At an icecream dinner party the question came up whether women actually like chocolate more than men. Stereotypes are known to often be correct, so i was curius. Quoting from Pinker's The Blank Slate: The idea that stereotypes are inherently irrational owes more to a condescension toward ordinary people than it does to good psychological research. Many researchers, having shown that stereotypes existed in the minds of their subjects, assumed that the stereotypes had to be irrational, because they were uncomfortable with the possibility that some trait might be statistically true of some group. They never actually checked. That began to change in the 1980s, and now a fair amount is known about the accuracy of stereotypes.14