Mote and beam of the SJW journalist

A quite disappointing article from the Atlantic - Americans Can't Escape Long-Disproven Body Stereotypes by Amanda Mull. It is either deceptive advocacy or ignorance. One more in the cognitive pollution associated with postmodernist intersectionalist Social Justice Jacobins seeking to create new victims where none exist.

Imagine preparing for a job interview or a promising first date. You probably consider your outfit and general grooming—a fresh shower, plus hair products and makeup, if you use them. Glasses or contacts? Hair up or down? Various decisions signal different levels of erudition or sexual appeal, and people spend considerable time and money trying to use them to their advantage in high-stakes situations.

New research suggests, though, that elements of your appearance that are far more difficult to control also have a substantial impact on those all-important first impressions. In a recent study, researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas asked a group of American subjects to look at bodies of different shapes—not just thin and fat, but detailed variations such as pear-shaped and broad-shouldered—and assign personality traits to those shapes.

Note that the new research is not linked, raising a big red flag.

The problem with this construct is that we already know that people use stereotypes formed from past experience or impressions. We also know that frequently those stereotypes are strikingly accurate.

The problem is not with the existence of stereotypes. The issue which Mull avoids is that stereotypes are an inherent and necessary cognitive fix in an environment with partial or uncertain knowledge. The only problem is if people refuse to update stereotypes once they have real knowledge.

If I have had twenty bad interactions with Russian businessmen and I meet a new and unknown Russian businessmen with a business proposition, I fall back on my stereotype generated from past experience. It says nothing about the quality and honesty of this Russian businessman. I won't know that until, if I have the time and opportunity, I interact with him to a degree that allows me to judge him as an individual and his actual proposition. Given that time and money are limited and risk can be large, stereotypes are a mechanism for sorting the wheat from the chaff based on probabilities arising from generic averages of accumulated experience.

They are useful as a mechanism in the real world. You only encounter a problem when you ignore detailed knowledge in order to cultivate a prejudice. If you the new Russian is presenting an otherwise appealing proposition and all the evidence supports that they can be trusted but you then decline the opportunity simply because of the generic prejudice, that's a problem.

First impressions are indeed important. But they are subject to control and modification. They are not fixed.

Mull ought to know all this from the well-known debacle with Implicit Association Tests. When first introduced twenty years ago it generated immense enthusiasm among social justice Jacobins because it proved that all Americans are racist (and all sorts of other deplorable attributes). Subsequently, we have discovered that people hold stereotypes for the reasons described above but that the vast majority of people are not bigoted. They hold a stereotype when in a state of uncertain information but as soon as they have certain information, they adjust their assumptions.

People may carry a range of assumptions/stereotypes of unknown people based on their body type. Mull fails to demonstrate that those assumptions/stereotypes are then translated into bigotry. She has no case to support her own bias that Americans are bigoted in their prejudice based on stereotypes.