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.

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.