Generalizations, Prejudgment, and Bias

Back on or around October 1991, I was a student at Lansing Community College. I was friends with a black female student named Valencia. One day Valencia showed up to class looking miserable. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "Michael, I feel so bad about something I just did. I was walking across the bridge to come to class and there was only one other person walking on the bridge. It was a black male walking towards me on the same side of the street. I got nervous so I clutched my purse and crossed to the other side of the street. Mike, we get mad at white people when they prejudge and are fearful of minorities and then look I just did the same thing we get mad about."

I told her "Don't you dare feel bad about you looking out for yourself. You don't know that guy and have no idea whether he's good or bad. You have no responsibility to put yourself in a possibly dangerous situation just to prove how non judgmental you are. In fact, in this case, non judgment would be the wrong answer. We can't just presume everybody out there is good."

In this society, at least since the Civil Rights Movement, we have been raised to believe that prejudging and generalizing about people are moral wrongs but in fact these are mental shortcuts that help humans optimize their choices in situations where our knowledge is limited. Compare 100 people who arrive to a job interview dressed professionally with nice shoes, a tie, and a neat haircut versus 100 people who arrive in jeans, a hoodie, gym shoes, and unwieldy hair. While I acknowledge that there would be some in that second group who would make good employees, the first group would have a higher percentage of good candidates because the way they dress speaks the qualities of conscientiousness and professionalism that set them apart from that second group. You don't have to bother with going through 200 applications in this situation. Restricting your search to that first group will provide optimal results.

This isn't an easy concept for people to understand because their belief in the immorality of generalizing makes them try to think of objections. Think about it this way. As a group men are taller than women. But if you say that (which should be a purely obvious and banal fact), someone is going to respond "That's not true. There is a 6 foot tall women at my job and the guys there are like 5'5". Of course the proper responses to this is are:

• The exception does not disprove the rule and;
• A woman in the top 2% of women's height should be compared to a man in that same percentile, not to a man in a low percentile

I was once in a bar with three members of my pool team and we got on the subject of generalizations. I said "Not all generalizations are bad. Some things just are. For example, black smokers are more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than white smokers."

On of my teammates took immediate umbrage at this and said "That's not true! I know plenty of black people who smoke non-menthol!"

Note first, he ignored the fact that I did not say no black smokers smoke non menthols. Also, my point is not that he was unaware of the fact that what I said was correct (and to clarify, it has been well documented that cigarette companies historically marketed menthol cigarettes much more actively in the black community and that menthol cigarettes are actually more deadly than non menthol but I digress). My point is that denying obvious truths in situations like these are examples of virtue signaling. Look at me, since I am the one arguing against generalizing and you are the one generalizing, I am the good guy and you are the bad guy. Never mind that acknowledging the discrepancy in these rates would actually be the first step in addressing health disparities between the two groups but that is entirely beside the point. For the person doing the virtue signaling, their point never was actually helping the people they are ostensibly advocating for. Their main and possibly only point was ever to paint themselves as good and their opponents as bad.

My final point is that generalizing is only appropriate when you lack specific knowledge of the situation you need to judge. If you have candidates of different races before you and you say to yourself oh Asians are more academically successful that other races, then you look at their transcripts and you find that the Asian is only in the median range and you hire that person anyway because "Asians are smarter", that is not appropriate and is evidence that one, you are a racist and two, you should not be doing the hiring.

If you have read this far, that is hilarious to me.