Essay on Stereotypes are Grounded in Truth - 1109 Words

Assume you’re walking down a street and everywhere you turn you encounter pitch black darkness. You reach a point where you only have two choices; either you go left where there is a group of tattooed muscular black men or you go right where you find a group of well dressed white men. What would you do? Your immediate choice would be to stay clear from the group of black men and that you’d be better off going to the right. What just happened here was that you assumed a certain group of human beings is more likely to cause you harm than the other. From a very young age we start to categorize things in to different groups. We see pencils, pens, erasers and we categorize them in a group and call them ‘stationery’. Similarly we tend to†¦show more content†¦They would argue that because there’s a higher probability of black people being violent, the sane choice would be to avoid them. This may seem like a perfectly justified reason, but the view that on average black people tend to be more violent is a logical fallacy in itself. Most stereotypes develop due to illusory correlation; a ‘cognitive mechanism’ that erroneously implies a relationship between two unlikely events even though no such relationship exists. Black people are a minority in USA; one is less likely to run in to a black person on any given day. ‘Undesirable behavior’ is also an unlikely event as compared to ‘desirable behavior’. Since both of these events are unlikely, the combination of the two events leads us to ‘overestimate the rate of co-occurrence’ (Hamilton) and in turn makes us believe the stereotype that black people are generally more violent. Even though certain stereotypes may seem grounded in reality, but a closer and more rational approach would clearly render even these stereotypes false. Satoshi Kanazawa, a renowned psychologist at LSE, wrote â€Å"What people call â€Å"stereotypes† are what scientists call â€Å"empirical generalizations,† and they are the foundation of scientific theory. That’s what scientists do; they make generalizations. Many stereotypes are empirical generalizations with a statistical basis and thus on average tend to be true. If they are not true, they wouldn’t be stereotypes.† Kanazawa here putsShow MoreRelatedStereotypes Exist Because They Are Grounded in Truth1476 Words   |  6 Pages2015-10-0106 SS-100 Writing and Communication Raazia Waseem November 18, 2011. Stereotypes exist because they are grounded in truth. Why hasn’t anyone ever seen a ‘’white crow’’ flying under a ‘’yellow sky’’? Why hasn’t someone ever experienced a ‘’really hot’’ winter season? Indeed why hasn’t my best friend yet told me, how she was once a popular Hollywood star? Clearly, because their lies no truth in the statements that I have put forward. One cannot see a white crow, when the entireRead MoreStereotyping: A Phenomenon That Is Instigated Or Perpetually Within Us?1541 Words   |  7 Pagescover of the VOGUE magazine and not in an AP Math class almost as if it were a reflex action. What just happened here was that a stereotype was formed based on mere appearance. Although many people believe that stereotypes exist because they are grounded in truth, the fact that they are not set in stone and have the capacity to evolve, falsify this claim; the idea of stereotypes began with mere observations configured by the s ociety based on logical fallacies and the most prominent reason behind theirRead MoreWhat Are Stereotypes? Essay1308 Words   |  6 Pages Stereotypes are assumptions held about the characteristics of a particular group of people. These assumptions could be due to their race, culture, country, community and religion. Women are not as smart as men. Men are strong and do all the work. Americans are tolerant but arrogant. 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