From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:UNKNOWN:upstill Newsgroups: net.misc Title: Re: freudian B.S. - (nf) Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8470 Posted: Fri Sep 10 17:42:49 1982 Received: Sun Sep 12 05:48:12 1982 References: zeppo.311 How does stereotyping begin? I'm convinced the answer is concerned with cognitive efficiency and statistics. The ideal, the unstereotyping, empirical ideal, is to deal with each individual (member of any class, not just subgroups of humanity), with perfect, deliberate ignorance about every aspect of them. This would imply that everything you knew about someone arose directly from interaction with them and from nowhere else. From the point of view of survival (since we are dealing with any class, not just people), this has two major drawbacks. First, it is an enormous cognitive effor to gather ANY information from the outside world at all, particularly information which is empirically pristine. In effect, you have to get your smarts where you can. Second, it is literally impossible to live without preconceptions, without some kind of "default value" for every aspect of reality which you evaluate. Once you realize that you have to believe SOMETHING, then you can only judge methods of acquiring knowledge as more or less effective i.e. reliable. The extent to which an individual can live and still minimize his dependence on "implied" information (which should include an ongoing effort to question, re-evaluate and update it, always with the qualifier "it seems to me that..." before an assertion), is the extent to which they can be considered broad- or open-minded. However, let's face it: perfect objectivity and empiricism is a chimerical ideal to which humans, who must scrap and scramble for every bit of information, can only aspire. Questioning the process of stereotyping is an attack on a special case of an assumption on which the whole field of statistics is based: that the behavior of individuals can be PROBABLISTICALLY predicted from the behavior of the group that contains them. The problem is not that stereotyping is a wrong way to get your "default" beliefs. The problem is that such beliefs become writ in stone and not subject to revision with new information. And THAT leads to the degradation and humiliation of the sterotypee. Steve Upstill