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Hasty generalization
Hasty generalization
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Hasty Generalization – an example of this would be someone making a judgement after seeing or meeting someone one time. If you decided someone was a bad person after meeting them one time would not be a fair conclusion. This would need to be avoiding when writing because you do not want to write something based on something you read once; find other resources to confirm it is true. Your readers might believe anything you write. Sweeping Generalization – this is when you state that everyone likes something when you do not have the facts to prove it. If you have a vote stating that all agree that would support that statement; if you don’t, you would need to say “some” people agree instead of saying “all” do. You cannot write assuming everyone
It is often people establish judgments of others based on a fragile perspective that will probably change once they actually get to know them. In Lucy Maude Montgomery's short story "A Fortunate Mistake", the Wallace sisters discover this when they thought Florrie Hamilton did not fit with them, only to find out that she is actually quite the charming girl. Their change of perspective is evident in Nan's impression of Florrie after her visit, and in Miss Braxton's girls' reactions after witnessing the blooming friendship, between Florrie and the Wallace sisters. In my experience, I have also naively based my opinions of others on what people had to say about them, which proved to be a foolish mistake that I no longer made. Although one may not be able to help but base judgments and opinions on limited perspective, it is through widening perspectives that an individual can reach a better understanding of those around.
Snap judgements are those immediate conclusions we make when we meet someone for the first time or experience something new or different. Many of us make snap judgements every single day of our lives without even being conscious of it. In fact, it only takes us a couple seconds to decide whether we like something or not. Snap judgements are a mental process we all do unconsciously. According to our class reading “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell, Gladwell states that most of us have experienced snap judgments, but we feel like we should not trust it. Snap judgements are not always precise but Gladwell believes we should ignore these odds and trust our snap judgements.
Confirmation Bias: A perfect example would pertain to when the victims of sexual assault from the University of North Carolina stuck together, they bonded when no one else would listen and believe them. They sought out each other and many others around the United States as the film continued until they had proven their point. The two women, Andrea and Annie just kept moving forward while avoiding those that
Research in rational inference in social-learning began with the work of Abhijit V. Banerjee[5], Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch[6]. In the basic setting of the model, rational agents end up herding. This characteristic is a feature of even more general settings and can be rationaled by the following argument: Given a finite action space and a finite and imperfect signal space, rational agents eventually "heard" as a consequence of "Information cascade", while ignoring their own signal, each person imitates others' behavior[7]:221. Though much of the basic logic regarding the proportion of private information and the proportion of information revealed by others' actions is well predicted by the model, it does have some core implications that seem unrealistic. Among its unrealistic statements is the claim that the agents have a level of sophistication that allows them to predict very unlikely behavior.
Categorization and social projection are important ways that people can more successfully navigate their social environment. People need to know that there are others in their in-group that share the same attitudes and behaviors as they do. If people are unable to determine how many people in their environment share their attitudes and behaviors, it would be more difficult to engage in social situations without offending or contradicting others. For this reason, false consensus is an interesting offshoot of this important idea. The false consensus effect refers to the fact that people have a tendency to over-estimate the proportion of the population that shares an attitude or behavior with him or her.
o Snap judgments suggests that such errors can be avoided by thinking more slowly; this isn’t the case, for some people think very slowly with no better results.
Thus, our predictions about others' beliefs or behaviors, based on casual observation, are very likely to err in the direction of our own beliefs or behavior. For example, college students who preferred brown bread estimated that over 50% of all other college students preferred brown bread, while white-bread eaters estimated more accurately that 37% showed brown bread preference (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). This is known as the false consensus effect (Ross et al., 1977; Mullen, Atkins, Champion, Edwards, Hardy, Story, & Vanderlok, 1985). The false consensus effect provides the basis for the following demonstration, which emphasizes the need for systematic rather than casual observation. You can use the set of six questions, below, to investigate this.
Self-fulfilling prophesy, where people expect a person to act a specific way so they treat them as if they would act...
Mindbugs. It’s a catch-all term touched on in Chapter 1 by the authors of Blindspot, Banaji and Greenwald. It is defined as: “Ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason and make decisions” (4). They readily supply mistaken ideas about different of human (social) groups. The authors argue that prejudicial thinking is often hidden from our conscious brains. The human brain contains a huge storage space full of associations between individuals and certain characteristics that many times, cause us to misidentify others. These cues are ingrained in all of us which lead to errors. They’re called social mind bugs.
An example is “For instance, swine and humans are similar enough that they can share many diseases” (Dicke and Van Huis 345). The authors create a Hasty Generalization fallacy by concluding that because humans and swine are similar, they share diseases. Furthermore, this makes the audience feel lost because the authors do not provide evidence of how “swine and humans are similar” (Dicke and Van Huis 345). Similarly, the author says that “Because insects are so different from us, such risks are accordingly lowered” (Dicke and Van Huis 345). Again, the author fails to provide a connection between how the risk of getting an infection is lowered because humans and insects are different. The authors also create a Hasty Generalization fallacy because they conclude that the risk of humans getting infected is lowered just because insects and humans are different. In summary, the use of fallacies without providing evidence and makes the readers feel
Merriam webster (2014). Assumption - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Retrieved April 11, 2014, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assumption
Most if the time people believe that their perspective and reason is the correct way to look to view the word, but they forget that certain beliefs can be faulty. Pitfalls such as snap judgments and prejudice are east to do that they become second nature to people and do they do not even realize that they are doing it. I am also guilty of doing all of the seven pitfall multiple times in my life. Sometimes, I do them without even realizing that I am doing them. Just as I have victimized people with the pitfall, I am certain many people have done the same to me. The pitfalls that I victimize people the most with are snap judgement, preoccupation, and one more thing.
Misconceptions happen everyday in different situations, for example, not understanding a topic, hearing the wrong story, or not knowing the full story. Many people who hold misconceptions do not even know that their ideas are false or incorrect. A stereotype can be formed or made by an individual who is unable or unwilling to obtain all of the information they need to make a fair judgement about people or situations. Stereotypes occur because one forms opinions about other people based on their looks, appearance, and so on. An individual can stereotype a person who might be a member of a group who they have not had firsthand contact with before. Stereotypes are basically generalizations that are made about groups. A disadvantage about stereotyping is that it makes us ignore differences between individuals, therefore we think things about individuals that might not be true. One disadvantage about misconceptions is that it can place an individual to believe a story that is not fully understanded. One common misconception is that individuals see that child adoption is wrong, when in reality it becomes a miracle to many families.
Being exposed to one single story make people judge others without knowing them. People use to stereotypes based on a single story that they heard about an individual or a group of people. There are occasions in which there is only a single story that can make human beings understand reality. However, a single story can damage society, while a balancing story can clarify unknown situations.
This makes it impossible to make true generalizations. Someone who hold in all cases about right,