Generation Why Don’t You Shut The Hell Up

 FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU…  stereotypes and over-generalisations.  Otherwise known as: the sand in my vagina.  Yes, NoBloJoFoYoHo 2010, I’m getting all butthurt at you and your trivial little prompts.  Hey, at least you’ve managed to prompt an entry out of me finally.

Rather than swim against the crippling current of "woman like shoes" and "men are emotionally retarded" and "generation Y are apathetic spoilt brats" and "Asians can’t drive" and any sentence that starts with "ethnic people", I’d like to discuss confirmation bias and stereotype priming.  Otherwise known as: "the root of all the unsupportable unresearched dumb-arse opinions in the world".  It’s the reason why you shouldn’t just brush people off when they suggest that your gut feelings about how the world work are a bit off without first checking out the old facterinos and doing some critical thinking about how things get to be that way.

Confirmation bias is a phenomenon that happens when you are looking out for evidence that supports something you already believe or that you already have a hunch about.    Or maybe you hear someone say "all men are jerks" and you wonder "Hmmmm… could this be true?" and then you go out there keeping an eye out for men who are jerks in order to test out the hypothesis.  You might not want the hypothesis to be true, but you’re looking for the evidence nonetheless.   The problem with this approach is that it usually creates a bias towards noticing the confirmations and discounting, missing or forgetting the contradictions.

The best analogy I know for it is poker machines.  When you win on a poker machine, a cute little noise is made and something on the screen moves.  Even for the smallest wins, and even for technical losses, like when you win 4 credits back off a 10 credit bet (technically that’s a 6 credit loss).  But if you win nothing, you see and hear nothing. The action and noise make you more likely to pause to register this stimulus before pressing the button again.  No action and no noise, and you’re more likely to click again very quickly, churning through your money.  This creates a disproportionate representation of hits in your perception compared to misses.  Going on feel alone, it feels like you’re winning a lot more often than you actually are.   I daresay, if we couldn’t see the credits on the screen, most of us would be surprised to see how quickly we can burn through 20 bucks on a 1 cent machine. 

With that approach, you can come to see that "men are jerks" and if someone points out one man that isn’t a jerk, you can go "Well, I’m just generalising of course.  What I mean is: most men are jerks".   I use qualifiers like "most" all the time – it’s great, you should try it.  Without any idea of the actual statistics on something, the word "most" covers any percentage from 50 to 99.  The chances of you being accidentally right are pretty good.  It’s quite necessary when you’re running on confirmation bias without any objective basis – 51 per cent may seem like 99 per cent to you which is a huge margin of error but under the category of "most", they’re both the same.    You can continue to draw conclusions and make opinions on the perception that almost every single man is a jerk while pretending to acknowledge that it’s only a slight majority, if that.  And that’s without comparing the percentage of women and genderqueer folks who are jerks, or whether you yourself are a jerk.  

Once you’ve decided to go around declaring that men are jerks or young people are lazy, there’s an interesting phenomenon that helps make you more and more right the more time other people hear this opinion.  It’s called stereotype priming.  It’s a form of socialisation where merely hearing a stereotype that relates to an aspect of someone’s personal identity creates a tendency to fulfil that stereotype. 

Studies have been done in which the questions asked before a test influenced the scores the test participants achieved.  Study participants have been given primers such as articles about the relative abilities of men and women, comments by researchers about the performance of men and women on a test, and also similar primers for ethnicity or racial identity, and this has been found to cause higher or lower mean scores on the test depending on which way the stereotype wind was blowing.   Tell women they’re shit at maths, and they do worse.  Tell men they should suck at interpreting facial expressions, and they do.   In fact, you don’t even need to spell the stereotype out.  If you give Asian American women a maths test, the participants who answered questions about their racial heritage did better on the test than the women who answered questions about their gender identity.  Ticking "Male" or "Female" before you answer other questions can actually influence how you perform.  The proposed mechanism for how this works is that it calls up in our mind what our social identity and expectations are, and if they’re negative people become anxious about trying to overcome that negative perception, an anxiety which distracts from the task at hand.  Positive expectations boost people’s confidence and focus.. 

So if men continually hear that they are jerks, then theoretically they will experience anxiety – even subconsciously – that will hamper their concentration on social skills that stop them being seen as a jerk.    

I actually have a different interpretation on how I think it works: I think stereotypes give everyone the excuse to be lazy and conform to the roles that are prescribed for them.  "I’m a man so everyone expects me to be a jerk, so who can blame me if I am?"  "I’m a woman and no one expects me to be able to change my own engine oil, so who can blame me if I don’t bother to find out how?"   If you patronise people by saying "Wow, you’re such a nice guy – most guys are jerks", then you’re creating the view that acting like a normal non-jerk person is some special achievement above & beyond the call of duty, while being a jerk is normal and unnoteworthy.  Not to mention that if you continually experience people imposing stereotypes on you and ignoring when you transcend them, there’s little incentive to keep on trying.  If everyone expects you to be a jerk because you’re a man and they don’t ever acknowledge when you’re not, then why not be a jerk?    If people talk down to you when discussing automotive mechanics without bothering to check whether you have any prior understanding on how to maintain a car, then what’s the use of knowing how to do it?  

However, social researchers have more expertise in this and I think I’ve seen data that has helped people form the "anxiety" explanation, so that’s just my own little biased embittered interpretation.  

Anyway, I haven’t bothered to source or annotate this, which I should edit it with later.  I was first introduced to the idea of stereotype priming by an article in Slate a few years ago, but I  thought maybe the article had overstated it just to make it sound interesting.  I’ve since heard more about it and recently read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender which goes through a lot more similar studies that isolate the same effect.  If I don’t ever bother to back up my claims here and anyone’s interested, I recommend looking up the gender stereotype priming example in Slate, and looking up Cordelia Fine’s references in Google Scholar.  Which I guess is asking you to create a confirmation bias for this, but whatever… the studies are controlled & blinded, cuz.  

I know I have a tendency to focus on gender – I’m identified as a white female, so being white doesn’t come back to bite me quite so much as being a woman does, except when filling out scholarship applications for uni (kekekekek) – but  you can easily apply this to racial identity or any other kind of social identity that we like rely upon to impose mass group generalisations on individual people without checking if they are relevant at that time.    My favourite arbitrary grouping to hate on is old people.   Shit, I’ve seen people do this according to hair colour, homeschooling, birth order and even which star sign they were born under.   Then mX publishes skewed interpretations of questionable results from dodgy studies done by market research companies and everyone thinks it’s a fact and walks around thinking "I’m a red head, so I should act like every day is my period" and making life HELL.  THANKS FAIRFAX YOU STUPID CORPORATE JERKS.  

End.