Quickies: Writing My Mind

     Via Chateau Heartiste comes a remarkable piece I’d not have expected to find in the pages of Psychology Today:

     There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy. However, one type is quite simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria. If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities? One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.

     And lots of scientists have. And you know what they found? That stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology. The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals). The average effect in social psychology is about .20. Stereotypes are more valid than most social psychological hypotheses.

     Which raises a question: Why do so many psychologists emphasize stereotype inaccuracy when the evidence so clearly provides evidence of such high accuracy? Why is there this Extraordinary Scientific Delusion?

     There may be many explanations, but one that fits well is the leftward lean of most psychologists....And when something happens where they can’t avoid looking at, they have denigrated its importance. Which is, in some ways, very amusing — if, after 100 years of proclaiming the inaccuracy of stereotypes to the world, can we really just say “Never mind, it’s not that important” after the evidence comes in showing that stereotype accuracy is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology?

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     The author of the above has said exactly what I would have said from the evidence he has amassed. He hasn’t just “read my mind;” he’s written it.

     This underscores the reason the Left has been so determined to conquer our institutions of supposedly higher learning. It is only from such perches that it can promulgate the exact reverse of important truths whose widespread dissemination, recognition, and acceptance would harm the Leftist cause.

     When Antonio Gramsci exhorted his Marxist fellow travelers to embark upon “a long march through the institutions,” he might well have had exactly this in mind.

     A dear departed friend once said, offhandedly, that “stereotypes exist because large numbers of people fit them.” To this we can add that left-leaning social psychologists decry stereotypes for exactly the same reason.