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