Black, it’s clear that the percentage of Black Americans in the “gang criminal” subculture is substantially less than the percentage of Jewish Americans in the “strict Orthodox benefits recipient” subculture.
Which just re-confirms how unreliable and biased it is to extrapolate from specific subcultures to the propensities of an entire group.
I think the thing for me is: why are we even bringing up the allegedly accurate observation if the goal is not generalizing? There are few contexts in which it’s necessary.
Pretty much every bigot I’ve met will concede that not every X is Y, or it’s just an average or whatever. But then they continue as though it’s middle earth and different skin colors map to completely different species.
A thought…
If the allegedly accurate observation is true then the problem can be dismissed as genetic and/or cultural and there’s nothing to be done to fix it save polite forms of genocide.
‘It’s not our fault they are like that and the only way to fix it is banning rap, more prisons, and sterilization in exchange for social welfare programs.’
(An aside, it isn’t heard often but 'What reparations? ‘We gave you welfare, foodstamps, and affirmative action so we’ve been even since the 70s.’ is something I’ve heard in some form for decades)
If the allegedly accurate observation is false then the problem is, pretty certainly, systemic and it’s actually our fault and our responsibility to fix. But, as seen in this thread, the very concepts of equality and equity are rejected. Apparently because, by definition, they take away the unearned, nay stolen, privilege that being the clearly superior race we clearly deserve.
The other foundational cartoon everyone needs to have burned into their brain,
(Clearly, giving the Black man a ladder would not be fair since the White man got up on the platform purely by his own efforts without a ladder.)
This was brought up very early on in this thread:
If there’s a noxious rumor floating around your community that is actively used to harm someone who has done nothing wrong, why would you want to voice limited and qualified agreement with the rumor? What is the purpose of digging out a tiny nugget of truth underneath all that unfair nastiness?
What’s surprising is that I could discuss the “truth” behind a nasty rumor about someone and then act like the aggrieved party when those someones (or their friends) get pissy with me.
It could serve a purpose if someone is going to the opposite extreme, claiming that there are no examples of that bad behavior.
If someone claims “Minority Group XYZ is committing all of the crimes” and then someone retorts, “Minority Group XYZ is committing none of the crimes,” then both are wrong, and an objective observer could point out that that minority group is committing some - which is neither all nor none.
You have a bigot attacking a minority group with a bullshit stereotype that’s been used for decades to encourage racist acts against that group. You also have a misinformed speaker who is incorrectly stating something about crime rates.
The objective observer should shut the fuck up instead of defending the racist trash who started the argument.
Would this be the right time to link to Asimov’s The Relativity of Wrong?
Yes, sadly, yes it would…