Picoult: Irony in Prejudice

I've been following some of the buzz surrounding Jody Picoult's new book House Rules over at Cat in a Dog's World. Interesting, but unfortunately more of the same regarding how disabled people are treated in mainstream, abled, discourse. Her analysis of a discussion question for the book, however, caught my attention.

The question:

Do you know anyone with Asperger's syndrome? Did the descriptions of Jacob fit what you know of that person?

As Cat in a Dog's World already explained, the principle problem with this question is that it assumes that all Asperger's individuals are fundamentally identical, which, from a social scientific point of view, is a symptom of the fallacy of out-group homogeneity.

The idea of the cognitive miser holds that, as individuals, we have limited ability to think about the world around us and that we are simply not able to take into consideration everything around us. As cognitive misers, the theory holds, we conserve cognitive resources by creating mental shortcuts concerning the nature of the world around us, stereotypes, which allow us to predict our environment.

Additionally, those of us who spend the least amount of effort thinking about a certain aspect of our world create the most generalising, or stereotypical, cognitive shortcuts. Therefore, according to the idea of the cognitive miser, prejudice stems from an unwillingness to exert the effort to challenge our preconceptions.[1]

Anyway, I was musing on the idea that a stereotyping question in a book club which is meant to invoke critical thought could, in itself, be based on the unwillingness to think critically.

[1]Think about that in terms of privilege for a moment.