Lunchtime poll: Stereotypes

[cdave]

[Poll #1474202]

Comments

[cdave]

The context the discussion thread on my recent link to the nerd handbook.

[jon-a-five.livejournal.com]

Interesting Poll. I went for 4 but frankly 3 has merit - humans need definitions to ringfence scope of discussion.

[andrewducker]

It's not ideal - but you can get good discussion out of it provided you bear in mind that you're dealing with generalisations and that indivudal variation tends to be high.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

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.

[cdave]

I suspect me and jon_a_five would both agree with you if we hadn't just polarised each others opinions :)

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

Oooh, you've reminded me of a poll I was going to do.

[jon-a-five.livejournal.com]

Hehehe :-)

[cdave]

Taking the house analogy, you couldn't assume a London house to be £300k, but if you assumed that a terrace house had a neighbours attached to both sides you'd be right most of the time. The end terraces would be an exception, but so long as you said "most" or "this is often true" or something, I think it should be fine.

[andrewducker]

http://deoxy.org/wiki/Sombunall

[cdave]

Nice.

[chiller.livejournal.com]

I guess my take on this is 50% "tautology" and 50% "wrong". I don't like the idea of there being fixed social groups. Human nature is so dynamic, is it fair to say that I am in X social group when I am also in A, B, C, and the rest of them? It may be true but it is always going to be a very limited and flawed definition of anyone.

[cdave]

If you want to make a general point about how some set of people behave, say football hooligans, or women who wear large hats at Ascot, then you'll never be able to say anything generally about, for example, their take on modern art, but you can say something about their behaviour at those sporting events, as that's how you've defined them for that point.

Even within those groups there'll be exceptions to most statements, but the interesting statements are the ones that minimise the number of exceptions.

[chiller.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose you can say something about people who wear large hats at Ascot, but if it's going to be true, isn't it pretty much limited to "people who wear large hats at Ascot, wear large hats at Ascot"?

[cdave]

You could say more. Like I suspect they will likely have "disposable income"* in the top 50% of the UK, and they don't see horse racing as unforgivably cruel.

But the more specific things you say, the less true they will be.


* in terms of discretionary spending funds available as opposed to actual income.

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

My answer depends entirely on your purpose. In marketing, for example, what you describe is a must. Also, generally, if you're trying to present data in one way or another (to techies; to execs; to yoof) you need to get some sense of who "they" are.