What responsibility does a group/category of stereotyped people have to change their behavior so they don't get stereotyped?

Great Debates
1

(Split off from the Jason Arday thread, which is a separate but related issue)

On the one hand, most folks agree that stereotyping and painting people with a broad brush is wrong. On the other hand, some or most folks would also agree that if it weren’t for Group XYZ of people engaging in a certain behavior, they wouldn’t be stereotyped as having that behavior to begin with. After all, pattern recognition is deeply hard-wired into the human brain.

Examples:

Women taking safety precautions against men because men are stereotyped as a potential threat to women;

People taking precautions against black people because of stereotypes of black violence (Obama said in a speech that before he became senator, women would clutch their bags nervously in elevators and people would lock car doors if he was walking near their car);

Arabs/Muslims being stereotyped as potential terrorists because of the many suicide bombings, hijackings or other attacks done by Arab Muslims;

Jews being stereotyped as heavily involved in media, banking, etc.

etc. etc. etc.

(More harmless stereotype examples might be: Germans loving beer, Brits cooking bad food, Asians playing ping pong and being obsessed with academics, black guys loving basketball, etc.)

In some cases, people will say things like “Men should treat women better if they don’t want to be regarded as threats to women.” But people will also say, “Muslims can’t possibly control the behavior of other Muslims, everyone stands alone on their own choices and decisions.” So, clearly people in Group XYZ are expected to behave better individually to improve their group’s image, yet also defended as individuals who can’t control the behavior of anyone else.

So - to what extent can, or should, society say, “Group XYZ, if you don’t want to be stereotyped as having a certain behavior, then stop that behavior” - or is the blame more to be put on the stereotyping folks who paint a category of people with a broad brush?

2

The latter is the problem. Period. All else is rubbish.

Quit broad-brushing. Because anyone doing that is assigning bad characteristics to 99 or 999 or 999,999 good people for every bad person / act they’ve ever heard about.

That degree of willful mis-thinking has a shorter name: bigotry.

Eliminate bigotry and the rest of perfecting society gets very, very easy.

Making excuses for bigots is really a hateful thing to do in its own right.

3

It’s the people doing the stereotyping that are the problem. It’s a common cognitive error called confirmation bias. Humans are very sensitive to patterns and err on the side of seeing patterns when none exist. They notice only the examples that affirm their biases. They do this with people and with information. Now it may even be that a majority of the group does some behavior but it probably doesn’t make a difference what the actual numbers are to the person doing the stereotyping.

That’s why it happens, not because someone from a marginalized group does some thing that fits someone else’s cognitive bias.

4

None at all.

5

And on the other hand, those people are right.

There’s always going to be a tiny minority making sleazy excuses for bad acts by others in their ethnic/religious/gender classification, and that isn’t helpful.

But calling on “Group XYZ” to conform to bigoted expectations in order to eliminate stereotyping is fatuous and unrealistic, not to mention bigoted.

6

So - to use one of the examples - women shouldn’t take safety precautions against men? Because that’s based off of the stereotype that men, as a whole, are a greater safety threat to women than vice versa.

Or we shouldn’t stereotype MAGA folks as being highly stubborn? Because in my conversations with most MAGA folks I’ve talked to, it’s like talking to several layers of brick wall.

7

Neither of those match the subject of your thread.

8

That’s a hell of a preposition to use there. What safety precautions are used “against” men?

Women certainly shouldn’t bear-spray random dudes in the eyes, or slap handcuffs on them (outside consenting yadda yadda). But the precautions women often take are “around” men. That’s very different.

It’s not stereotyping to say that people who adhere to a specific belief system have traits that allow adherence to that specific belief system.

9

They do. Because there are, without a doubt, a good number of men who are totally safe to women, and some MAGA folks who aren’t mule-headed. But they get those stereotypes because enough dangerous men exist, and stubborn-conspiratorial MAGA folks exist, for the stereotype to exist and persist.

Most of us, when we see someone walking towards us with a red “Make America Great Again” cap, already have pre-set expectations about what that person will be like.

10

How about, Jews shouldn’t stop working in finance because some people stereotype them on that basis. Maybe I should keep getting the haircut I like even if some assholes driving by in cars harrass me for looking dykey.

11

I’m not sure what you mean by this, or how this applies in cases where a pattern is fairly clear. For instance, Czechs are stereotyped as liking beer, and it’s because Czechs as a whole do consume quite a bit of it - in fact, they lead the world per capita. There are, without a doubt, Czechs who don’t drink at all. Stereotypers shouldn’t stereotype, for sure. But it would be hard for Czechs to shed the image of being beer fans if they keep leading the world in per capita beer consumption.

12

I can’t help but think it’s fair to judge people based on their political affiliations and make assumptions about their character. If you join or continue to remain a member of a party led by a serial lying sex pest, a man who cannot run a business without committing fraud, and is hellbent on protecting pedophiles it says something about your values.

13

I think there’s a key misconception in the OP: a group can’t decide to change their behavior, because a group can’t make a decision. (Outside of groups with a formal decision-making process, like a nonprofit board of directors, and that’s clearly not the kind of group we’re talking about here)

Only individual members of a group can make decisions about their own individual behavior

I’m a man. I can’t change men’s behavior. I can only change my own. It’s not that I don’t want to change men’s behavior. It’s that I lack the mind-control rays necessary to do it.

As such, holding an individual responsible for changing a group’s behavior in order to avoid a consequence is an incoherent idea. And since a group has no capacity to make a decision to change group behavior, that’s a similarly incoherent idea.

There’s absolutely no group responsibility at all that makes any kind of sense at all.

14

Right, stereotyping something like this is relatively harmless so I’m not going to get all het up about it, but my point was that stereotypes persist regardless of whether they reflect the behavior of the majority because that is the nature of confirmation bias. The problem, as I see it, is confirmation bias, a cognitive distortion, rather than the fault of a whole group of people.

It gets complicated with -isms because there’s confirmation bias and then there’s outright racism etc and I think of them as different things, although confirmation bias can support racism.

15

No, it’s not based off any stereotype. It’s based off women’s real lived experiences in living under a Patriarchy.

16

But your subject is not whether we (the general public) should stereotype, you seem to have asked the the men or the MAGA folks own responsibility to change their behaviors. Did I misinterpret your OP?

17

I think it’s meant to be some kind of gotchya. There’s a real conversation to be had here but some of the examples really seem to be poisoning the well for this kind of discussion on this board.

19

Moderating:

This thread is closed, pending a full review by all the Great Debates moderators. Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE - After a review by all GD moderators, this thread will remain closed. @Velocity, in forming your OP, you made the assertation:

This is in violation of the TOS on our rules regarding Hate Speech:

  1. Criticism of groups to be clearly framed as a debatable proposition. Criticism of groups or their members on factual grounds is not considered hate speech and is not a violation of SMDB rules, provided it is clearly framed as a debatable proposition. By this we mean that (a) the asserted criticism should be expressed in unambiguous language and not rely on innuendo, “dog whistles,” or the like, and (b) in principle, the criticism could be shown to be unfounded.

Your passage from the OP argues from the conclusion that members of Group XYZ are performing enough of these behaviors that they have to take responsibility for it. Despite some minor qualifiers, this means you are accepting this as a given for purposes of this thread.

As such, it will remain closed. @Velocity, be very careful if you want to revisit this sort of topic to keep the premise debatable and specific, and not to endorse or support stereotypes especially ones that are social/religious/racial cheap shots.