What it is: Drawing an unwarranted consequence from partly verified facts, and often we are even unaware that we are doing it.
Example: take the belief "most terrorists are Moslems" can make our minds and bodies cringe every time we see a Moslem or a mosque or a minaret.
The statistical relationship just does not work. But because we base our knowledge on small exerpts from reality, we ignore the bigger picture: that there are about one billion moslems in the world, of which a tiny fraction may be terrorists.
The same leap of thought applies to other areas: shops place security tags on each item. Although only a very small proportion of people actually steal things in shops, every single customer gets penalised.
Copmpanies apply a penalty for late payments. Customers in good faith who make a genuine error pay for a small number of people who abuse the system.
I had a bad meal in that restaurant; therefore it is a bad restaurant.
We do it all the time. Of course, being human as we are and having the hardwired brain that we have, we cannot survive without these simplifications of reality, without categorizing, without putting others into arbitrary boxes of prejudice.
This should really more often than not be called postjudice, when you think about it, particularly when it is based on a single piece of evidence that we have come across once in our life...
Oh but hang on... we have a word for that: experience.
You get my drift: on one hand we physically can't avoid generalisations, on the other hand these very generalisations lead to all sorts of conflict in all areas of our lives.
I guess, just being aware of them would be one way of minimizing some of the disastrous implications.
But then again, that is probably another generalisation.
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