Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Good Ideas 313If people form stereotypes even about rabbits and fish, does racism comenaturally to us? And if racism is both natural and irrational, does thatmake the love of stereotypes a bug in our cognitive software? Manysocial and cognitive psychologists would answer yes. They link ethnicstereotypes to an overeagerness to form categories and to an insensitivityto the laws of statistics that would show the stereotypes to be false. AnInternet discussion group for neural-network modelers once debatedwhat kinds of learning algorithms would best model Archie Bunker. Thediscussants assumed that people are racists when their neural networksperform poorly or are deprived of good training examples. If only our networkscould use a proper learning rule and take in enough data, theywould transcend false stereotypes and correctly register the facts ofhuman equality.Some ethnic stereotypes are indeed based on bad statistics or none atall; they are a product of a coalitional psychology that automatically denigratesoutsiders (see Chapter 7). Others may be based on good statisticsabout nonexistent people, the virtual characters we meet every day onthe big and small screens: Italian goodfellas, Arab terrorists, black drugdealers, Asian kung fu masters, British spies, and so on.But sadly, some stereotypes may be based on good statistics about realpeople. In the United States at present, there are real and large differencesamong ethnic and racial groups in their average performance inschool and in their rates of committing violent crimes. (The statistics, ofcourse, say nothing about heredity or any other putative cause.) Ordinarypeople's estimates of these differences are fairly accurate, and in somecases, people with more contact with a minority group, such as socialworkers, have more pessimistic, and unfortunately more accurate, estimatesof the frequency of negative traits such as illegitimacy and welfaredependency. A good statistical category-maker could develop racialstereotypes and use them to make actuarially sound but morally repugnantdecisions about individual cases. This behavior is racist not becauseit is irrational (in the sense of statistically inaccurate) but because itflouts the moral principle that it is wrong to judge an individual using thestatistics of a racial or ethnic group. The argument against bigotry, then,does not come from the design specs for a rational statistical categorizer.It comes from a rule system, in this case a rule of ethics, that tells uswhen to turn our statistical categorizers off.