A twitter thread summary of this paper on the accuracy of stereotypes, which I read so you don't have to: gwern.net/docs/psycholog
4
3
66
Conversation
We open with a summary of attitudes in various fields (mostly academic) which assume stereotypes are inaccurate, with a few peeks into how the research supporting this assumption is lacking. Theory: that a belief that stereotypes are harmful has lead to belief they're inaccurate.
1
15
Stereotypes *don't* mean prescriptions (e.g., "children should be seen and not heard), but rather descriptions (jews are rich). Believing that all descriptions of groups are inaccurate is silly. Calling only inaccurate group descriptions 'stereotypes' is also silly.
1
1
17
They define the word: “a stereotype is a set of
beliefs about the personal attributes of a social group.”
We then go into what exactly 'accurate' means - it clarifies some nuance and different definition types, and provides their thresholds for degrees of scoring accuracy (r=.4)
2
8
Replying to
One problem with the stereotype accuracy literature is that this threshold seems too low. If one finds, r=0.4, then this means that 16% of the stereotyoe is due to truth and 84% of the stereotype is inaccurate.
1
1
This is a large effect size for psychology, but psychology usually studies things that a different but might cause each other. For the purpose of causation, relatively small effects are useful.
1
1
And unless one expects the system to be near deterministic, one can't expect big effect sizes for causality. Meanwhile, stereotypes, being beliefs, are more like correspondence to the world, and as such one would expect them to have much higher accuracy.
1
I'd say anything lower than r=0.7 could be argued to be mostly inaccurate (literally: it's more noise than signal), and even then, 0.7 is pretty low. Consider that e.g. IQ tests often have test-retest reliabilities which suggest an accuracy greater than 0.9.
1
Replying to
I'd read the paper for this - they give specific r numbers for each study. While 0.4 was their threshhold, many (most?) of the studies they looked at saw 0.7 and above.