This why evolution has it's flaws, due to overgeneralizing. Full article here on
overgeneralizing.
Charles Darwin saw a pattern that governs the evolution of all life on earth. Quite a generalization! From that single generalization, new understandings about diseases were discovered that greatly improved the effectiveness of doctors. In fact, whole new sciences have issued from that single generalization.
What Im trying to say is: The mistakes our brains tend to make (like overgeneralizing) are the inevitable by-products of our great intelligence.
Your ability to recognize a face comes from your brains ability to complete a pattern with minimal clues. It has been exceedingly difficult to create computers that can do it, and they still arent as good at it as you are on a bad day without even trying. Your brain recognizes faces without any effort on your part. Your brain is so good at completing a pattern that, even in dim light even if you can only see half of the face you recognize immediately who it is.
But this amazing ability also sometimes causes us to see patterns that dont really exist. We see a man in the moon. We see a horse in the clouds. We see the big dipper, the little dipper, Orions belt. Our brains can take the most scant clues and see a pattern, without us making even the smallest effort to do so.
But especially given our brains bias toward negativity, we also see patterns that create pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism patterns our brains have created out of minimal clues patterns that dont actually exist.
The woman I used to work with who had two failed marriages concluded, All men are pigs. From only two examples, she created a generalization that included three billion men! Her cynicism, her unwillingness to allow any men to get close to her, was the side-effect of two common mistakes our brains tend to make: 1) the brains amazing ability to see a pattern with minimal clues, and 2) our brains tendency to look for evidence that confirms an already-existing conclusion. In other words, your brain tends to overgeneralize and then the world seems to prove youre right about it.
The two primary mistakes that turn generalizations into overgeneralizations are:
1. Holding the generalization as a fact rather than an hypothesis. Any generalization you make is a guess. You will have some degree of certainty about your guess you can be quite certain your guess is correct, you can be very uncertain about your guess, or anywhere in between. When you have more certainty about your generalization than the facts justify, it is an overgeneralization. Youve gone too far.
2. Generalizing from too few instances. Researchers have discovered that people dont have a very accurate sense of what chance sequences look like. People expect sequences of coin flips, for example, to alternate more than they actually do. So truly random sequences can often look like a pattern to us.