It’s not so much the word “stereotype” that bothers me (although it obviously carries a connotation) – it’s calling something a stereotype rather than saying anything about whether or to what extent or in what circumstances a particular stereotype is likely to have truth value.
I think your (Bob’s) point is that any stereotype, any wholesale categorization, is inherently flawed and so no further comment is necessary. I appreciate the sentiment of avoiding general patterns and focusing intellectual efforts on individuals, but let’s think about this.
I understand myself to be in the categories of human, male, 26.5 years old, corduroy-wearing, racquetball-playing, etc. Can I fully and accurately understand myself based on the patterns (stereotypes) that accompany those categories? Of course not. But it’s a starting point. It might even be *the* starting point because I don’t know how else you could logically understand a person or object without first having some pattern-observations about categories. I’d have a pretty serious identity crisis if I succeeded in weaning myself from the mental category of “human,” for example.
Your main beef seems to be that thinking in patterns means treating individuals as fitting inside tidy boxes. I don’t think that’s true. Two reasons: (1) a big part of what makes an individual unique is their combination of categories, and (2) no individual perfectly fits every pattern. There’s nothing about recognizing patterns in women in general that prevents me from recognizing that a woman in particular does not fit every pattern. The patterns are merely hypotheses (almost always unconscious ones) I use when trying to understand an individual.
We’re thinking about this nice and consciously behind our keyboards, but the fact is we’re doing this categorization and pattern-recognition stuff all of the time unconsciously. That’s how we learn. That may even be what learning *is*. Are there faults with it? Of course. But time and energy are scarce so evolution made trade-offs. The default is that we use pattern recognition as a starting point and then adjust to the messy individuals we get to know. If you’re arguing that I’d be small-minded not to change, I’m going to need more evidence for why we should spurn the ancient learning system plus evidence for whether spurning it is even possible.
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UPDATE: Anna adds in her characteristic saying-so-much-in-so-few-words way (see: I notice patterns in individuals, too) this:
Also, it's fun to shoot the sh*t.
