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of the most heartening features of the times we live in, if you
are of a conservative inclination, is the discoveries now being
made in the human and biological sciences. Anthropology, psychology,
sociology, and
genetics
are all turning up results — good, hard, replicable scientific
results — whose broad tendency is to prove that human nature
is much more like what conservatives have always said it was like,
than it is like what leftists have believed. Every time one of these
results escapes from academia into the awareness of the general
public, it is greeted with shrieks of horror and obloquy by the
leftist establishment (remember The Bell Curve?) and the
researchers who uncovered it are tarred, feathered, and run out
of the public square with cries of "racist!" ringing in their ears.
Those results are piling up mightily behind the dam of orthodoxy,
though, and the guardians of that dam are running out of fingers
to stick in the cracks. Meanwhile the academics — normally
a timid and retiring lot by nature — are getting bolder and
bolder in defense of their hard-won truths.
All of which is by way of introducing an astonishing book I have
just been reading. The book's title is Stereotype Accuracy: Toward
Appreciating Group Differences. It is a collection of academic
papers written by researchers in the field of Social Psychology.
The editors are Yueh-Ting Lee, Lee J. Jussim, and Clark R. McCauley,
and the book was published by the American Psychological Association
in 1995. I found it by chance when hunting around for research materials
to support an article on racial profiling I was writing for the
print version of this magazine. (That article will appear in next
week's issure of National Review.)
Before you run out to buy the book, I had better say that this is
academic stuff, written in academic jargon, with lots of graphs
and tables. These are the kind of folk who write "veridicality"
when they mean "truth." Stereotype Accuracy is not bedtime
reading, and I personally found some parts of it hard to follow.
The main thrust of the book is clear enough, though. These people,
all of them full-time researchers at respectable universities, have
been carrying out studies of the tendency we all have to stereotype
groups of human beings, including our own group. They have been
asking very interesting questions, not all of them politically correct.
Why do we stereotype? Are stereotypes actually good for anything?
Do they blind us to individual qualities? Are they ever true?
Stereotypes, of course, come in both positive and negative varieties,
with a single group often being the subject of both simultaneously.
Positive: Fat people are jolly, good-looking people are sociable,
blacks are athletic, Jews are smart, the English are classy. Negative:
Scandinavians are morose, blondes are dumb, blacks are lazy, Jews
are pushy, the English are undersexed.
Generally speaking, stereotypes have had a very bad press. They
lead, we have been told, to bias, prejudice and discrimination.
The editors of Stereotype Accuracy point out that many of
the researchers who contributed to the book were first attracted
to the field by a desire to fill some obvious gaps. Until recently,
most academic work on
| “Generally
speaking, stereotypes have had a very bad press.” |
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stereotypes
took that hostile point of view, and there was a need to redress
the balance. Pure logic suggests that stereotypes fall into four
classes (any one of which might, of course, after careful research,
turn out to be empty): positive and accurate, positive and inaccurate,
negative and accurate, negative and inaccurate. Prior to the work
summarized in this book, practically all research had been done
on category four, practically none on the other three. If you are
a researcher looking for a topic, you naturally zero in on gaps
of this kind.
Well, now the research is being done, and the results coming in
are unexpected. Far from being a loathsome aberration that ought
to be purged from our behavior, it turns out that stereotypes are
essential life tools, are accurate much more often than not, and
that we do not use them as much as, from cold practical considerations,
we should. Modestly, methodically, with batteries of experimental
evidence, these researchers are demolishing most of what you thought
you knew about stereotypes.
Item: People ascribe a stereotype to everybody in the subject
group. "All Germans are efficient". "All English people have
bad teeth." In fact, these researchers were not able to locate anybody
who believes that a stereotype is true of all members of the stereotyped
group. Stereotypes are probabilistic tools, and even the most dull-witted
human beings seem to know this. People who believe that Mexicans
are lazy or that the French don't wash, understand perfectly well
that there are losts of industrious Mexicans and fragrant Frenchmen.
Item: Stereotypes exaggerate group characteristics. No, they
don't. Much more often, the opposite is true. For example, the racial
stereotypes that white Americans hold of black Americans are generally
accurate; and where they are inaccurate, they always under-estimate
a negative characteristic. The percentage of black American families
headed by a female, for example, was 21 at the time of one survey
(1978): The whites whose stereotypes were being investigated offered
estimates of from 8 to 12 percent. It is not true that stereotypes
generally exaggerate group differences. As in this example, they
are much more likely to downplay them.
Item: Stereotypes blind us to individual characteristics.
Nope. It is not the case that when we pass from a situation where
we have nothing to go on but a stereotype (cab driver being hailed
by young black male) to one where a person's individuality comes
into play (interviewing a black job applicant), our stereotypes
blind us to "individuating traits." On the contrary, researchers
have found that the individuating traits are seized on for attention,
and stereotypes discarded, with rather more enthusiasm than the
accuracy of stereotypes would justify. Teachers' judgments about
their students, for example, rest almost entirely on student differences
in performance, hardly at all on race, class or gender stereotypes.
This is as one would wish, but not as one would expect if the denigrators
of stereotyping were to be believed.
Item: The real function of stereotypes is to bolster our own
self-esteem. Wrong again. This is not a factor in most stereotyping.
The scientific evidence is that the primary function of stereotypes
is what researchers very prettily call "the reality function." That
is, stereotypes are useful tools for dealing with the world. Confronted
with a snake or a faun, our immediate behavior is determined by
generalized beliefs — stereotypes — about snakes and fauns.
Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind's ability
to make generalizations, without which science and mathematics,
not to mention much of everyday life, would be impossible. Researcher
Clark R. McCauley:
Standing next to the bus driver, we are more likely to ask about
traffic patterns than about the latest foreign film. On the highway,
we try to squeeze into the exit lane in front of the man driving
a 10-year-old station wagon rather than trying to pull in on the
man driving a new Corvette. Looking for the school janitor, we are
more likely to approach a young man in overalls than a young woman
in overalls. This kind of discrimination on the basis of group differences
can go wrong, but most of us probably feel that we are doing ourselves
and others a favor when we respond to whatever cues and regularities
our social environment affords us.
Ah, the sweet cool breeze of common sense! Wafting to us from academia,
of all places!!
With the courtesy and humility that is proper to all honest scientific
inquiry, the editors of Stereotype Accuracy have included
a dissenting voice, Charles Stangor of the University of Maryland,
who throws a wet blanket over some of the findings. ("Arguments
that stereotypes are by and large accurate are premature…")
Stangor takes a clear political stand: "As scientists concerned
with improving the social condition…" He is the only one in
the book to do so, and does not explain why "improving the social
condition" is necessarily any business of scientists as scientists
— however much it may concern them as citizens. Nor does he
offer a definition of "improving the social condition," the precise
interpretation of which is, of course, the source of all political
differences. Lenin wanted to "improve the social condition" of Russia
via a terroristic dictatorship that expropriated all private property;
Adolf Hitler undoubtedly believed that he was "improving the social
condition" of Germany by exterminating the Jews. Most of us would
disagree with both of them, but neither their views nor our disagreements
with them belong in the realm of scientific inquiry. It is highly
characteristic of political ideologues that they believe "improving
the social condition" can have only one possible meaning —
theirs.
I found that the overall effect of reading this book was to make
me feel more tenderly towards the human race and angrier towards
the Left, which, au fond, hates humanity and seeks to wage
war against human nature. (Mao Tse-tung denied flatly that any such
thing as "human nature" exists.) Here we are, a rather fragile,
smelly, two-legged animal with all the soft tissue on the outside,
not very fast and not very strong, dropped into the world with few
natural defenses and swamped with a continuous tsunami of impressions
coming in to all our five senses all day long, that we somehow have
to sort out into useful information. To accomplish this stupendous
task, we have developed, or been given, marvellous skills. The most
marvellous of all, perhaps, is our skill at generalizing, without
which, as Clark McCauley points out (see above), life would be impossible.
Yet just as marvellous, in a way, is the power that even the least
intelligent of us seems to have, to drop our generalizations when
more useful, more particular information, is available — to
form individual judgments that violate our stereotypes. We can all
do this, and we all do do it, all the time. What a piece
of work is man!
Footnotes
(Yeah, yeah, I know: you don't normally get footnotes in an opinion
column. But reading all that academic stuff has put me in a "footnotes"
frame of mind. Indulge me.)
(1) Having spoken somewhat slightingly of the style of these authors,
I would like to credit one of them — presumably Yueh-Ting Lee,
who is a joint author of this particular paper — for reminding
me of my second-favorite Confucius quote: Jun jun chen chen fu
fu zi zi. Given that jun means "prince," chen
"government minister," fu "father" and zi "son", I
invite the reader who knows nothing about classical Chinese grammar
to try guessing the meaning of this apothegm. (My first favorite
Confucius quote, not entirely inapt here, is: Ren bu qi ye
— "A man is not a pot.")
(2) The business of writing "veridicality" for "truth" reminds me
of an anecdote about Bertrand Russell. While the great philosopher
was living in America, Harvard University asked him to give an address
to their philosophy department. Russell wrote up an address and
sent it to them for approval. He gave it the title "Words and Things."
Some days later he got a call from the philosophy department. "Prof.
Russell, we think your address will do just fine. However, there
is a problem with the title. 'Words and Things' really won't do
for a lecture on academic philosophy. Do you think you could change
that title? Make it a little more…professional?" Russell
changed the title to something like "Linguistic Correlates of Epistemological
Constructs." Harvard was happy and the lecture was a success.
Generally speaking, stereotypes have had a very bad press.
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