An Empirical Study of Stereotypes

The title is slightly misleading, but I was called into work at my convenience store on Friday due to an IT emergency. Our main cash register experienced a database corruption and aside from my duties as hangover vomit removal specialist, I also serve as the store's IT Manager, so I came in to deal with that at double overtime pay. I wish there were more emergencies that needed my immediate attention at double overtime.

While I was waiting for the database to rebuild, I decided to test my "customer stereotype accuracy". As a customer entered, I made note of what my unfounded assumptions about them were, then noted whether they were correct. I got 7.1% completely correct and 17.3% partially correct out of 197 customers who entered. I only counted customers who bought something and I did not include any friends that were with these customers unless they bought something as well. I also did not count any of the "regulars", whom I would already be familiar with. So, at best I had about one fourth of my assumptions correct. It seems that there's quite a confirmation bias when it comes to that stereotype; I thought I had quite an accurate picture of our customer base, but in the end it turned out that most of that was just my only noting my correct assumptions. I would speculate that this is what fuels a lot of stereotypes. Confirmation bias seems to be the main reason why my customer stereotypes are maintained. I'm hoping to do my final project on stereotypes, so I wonder if there's any way I can try to perform any sort of confirmation bias framework for my network.

Of course there are several problems with my "experiment:"
1) No control
2) I was quite stressed at this time, as our Friday sales are some of our biggest sales day, and a colossal database crash is quite a stressful event for me. Running that many customers through on our single backup terminal while simultaneously repairing our main system probably caused me to be a bit terser with customers than I normally would be and thus might have affected their attitudes.
3) One particularly annoying customer whom I ended up having to call the police on put me in a very terse mood that, again as above, might have affected my interactions with customers.
3) There's the "awareness" factor where, as both the experimenter and the subject, I was probably not making the same assumptions I normally would be, or at least had a different pattern of behavior.

In any case, it was an interesting study that I think will affect how I view customers and how I treat people who enter our store.