Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy 1st Edition

I have little to add that hasn't already been said by other reviewers. Jussim's book is an excellent review of the literature on perceptual accuracy. I would strongly recommend this to any graduate student or advanced undergraduate student who is interested in conducting social psychological research, even if that research is not necessarily related to person perception or stereotyping. The larger message from this book isthat many of the canonical writers in psychology have chosen to ignore taboo topics, one such topic being stereotype accuracy.

This book changed everything I think about stereotypes and many other topics in social psychology. I will say that it drives me insane now to see how often people repeat lies that I now know aren't true. This book and Dr. Jussim's work need more coverage to correct the record on stereotypes. As he says, stereotypes have been stereotyped.

Stereotypes are just pattern recognition! It's really actually quite evil for our society to have a war on pattern recognition when it's one of the "super powers" of homo sapiens that allow us to achieve such great things on this little planet.

Looking for the latest review of published research to tell us how we're controlled by processes of which we are unaware and are therefore often wrong? Not in this book. Through pains taking argument and review of the oft sited studies in psychology textbooks, Jussim shows how humans are usually correct in their perceptions and, if not correct usually, learn so that perceptions eventually correspond to reality. One has to wonder how Psychology researchers can claim that people are commonly and easily biased then present their findings as if they and their research escapes what they claim bedevils the rest of humanity.

It takes a lot of strength to go against the academic mainstream and it is usually rewarded with scorn, hate, or ignorance. This did not stop Lee Jussim.

We all know that "stereotype" is bad and always incorrect. The media tells us so. In case the stereotype is correct it is not because of some intrinsic reason, no, it is because of "self-fulfilling prophecies". You are not dumb because you are born that way, you are dumb because society expects that of you, e.g. because of the existing stereotype that people with lots of muscles are dumb. There is a subconscious urge to follow those unwritten rules of the other people. Stereotypes are bad, get rid of them or you are a bad person.

This is just an example. To make it short, Lee Jusim tells it the other way. He says that stereotypes are overall relatively accurate and that - despite what press and social scientists often claim - stereotypes can be easily altered by experience that disconfirms held beliefs. Self-fulfilling prophecies usually only have a small effect and in a few cases they can be large, but not as a rule.

That does not sound overly spectacular but runs contrary to that what the mainstream media postulates, fed by a generation of social psychologists and scientists. It all runs together with the idea that social engineering is working and a good idea, so you can mold human nature the way you want. Also, everything bad in the world is the result of bad people and their bad ideologies.

Of course, in truth stereotypes are not always bad. They can be useful. Imagine your parents telling you that you should avoid tigers because they are dangerous. If you follow that stereotype you will survive. Do not follow it, you are dead. And cannot procreate. Evolution at work.

The author also spends time to review many famous studies whose results and interpretations have often been taken for granted in the past and have become the foundation of many theories about society. He debunks many of them. This shows that even classic studies are often never properly checked at some point any more, they have become "gospel". One most wonder how often that is the case for many things science and the general population now holds to be true.

Despite using an entertaining writing style and not the typical dry-academic-we-are-smart-approach the book is still long and hard to read because it is filled with statistical jargon. Footnotes often make attempts to explain it but I doubt that someone without proper statistical training will truly get most of the stuff. Definitely not "layman" stuff!

Despite this being a great piece of work it has not penetrated mainstream science and opinion very much. Some of the reasons why this is the way I have stated above. The book is out by now for two years and there are hardly any reviews.

What I suggest to Mr Jussim now is that he should write a shorter, more pop-science version of this book so he can get more exposure. It is an important topic. A must read for all social scientists out there.

This key work successfully uses good science as an antidote to the almost religious fervor with which academia discourages stereotyping people, to the point where the social sciences are probably harmed through inaccuracy. The author convincingly lays out a case that our stereotypes tend to be pretty darn accurate-- that we're not perfect, but quite good at picking up social cues, and therefore social differences, particularly when we have a lot of exposure to who we're stereotyping. There's also some useful information about how self-fulfilling prophecy effects (treating people different makes them different) can be overemphasized in size and importance sometimes (he doesn't at all negate their importance- on the contrary- but tries to show the need to place these special cases within a generalized context of remarkable accuracy in our social perception).

Buried in the many stereotype chapters is some evidence-based speculation that part of the reason for our academic reluctance to stereotype may be ideological- that American liberals tend to either miss differences, or purposefully gloss over them, so that they make assumptions that stereotyping is bad or dangerous (or, even if admitted, display a kind of 'yes, but' attitude that may decrease accuracy in judgement). This subject is treated perfunctorily, but the ideology connection fits, given the overwhelmingly liberal makeup of social psychology college professors. For some, that connection glows and throbs; with this book's release, there was a mini-flurry in the conservative blogosphere, with one commenter even worrying about noting their approval publicly: "If he is one of us, then we should think long and hard as to not do the kiss of Judas on him." Indeed, the author has entries about this ideological connection on his blog at Psychology Today, so I missed examples in this work that probably come readily to the author's mind, where poor attitudes- bad stereotypes, really- about stereotype cost us important research and conclusions. Nothing about Shockley- horrors- or any other of probably oodles of cases where useful but upsetting stereotypical findings or assertions were left unused, or were turned against a researcher. Including the painful examples would've made this book far more tangibly useful to lay people and the academy alike. Even controversial examples (Jussim is very good at circumspection, at using "often", "may", "tends", etc., as well as providing alternatives, to make his points inclusive of other possibilities). Conservatives display much less compunction with using stereotypes to judge social situations, as any cursory review of said blogosphere will reveal: indeed, that's probably one of the most clear linguistic/semiotic differentials between the two ideologies. American liberals often view this conservative characteristic as reproachable, even reflective of an underlying prejudice. But there's good implication that our individual comfort with stereotyping may have more to do with our ideology than empirical accuracy. This is quite reasonable it turns out, because ideology has recently been shown (Hatemi, 2012) to be as fundamental as personality to our makeup, with broader, unintuitive implications (correlations) to personality and human behavior than we normally assume our political ideology would have in day-to-day existence.

It's a long book to be making a few rather simple, powerful, important points, but is in spirit an academic treatise containing two thoughtful meta-analyses. It's complete, careful, and circumspect, yet much more readable than most such ambitious efforts. Hopefully, there's a 3-minute video version of conclusions somewhere, along with some great condensations that made it into magazines for regular folks- no non-academic could be imagined to trudge through these nearly 500 pages to get the main point (though the intro or chapter 1 are great standalone). The book deserves some kind of award for a scintillatingly academic, unclear title, and the publisher did a dodo move with their pricing strategy.

No, it didn't go as far as I might've liked in examining the causes of these problems. But 5 stars for a thorough, convincing, well-written treatment of a hugely important, large subset of social psychology.