Do you think "rationalists", or rationality leads people to, stereotype demographic groups less or more than the general public?

Though if very few people besides you and I are participating, then I'd concede this conversation is not that fruitful and go discuss something else, I thought your point (2) was very interesting but I feel the ground the term "stereotype" covers is still a bit more narrow than this.

"2. When you are faced with a person about whom you have little information, to what extend are you willing to have an explicit model of the person. How strongly does that model influence your actions in the context of the person."

Stereotypes aren't just any explicit model based on limited information but are particular models based on larger group membership and assumptions of homogeneity in that group membership (for instance, if based on limited information, I look at Jane glancing at me funny and frowning and make up a mental model about Jane that maybe she hates me because some conspiracy against me as evidenced by her frown reminding me of my childhood bully that also frowned against me that way before plotting against me, that's an explicit model of her but not a conventional thing people would call a stereotype -- it's too thoughtfully individualistic, deliberate, explicit and idiosyncratic a model of a person. If I see Jane frown at me, and then think Jane frowns on me because she is a member-of-group and we all know member-of-groups don't like people doing X, which I just did, that falls more into a typical episode of stereotyping based on limited info).

I think a few traits of stereotypes (but not always) involve

• Being part of the "common knowledge" of a society that most people share (in mass media societies it could be propagated through it, or orally as part of common knowledge elsewhere).
• Homogeneity assumptions that may have some statistically average grain of truth or sometimes not, but is heavily played up in tropes that people rightly or wrongly see as over-the-top in some settings (people say stereotypes are played up in comedy, ads etc.).  For example, stereotypes of women shopping for shoes are popular and may be backed up by real stats (e.g. data on purchases) but take on a life of their own grander narratives in media.
• Often passed on without firsthand knowledge to others through hearsay (though firsthand knowledge can confirm or disconfirm it) -- e.g. think of the father telling the young son "what women are like" even before the son has any good mental model from experience, though also heavily backed up by people who have tons of firsthand knowledge insisting it's common sense ("or I know it's stereotypical but it's true, I've been married 40 years"). The thing is stereotypes are things widely recognized by the culture -- something you discovered yourself through years of experience about generalizing about people but are not celebrated in mass culture, common knowledge are generally not called "stereotypes".
• Not saying all stereotypes have these traits but possessing more of these traits makes something more likely to be called a "stereotype".
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• 3. How much entropy do you see in the information that's assessible in a few seconds. 
• Yes, stereotypes seem to be reliant on certain cache'd thought/models and rely on thinking fast. If you think too much about the information and modeling, it almost becomes less  "stereotypical". But not all examples of thinking fast or relying on judgements accessible in a split second are stereotypes though.
   

I don't know why this is being downvoted so much as I am trying to argue in good faith (I hopefully had tried to give the impression I'm not deliberately stoking culture war but want a clearer rational discussion about this) even though "stereotype" is a fuzzy set. 

Clearly stereotyping is enough of a "thing" that academics (e.g. Lee Jussim etc., people arguing about the validity or invalidity of things like stereotype threat, how important mass media perpetuating stereotypes matter vs. "common sense, people seeing what's in front of them") heavily cite each other and debate intensely over it.

I am thinking about the central examples in social psychology (fast judgement of demographic characteristics that emphasize social differences between groups that are at best statistical, so not "all humans breathe air", particularly traits that are amplified or played up due to their salience in mass culture, society, or media etc like "women like shopping".). 

I hate to do a "I know it when I see it" when it comes to the word stereotyping but even discussing what are the central "traits" of stereotypes are worth discussing.

I do think breaking down those questions makes sense. On your point about mental, explicit models, it seems what most people call "social" stereotypes have certain traits that rationalists would utilize (e.g. being explicit about how you might not be able to predict one individual's traits, but can rely on group averages like "men are more risk-taking") or using correlations of one trait to predict another trait.

Perhaps stereotypes are better framed as a type of prior -- but one that usually apply to people (you rarely hear about animal or inanimate object "stereotypes" but those are usually called generalizations like "the sky is blue -- well in sunny locales", or "dogs are friendly -- mostly") and subgroups or people, whose validity is heavily disputed.

Maybe framed another way, my central question is something like:

Are rationalists more likely to stray from the type of priors based on group-level characteristics that in academia/pop culture etc. are labelled "stereotypes". Because of various reasons -- higher prior on individual variation (less on homogeneity)? 

More focus on analytical thinking -- less gestalt belief in essentialism of clusters even if you use cluster thinking (i.e, the categories are made for the man)? More awareness that even if using stereotypes can be useful, they are a tool only, and stereotypes are in the map not the territory (a poorly drawn but still-occasionally handy map is a trait of the map, the territory is still complex).

Maybe other traits like less reliance on mass media/pop culture (people are rarely explicit on where the "model" for stereotypes come from -- is it personal experience like "stereotypes are really just a name for my personal accumulated experiences, prior updating to posterior, and then many times over and over time I become more accurate so they become second nature" or are their particular sources amplifying stereotypes, like this is true for X% of some group people, but everyone shouts about, jokes about the stereotype as to give the impression that it's 3X% of people,, biasing my priors, amount of updating etc. and if rationalists fall prey to them less)?

Also I'm not trying to use "stereotype less" as "applause light for "yay us, thoughtful individualists" entirely as I agree with the academic Lee Jussim that stereotypes can be useful and academics have overplayed the "things people call stereotypes are inaccurate and useless in providing information" card too much.

I acknowledge there can be stuff that is sacrificed for being less stereotypical and more open-minded (e.g. take longer to think, get mocked as "lacking common sense", "of course group X and Y differ" etc.). But at some benefits like being careful and thoughtful about the (possibly smaller numbers of) individuals who buck the trend or don't follow the stereotype (that society or other individuals might not always see as worth the trade-off vs. quick demographic judgement like in the insurance risk scenario).