This is all true, but doesn’t seem relevant. The study description says:
participants were simply asked to rate a particular group
That sounds like rating the group, not individuals. It sounds like being asked about the validity of the stereotype itself. And I’m pretty sure the stereotypes mentioned as examples are in fact true:
a series of stereotypical characteristics, for women were: warm, family-oriented and (less) career-focused
The only question is the magnitude of the true stereotypical difference, and whether people estimate it correctly.
I don’t think it would be right even when applied to individuals. If someone tells you “X is an expert nuclear engineer” and you know that X is a woman, the prior for nuclear engineers being male no longer applies, because you can observe that X is a woman with 100% certainty. But in the resume evaluation example, what the resume evaluator wants to discover (how good a worker the applicant is) is not something that he can observe. It is true, of course, that the more detailed facts on the resume also should affect the evaluator’s result, but that just means that both the applicant’s race/sex and the other facts should affect the result. Even if the sex/race has a small positive correlation with being a good worker and the other facts have a larger positive correlation, the evaluator is better off using both race and the other facts rather than using the other facts alone.
This is all true, but doesn’t seem relevant. The study description says:
That sounds like rating the group, not individuals. It sounds like being asked about the validity of the stereotype itself. And I’m pretty sure the stereotypes mentioned as examples are in fact true:
The only question is the magnitude of the true stereotypical difference, and whether people estimate it correctly.
I don’t think it would be right even when applied to individuals. If someone tells you “X is an expert nuclear engineer” and you know that X is a woman, the prior for nuclear engineers being male no longer applies, because you can observe that X is a woman with 100% certainty. But in the resume evaluation example, what the resume evaluator wants to discover (how good a worker the applicant is) is not something that he can observe. It is true, of course, that the more detailed facts on the resume also should affect the evaluator’s result, but that just means that both the applicant’s race/sex and the other facts should affect the result. Even if the sex/race has a small positive correlation with being a good worker and the other facts have a larger positive correlation, the evaluator is better off using both race and the other facts rather than using the other facts alone.