How to Make a Decent Social Generalization
without triggering anyone and getting upset for no reason
One of the hot-button topics of modern, liberal thinking is the 'micro-aggression.' Micro-aggressions are subtle comments (or even facial expressions) delivered unconsciously that convey condescending bias against another group.
(
has a great discussion on micro-aggressions on her Substack if you want more detail). Think ‘condescension’ based on dated stereotypes.I'm sorry to report that unconscious bias is as old as humanity. It’s as old as social primate species. Chimpanzees display unconscious bias against neighboring troupes in the jungle. They tend to beat the sh*t out of them when they come near. And this chimp violence is NOT due to caffeine intake. They are defending territory.
Our massive, bone-shrouded imagination machines have a lot of cognitive work to do daily. So, we must prioritize what to ponder deliberately and what to do unconsciously. I'm pretty sure we would go mad if we consciously deliberated every actual behavioral option before us as each day unfolds.
So, we make assumptions. Unconsciously. To reduce the number of choices we make. Most of these choices involve hard-to-debate facts, like how to drive out of your neighborhood in a car safely. They become unspoken, habitual behaviors requiring no thought at all.
Social bias is a learned cognitive bias about another group's behavior patterns.
Social bias is the same process that leads some people to move to the other side of the street when approached by two young black men in hoodies. We have no evidence that wearing hoodies correlates with violent crime. Or that hoodies on African-American heads connect to any imminent threat. Racist people make these assumptions. They have visual biases based on skin color and other behavior patterns like body posture and clothing.
Our brain is filled with negative media representations, and racist family comments about young black males. And so most Americans learn to make an amygdala snap judgment about any young black male in a hoodie. 'What's the harm?, we say, 'We crossed the street quietly…just in case.' I once got into a heated argument with an older, middle-aged grad student at the University of Chicago in the 1990s about the disturbingly racist nature of this cross-the-street scenario. He remained unconvinced. After thirty minutes of back and forth, he didn’t budge. Avoiding black folk in hoodies was NOT racist.
Unconscious bias gets worse if we suffer from anxiety of any kind. We will tend to make damaging assumptions about strangers any day of the week. I know I do. So, I fight back and swallow those thoughts. And it doesn’t always work.
The plague of unconscious bias is based on a functional human trait, folks. This is the vantage point we must take when understanding how to make a social generalization. In a rapidly changing world, a helpful generalization from decades ago may persist in social gossip, media representations, and our heads. And become disastrous.
What is a Social Generalization?
We usually try to assign good/bad traits to individuals as we navigate our local areas. It happens unconsciously. As social animals, we put individuals into tribes we've learned about elsewhere, even if these assignments are inaccurate because the information we've received is horrendously biased (or made up).
Let's look at some examples of how we American goofballs generalize socially:
"He's homeless."
dirty clothes
dirty hair
standing at a major intersection
holding a cardboard sign
panhandling
"She's a 'working girl'"
wearing 6-inch high plastic heels
boobs on display
a short skirt
pacing up and down the sidewalk
near a low-priced motel
on 'that street.'
"He's a banker."
driving BMW 700 series
wearing a dark suit
a stern, irritated look
angular face
We frequently place random strangers into 'tribes' using little more than their clothing, body language, and grooming. Since we are massively afraid of strangers AND so swamped and important (joke), we clearly can't be bothered to park and ask these random individuals a few basic open-ended questions (where we might learn the real tribes they fit into pretty quickly).
This drive-by approach is pretty accurate for most of us if we're just placing strangers into social classes (upper, middle, low). We're not that bad at this kind of simplistic amateur sociology. Except for my 80-year-old aunt, who thinks most of the middle class is working class based on the 'decline' in personal grooming she sees compared to, say, 1965 (!).
Seriously, though, what is a social generalization? It's assigning a behavioral attribute to all members of an identifiable social group. The behavior could be a stated moral belief, a clothing style, a gesture, or something as complex as a ritual (we Americans pay for ALL our ritual activities).
Humans engage in this generalizing behavior to reduce cognitive burden, plain and simple. The challenge in 2023, though, is that our society is not only more diverse than ever in terms of lifestyle expressions (in grooming, body movement, etc.), but it is also changing much more rapidly than in pre-modern times.
When humans experience intra-generational shifts in collective lifestyle patterns, anyone can get legitimately confused and make dated off-base assumptions. When social classes stop mixing, their behavior trends go un-tracked, and wrong assumptions are made. For example, working-class grooming and clothing habits have become very casual in the past 30-40 years, but this does not necessarily signal a specific decline in work ethic like it would to my late grandmother (born in 1906).
My Rules for Valid Social Generalizations in a Rapidly Changing World
So, without further ado, here's my recommended approach to making a valid social generalization in your everyday life.
Are you just afraid right now, or did fear of something cause you to make a snap generalization based on one piece of evidence? If so, then don't make any generalizations right now. You'll just be focused on assigning negative, offensive traits to various groups because of your issues, not theirs. Come back later and start at #2 when you're calm and safe. Please. Trust me, the homeless guy on the corner doesn't need your sh*t right now. It's the last thing he needs. Snap generalizations about 'weird' strangers not like us are usually racist, sexist, classist, or all three if you're my annoying Uncle Larry (fictitious person)!
Don't generalize upwards from one individual (!) - the disheveled guy panhandling on the corner (above) does NOT prove that all homeless people panhandle OR that people standing on the corner panhandling are even homeless. Not at all. My Dad loves to tell the story of an apartment-renting, mentally ill guy who spent most of the day/night panhandling or screaming in a public park in downtown Manchester, N.H., in the 1980s. When it got offensive, the cops would tell him to go home. LOL. He looked homeless and acted like our stereotype of a homeless person. But he was not homeless. Instead of generalizing up from one person, note the groups you think the person is in and whether you have any corroborating evidence. This lazy generalizing and stereotyping only works in an old, slowly changing society with a limited number of social roles (e.g., The Trobriand Islands in the 1930s). The Amish are probably pretty good at generalizing inside Amish culture. They inhibit social change and lifestyle diversity, making valid generalizations much easier.
Pick and define a group properly (to prevent #2). You generalize maturely in a complex society by starting at the group level and heading down to the individual later. Let's look at our allegedly homeless dude above. Our brain assigned him to 'homeless' based on three weird behaviors: unkempt grooming, panhandling, and hanging out in an intersection in the broiling heat. We all make assumptions about abnormal local behaviors without much evidence from our everyday lives (in which we don't chill for hours with panhandlers). Better questions to ask are: Are homeless people usually dirty? Do homeless people generally panhandle? Do homeless people typically have jobs? Stop taking one case of deviant behavior and jumping to conclusions about entire groups. Do hoodies on black men signal impending violence? No. If hoodies signaled this, black folk in the inner city would be the first to come up and rip the hoodies off their punk-ass heads. Think about it. Wearing a hoodie does not equal pointing a gun at someone. It’s an urban fashion behavior with inner-city origins. My 13-year-old, upper-middle-class white kid wears hoodies.
Pick valid attributes before assigning them to groups - “Dipshit” is not a social attribute. Neither is “Asshole” or “Blockhead.” Why not? Because if you select attributes like this, you are not trying to be open-minded. You are not trying to be curious. You are just an angry goofball or a bigot acting out of fear. You're telling us more about your current emotional state (i.e., pissy) than you are about the world. Now, please don't sit there in sanctimonious robes of glory and pretend you haven't slurred any group before based on seeing one individual member of it. We've all done it because it's part of that cognitive shortcut process humans need to take to reduce cognitive burden.
Use the 'Almost All' qualitative check (to save time without being an ass). If you think your attribute-group assignment has merit, slap a 'draft' sticker on it and jot down how many of the ensuing 10 group members you randomly encounter have the attribute. This is NOT an actual random sample at all. But plenty of attributes come very close to a ubiquitous presence in social groups (if they are groups). When you do this test, you may stumble on the fact that panhandlers prefer high-traffic arterial intersections with long light sequences (so they can hit tons of cars quickly). Now that's good sociology! You will soon lose interest in their potential homeless status. Here's another qualitative generalization you can count on. I dare you to contradict it with stats: sexually active young women have longer hair than older, menopausal women. Our groups here are life stages, in which we're looking at what the presence/absence of long hair signals to other men. Long hair signals sexual availability to human males; it's a pre-cultural thing well-studied by anthropologists in many cultures. Conservative, patriarchal societies tend to mandate that young, fertile women keep their long hair tied up (i.e., you are NOT to advertise your availability publicly; we family members will handle that). In a more sexually open, promiscuous society like ours, young women let their long hair flow (which may be correlated to male traffic accidents near college campuses)! If you've been married a while and your wife suddenly grows her hair and wears it long in public, I'd have a gentle, deep conversation if I were you. Something's amiss. And, if you're male, you are probably the reason.
If you can't pass #4 AND no quantitative data exists, DON'T MAKE A GENERALIZATION. Wow. Yes, sometimes we must just shut up. Just. Don't. Say. It. Please. For example, I spent about an hour looking for educational attainment data on homeless adults (the unhoused) for this piece. I only found one study based in LA. This is a data-gathering problem in homelessness research. Researchers have made an assumption (one that may be changing under our feet) that most homeless adults are poorly educated per American averages. So they don't include the question on surveys. BTW, I found that our stereotype of homeless adults as predominantly not four-year college graduates (i.e., not highly educated) is pretty dead-on.1
Find statistics about the group using a 75-80% cut-off (in case #4 generated a local anomaly). For example, Maricopa County, AZ, has a considerable population of insane humans (who voted for Cheeto-head). But this does not mean that humans are primarily insane or that even most humans in Maricopa County are insane. And pick a better attribute than 'insane,' which is a slur, not a scientific attribute. Severe mental illness is NOT a defining attribute of Maricopa County residents (use of sunglasses is). Sorry. It's just not. And here's why you should not even waste your time looking up the public health stats (which do exist). No local county could function if most residents had a severe mental illness. Whatever we attribute to mental illness would no longer be aberrant at all. It would not be deviant. Deviance can't involve a super-majority of any group. That's an internal debate, folks, not deviance. Here's a zinger - when making the leap from panhandler to homeless (which we did above), we're often assuming a panhandling adult is panhandling to survive on the streets, i.e., not working, and, conversely, that homeless people don't work (they panhandle). Oh dear, we're confused. Most homeless adults in LA have full-time jobs (ibid). What? Yup. That's how embarrassing our housing crisis is. Panhandlers may be mostly homeless, but if they are, the panhandling homeless are a tribe within a larger homeless tribe.
Finally, does your assigned trait even have a plausible causal pathway? Why would we assume that someone panhandling is automatically homeless? Is it because it's written on their sign? Look again. Many of those signs say, "I'm out of work." That also may or may not be accurate. Why would we assume someone begging is homeless rather than trying to supplement poor cash flow? We shouldn't. Do the research that I'm training you to do. That's how dumb generalizations get made! Laziness. Here's the big takeaway on the 'may-not-be-homeless panhandling dude .' All humans are horrible at assigning traits to groups with which we don't interact. Like people experiencing homelessness! Like panhandlers! If it's a tiny little social world you know nothing about, you should be asking open-ended questions, not making generalizations. Shut up and listen. And this explains why our social class generalizations tend to be better. Highly educated people can pick each other out of a crowd at McDonald's in milliseconds. We recognize our tribe quickly…because we interact all day, mostly with them!! What a surprise!
Be careful - Social life is changing rapidly, so what was 'normal' 25 years ago can't be assumed to be the case anymore. For example, I now routinely say "for the win” and “appreciate you,” even though, deep down, it makes me gag as a pessimistic, dour New England curmudgeon.
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