Definition: A stereotype is “...a fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people.” (Cardwell, 1996).
"Even if there is a kernel of truth in the stereotype, you're still applying a generalization about a group to an individual, which is always incorrect," says Bargh.
When I google, “psychology stereotypes”, I believe I am witnessing an attempt to reconcile what people want to be true with what they want to be good. Somehow, true bad stereotypes doesn’t fit what anyone wants to believe, so the definition switches.
In order to maintain that stereotypes are false, these psychological articles define stereotypes as a generalization, and generalization as over-generalization or universalization. This is not how anyone ever defines generalization anywhere else. Some things are true in general. But in the context of stereotypes, generalizations become defined in a way to make them necessarily false.
Of course, in practice this is not the definition of the kind of stereotypes people cringe at. What violates the moral feelings is the idea of any generalization, not over-generalization or universalization. The definition changes in order to maintain the broader object of moral disgust.
Some stereotypes are true. I don’t think people want them to be, so they offer a definition that makes stereotypes necessarily false. The consistent thing to do is to bite the bullet and confess the simple logic that information is scarce so we have to employ generalizations on some level, many of these generalizations are about other people, and neglecting to employ these generalizations leads to poorer decisions than we otherwise could be making. Ignoring valid stereotypes leads to poorer decisions. You can call that immoral if you like, but don’t twist the definition to reconcile your contradictory moral intuitions against stereotyping and for believing true things.
By the way, stereotypes don’t come from an evil guy making stuff up in a tower. They emerge from our social order, so it would make a lot of sense that stereotypes were correlated with truth.
