Jansz, If they have honestly found that to be the case with everyone of that grouping that they have met, then that's fair enough by my book. The amusing thing is that you are doing exactly that with your statement about racists. Are you "racist", or guilty of the same stereotyping as racists by making a statement about all racists? I personally find that people who I would consider racists are much more likely to claim that they have a reason, but in actual fact they don't, or it is based on a very, very small sample space.
I agree that if you meet one asian guy, and then loudly proclaim that all asians are hard-working hikikomori, then that would be being racist (on account of the small sample space), but if I met 100 and they ALL turned out to have one particular thing in common, I'd feel a lot safer about making a statement, disregarding for a second that "asians" are highly unlikely to have one aspect which they all have in common because of the sheer area and population involved :P
Rubato, I wish you luck in your quest to rid the world of assumptions, but it simply aint happening. Stereotypes do exist for a reason, but that said I would not assume a stereotype was true unless I had personal experience to back up that stereotype. We simply have to make assumptions in order to get along. For example, you assume that you can make any kind of non-PC jokes around someone who has made a non-PC joke before. You make assumptions based on everything you know about a person all the time, in order to gauge how you interact with them. If we didn't, we'd have to be so careful about everything that it would simply be ridiculous.
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