“They are all alike; we are diverse”

The fallacy of out-group homogeneity

It’s long been observed that we tend to view members of a different group as being essentially similar to each other but members of our own group as being varied. “they are all alike; we are diverse.” This tendency – fallacy – impedes mutual understand and dialogue. We see this in opinion pieces that aim to speak to an “other” group in monolithic terms.

Such rhetorical approaches rarely succeed…

…because, consider: Members of the other group feel just as offended as you feel when others do it to you. You dismiss their reply of “Not all…” yet you do it yourself when the tables are turned.

We all do this. In fact, this tendency is one of the things that unites us as humans.😉

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

Spontaneous social categorization

Reading from from https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/social-categorization-and-stereotyping/

“Social categorization occurs spontaneously, without much thought on our part (Crisp & Hewstone, 2007). Shelley Taylor and her colleagues (Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978) “ –

…describes an experiment with names & different racial groups..along with a table of errors.

“The conclusion is simple, if perhaps obvious: Social categorization is occurring all around us all the time. Indeed, social categorization occurs so quickly that people may have difficulty not thinking about others in terms of their group memberships “

Benefits of Social Categorization

“The tendency to categorize others is often quite useful. In some cases, we categorize beca

use doing so provides us with information about the characteristics of people who belong to certain social groups (Lee, Jussim, & McCauley, 1995). … The description of social categorization as a heuristic is also true in another sense: we sometimes categorize others not because it seems to provide more information about them but because we may not have the time (or the motivation) to do anything more thorough.”

Negative Outcomes

(…pretty well-documented already, right? Including the above out-group homogeneity.)

“Although thinking about others in terms of their social category memberships has some potential benefits for the person who does the categorizing, categorizing others, rather than treating them as unique individuals with their own unique characteristics, has a wide variety of negative, and often very unfair, outcomes for those who are categorized.”

…discusses some experiment by Tajfel in 1970 involving lengths of lines. I don’t understand.

…discusses out-group homogeneity. Mentions work by Patricia Linville and Edward Jones (1980) on blacks & whites.

“Outgroup homogeneity occurs in part because we don’t have as much contact with outgroup members as we do with ingroup members, and the quality of interaction with outgroup members is often more superficial. This prevents us from really learning about the outgroup members as individuals, and as a result, we tend to be unaware of the differences among the group members.”

“Once we begin to see the members of outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are, it then becomes very easy to apply our stereotypes to the members of the groups without having to consider whether the characteristic is actually true of the particular individual.”

"The outcome is that the stereotypes become linked to the group itself in a set of mental representations ([Figure 11.6](https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/social-categorization-and-stereotyping/#figure11.6)). "

“We begin to respond to members of stereotyped categories as if we already knew what they were like. Yaacov Trope and Eric Thompson (1997) found that individuals addressed fewer questions to members of categories about which they had strong stereotypes (as if they already knew what these people were like) and that the questions they did ask were likely to confirm the stereotypes they already had.”

‘In other cases, stereotypes are maintained because information that confirms our stereotypes is better remembered than information that disconfirms them. When we see members of social groups perform behaviors, we tend to better remember information that confirms our stereotypes than we remember information that disconfirms our stereotypes (Fyock & Stangor, 1994).’

^^Note that that is the OPPOSITE of how ML systems learn.

Extra: Notes from Talking to James & Liz

Got to talk to two Psych prof friends last night, and feverishly took notes as they responded to my general queries re. categories in psych. (Neither are specialists in this area. James does Psych of Religion, Liz’s work is about gender & theology.)

cognitive science
eleanor rousch
neural networks are big
...contrain how people categorize...(?)
did we evolve categories? cog. structure for categories
cat.'s like animal vs tool? 
are categories encoded genetically?
pascal boyer:  evolved categorical structures ... handbook of ev. psych 
(no relation to the Boyer Model of Scholarship btw)

parts of brain about detecting tools
   word "objectification" is where you see a person and your tool part of brain lights up
someone sexually objectifying someone would see someone more isntrumentally vs personally

how we blend categories based on...(?)


how deep it goes.  how maleable are those categories?

debate:genetic vs innate?
more like it's both
several ways to categorize, probably use whatever's most useful
evidence for more stringent categories vs non-stringent.

developmentally.  kids tend to categorize quickly
how much of kids' categorization is learned vs innate?

research on how & when categories come about...

cog psych textbook.   matlin, or anderson
james will send references.

Me: what about language & categories?
language shapes categories, e.g. colors
(language is a whole 'nother ball of wax. they they didn't want to get into.)


(Basically all this seems to be still a huge area of research. Much is known, much is unknown, much is contested,....)