John,
I mean that when a group of people are generalized to be less moral, or lazy, or greedy with money, or less intelligent, it's an expression of prejudice. And prejudice means lack of thought, or pre-judging. The fact that somebody is referring to Democrats doesn't make it more thoughtful than somebody referring to Jews or Germans or any other group.
I don't disagree with anything you say. When it comes to various traits or personalities, most of these are distributed throughout a bell curve, and when you come across 1 person, the characteristics of the bell curve don't matter. All that matters are the qualities of the individual.
But if you divide the population to various demographic groups, you will get the number of bell curves with different characteristics, other times you may not. For example, there may not be a statistically significant correlation between graduation from college and dental health.
But the authors of the study found a statistically significant difference between Democrats and Republicans in their self assessment of their ranking on various "moral" questions. Why is this insulting or prejudiced to anyone?
I speculate that you worry about how "people who don't think" would "process" this information, so it is better to suppress this information. If it is so, it is a very slippery slope.
Joe |
