Geographic, cultural and demographic stereotyping can actually be a very good tool, if correctly applied. It’s used every day by businesses, organizations and governments to create and improve plans and implementations, determine budgets, design products, market services and so on.
They’re also completely misused every day by a significant fraction of everyone, because stereotypes and demographics are not reversible.
That is, the aggregate behavior of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of millions of people gives you useful information about trends and tendencies, but only of the trends and tendencies of the sample population. Stereotypes don’t tell you a darn thing about any individual member of that population.
The most common implementation of demographics and related stereotypes, unfortunately, is incorrect to the point of nonsensical and trends towards the prejudicial.
Taking in information about millions of people who are members, supporters or elected officials of a political party, we can develop an aggregate picture of the average party adherent. With it, policies and speeches can be tuned to build a positive reaction among that group, programs can be developed that are more likely to benefit them than programs developed without that information and so on.
But it’s likely that few or no members of the group actually match the generated stereotype. The demographic information is only useful en masse, and tells you nothing about any given individual, their situation, their beliefs or their political opinions.
All you really have is a shorthand that allows you to accessibly work with thousands or millions of people. You haven’t got a tool that describes any one of them.
So, while you can generate a model where you can predict how the millions will respond on matters of gun-control, Big Government, child-safety, roads, health-care and education, every single member of the class will differ from the class aggregate. The generated stereotype tells you nothing about what any individual thinks about these things, or how they will respond as a person.
Not convinced? If you’re an American you can look up your local representative’s views on a wide variety of issues, from privacy and stem-cell research to same-sex partners and Pentagon budgets, and whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican, you’ll find that there’s an amazing amount of variation in what they believe and what they support. “Left” and “Right” don’t tell you anything about your candidates – none of them truly fit those stereotypes. Among their own supporters, you’ll find an even wider diversity of views.
Sure, these stereotypes are useful tools, but generally not when you’re talking about actions or trends of groups smaller than a thousand or so. As soon as you try to drill down further, people – real people – defy categorization, and it’s prejudicial to attempt it.
Populations can be practically labeled. Individuals can’t.
Stereotypes like how Linden Lab stereotypes D/s lifestylers and Goreans as sex freaks but since half of LL is furries they won’t classify furries as sex freaks even though there is as much circumstantial evidence that furries are also have a disturbing reputation that includes several paraphilias such as macrophilia, vorarephilia, infantilism (babyfurs), and maiesiophilia that amazingly Linden Lab has not banned? Perhaps because LL will not ban that which they enjoy?
Once you start down the road of stereotyping you are going to get burned at some point.
Demographics are useful for deciding where to place advertising but not much more and even that is not very effective anymore since it is based on obsolete psychology.
Wow. Half? That’s about 140 people. Do you have a list, or is that figure based on some sort of extrapolated sample? Solid data would make for an excellent story.