national identities study ...

The newest issue of Science is supposed to have a study on National Stereotypes. I have not yet seen/read that article, or the study itself (which one should ALWAYS do before posting on the subject ... but since i am aware of that rule, it's okay if i break it).

My understanding of it is .. that amongst its claims are these ...

A countries national stereotype of itself generally matches the stereotype attributed to it by other nations. (Presumably the strong negative characteristics are re-described, the US would call its intelligence practical, the French would call it something else.)

But then, and here i believe is the heart of the article ...
While the citizens of a nation in question believe the national stereotypes about their own nation, when asked to describe their family and friends and network, it vastly differs from that stereotype.
Most importantly ... this is across the board, everyone.
Or, roughly, all Americans know the Americans are like their national stereotype, in aggregate, but no American actually knows people like that stereotype (and the same for the Germans, Italians, etc).


This fits pretty well my general perceptions about people. They are all ready to take the lazy route and think of their neighbors (and the people of the world) in crude and stereotypical forms. At the same time, no one they know well fits those forms ... across the board. It's only the people you don't know that act stereotyipcally.
(In neuroscience terms, this falls out from how we "code" our perceptions ... it's related to why you see blue Toyota Camerys everywhere if you have just purchased a blue Toyota Camery. People we don't know ... all we have of them is this first-impression coding.)

I would hypothesize that the same truth holds true for images of large sub-populations (The Cubans in the US, Midwesterners, libertarians, librarians, etc) in a country as well.

This all said ...
Don't get me wrong. I believe about ability to geenralize over people as a whole is a very useful tool at time. You really cannot learn much about, say, Brazilian culture and history without making some such claims. We just don't want to make the mistake of thinking the claims are true. They are tools ... on par with speaking about, say, the reasons a tree turns its leaves toward the sun. No such event really occurs, the leaves turn toward the sun because of a complex set of interactions, not because the tree wills it. But imagine trying to build an evolutionary science devoid of all such misnomers. (Only a philosopher would try it.)
Tables aren't really flat either, but anyone who points that out is just ceasing to play the language game and are not really helpful (unless that happens to be their job, to point such things out).
The image of a "Brazialian" i have is far more crude, indestinct, and flat out wrong than these examples ... but again ... either i'm just filling a place in a sentence and the exact conotation is not required (like "flat" tables) or it is merely a term to fix a reference which i hope to keep refining.
In the former it is just a vague meaningless usage. In some cases, the use of stereotypes in humor is like this. The target changes over the years, the terrible joke about Jews becomes a terrible joke about lawyers.
In the latter, so long as i am more shocked to find that someone fits the stereotype, moreso than discovering that someone does not fit it, the usage remains ... okay.