“Stereotypes” have a bad name, and everybody hates stereotypes. But what exactly is a stereotype?
What people call “stereotypes” are what scientists call “empirical generalizations,” and they are the foundation of scientific theory. That’s what scientists do; they make generalizations. Many stereotypes are empirical generalizations with a statistical basis and thus on average tend to be true. If they are not true, they wouldn’t be stereotypes. The only problem with stereotypes and empirical generalizations is that they are not always true for all individual cases. They are generalizations, not invariant laws. There are always individual exceptions to stereotypes and empirical generalizations. The danger lies in applying the empirical generalizations to individual cases, which may or may not be exceptions. But these individual exceptions do not invalidate the generalizations.
An observation, if true, becomes an empirical generalization until someone objects to it, and then it becomes a stereotype. For example, the statement “Men are taller than women” is an empirical generalization. It is in general true, but there are individual exceptions. There are many men who are shorter than the average woman, and there are many women who are taller than the average man, but these exceptions do not make the generalization untrue. Men on average are taller than women in every human society (and, by the way, there are evolutionary psychological explanations for this phenomenon, known as the sexual dimorphism in size, but that’s perhaps for a future post). Everybody knows this, but nobody calls it a stereotype because it is not unkind to anybody. Men in general like being taller than women, and women in general like being shorter than men.
However, as soon as one turns this around and makes a slightly different, yet equally true, observation that “Women are fatter than men,” it becomes a stereotype because nobody, least of all women, wants to be considered fat. But it is true nonetheless; women have a higher percentage of body fat than men throughout the life course (and there are evolutionary reasons for this as well). Once again, there are numerous individual exceptions, but the generalization still holds true at the population level.
Stereotypes and empirical generalizations are neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable, moral nor immoral. They just are. Stereotypes do not tell us how to behave or treat other people (or groups of people). Stereotypes are observations about the empirical world, not behavioral prescriptions. One may not infer how to treat people from empirical observations about them. Stereotypes tell us what groups of people tend to be or do in general; they do not tell us how we ought to treat them. Once again, there is no place for “ought” in science.
As empirical generalizations borne of the observations and experiences of millions of individuals, most stereotypes are on the whole true. If they are not true, they cannot survive long as stereotypes. Nonetheless, theory and research in evolutionary psychology have overturned a few stereotypes and shown them to be false. For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, all the stereotypes that have been shown to be false so far have to do with people’s physical appearances. In the next few posts, I will discuss each of these stereotypes which evolutionary psychological theory and research have shown to be false.
译文:
【所有刻板印象都没错，除了……】一：什么是刻板印象？
“刻板印象”臭名昭著，每个人都讨厌它。但刻板印象究竟是什么呢？
人们称之为“刻板印象”的也就是科学家所说的“经验主义归纳”，而这正是科学理论的基础：归纳总结——科学家们就以此为业。许多刻板印象都是具有统计基础的经验归纳，因此平均而言应当是对的。
如果它们不对，也就不成其为刻板印象了。唯一的问题是，刻板印象和经验主义归纳并不能保证对
所有个例
总是正确，它们只是归纳总结，而不是恒定的法则。刻板印象和经验主义归纳总是存在着例外，而危险就在于把经验法则应用到个案上，因为它可能是例外，也可能不是。但即使有例外的存在，也不会使归纳结论失去意义。
一个观察结果如果是正确的，而又尚没有人提出异议，它就会变成经验总结，随之成为刻板印象。比如“男人比女人高”这句话是一个经验总结。它大致上是正确的，但也存在个别例外。有很多男人比一般女子要矮，也有很多女人比一般男子要高，但这些例外都不会导致这个结论的错误，在任何人类社会中男人的平均身高都比女人要高（顺便一提，对于这种现象有着进化心理学上的解释，叫做身材上的两性异形，但这也许是以后的话题了）。每个人都知道这一点，但却没人管它叫刻板印象，因为它并没有冒犯任何人。男人一般都喜欢比女人高，而女人也一般都喜欢比男人矮。
然而，一旦有人把它掉个个儿再做一点小小改动，变成“女人比男人胖”，虽然同样是正确的，这句话却变成了刻板印象，因为没有人——至少没有任何女人喜欢被说成胖子。尽管如此，这句话还是没错：女人在整个生命进程中的身体脂肪含量确实要比男人高（这也有着进化上的原因）。无数例外同样存在，但在全体人口的层面上这仍然是正确的。
刻板印象和经验主义归纳并没有好坏、优劣、道德与否的区分，它们就是如此。刻板印象并不告诉我们应该怎样对待其他人（或群体）。刻板印象是对于经验世界的观察结果，而不是行为指南，一个人可能无法从对别人的经验观察结果中推断出要怎么对待他们。刻板印象告诉我们什么群体一般会是什么样或一般会做什么，但没有告诉我们应该怎样对待他们。同样，在科学中没有“应该”这个词。
由于经验主义归纳来源于对上百万个体的观察和体验，大多数刻板印象基本上都是对的。
如果它们不对，它们就难以再作为刻板印象而存在。尽管如此，在进化心理学上的理论和研究已经推翻了一些刻板印象，证明它们其实是错的。处于某些我还不太清楚的原因，所有到目前为止已经被证明错误的刻板印象都与人们的外表长相有关。在此后的几篇文章中，我将逐一讨论这些已被进化心理学理论和研究证明有误的刻板印象。