As an Indian friend of Isaac Asimov’s once told him, “All mothers are Jewish.”
But you can have cultural norms that mean a group largely exhibits a characteristic.
Not exactly a stereotype (well, maybe aimed at Americans of European descent), but I have a friend who married a Hispanic woman. They come to a number of our family events, including the Pumpkin Carving Party we have every October and the Yankee Swap we have near Christmas every year. And every time she says “This is really why I married Matt. I like doing these White People Things.” To which I always respond with joke outrage at being stereotyped, call her a racist, and ask her what counts as “Spanish people things.”
Just to note, I typically use the term “Hispanic” or maybe “Latin” but she calls herself “Spanish,” so when talking to her that’s what I use.
That means she really considers herself White at least as compared to mestizos.
I don’t know if you’re joking or not. She’s from the Dominican Republic, and if you saw her you’d have no doubt that she is Hispanic.
This misses the next paragraph in the argument: Because Jews are more privileged (controlling banks, Hollywood, etc.) it’s acceptable to hate them and organize violence against them.
The point of bigoted stereotype is often that the group is offensive in some way, and therefore deserving of the bigotry. Examples mentioned here are Blacks being more violent, Irish being heavy drinkers, and (I’d argue) MAGAs being stupid[1].
Saying all stereotypes must come from a nugget of truth is an unfair stereotype of stereotypes. Stereotypes can come from lots of places, an original nugget of truth, a nugget of non-truth pushed as a nugget of truth to excuse the big lie, or just totally made up.
None of those things are immutable characteristics. Both crime rates and gender can change. Not only that, the stereotypes around them can change.
For example, for much of the 20th and 21st century the stereotype has been that men are unable to control their sex drives, and women must be protected. In prior centuries the stereotype was just the opposite, that women are the ones with uncontrollable sex drives, and must be protected from themselves.
Did the nature of the human sex drive change, or did the stereotype just shift the way many cultural things do? Of course the point of both stereotypes is that men should have control of women’s bodies.
I certainly don’t agree with MAGAs, and find many of their views abhorrent, but dismissing them as stupid is a strategic error in fighting them. Just calling them stupid as an insult is different. ↩︎
I mean, people do say that, women are known to have better “small muscle control” aka dexterity on average. It just doesn’t have much effect on what jobs get stuck in the “men’s work” or “women’s work” category; as you say, that’s about status and money, especially status.
It’s one reason why dexterity is largely ignored or undervalued IMHO, valued attributes and behavior are generally ones men have more of like size, strength, and workaholism because that makes it easier to claim men are superior. There’s a lot of backwards reasoning involved; look at what men have more of/do more, then declare those to be the valued qualities of a human being.
I mean, notice how whenever somebody compares the genders you’ll nearly always see “men are stronger”, but almost never “women live longer”. Or even better, “men are bigger” as if being larger was an innately valuable feature.
This is exactly what DemonTree was getting at. Both of you are perfectly capable of inserting the required caveats to convert the general stereotype into something more specific. Language is contextual, and we had been talking about the NBA and more generally the SDMB is dominated by Americans. Further, the stereotype left open the actual reasons for the claim, so statements about physical form or culture or anything else are perfectly consistent with it.
In almost any conversational context it would be obvious what was meant. So the main purpose of the caveats and additional detail would only be to soothe the indignation of the listener (and it would never be enough). The main reason to not say such a thing is that it’s so obvious that it’s barely worth saying!
Somehow we can state less controversial stereotypes like “adults are taller than children” without having to make endless elaborations about overlapping height distributions or admitting that 17-year-old boys are taller than 18-year-old girls or whatever else. Perhaps the statement actually is false in some particular context, like if someone was using the stereotype to make claims about differing populations. In which case it should be dismissed on that basis. But it remains a stereotype which is largely true.
Black people tend to go for basketball because it’s something poor people can play on an improvised court. As always, it largely comes down to the poverty imposed on them for generations.
In other words, both of us are perfectly capable of objecting to the stereotype and pointing out that it isn’t valid.
The fact that we can do so doesn’t mean that perpetuating the stereotype is OK.
And you’re perfectly capable of not using the stereotype in the first place.
Why are you putting the work on us?
By doing it properly.
Let’s say someone goes on a long and bigoted homophobic rant. And in the midst of the rant they mention gay people wearing flamboyant clothing.
You can then lambast the person’s rant and call out their bigotry, but also point out that the mention of gay fashion, while absolutely not a universal truth, still reminded you of how colorful and beautiful a recent Pride parade was. And then you share pictures of that event to show what you’re talking about.
There’s your tiny nugget of truth and I don’t think anyone but that bigot would object to your contribution.
Is it your position that all stereotypes are inherently wrong, even when true (given whatever caveats)? That would be difficult to work through since stereotypes are one of the primary ways that humans understand the world, given its incredible complexity vs. our primitive brains. Most of these stereotypes are given very little thought, which in a sense is the whole point–they operate as a useful heuristic so that our limited capacity can be better applied to other things.
Is it just that false stereotypes are bad? I’d agree with that; false stereotypes should be eradicated. But as DemonTree’s link acknowledges–along with many other sources–stereotypes are generally accurate. It’s a very robust finding in psychology; one of the most robust.
Perhaps you mean that bad stereotypes are bad, but that would be a tautology. What makes it bad? Should we not say true things because someone calls them bigoted?
Every conversation rests on a shared context of some kind. And almost any discussion of any substance will require some stereotypes, even if they are so innocuous as to be beneath notice (adults are taller than children, etc.). So the work is already being done.
But when certain particular stereotypes are mentioned, they seem to invite pushback, even if said pushback adds nothing to the conversation. The person making the statement adds their caveats, which were already understood by the recipient and thus didn’t need to be said–and so the conversation turns tedious.
I think it’s worth a closer look at the PDF that @DemonTree posted.
In particular, note that the meta-study (a study of other studies) drew a distinction between consensual stereotypes (“which are shared by members of a particular culture or sample and usually assessed by sample means”) and personal stereotypes (“which are individuals’ beliefs about groups”).
Also note that the study includes this caveat: “When articles reported correlations of stereotypes with multiple criteria (e.g., self-reports and observer reports), we averaged them to produce a single correlation for this table.” So, for the purposes of the study, they gave equal weight to what I say about myself as a Jew and what the people marching in Charlottesville say about me as a Jew.
Huh?
Further, look at Table 2 on PDF page 4. It delineates the ‘accuracy’ of stereotypes based on self-report (ie, what I think about myself), and contrasts it with the ‘accuracy’ of personal stereotypes (ie, the beliefs I might hold about other groups).
I would argue that these two top-level categories – what I say about me vs. what you say about me – are profoundly different, and that mixing them using equal weight is reminiscent of the old joke: “I had a friend who was a statistician. He slept with his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven. ‘On average,’ he remarked, ‘It’s quite comfortable.’”
Also notice the standard deviation among the two groups – consensual and personal – particularly when broken into the sub-categories: race, gender, political affiliation, national character, other.
Finally, what were the stereotypes involved in these studies? Were they asking if Germans own the highest percentage of German-made automobiles in the world? If the Irish consume more sugar per annum, per capita, than any other United Nations member? If the average home size in Liechtenstein is greater than or less than the average home size in Lesotho?
Or were they asking if Jews were cheap, British people have bad teeth, and if the French have noxious body odor?
ALL of these things (and more. Read the PDF in its entirety) make it beyond risky (I’d argue illogical, irrational, painfully reductive, and the apotheosis of confirmation bias) to extrapolate from that paper to the kind of discussion that we’re having in this thread, particularly given the connotation that almost surely comes to mind for many of us when the concept of “stereotypes” comes up here.
There. There’s my GD answer 
And in the early 20th century the stereotype was that Jewish people were particularly good at basketball
If you look back at sports history it becomes clear that sports was one of the ways for ethnic and racial minorities to get out of poverty.
But that actually weakens the reported numbers. You can see from the table that (unsurprisingly), consensual stereotype correlations are stronger than personal stereotype correlations. So averaging in a degree of personal stereotypes to consensual stereotypes should make consensual stereotypes look worse–and yet the correlations were still incredibly high! In fact they were very strong for personal stereotypes as well, just not as strong.
It’s not just that paper. And, it should be said, the correlations are so high that they can cover for any minor problems in the metastudy. Metastudies can get dubious with weak effects, since they become very sensitive to how you combine the results together. But that’s just not a problem when the results are this strong.
Sure. I think it’s clear that there’s no consensus on what a stereotype even is. I’m not interested in connotations of the word; as far as I’m concerned a stereotype is any general belief about categories of people, without any implication of true/false or good/bad.
Not necessarily – particularly when we don’t know how often they averaged the two. It’s a meta-study that draws from lots of underlying studies. Not keeping them clean and segregating them out is a bad move, IMO.
We also can’t be sure into what bucket they were thrown when they were averaged. It matters. It looks like they were lumped in with the ‘consensual’ figures, but a) I can’t be sure, and b) it’s inherently dirty data by their chosen approach. It’s nigh unto meaningless unless somebody who cares far more than I do drills down into the underlying studies – similar to endeavoring to understand what constitutes a “stereotype” for the purposes of this study and every single study that’s rolled up into it.
It really matters when evaluating the strength of the meta-study that DemonTree offered. It would matter more if I knew whether or not the underlying studies captured in that meta-study represented a plurality or majority of the applicable studies published during that time frame.
I’d also argue that it matters here. The kind of stereotype – even defined as broadly as “what I say about me” vs. “what you say about me –” particularly if I view what you say about me as derogatory – is pretty much the whole ball game.
The footnote is clearly attached to the consensual-stereotype column. And in any case, averaging two values–even if you don’t know the weighting factor–can only give a result between those values. And obviously the proportion of these studies cannot be very high anyway, since otherwise the two columns would be much closer together (identical in the case where every study had mixed data).
The other thing that seems to be overlooked in this thread is that stereotypes generalize. If I say that black people in the US, in general, tend to be poorer than white people, that’s true. But if I meet a black person and conclude that that person is poor, that might or might not be true, and is definitely a stereotype. Even if it’s true that “Most X are Y”, or “X are more likely than average to be Y”, or whatnot, you still can’t validly conclude from that that “all X are Y”. It’s that jump from “more” or “most” to “all” that’s the problem.