Generalization In Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast And Slow'

Recently, on a trip to New York City, I chatted up a couple of pedestrians. At one point, the bearded man burst out, “India? Isn’t that near Egypt or something?” I paused a little and the familiar ‘Americans do not know their geography’ comment flared up in my mind. But that would be a generalisation, a stereotype… ugly, vicious, reeking of evil. The unspeakable sentences. Realm of internet trolls and ignorant illiterates.
Was that enough to get you interested? Hasn’t the phrase, ‘You must not generalize like that’ been thrown around by several self-proclaimed purists?
What exactly is a generalisation and where does it stem from? As a whole, a generalisation refers to identifying the manner in which detailed facts about a particular concept
They form the basis for research in cultural, psychological and gender studies and the obvious benefits that arise from them. In his famous book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahneman successfully demonstrated that experts are more likely to go wrong about their predictions as time progresses. He cites enhanced overconfidence and an over-reliance on intuition as the reason for this. As is evident, a sweeping generalisation has been made here as not all experts are prone to this bias. This conclusion would have probably hurt the sentiments of those who ironically believe that they are right all the time (and, might actually be). But, being wary of such biases has led even the most seasoned experts to scrutinize their predictions in a more exhaustive way so as to eliminate scope for error. The principle also holds true for conclusions and recommendations based on other studies that classify people into different groups on the basis age, ethnicity, personal preferences, social and economic backgrounds amongst
International terminals at many airports across the world have dedicated sections to check all people who are coming from South American and African countries. As one can imagine, this practice has drawn a lot of criticism in the sense that it is discriminatory against people from certain regions of the world. What the public fails to understand is that this has been introduced after careful considerations about all aspects of the drug trafficking issue. Officials cannot be expected to check everyone to the same extent because it is not practically feasible. Similarly, it makes no sense whatsoever to check no one at all. So, a mildly extreme stance is adopted with the hope of tackling the problem. The fact that this practice is still prevalent bears testimony to its success outweighing other