I don't really agree with any of the options, including the last one.
Life is incredibly complex and messy ... part of human consciousness is finding ways of simplifying things down to where a decision can be made based on that approximation of reality.
It's always important to remember that individuals are all different and you can't apply statistics to a single sample. The average house price in London might be, say, £300,000, but that doesn't mean any random house you see should be assumed to be £300k.
Similarly, just because suicide bombers in the UK are predominantly from a particular ethnicity or religion does not mean that any particular person of that ethnicity or religion is a suicide bomber (in fact, statistically, they are very nearly as likely to be as you ... a few individuals out of hundreds of thousands or a few million is pretty close to zero)
So answer 4 "wrong. We should never prejudge anyone." is about each single person while the original statement was about social groups. So invalid answer to original question :-) (IMHO)
But yes, it is sometimes fine to "profile" a social group by some aspect of their common behaviour ... but you can't apply that to individuals in that group.
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Date: 2009-10-21 10:56 am (UTC)Life is incredibly complex and messy ... part of human consciousness is finding ways of simplifying things down to where a decision can be made based on that approximation of reality.
It's always important to remember that individuals are all different and you can't apply statistics to a single sample. The average house price in London might be, say, £300,000, but that doesn't mean any random house you see should be assumed to be £300k.
Similarly, just because suicide bombers in the UK are predominantly from a particular ethnicity or religion does not mean that any particular person of that ethnicity or religion is a suicide bomber (in fact, statistically, they are very nearly as likely to be as you ... a few individuals out of hundreds of thousands or a few million is pretty close to zero)
So answer 4 "wrong. We should never prejudge anyone." is about each single person while the original statement was about social groups. So invalid answer to original question :-) (IMHO)
But yes, it is sometimes fine to "profile" a social group by some aspect of their common behaviour ... but you can't apply that to individuals in that group.