What stereotypes have you found to not be true?

[enipla]

All tall people are good at basketball. No, some of us are rather clumsy (I think that’s because we have growth spurts growing up).

[Kimstu]

Hmmm, it seems to be mostly about the discouragement and negative stereotyping about math ability, rather than just expecting girls to be better at verbal so they end up favoring that over math.

For one thing, there really isn’t a cognitive “split” between verbal and math thinking intrinsically, despite caricatures of inarticulate math whizzes. Being verbally adept and confident helps math understanding and processing, rather than hindering it.

Second, AFAICT the boy/girl split in math achievement has been shown to start with formal schooling, rather than appearing in early childhood when girls start being expected to be more verbal/social than boys.

[pullin]

@Velocity

What a lot of people mean about Southern folks being nice is often that they do their meanness more indirectly. Someone from the northeast may be rude in the “Fuck you” way, while a Southerner may do it in the “bless your heart” way.

Lived most of my life (esp the early parts) in the South. I assure you “Southern Hospitality” has nothing to do with hospitality. It’s about control. What your guests eat, how much, where they sit, what will be talked about, and on and on.

In my experience, they’re not trying to make you feel “at home” or comfortable.

[scudsucker]

@Moriarty

Gay Men are effeminate

Yes, I have met gay men who are effeminate, but I have a hetero friend who is effeminate, yet married to a wonderfull woman, and I am (despite my self reported hetero status) often get approached by gay men.

As the song goes “I’m not the most masculine man”

In my callous youth I used to milk that in a somewhat greedy way, in that I would obtain free drinks by would-be suitors, then depart.

[DSeid]

FWIW responding to the developmental divvying up hijack in a new thread.

Development buckets; gender bias/differences; visuospatial and verbal skills

Continuing the discussion from What stereotypes have you found to not be true?: I was honestly surprised that the basic premise was at all controversial, but it was! To me it is simply that the average child averages out to be average but is rarely average at all things. Of course some kids average out higher than the mean, and some lower. That overall capacity seems to be fairly stable across time (see stability of the crude proxy of IQ, for example); we can teach kids to better reach their p…

[Jackmannii]

I just ran across a lollapalooza of a stereotype in a Stephen Hunter novella. “Johnny Tuesday” is an example of his modern hard-boiled fiction. He writes:

It was February 1945, and in the cities of America, small or large, town, burg, village, or hamlet, everybody smoked. Moreover, everybody wheezed, everybody coughed, everybody picked flecks of tobacoo off their lips and hawked gobs of incandescent goo from lungs into kerchiefs or the streets, burned holes in suits, sweaters, and pants, set wastebaskets and sometimes houses ablaze. Everybody died early. Notice noticed, nobody cared.

Even accounting for artistic license, this is a gross exaggeration. In the first Gallup poll to examine the issue in 1944, 41% of adult Americans reported being smokers. Juust a bit less than “everybody”.*

*that 40%+ figure held pretty steady through 1974, then began dropping off, most recently reported at 11% of adult Americans smoking.
**Acceptance of smoking decades ago was of course commonplace even among nonsmokers. Mrs. J. reports that as a schoolchild, her class was encouraged to send gift parcels to veterans at the local V.A. hospital, which were to include a pack of cigarettes. Much later (1980s) I recall making my way through dense clouds of tobacco smoke to locate patients in the V.A. hospital lounge.