the usual suspects
There's a game called "Guess Who?" with which I would guess that most of my readers (er, both of my readers) are familiar. It's a game where two players each have a board with 24 different faces on it. Each player also has a "mystery person" that s/he knows, but which the opponent does not. The object of the game is to ask yes/no questions regarding your opponent's mystery person, thus eliminating the faces on the board until you've finally figured out who your opponents mystery person is.
First, I just want to point out a couple of eccentricities of the game.
- The game is subtitled "The Mystery Face Guessing Game." When I read that it sounds like "The Jerk Wad Guessing Game," as if it's a game intended to be played only by people who would refer to themselves as "mystery-face."
- Only about one quarter of the faces are women! You'd think that in a yes/no guessing situation that'd be the first thing you'd want to make approximately equal.
This game is not very entertaining for players above the age of 10 years or so. Thus, to make it more interesting, I tried playing it with a new rule: no questions could be asked about the mystery person's physical appearance or characteristics. In fact, all questions had to be based on stereotypes. Perhaps this sounds like an impossible game, especially since the characters on the board are all cartoons, not real photos, and there's no background or context provided. However, I was quite surprised with the outcome, as I expect you may be.
But first, let me put down here some of the more interesting questions:
- Does your person hate America?
- Does your person care too much about how s/he looks?
- Does your person talk too much?
- Would your person use Viagra?
- Would your person watch sports?
- Would your person be into indie music?
- Does your person worry about 'street cred?'
- Was your person from a richer family in another country?
- Does your person know how to browse the internet?
- Could you believe that your person is illiterate?
I think those are actually good questions when you're first getting to know someone, too. For example at a party or on a first date. Deep, intimate questions. "Do you think you're cool because you have 22" rims?" Etc.
Ok, so now on to the actual results! It turns out that you can use stereotypes to correctly identify an individual 50% of the time! To me, this says less about whether stereotypes can be accurate or not (though in fact they can be, just not reliably so) than it does about how consistent stereotypes are between people. I'm a male who grew up in the midwest, and I played this version of the game with a female who grew up on the west coast - and we come from distinct ethnic backgrounds as well! Yet we found our stereotypes to overlap fairly well - and that was with only cartoon pictures of fictional people! Given a bit of story about them, or even some background image that indicates where they live (urban area, rural area, war-torn area, desert area...) I imagine the hit rate for stereotypical identifaction would rise significantly.
Ok, let me guess: you're a college-educated person who is not black and works a professional-type job at a desk with a computer. Am I right? Yessssssss!
odometer (guestbook)
cloud watching