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Red Apples, Liberal College Professors, and Farmers Who Love Bach

1992; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1207/s15327965pli0302_26

1532-7965

David J. Schneider,

Animal and Plant Science Education

Fox would have us believe that our prejudices and stereotypes are based on defects in human reason that are themselves functional and have had evolutionary significance. What a strange idea, and such a naughty man. And yet he is, I think, more or right. More or less because in some ways he goes too far and in others stops short. But the central message he bears is provocative, although naughtily so to modern social psychologists than he might wish. Contemporary stereotype research has begun to wrestle with many of the ideas presented by Fox. The history of stereotype research in social psychology is a checkered one. Social psychologists do recognize the importance of Lippmann's (1922) early statement, but I think we must regard Lippmann as more a totem than a beacon. It is not clear that he actually influenced many people; he is as highly regarded as he is today in part because he seems so modern, so right with the cognitive world social psychologists now inhabit. No, the real impetus for the incorporation of stereotypes into the social science canon was the pathbreaking empirical research of Katz and Braly (1933, 1935). They were interested in uncovering the cognitive underpinnings of stereotypes than in stressing their cultural foundations. In any event, it was Katz and Braly and not Lippmann who influenced the first generation of research, and in that body of work, despite the many caveats that were offered from time to time, stereotypes were seen as dark and ugly things. They were a set of rogue cognitions, generalizations gone bad from lack of contact with the sunshine of rationality and the fresh air of experience. Most people in those early days seemed to find culture the main culprit. This screw was tightened even further with the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) in which stereotypes were seen as due to a flawed personality that eagerly sought out cultural generalizations. Gordon Allport (1954), bless him, operated at a crossroads. His book hearkens back to the earlier Lippmann suggestions about the cognitive necessity for using stereotypes and he offered some very modern-sounding ideas. ' But Allport was also tempted by the flawed-personality approach (which he called the prejudiced personality). By the time of Brigham's (1971) review, stereotype research had all but died, in spirit if not in actuality. Very few articles on the topic appeared in major journals during the 1970s. The area went into hibernation in part because approaches to racism and discrimination in the 1970s emphasized political, cultural, and economic factors more than individual psychology. However, it also died because the area just plain got boring. It was clear that one needed more than culture and worn-out notions about flawed people holding stupid ideas. When the area began to pick up again in the late 1970s and 1980s, it did so by garbing itself in a cognitive language that Lippmann and Allport would have approved. No longer were stereotypes seen as rogue cognitive constructs; they were consistent with normal ways of thinking. Stereotypes could be seen as schemata, concepts, or generalizations. That perspective allowed social psychologists to bring the full arsenal of modern cognitive psychology to bear on the topic, and they have done so with great effect. Stereotypes are finally back where they belong-at center stage in social life. One problem is that by emphasizing the ways that stereotypes are like other concepts and generalizations, social psychologists have failed to consider all the ways they may be different. Let me pose a question. How is saying that college professors are politically liberal, women are shorter than men, and Hispanics score lower on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than Anglos different from saying that red, ripe apples taste good, cars break down, Houston summers are hot and uncomfortable? To the best of my knowledge, all these generalizations are quite beyond dispute as factual generalizations, although of course we could quibble about the meanings of such terms as liberal, taste good, uncomfortable, and the like. But we have more important problems at the moment than worrying about the meanings of words such as these. Fox does not directly say, but seems to argue that a generalization is a generalization is a generalization. Red apples and liberal college professors (or more to the point-poisoned apples and dangerous looking professors) are one for the purposes of his argument. Indeed he argues quite strongly and eloquently that without early humans' capacity to generalize, there would be no people to make generalizations today. That seems right enough. I'm not sure I'd want to mount a strong argument about evolution on that basis, but psychologists seem quite intellectually constipated when it comes to making evolutionary arguments, at least compared to some anthropologists. Maybe he's right-it sounds reasonablebut in fact nothing significant in my argument rests on whether the tendency to generalize (or tendencies to ascribe causality or to blame) is or is not encoded genetically. The tendencies to generalize, to form concepts on the basis of those generalizations, and to act on the basis of such generalizations seem primitive and ubiquitous. Let's leave it at that. So far I would agree with Fox. It's hard to imagine a cognitive system that does not have generalization as one of its key tools, and it's even harder to imagine that system generalizing about things but not people. Thus far, neither I nor most stereotype researchers would disagree. But I do have two major problems with his analysis: (a) his somewhat naive reading of the farmer example and (b) his seeming lack of concern over the ways that generalizations (or stereotypes if one prefers) about people and things differ. First, let us consider the farmer example that Fox presents via Kahneman and Tversky. Subjects are told that 90% of a 'Well, he was modem. Some of us remember him in the flesh, and what are we if not modem?