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Originally Posted by sapiens
It may be that people base their judgments of the frequency of a characteristic in a group on the ease to which it comes to mind (a la the availability heuristic). Obnoxious black women are more noticeable than the many non-obnoxious black women. Consequently, people may base their estimates of the frequency of that characteristic on the ease to which it comes to mind rather than it's actual base rate in the population. |
I thought of this, but in that case it would have no predictive value.
I forget what % of the population blacks are to other races in the us, something around 11-15% I think. So when you read a story about 'girl wears something inappropriate and gets led out in cuffs' there should be a only around a 15% chance or less of that girl being black, yet there were so many of us were thinking it.
Likewise I can understand why I wouldn't associate bad behavior with someone who 'looks like me' on racial terms, but then I should be more aware of obnoxious asian women or indian, and yet, I am not.
If someone says 'serial killer' and thinks 'white male' should I be offended or feel its a racist thing to do? To be fair there have been serial killers of other races, but if I read about a creepy, bodies in the crawl space, doing it for years serial killer, I'm going to be shocked if its NOT a white male doing it.