Edit: Actually, on thinking about it, I realize I’m being a doofus. You almost undoubtedly meant, not inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population, but inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G, which is a far more unreasonable thing to be upset about. My apologies.
It’s very interesting that you made this mistake (and I didn’t notice it until you pointed it out, and would maybe have made the same).
It seems that the human mind doesn’t make a sufficiently good distinction between the two, between “blacks are more likely than non-blacks to have a criminal record” and “blacks are more likely than not to have a criminal record”. Maybe by default the non-verbal part of the brain stores the simpler version (the second one), and uses that part to constrain expectations and behavior.
I don’t think it’s a question of what gets stored so much as what gets activated.
That is, if I have three nodes that “represent” inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population (N1), inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G (N2), and the word “stereotyping” (N3), and my N1->N3 and N2->N3 links are stronger than N1 and N2′s links to any other word, and the N3->N1 link is much stronger than the N3->N2 link, then lexical operations are going to make this sort of mistake… I might start out thinking about N2, decide to talk about it, therefore use the word “stereotyping,” which in turn strongly activates N1, which displaces N2.
This is why having distinct words for minor variations in meaning can be awfully useful, sometimes. I’m willing to bet that if we agreed to use different words for N1 and N2, and we had enough conversations about stereotyping to reinforce that agreement, we’d find this error far less tempting, easier to notice, and easier to correct.
What you strike me is the human tendency to mark one option as the default and the other as a special case.
However, it makes me wonder: if the person making the judgement belongs to the category commonly considered “a special case”, will they mentally mark either category as the default? Judging by myself (yes, yes, generalizing from one example), among the intersection of social partitionings that define me, I tend to skip ones where I’m in the majority category (for example, white, or specifically on LW, atheist), and in cases where I’m a minority, treat neither option as the implicit default.
As I recall, for some categories this turns out, surprisingly, not to be the case. Women are as likely as men to consider a person of unspecified gender male, for example, and blacks are as likely as whites to consider a person of unspecified color white… at least, in some contexts, for some questions, etc. (I would very much expect this to change radically depending on, for example, where the study is being performed; also I would expect it to be more true of implicit association tests than explicit ones.)
I have no citations, though, and could easily be misremembering (or remembering inconclusive studies).
It’s very interesting that you made this mistake (and I didn’t notice it until you pointed it out, and would maybe have made the same).
It seems that the human mind doesn’t make a sufficiently good distinction between the two, between “blacks are more likely than non-blacks to have a criminal record” and “blacks are more likely than not to have a criminal record”. Maybe by default the non-verbal part of the brain stores the simpler version (the second one), and uses that part to constrain expectations and behavior.
I don’t think it’s a question of what gets stored so much as what gets activated.
That is, if I have three nodes that “represent” inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population (N1), inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G (N2), and the word “stereotyping” (N3), and my N1->N3 and N2->N3 links are stronger than N1 and N2′s links to any other word, and the N3->N1 link is much stronger than the N3->N2 link, then lexical operations are going to make this sort of mistake… I might start out thinking about N2, decide to talk about it, therefore use the word “stereotyping,” which in turn strongly activates N1, which displaces N2.
This is why having distinct words for minor variations in meaning can be awfully useful, sometimes. I’m willing to bet that if we agreed to use different words for N1 and N2, and we had enough conversations about stereotyping to reinforce that agreement, we’d find this error far less tempting, easier to notice, and easier to correct.
See the sequence on A Human’s Guide to Words for more on this subject.
Cool! I’d read at least most of these, and the ideas aren’t new, but I hadn’t realized they were all linked in one place. Thanks for the pointer.
What you strike me is the human tendency to mark one option as the default and the other as a special case.
However, it makes me wonder: if the person making the judgement belongs to the category commonly considered “a special case”, will they mentally mark either category as the default? Judging by myself (yes, yes, generalizing from one example), among the intersection of social partitionings that define me, I tend to skip ones where I’m in the majority category (for example, white, or specifically on LW, atheist), and in cases where I’m a minority, treat neither option as the implicit default.
Efficiency of encoding, perhaps?
As I recall, for some categories this turns out, surprisingly, not to be the case. Women are as likely as men to consider a person of unspecified gender male, for example, and blacks are as likely as whites to consider a person of unspecified color white… at least, in some contexts, for some questions, etc. (I would very much expect this to change radically depending on, for example, where the study is being performed; also I would expect it to be more true of implicit association tests than explicit ones.)
I have no citations, though, and could easily be misremembering (or remembering inconclusive studies).