why do many generalisations seem to arise out of negativity?

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hahahaha WIN

I think it's this, of which Jakob Virgil's "evolutionary avoidance of poison" is a subset. I think this also explains why a negative generalization can frequently only be undone by personally experiencing counter-examples. Arguments won't work. You won't stop fearing something until you personally experience that it isn't dangerous to you. (I won't name names but there is an example of this on Love and Dating of a man who discarded negative generalizations of women once he got into a positive relationship with one.)

Positive generalizations, on the other hand, have the potential to be dangerous, so I think we are less inclined to make them. Naivete can be dangerous. And making positive generalizations is what naivete really is. However, there are people who can be observed making positive generalizations that are not naive and put them in no danger. How did that come about? I think they learned through experience what constitutes a safe positive generalization and what constitutes a dangerously naive one and apply that sorting process when confronted with new things.

I'm probably redunant in saying this but IMO its a boiler-plate mechanism. One...err...neutral generalization I'll make here is that typically the more intelligent or observant a person is the more readily they can separate the arbitrary elements out to get to the core of a problem rather than, say, painting it all black off of one example.

Then again it does get more complicated if we're talking about human dynamics. If its a social issue - people are treated disparately enough that their senses of the world can come out very differently. Additionally you have some social issues where a generalization can be true maybe 40% of the time to some, 70% to others, all depending on the local culture and who they're around. People also can't necessarily see the flip-side much of the time; ie. a group dominates their field of vision to where others become invisible, or they can't figure out or perhaps have never really sat back and thought about why these people are out of their focal range or what disconnect pushes them out of relevance.

It seems like this though - with political issues it gets to be religious quickly. For social issues or biases of certain creeds, certain classes, genders, etc., it can be partly driven by mythology and party endorsed by experience.

If we are talking about produce, calzones, brands of tennis shoes or roller blades, etc., its certainly more clear-cut and at least up until a reasonable point there are standards before personal taste kicks in for leading our decisions. Trying to piece the human puzzle together though is dealing with one of the wildest/gnarliest systems that the universe has - if not the most inscrutable.

Learning to avoid touching the coils on a hot stove, or to avoid petting certain snakes or petting sabor toothed tigers is more urgent than parcing out which flower smells better.

So negative information is what we are wired to pay attention to. So if it "bleeds it leads" in newspaper headlines because thats what sells.

Ironically, food is a place where I'm likely to make positive generalizations. Food poisoning is common today, just as it was in hunter/gatherer days. But modern food poisoning comes from bacterial/viral contamination of individual batches (that then gets spread around) rather than from picking an overall "wrong" category of food and being poisoned by it. This calls for the balancing act of calling an entire food category "bad" but only until the contamination is found and dealt with. Even so, I think you have to make a conscious decision to be a gourmet/omnivore in order to really make lots of positive food generalizations.

The reason why people are different is because of the Gene Pool. Futhermore the human brain is a very large thing, and from that explode a huge spectrum of human personalities that also modify expectations and generalizations. But sadly most Humans produced entrenched ideas because most Humans are adapted to produce entrenched ideas. It's primitive I know, but that's the beauty of evolution. It's iterative.

Yes, Humans are disgusting like that. It's Carlinian honesty. Many Humans are naturally *ssholes.

that is a really good point, that we are not necessarily stuck with those generalisations for life. i observed something similar in a female in L&D - it's like night and day depending on that person's relationship status! now that i think of it, sometimes it seems like people who have strongly negative generalisations end up having the extremely-super-positive feelings once they have a good experience (example: strident atheist becomes born-again christian of a fundamentalist sort).


i think you may be right, at least in part. education helped me to become more open-minded about religions and cultures, for example.

on the other hand i wonder some people have an impairment when it somes to learning from negative experiences. i was hit by a bus at age 12. not too serious, but bad bruising plus shame/humiliation means i still cringe when i think about it. logically, i would be more careful in similar situations, but... i have been very nearly hit by buses two times since, in very similar locations and situations. i do eventually learn most of the time, but it takes a lot of experiences to really internalise any behavioural change.

i tend to think that not judging people according to generalisations is morally sound, but i also have to consider whether some of us are born different/impaired.


this is very insightful. have you thought of this sort of thing before, or do you process ideas like this as it comes up?


thank god i don't live in the wild. ok ok to be honest i actually lived in the semi-wild and used to go looking for bears, tried to touch the caribou, etc. i think i need a minder when i go off looking for flowers (or bears).


it's a bloody miracle i produced offspring before i did something really stupid. or rather, died from doing something really stupid. anyway, your point makes sense.


i refuse to accept that.... ummmm generalisation. heh.

Well, its part of the body of knowledge I've been building about the world for a lomt time. I've realized it before and thought about it in connection, most often when I feel like I'm fighting futility on something, but - its difficult at the same time to make that kind of information actionable; ie. I can know that but still fall into the same semantic traps anyone else would when I'm in 'social' mode rather than analytical (and I suppose part of being social is voluntarily putting ones own foot in their mouth for the sake of conversation and humor/dynamics).

I think it also goes to show how counter-practical things are when it comes to how human beings socialize and what we deem 'cool' or 'uncool'.

Generalisation is both a blessing and a curse.

It lies at the bedrock of human intellect--our ability to recognize patterns, and to induce and deduce from them. Indeed, if pressed to give a definition of mathematics, I will usually say that it is the study of patterns.

But generalisation also is what leads us to "manage to the 4th quintile." This is the idea that if we can manage in a satisfactory fashion for 80% of our clientele, then we can dismiss the other 20% as outliers.

I don't, however, see generalisation as a uniquely or even predominantly negative phenomenon. I think we generalise postively in any number of ways--keeping ourselves wilfully blind to facts that contradict our prejudices or run contrary to our biases.

+1. Sharing wisdom as usual. As for why negative generalizations seem to carry more weight, well our fear of loss is stronger than our inclination to go after gains. This is detrimental in the long run but hey us human beings are short sighted and irrational so that explains it.