Is it just me but why do people get so aggressive when they can't accept me rebelling what they said?

Question

A lot of people get aggressive when I say something about their stereotyping ideas. I don't like stereotpying and I correct those who do but they never admit and say that I overreact and THEN explain things to me which I don't need to know. Why is it that they are trying to convince me when they clearly generalized thereby stereotpying the problem from the start? I don't understand why people need to defend themselves like that. They clearly did not explain the issue before and then says that I misinterpret things which there was nothing much said about before. Why do people mistaken me all the time? I was just trying to say that they should not generalize things because it's not always true.

Answer 1

Generalizing and stereotyping are touchy matters because people don't understand what they are, yourself included. The misunderstanding makes attempts to grapple with them frustrating. If you're going to make extreme statements about very basic means of human cognition, most people won't be able to diagnose the problem, but will only smell something fishy going on, and will likely get frustrated trying to put a finger on what is a correct, if unarticulated, intuition.
___You say, "they should not generalize things because it's not always true." A true generalization does not necessarily apply its predicate to all members of the group about which the generalization is made. You're thinking of a statement of the form, "All x's are y," a universal statement.
___Aristotle often qualified his generalizations by introducing them, "Generally and for the most part...." This phrase would go a long way to clear up a lot of misunderstandings, if it were used more often today. Other qualifications like "often", "usually", or "tend to be" serve the same purpose.
___The world is full of similar things that are not similar in all respects. When we talk about humans having less acute vision than eagles, we omit mention of blind humans and eagles, for the sake of linguistic and cognitive economy, but no sane person interprets this omission as a firm statement that there are no blind humans or eagles.
___Generalizations can be universal or not. Universal statements are a stricter sort of generalization, that are true for every member of a group. If one is dealing with a finite group, every member of which is known, one can make statements that apply to them universally. But if one doesn't know all members, then the generalization can't be said certainly to apply universally; there might be exceptions.
___Then there are statements of necessity: "To be a lion, a thing must be a mammal." Another sort, "A circle cannot have corners." "7+5=12" All these statements are necessarily true. But universality is not the same as necessity. If I have only 3 shirts, and they all happen to be white, it's true that all my shirts are white. But nothing prevents me from dyeing one of them blue, or from buying a blue shirt. There's nothing intrinsic about being a shirt or about being mine that makes "my blue shirt" an impossibility.
___The laws of physics are generalizations. Given the nature of scientific inquiry, they are true for all cases observed so far. It is not impossible that there might be an exception found someday. More usually, what occurs is not finding one exception to such a rule, but a class of phenomena that requires the revision of the entire rule. Relativity was an "exception" of this sort, that required qualifications to be applied to Newton's Laws.
___Humans use language and cognitive skills loosely, because in an infinitely complex world, insisting on absolutes would stop practical cognition and activity dead in its tracks. We don't have infinite cognitive capacity.
___We do have some insight about what we can truly say absolutely, universally, or generally. We have insight on the difference between literal and figurative expressions, and on the proper use of hypothetical expressions. But the social sciences, at least in their clinical iterations, seem not to have received the memo. A basic course in logic would help here. And perhaps one in the philosophy of mathematics, so that the reasons for the rules of statistical practice are understood.
___Don't get carried away with a crusade against generalizations; that ground is well-covered by millions of undergraduates and second-tier academics. Cover some new territory. It has been said (by an author of the 1st EPA second-hand smoke report) that it's "OK to massage the data for a good cause." This seems to be a general rule in the more politicized disciplines. But exaggerations and massagings of data are marginal lies, that is, lies about the degree or extent of something. Now if one has to lie about one's "good cause", then how does one know that it is, in fact, a good cause?

Answer 2

you know what's funny.. it would be unbelievably easy to get into the very argument you are talking about with you right now just on this statement alone. The problem is you 1: are giving people advise they may not agree with and didn't ask for and 2: are becoming defensive when they react by letting you know they didn't agree or didn't ask for your advise.

People know generalizations aren't always true... if it was always true.. it would be called a fact, not a generalization.. so they don't need to hear it from you.. that's all.

Answer 3

I'm not entirely sure I understand your question, but I'll take a go at it. You're asking why people get offended when you call them out on their stereotyping behavior?
Basically stereotyping is a basic thought process. When we learn new things, we group them into categories until we encounter additional information to re-categorize. Stereotyping people is the extreme of non-pc behavior, unfortuantly it is near impossible for people not to generalize traits to other people (these can be good and bad traits - people in IT are smart, secretaries are dumb, and so on). Calling a person out for stereotyping somone or something, is putting them on the spot and probably embarassing them.