The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood." - George Santayana

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Strongly supporting my observation that "stereotypes persist and endure because they are often true":


"The tacit equation is, if stereotypes are associated with social wrongs, they must be factually wrong. However, the accuracy of stereotypes is an empirical question, not an ideological one. For those of us who care deeply about stereotypes, prejudice, and social harmony, getting to the truth of these collective cognitions should guide inquiry about them.

Unfortunately, this has not always been our experience. Because of his inquiries into stereotype accuracy, the first author has been accused by prominent social psychologists of purseying “nonsense,” of living “in a world where stereotypes are all accurate and no one ever relies on them anyway,” of calling for research with titles like “Are Jews really cheap?” and “Are Blacks really lazy?,” of disagreeing with civil rights laws, and of providing intellectual cover for bigots...

To argue for the need to take seriously the possibility that sometimes, some aspects of some stereotypes may have some degree of accuracy, therefore, is to risk making claims that are unbearable to some social scientists. However, science is about validity, not “bearability.” It is about logic and evidence...

No social scientist has ever explicitly claimed that all beliefs about all groups are inaccurate. Thus, toppling the assertion that all stereotypes are inaccurate might appear to be refuting a straw assertion. Unfortunately, however, this straw assertion, even if it is merely an implicit rather than explicit assertion, appears to have an ardent scientific following. For decades, stereotypes were predominantly defined as inaccurate, with virtually no evidence demonstrating inaccuracy. Furthermore, among those who define stereotypes as inaccurate, statements regarding what sort of beliefs about groups are accurate (and, therefore, not stereotypes, almost never appear... Accurate beliefs about groups, therefore, appeared to be an empty set.

Furthermore, in their empirical studies, the social sciences have considered people’s beliefs about almost any attribute (personality, behavior, attitudes, criminality, competence, demographics) regarding almost any type of group (in addition to race, sex, class, occupation, dorm residence, sorority membership, college major, and many more to he a stereotype. It seems, then, that for all practical purposes, the social sciences consider any and all claims and beliefs about groups to be stereotypes...

So little of the stereotype research has assessed the accuracy of the beliefs under investigation...

[We can't define stereotypes as inaccurate beliefs about groups since] almost [no social psychology "research purportedly addressing sereotypes"] has empirically established that the beliefs about groups being studied are in fact erroneous. There would be nothing left—no studies of the role of “stereotypes’ in expectancy effects, self-fulfilling prophecies, person perception, subtyping, memory, and so on. Poof! We would have to throw out the baby, the bathwater, the tub, the bathroom, and indeed tear down the entire scientific and empirical house in which all our current understanding of "stereotypes" exists...

Fortunately, many modern definitions of stereotypes do not define stereotypes as inherently inaccurate, and are instead agnostic in terms of stereotype accuracy. One of the simplest of these definitions, and the one we use throughout this chapter, was provided by Ashmore and Del Boca (198l) who stated that 'a stereotype is a set of beliefs about the personal attributes of a social group' (p. 21). Stereotypes, as defined by Ashmore and Del Boca, may or may not be accurate and rational, widely shared, conscious, rigid, exaggerations of group differences, positive or negative, or based on essentialist or biological rationales. Stereotypes may or may not be the cause or the effect of prejudice, or the cause of biases and self-fulfilling prophecies...

Stereotype accuracy issues occur, therefore, at two different levels of analysis. each captured by a different question. First, how accurate are people's beliefs about groups? Just as a person might not accurately remember how many games Roger Clemens won in 2010 (inaccuracy in person perception) and still remember that the Yankees won the World Series that year (accurate belief about Clemens’s group), inappropriate application of a stereotype does not mean that the stereotype is itself inaccurate. A person may correctly know that, on average, women earn about 70% of what men earn, but have no accurate knowledge whatsoever about how much Nancy earns.

Second, does people’s use or disuse of stereotypes in judging individuals increase or reduce the accuracy with which they perceive differences between small groups of individuals with whom they have personally come into contact? This is the accuracy version of the “stereotypes and person perception" question. Do, for example, general stereotypes of male superiority in athletics lead the coach of a soccer team to erroneously view the particular boys on the team as better than the particular girls on the team, when they really have equal skill?...

How much correspondence [between stereotypes and reality] should be considered “accurate”?... we adocate holding people to a high standard—the same standards to which social scientists hold themselves.

J. Cohen (1988), in his classic statistical treatise imploring social scientists to examine the size of the effects they obtained in their studies and not just the “statistical significance” of the results, suggested that effect sizes above .8 could be considered "large.” Such an effect size translates into a correlation of about .4... By this standard, correlations of .4 and higher could be considered accurate because they represent a “large” correspondence between stereotype and reality.

This standard has been supported by two recent studies that have examined the typical effect sizes found in clinical and social psychological research. One recent review of more than 300 meta—analyses - which included more than 25,000 studies and over 8 million human participants — found that mean and median effect sizes in social psychological research were both about .2 (Richard et al., 2003). Only 24% of social psychological effects exceeded .3. A similar pattern has been found for the phenomena studied by clinical psychologists (Hemphill. 2003). Psychological research rarely obtains effect sizes exceeding correlations of 3. Effect sizes of .4 and higher, therefore, constitute a strong standard for accuracy. Last, according to Rosenthal’s (1991) binomial effect size display, a correlation of at least .4 roughly translates into people being right at least 70% of the time. This means they are right more than twice as often as they are wrong. That seems like an appropriate cutoff for considering a stereotype reasonably accurate...

Consensual stereotype discrepancies are a mix of accurate and inaccurate beliefs. Nonetheless, most judgments were either accurate or near misses. Only a minority were more than 20% off...people’s consensual stereotype discrepancies for between group differences are consistently more accurate than are their consensual stereotype discrepancies for characteristics within groups... these results provide little support for the idea that stereotypes typically exaggerate real differences. Exaggeration occurred, but it occurred no more often than did underestimation... the extent to which people’s stereotypes corresponded with reality was strikingly high. Consensual stereotype accuracy correlations ranged from .53 to .93. Personal stereotype accuracy correlations were somewhat lower, but still quite high by any standard, ranging from .36 to .69... [For gender stereotypes] results are broadly consistent with those for ethnic and racial stereotypes...

Addendum: Although most of the studies only assessed the accuracy of undergraduates' stereotypes, several assessed the accuracy of samples of adults. Some of the highest levels of accuracy occured with these adult samples, suggesting that the levels of accuracy obtained do not represent some artifact resulting from the disproportionate study of undergraduate samples...

The studies examined a wide range of stereotypes: beliefs about demographic characteristics, academic achievement, and personality and behavior. The consistency of the results across studies, therefore, does not reflect some artifact resulting from the study of a particular type of stereotype...

Despite the impressive and surprising evidence of the accuracy of stereotypes, there is some consistent evidence of inaccuracy in stereotypes. In the United States, political stereotypes tend to have little accuracy (e.g.. Judd & Park. 1993). Many people in the United States seem to have little knowledge or understanding of the beliefs, attitudes, and policy positions of Democrats and Republicans.

A recent large-scale study conducted in scores of countries found that there is also little evidence of accuracy in national stereotypes regarding personality... somewhat more surprising is that people from cultures with a great deal of contact (various Western European countries: Britain and the United States) also have highly inaccurate beliefs about one another’s personality characteristics...

What happens when people rely on a largely accurate stereotype to judge an individual? Given that the prior section demonstrated moderate to high accuracy in many stereotype beliefs, this becomes a pressing question. It turns out that there are some conditions under which relying on an accurate stereotype can increase accuracy in judging an individual...

Consider stereotypes of peace activists and al-Qaeda members. You hear the same thing about an individual from each group: They have “attacked” the United States. Should you interpret this to mean that they engaged in identical behaviors. Not likely. The attack perpetrated by the peace activist is most likely a verbal “attack” on U.S. war policies; the al Qaeda attack is probably something far more lethal.

The same principles hold regardless of whether the stereotypes inolve groups for whom stereotypes are deemed acceptable (e.g.. peace activists or al Qaeda or groups for whom stereotypes are deemed socially unacceptable (e.g. genders, nationalities, races, social classes, religions, ethnicities, etc.). For example, if we learn both Bob and Barb are regarded as “tall,” should we conclude that they are exactly equal in height? Of course not. Undoubtedly. Bob is tall for a man, and Barb is tall for a woman, and, because men are, on average, taller than women, tall means different objective heights for men and women...

What about judgments about more socially charged attributes, such as intelligence, motivation, assertiveness, social skill, hostility, and so on? The same principles apply. If the stereotype is accurate and one only has a small bit of ambiguous information about an individual, using the stereotype as a basis for judging the person will likely enhance accuracy. For the statistically inclined, this is a very basic application of Bayes’s theorem and principles of regression. Let's assume for a moment that 30% of motorcycle gang members are arrested for violent behavior at some point in their lives, and 0.3% of ballerinas are arrested for violent behavior at some point in their lives. People who know this are being completely reasonable and rational if, on dark streets or at lonely train stations, they avoid the bikers more than ballerinas, in the absence of much other individuating information about them.

In all of these cases, the stereotype “biases” the subsequent judgments. At least, that is how such influences have nearly always been interpreted in empirical social psychological research on stereotypes. It is probably more appropriate, however, to characterise such phenomena as stereotypes "influencing” or “informing” judgments. Such effects mean that people are appropriately using their knowledge about groups to reach as informed a judgment as possible under difficult and information-poor circumstances. If their knowledge is reasonably accurate, relying on the stereotype will usually increase, rather than decrease, the accuracy of those judgments (see also Jussim, 1991, 2005).

If you are given absolutely no information, and are asked to predict today’s high temperature in Anchorage and New York, what should you do? If you know anything about the climate in the two cities, you will predict that it will be warmer in New York. Indeed, you should predict this every time you are asked to do so. Would this mean your beliefs about climate are somehow irrationally and rigidly resistant to change? Ot course not...

People should primarily use individuating information, when it is available, rather than stereotypes when judging others. Do they? This area of research has been highly controversial...

Fortunately, literally hundreds of studies have now been performed that address this issue, and, even more fortunately, multiple meta-analyses have been performed summarizing their results...

The effects of stereotypes on person judgments, averaged over hundreds of experiments, range from 0 to .25. The simple arithmetic mean of the effect sizes is .10, which is an overestimate...

How small is an effect of r = .10? It is small according to J. Cohen’s (1988) heuristic categorization of effect sizes. It is among the smallest effects found in social psychology (Richard et al.. 2003). An overall effect of .10 means that expectancies substantially influence social perceptions about 5% of the time. This means that stereotypes do not influence perceptions 95% of the time...

There is always the possibility that researchers have not searched in the right places or in the right way for powerful stereotype biases in person perception. At minimum, however, the burden of proof for the existence of widespread, powerful stereotype biases in person perception has shifted to those emphasizing such powerful biases...

People seem to be generally doing the right thing—relying on individuating information far more than stereotypes...

Madon et al. (1998) examined the accuracy of seventh-grade teachers’ perceptions of their students’ performance, talent, and effort at math... teachers were mostly accurate. The correlation between teachers’ perceived group differences and actual group differences was r = .71. The teachers’ perceptions of sex differences in effort, however, were highly inaccurate—they believed girls exerted more effort than boys, but there was no sex difference in self—reported motivation and effort. When this outlier was removed, the correlation between perceived and actual group differences increased to r = .96.

We are aware of only two other studies that have addressed whether people systematically and unjustifiably favor or disparage individuals belonging to certain groups. Both yielded evidence of accuracy accompanied by small bias...

The utility of an accurate stereotype was also demonstrated by Brodt and Ross (1998). College students made predictions about the behaviors and preferences of other college students who lived in one of two dormitories. The students in the "preppie" dorm were widely seen as politically conservative, wealthy, and conventional. The students in the “hippie” dorm were widely seen as politically left wing with unconventional practices and preferences. Perceivers (other students who did not live in either dorm) viewed photographs of individual targets, were informed of each target’s dorm, and then made predictions about each target’s behaviors and attitudes. Perceivers’ predictions were then compared to the targets self-reports on these same preferences and attitudes.

When perceivers predicted targets to be consistent with their dorm (for a preppie dorm resident to have preppie attributes or for a hippie dorm resident to have hippie attributes), 66% of their predictions were correct (they matched the targets self-reports). When perceivers jettisoned their dorm stereotypes, and predicted targets to be inconsistent with their dorm, 43% of their predictions were correct. Relying on the preppie—hippie dorm stereotypes enhanced the accuracy of person perception predictions...

Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes Are More Valid Than Most Social Psychological Hypotheses...

First, the accuracy of two of the other major types of stereotypes—religion and social class—have, as far as we know, never been examined. Although we can think of no reason why patterns of accuracy should differ for these types of groups. we will never know until the research is actually conducted.

Second, the existing research has overwhelmingly examined the stereotypes held by college students, largely because those samples are convenient. Is this important? Maybe. Suggesting it may not be that important has been the research by McCauley and colleagues, and by Clahaugh and Morling (2004) showing that the accuracy of noncollege groups is nearly identical to that of college students. Nonetheless, more research with noncollege samples is needed...

Fourth, most of the research on stereotype accuracy to date has been conducted in the United States and Canada. Perhaps stereotypes in other countries are less (or more) accurate...

People are better at judging differences between groups, and at judging the rank order of attributes within a group, than they are at judging the exact level of particular attributes within a group... [people] either consistently over- or underestimate the level of an attribute in a group...

[Ed: This is the same reason we use ordinal, not cardinal, utility]

On average, personal stereotypes corresponded well with groups’ attributes (i.e., individual beliefs about groups correlated moderately to highly with criteria). Nonetheless, some personal stereotypes were highly inaccurate. Nearly all of the studies reporting personal stereotype accuracy correlations found at least some people with very low—near zero—correlations...

Ideology/motivated egalitarianism/universalism (which, despite the intended benevolence of an egalitarian ideology, seems to lead people to hold less accurate stereotypes - Wolsko et al., 2000). Despite the existing evidence showing only weak relations between prejudice and stereotyping (Park & Judd. 2005), perhaps under the right (or wrong) conditions, deeply held prejudices and hostilities can sometimes lead to highly distorted stereotypes...

Education and mass communication levels are so high in the United States and Canada, where most of the stereotype accuracy research has been conducted, that, perhaps, in general, people are more exposed to social reality in these places (and, probably, in other Western democracies) than in many other places around the world. Perhaps poverty and ignorance help breed stronger inaccurate stereotypes. Perhaps the propaganda of demagogues in authoritarian regimes helps perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes...

Stereotypes can be accurate. Some scholars and lay people resist this conclusion, believing that crediting any accuracy to stereotypes is tantamount to endorsing prejudice. We argue that the opposite is more likely true—that acknowledging the accuracy of some stereotypes provides the episiemological clarity needed to more effectively address prejudice and bigotry, and to more effectively investigate the nature, causes, and moderators of stereotypes.

Not all stereotypes are accurate, and those that are inaccurate may be the most damaging. A special and important case is that of manufactured stereotypes, which are intentionally designed to despoil the reputation of particular social groups... [like] the perpetual stereotype of Jews as seeking world domination...

Whereas Jews do not seek world domination, it is not always absurd to believe that certain groups seek domination over, if not quite thc world, at least large parts of it (consider. e.g., Rome. Nazis, Communists, Imperial Japan, the Mongolian Khans, and, possibly, some modern Islamic extremists, etc.). Without standards and methods for assessing (in)accuracy, it becomes impossible to reliably sort out valid from bogus beliefs...

Stereotypes are not static phenomenon, but shift with circumstance, policy, social contact, and other forces. To what degree do stereotypes map these changes? How responsive are the to social shifts, or to targeted interventions? Why do some stereotypes shift rapidly and others remain entrenched? Perhaps not surprisingly, if one makes the common assumption that stereotypes are inaccurate, and answers these questions by assumption, one is not likely to even consider such questions, let alone provide answers to them...

In sum, accepting that stereotypes can sometimes be accurate provides the means to distinguish innocent errors from motivated bigotry, assess the efficacy of efforts to correct inaccurate stereotypes, and reach a more coherent scientific understanding of stereotypes. We believe that this proposition can advance the depth, scope, and validity of scientific research on stereotypes, and thereby help improve intergroup relations."

--- The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes in Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination / Lee Jussim, Thomas R. Cain, Jarret T. Crawford, Kent Harber, Florette Cohen


In summary:

- Stereotypes are mostly accurate, regardless of how you measure accuracy
- Stereotypes are accurate regardless of who holds them
- Many types of stereotypes are accurate
- Stereotypes aren't usually exaggerated and don't usually lead to exaggeration
- The stereotypes most people believe are the most accurate

Ed:
- People start with stereotypes but as they get more information about an individual they abandon the stereotypes and use the more-relevant individuating information in evaluating the individual

Addendum: Truth, lies and stereotypes: when scientists ignore evidence

"Typically, when people have clear, definitive, relevant information, they rely on that information almost exclusively. Indeed, reliance on personal characteristics, rather than stereotypes, is up there with stereotype accuracy as one of the largest and most replicable effects in social psychology. Some 20 years ago, when social psychologist Ziva Kunda and philosopher Paul Thagard tabulated all the studies they could find that addressed this issue, they concluded effects of unique, personal characteristics on judgments were massive. The effects of stereotypes in such situations are small to nonexistent. On the other hand, when personal information is absent, or ambiguous, people do rely on their stereotypes, although even in these situations, stereotype biases are not very large"