There’s a long article with in depth explanations of the research here:
“Black people are over-represented among professional basketball players in the USA” is a fact. “Black people are good at basketball” (let alone “Black people are good at athletics”) is a stereotype. And they’re not at all the same statement: because, as you note, there are a lot of Black people who aren’t particularly good at basketball.
(It’s possible that the physical form needed to be extremely good at basketball is more common among Black people in the USA than among whites (though it’s certainly rare among some other populations who have dark skin). It’s also possible that Black people in the USA are more likely to go in for professional athletics than White people are; I can think of a batch of possible reasons. So that overrepresentation may or may not have anything to do with natural basketball playing ability; it may just be that a higher percentage of people not identified as Black don’t try to become professional players.)
Haha! Yeah, exactly.
In the same spirit, do you have any evidence that stereotypes are merely confirmation bias?
Thanks for those. I quickly skimmed both.
I think those are two excellent meta- examples of the core of this thread – ie, there exists a kernel of truth in what you’re saying, but the two cites you offered – more so the PDF – go to great lengths to provide much needed context, which – to me – nearly negates the underlying premise.
Put another way: my brother used to deal Blackjack at a casino. He could tell you the odds of the next card dealt being the one you needed. But you’d have been a fool to bet the grocery money on it.
To me, this topic dances a bit closer to the ‘scientific racism’ line than I’m comfortable with.
Nope. I can’t find anything article that says that bigoted stereotypes are the result of confirmation bias.
I’d love to see the call for volunteers: Calling all bigots! We want to see if your bigotry is the result of confirmation bias or some underlying nugget of truth.
When stereotypes are based on cultural conventions, there can be a nugget of truth to them. For instance, if culture X highly values dancing and it is tradition to start their kids dancing as soon as they can stand up, people from that culture will likely be good dancers. Culture Y where dancing is frowned upon will generally have people who aren’t as good dancers. People might say things like “Culture X people are good dancers" and “Culture Y people are bad dancers”. While that’s not an absolute statement about everyone in those cultures, they are statements which are generally true about people in those cultures due to the particular traditions and customs of that culture. If a culture and race are tightly linked, then people may say that people of a certain race have some characteristic. But really, it’s that it came from cultural conventions rather than any sort of innate race characteristic.
They generally aren’t tightly linked, and very often not linked at all; but bigots either ignore that, or are so ignorant that they don’t even know it.
There are, for instance, a huge number of different cultures and different frequencies of physical traits among people who share the physical trait of dark skin color.
We must differ radically in our understanding of the meaning of ‘stereotype’. To me, it chiefly refers to beliefs about empirical differences between groups, eg ‘black people are overrepresented in the NBA’ rather than to putative explanations for those differences (eg ‘black people are better at basketball’). My sources straightforwardly confirm the claim I was making, and I had no intention of implying anything else.
See also @RitterSport’s posts, which are clearly referring to and dismissing as confirmation bias beliefs about empirical differences between groups (never mind the real-world evidence that young men do drive more aggressively, in the form of insurance companies charging them higher premiums).
And note the massive bias displayed here: all that is required to “confirm” the popular view is made-up scenarios and Onion(!) articles. Meanwhile I link to an academic publication and an article in Psychology Today, and you dismiss them after a quick skim, while other posters simply ignore the only actual evidence presented so far.
what in the world is this supposed to mean?
there is no such thing as “natural basketball playing ability”. Basketball is a learned skill. There is a such a thing as natural athletic ability, that in turn gives you the ability to play basketball better than a comparably skilled person with less natural athletic ability.
Let’s stay focused here, though, on bigoted stereotypes, right? Some stereotypes are obviously true – African Americans typically have darker skin than Irish Americans.
This thread is about bigots having a nugget of truth in their bigotry, not about stereotypes in general.
Things usually only get called a “stereotype” if there’s something questionable about them in the first place. Masked men barging into a store waving guns being robbers is a stereotype, but nobody would call it that both because it’s so obviously the way to bet and out of self preservation.
So if something is considered a stereotype you can assume it’s a touchy subject matter at best, because it being problematic is the usually-unspoken part of the unofficial definition of the word.
As for bigoted stereotypes having truth to them, many do. It’s just that they are out of context, exaggerated or otherwise slanted for the purpose of serving that bigotry. For example, black people do have a high crime rate - that’s just what happens when the police and courts make a point of arresting and convicting a population, they end up with a high “crime rate” no matter how many or few crimes they actually commit. Or how women really do often tend to take rejection badly (“hell hath no fury”, etc); that claim isn’t wrong, it just leaves out the little detail that men also have a long history of taking rejection badly. Sometimes “makes it onto the TV news” level of badly.
This makes voicing agreement with a technically accurate bigoted statement problematic, because that bit of truth is often included specifically for the purpose of making the less-accurate parts more plausible. Even assuming that isn’t your intention, you have a high probability of playing right into the hands of the bigots who crafted that bit of propaganda. You need to at best be very careful because there are going to be people involved who are not interested in having an honest argument, but in exploiting the opening you just gave them.
In many cases it’s neither, but a matter of necessity. Many of the stereotypes about black people and sports for example boil down to them playing the only sports they’ve been allowed to play, between enforced poverty and general persecution. Why are so many good runners? Because you don’t need infrastructure to practice running. Why are they seldom good at swimming? Because they weren’t allowed to use swimming pools, even if the local authorities had to close down pools for everyone to keep black people from using them. And so on.
The same goes for the stereotype about black people eating watermelons and fried chicken. Those became stereotypes because in the time and place the stereotype started, those were poor people foods. Black people ate a lot of them because they were forced into poverty, and so by necessity ate poor people food. And of course only subhumans eat poor people food, like black people and the poor. That’s why it worked as an insult originally, but tends to confuse most modern people.
For clarification, how do you think a bad stereotype starts if there’s no nugget of truth to it?
For instance, MAGA and Trump supporters are often regarded as QAnon/racist/sexist/homophobic people. Do you think there’s no nugget of truth in it?
During slavery and Jim Crow, there was an ENORMOUS stereotype that Blacks, and particularly Black men, were dangerously violent, and in particular had violent sexual appetites that endangered White women.
But who was really dangerous? Who was really violent? Who was really raping? Quite obviously, Whites were extremely dangerous, violent, and sexually rapacious to Blacks. It was probably on the order of 100 to 1, if not more, in terms of how much more dangerous a White person was to a Black person than vice versa, if we had accurate statistics at the time.
That stereotype was based on absolutely nothing except what would be most useful to the White power structure.
What makes a stereotype bigoted, though? The general rule seems to be that it’s bigoted if it says or implies something negative about a less privileged group. It is not usually considered bigoted to say that men have a higher violent crime rate than women, for example.
But that doesn’t tell us whether a stereotype is accurate or not (assuming it’s a testable claim at all).
Again, a stereotype is highly unlikely to exist or persist in the first place unless there’s at least some nugget of truth to it. If I tried to spread some stereotype tomorrow claiming that Californians are all people who go about wearing 4-foot-long stilts on their feet and go everywhere walking on stilts, there’s no way that stereotype could stick or be believed by anyone because the number of Californians who do that is essentially zero, and just about no one has ever seen a Californian do that, apart from maybe a circus.
The bigots just lie? Like “blood libel”; there was never any truth to the claim that Jews murdered non-Jews to use their blood in religious rituals; the bigots just entirely made it up to demonize Jews. That didn’t stop the claim from being a popular stereotype for centuries.
Okay, then let’s return to the example I used. One negative stereotype about Trump supporters and MAGA people is that they are irrational, QAnon-believing, racist, sexist, uneducated, conspiracy theorists, unscientific, etc. Would you say that’s ‘blood libel’ or is there some truth to that stereotype?
Bullshit. I can’t think of a single bigoted stereotype that’s actually based on any facts, if we look back to when it started.