Not trying to be offensive, but did you feel the need to add the statement abut self-fulfilling prophecies because making a bare claim like &quot;I believe in some stereotypes&quot; is so  politically sensitive that you&#x27;re afraid of being judged as a racist or sexist? This is similar to the sort of complains the author has about older research into stereotypes assuming they were inaccurate without testing them - no doubt they made that assumption to protect themselves from allegations of racism&#x2F;sexism&#x2F;etc.<p>The self-fulfilling prophecy argument is a way to say &quot;OK, they might be true, but the blame lies with some other group of oppressors and it&#x27;s still not an innate quality of the subjects themselves, so it&#x27;s still not really fundamentally true.&quot;. Why shouldn&#x27;t it be an innate quality? Maybe women really do earn less than men because of something different in how men and women earn money, not because men oppress women with their stereotypes.<p>Without research, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s any more reasonable to say &quot;stereotypes are mainly accurate because they&#x27;re self-fulfilling prophecies&quot; than to say &quot;stereotypes are mainly accurate because groups of people are naturally different.&quot;.