Social categories
Problems with stereotypes:
- Not always accurate
- confirmation bias
- we don’t get our data from scientific research but from media which may not be representative
- We naturally take groups seriously even when the groups are arbitrary and favor us v.s them
Even the stereotypes are accurate, there are moral problems
- we often have the intuition that people should be judged as individuals, not as group members.
- this gets complicated for whatever reason society allows certain circumstances where you can judge people as group members. In the United States, for instance, auto insurance, how much money you pay to insure your car, varies depending on how old you are and other facts about you. But at the same time, you wonder whether that would be moral if, for instance, different ethnicities had different records of safety in driving. Similarly, we allow some profiling in criminal cases. For instance, there’s a strong presupposition when there’s a violent crime that the perpetrator is male. But even if you gain some benefit through racial profiling, the cost in terms of making it to a life worse for minority members of the society outweighs any benefit that you get.
- Social psychologists are interested in all social aspects of stereotypes and they tend to talk about different levels and different types of stereotypes
- public stereotypes: what we say to other people about a group
- private stereotype
- implicit stereotypes: unconscious associations that guide us and affect us even if we’re not conscious of it
IAT method: implicit.harvard.edu
Many of the rest of us are at war for ourselves in that group membership matters even when we think it shouldn’t. Even when we think we want to be colorblind, we want to be gender-blind, we want to be attractiveness blind, we’re still swayed by things. It’s an interesting question how to deal with this problem and I think part of the answer is, we can use our intelligence to override our biases. That is, we don’t become less biased just by trying to be less bias rather we become less bias by using clever methods to override it. So, for instance, it used to be that for auditions for symphony orchestras, men would be overwhelmingly chosen over women, and because they sounded better according to the judges but it turns out that when you do blind auditions, you have them audition behind the screen, the effect goes away, and a gender difference largely disappears. What’s interesting here from a psychological point of view is the judges, male and female who were saying that the men sounded better than the women, were most likely not being self-consciously sexist saying," Ha ha I’m going to discriminate against women. I hate women," etc. Rather they might have entirely had egalitarian views, but because of their biases, they couldn’t help but hear them differently. Then when you hide the gender of people, you take away the chance for the biases to operate. Things change. More generally, we talked about so many social psychology biases, so many ways in which we’re contorted by first impressions, by stereotypes that we believe are inaccurate, by cognitive dissonance. The way we can make it through the world as better decision-makers and better people often is to use our intelligence to structure the world so these biases don’t apply. To put it much broader, we can use our heads to override our hearts.
8.5 Social categories
Problems with stereotypes:
Even the stereotypes are accurate, there are moral problems
IAT method: implicit.harvard.edu
Many of the rest of us are at war for ourselves in that group membership matters even when we think it shouldn’t. Even when we think we want to be colorblind, we want to be gender-blind, we want to be attractiveness blind, we’re still swayed by things. It’s an interesting question how to deal with this problem and I think part of the answer is, we can use our intelligence to override our biases. That is, we don’t become less biased just by trying to be less bias rather we become less bias by using clever methods to override it. So, for instance, it used to be that for auditions for symphony orchestras, men would be overwhelmingly chosen over women, and because they sounded better according to the judges but it turns out that when you do blind auditions, you have them audition behind the screen, the effect goes away, and a gender difference largely disappears. What’s interesting here from a psychological point of view is the judges, male and female who were saying that the men sounded better than the women, were most likely not being self-consciously sexist saying," Ha ha I’m going to discriminate against women. I hate women," etc. Rather they might have entirely had egalitarian views, but because of their biases, they couldn’t help but hear them differently. Then when you hide the gender of people, you take away the chance for the biases to operate. Things change. More generally, we talked about so many social psychology biases, so many ways in which we’re contorted by first impressions, by stereotypes that we believe are inaccurate, by cognitive dissonance. The way we can make it through the world as better decision-makers and better people often is to use our intelligence to structure the world so these biases don’t apply. To put it much broader, we can use our heads to override our hearts.