Greg Ellis reads How a Rebellious Scientist Uncovered the Surprising Truth About Stereotypes, Claire Lehmann’s article about Lee Jussim, the maverick social psychologist who discovered that stereotypes accurately predict academic achievement, personality and behaviour. It was published in Quillette on 4th December 2015.
Published on June 21, 2019
How a Rebellious Scientist Uncovered the Surprising Truth About Stereotypes by Claire Lehmann
All readers here had ancestors who stereotyped saber toothed tigers as dangerous. Otherwise, you/we wouldn’t be reading this.
The people who make decisions on advancement probably make use of stereotypes for the sake of simplicity, and these stereoetypes affect acheivement, personality and behavior.
Stereotyping is a prerequisite to learn anything about people. If we were to conclude that we cannot learn behaviour from one individual to another, we should also shut down all the humanities.
The idea that stereotypes would not be broadly accurate is rather a bizarre one. It seems clear that generalisations, approximate models about all aspects of the world for which detailled knowledge is not available are necessary and are likely to be broadly accurate especially with respect to those aspects which are encountered reasonably often.
The idea that stereotypes are generally wrong would require strong evidence. It would imply that people perceptions and learning about the world are mostly wrong, not in the detail, unusual or obscure situations, or arising from simplification and generalisation but broadly wrong. This would be a substantial disadvantage how could it arise in evolutionary terms?
Why couldn’t I read a transcript? Listening to things takes forever.
The transcript is the link just below the podcast. All of these “narrated” podcasts have original articles on this site.
I much prefer listening to them. It’s very time effective when I am on their go, especially in the car.