patrick.net

If you make almost any claim about almost any group, the quickest way to have your claim dismissed is for someone to declare: ‘That’s just a stereotype!’ This ‘works’ because of the widespread assumption that stereotypes are inaccurate, and the unstated insinuation that you are probably a bigot. Thus, any evaluation of the validity of your claim is short-circuited by the peremptory dismissal.

Still, high moral purpose (or lack of it) does not translate to scientific truth (or its absence). We do not usually presume people making other generalisations – say, about the weather in Madrid or the taste of oranges – are doing something bad and inaccurate. Despite this point, the notion of generalisations about people as inherently bad and inaccurate has long been baked into the science without any proof. It is almost impossible to conduct social scientific research on stereotypes without running into the scholarly emphasis on their inaccuracy.

When I first began my research, I had assumed all those social scientists declaring stereotypes to be inaccurate were right. I wanted to know the basis for those claims – not to refute them, but to promote them and proclaim to the world the hard scientific data showing that stereotypes were wrong. So, when some published article cited some source as evidence that stereotypes were inaccurate, I would track down the source hoping to get the evidence.

And, slowly, over many years, I made a discovery: there wasn’t any evidence there. Claims of stereotype inaccuracy were based on… nothing. For example, a classic paper from 1977 describing research by social psychologists Mark Snyder, Elizabeth Tanke, and Ellen Berscheid stated: ‘Stereotypes are often inaccurate.’ Ok, but scientific articles are usually required to support such claims, typically via a citation to a source providing the evidence. This is important so that anyone can find the evidence for such a claim. There is no source here.

As I read more of the literature on stereotypes, I discovered that this pattern was pervasive. Every article or book that declared stereotypes to be inaccurate either similarly cited no source, or ended in an identical dead end via a slightly different route. Many researchers cite social psychologist Gordon Allport’s benchmark book, The Nature of Prejudice (1954) in support of the claim that stereotypes are inaccurate, or at least exaggerations of real differences. And Allport did declare that stereotypes exaggerated real differences. But, aside from an anecdote or two, which is hardly scientific evidence, he presented no evidence that they actually did so.

These practices created what I call ‘The Myth of Stereotype Inaccuracy’. Famous psychologists declaring stereotypes inaccurate without a citation or evidence meant that anyone could do likewise, creating an illusion that pervasive stereotype inaccuracy was ‘settled science’. Subsequent researchers could declare stereotypes inaccurate and could create the appearance of scientific support by citing articles that also made the claim. Only if one looked for the empirical research underlying such claims did one discover that there was nothing there; just a black hole. ...

The evidence is clear. Based on rigorous criteria, laypeople’s beliefs about groups correspond well with what those groups are really like. This correspondence is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Stereotype accuracy has been obtained and replicated by multiple independent researchers studying different stereotypes and using different methods all over the world. People have been found to be quite good at perceiving academic achievement, personality, and a variety of social and economic characteristics among racial and ethnic groups in the United States and Canada.