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Frederick Schauer: Generalizations Aren’t Always Bad Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes The following is an excerpt from a new book by Professor Fred Schauer that looks at stereotyping and profiling. In this excerpt, Schauer looks at the way New York City dealt with the issue of pit bull attacks in the 1980s, by forcing pit bull owners to adhere to special registration and insurance rules not imposed on other breed owners. In response, the owners called for general restrictions on only dangerous dogs that had shown some aggression in the past. The continuing controversy about stereotyping dogs by breed illustrates two important lessons. The first is that what some people pejoratively call stereotyping is an essential part of our cognitive and decisionmaking apparatus. It is simply how we think. The fact that many people who are uncomfortable with breed-specific regulations remain comfortable with dog-specific regulations is powerful evidence of the way in which methods of decisionmaking employing no generalizations at all are a virtual impossibility. Even better evidence for the ubiquity of generalizing comes from the fact that many people who are uncomfortable with breed-specific regulations are comfortable with probabilistic predictions based on various other attributes, including behavior under simulated and therefore nonidentical clinical conditions. By exposing the way in which most objections to generalizations turn out merely to substitute another generalization, we have underscored the much larger point that avoiding decisionmaking by generalization, even nonuniversal generalization, is well-nigh impossible. A few more examples may reinforce our understanding of the inevitability of nonuniversal generalization. When I travel from Massachusetts to New York, I ordinarily take an airplane, and I do so because flying is usually faster than driving or taking the train. To my regret, however, I have not infrequently been delayed in flying to such an extent that in retrospect it is clear that it would have been faster to drive. Nevertheless, I persist in flying in most cases, and I do so because I believe that the generalization that flying is faster is a better guide for my travel decisions than any other decision procedure I can devise. Similarly, I evaluate the reliability of types or makes of cars or household appliances on the basis of nonuniversal generalizations, and I cannot imagine how it would be otherwise. People may not get as exercised about stereotyping Ford cars or Hotpoint refrigerators as they do about stereotyping pit bulls, but the processes are essentially the same. If I choose to buy Fords because they are more reliable, or refrain from buying Fords because they are less reliable, I am basing my decision on the belief that a car’s being a Ford is a good predictor of its reliability, even as I recognize that some particular Fords are not reliable and that many other particular cars are. If reliability is for me an important criterion in choosing a car, therefore, the decision to buy or not to buy a Ford is essentially the same as the decision not to own a pit bull. One of the large lessons of the story of the pit bulls, therefore, is that decisionmaking by generalization, popular rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, appears to be an unavoidable feature of our decisionmaking existence.
The Bellwomen Marjorie Stockford MPA 1992 The idea came to him after reading a headline in the Washington Post. The headline said: “AT&T Seeks Higher Long Distance Rates.” It was 1970 and David Copus, a young lawyer working for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was looking for a way to help the hundreds of people, mostly women and minorities, who had filed discrimination complaints against AT&T, the telephone company known as “Ma Bell” that monopolized communications at the time. Time and again, Copus saw young women, particularly black women, get turned down for jobs with the phone company and he knew what he had to do: stop Ma Bell from raising its rates until the company stopped discriminating against its female employees. As author Marjorie Stockford MPA 1992 writes, “From the instant it flashed through his mind, Copus loved the idea. It had a sense of justice, a quid pro quo with teeth.” In The Bellwomen, Stockford, who worked for a time for the phone company, tells the story of Copus’s plan, which eventually worked. In 1973, a landmark $38 million settlement was reached, benefiting 15,000 employees. Using a narrative style framed around the experience of three women involved in the case, Stockford shows how the lawsuit changed the lives of thousands of women and perhaps more importantly, dramatically changed the way corporations treat female workers.
Bare Branches Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer In this latest book from the BCSIA Studies in International Security book series, the authors tackle a question they say has been ignored for too long: what happens to a society that has too many men? “The masculinization of Asia’s sex ratios is one of the overlooked stories of the century,” they write. Looking specifically at China and India, which make up 38 percent of the world’s population and favor male babies over female babies, Hudson and den Boer argue that high male-to-female ratios cause a huge demographic shift that triggers domestic and international violence. “Artificially high sex ratios pose potentially grave problems for society,” they write. These countries end up producing a huge surplus of low-status, poor, transient, unskilled young men known as “bare branches” by the Chinese because they may never marry and continue the family tree. As the authors write in this book, men in this bare branch group are more likely to turn to vice and commit violent crime, forcing their countries to govern using an authoritarian political system. In the future, as security scholars and policymakers analyze and debate the most pressing issues facing Asia, the authors write, they must look at the impact the bare branch population has on the progress of women’s equality and on overall peace and democracy. |
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