Negative expectations about aspects of our identity such as race, sex, age, sexual orientation and social background can have powerfully self-fulfilling effects
Assumptions about us made by others can have powerful effects, regardless of their accuracy, argues Cordelia Fine
The waiter asked the blonde if she would like her pizza cut into six pieces or twelve.
‘Six please’, she said. ‘I could never eat twelve!’
Harmless fun or time to call the political correctness police?
Or what about those carefully designed promotional leaflets from which beam women and people from ethnic minorities: politically correct tokenism or the valuable expression of commitment to equal opportunities?
As we, as a society, bicker over these and other questions, it’s worth thinking about how such seemingly trivial expressions of denigration or confidence can affect the person who encounters them. As a starting point, any reader who doubts that someone else’s low opinion of our abilities can have a harmfully self-fulfilling effect should take a ride in my car the next time my mother is in the passenger seat.
For me, it is an experience that always brings to mind William James’ observation that ‘a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind’. As my mother sits in an ill-disguised pose of rigid anticipation, I begin to harbour suspicions that her assessment of my competence as a driver has remained largely unchanged since I got my licence over a decade ago. What is odd is how this conviction affects my driving: all at once I clean the windscreen instead of indicating; I stall three times in quick succession; and my indecision earns me a toot at the roundabout.
This is a subtle, but important, problem for people who belong to social groups that are stigmatised in some way or another. More and more research confirms just how much we can be affected by what we think other people think of us – particularly if that person’s opinion is important. Our self-identity is malleable, and we ‘tune’ our self-evaluations to match the view ostensibly held by the person with whom we are interacting, as University of Virginia psychologist Stacey Sinclair and her colleagues have found in a series of experiments.
They discovered that African American students, for example, rate their academic abilities and interests lower when they think they are being evaluated by someone with stereotypical negative beliefs about black people. Even though such self-deprecation goes against their best interests, these students unconsciously accommodate their self-image to fit with the other person’s prejudiced view. By contrast, African American students who think they are being judged by someone more egalitarian wind up with a more positive estimation of their own academic ability.
Something similar happens to women who think they are about to spend some time with a charmingly sexist man (the type who thinks that ‘women should be cherished and protected by men’, and who judges the qualities of caring and nurturing as more important in a woman than, say, confidence and assertiveness). In such cases, women tend to slide their view of themselves to suit traditional opinions. They regard themselves as more stereotypically ‘feminine’, compared with women who are expecting to hob-nob with a man with a more modern view of their sex.
Self-image is also vulnerable to public opinions, as revealed by experiments that explore what happens to people when they are reminded of prevailing cultural beliefs. For example, reminding high school students of gender stereotypes about maths versus the arts distorts their memories of their actual school marks in those subjects. Girls inflate their marks in arts but underestimate how they did in maths, while boys show the opposite, stereotype-consistent, bias.
The vulnerability of our self-identity to the perceived beliefs of others indicates a need for some careful thought before we make generalisations about different groups of people. When the Scottish Qualification Authority recently announced a gender action plan to eliminate sex divisions in school subject choices, some teachers freely expressed doubt that it was worth the effort. ‘I think it is much better to realise that there are differences between boys and girls, and ways in which they learn’, said the head of a well-known Edinburgh private school. ‘Overall, boys choose subjects to suit their learning style, which is more logic based’, he went on, leaving his audience to draw the inference that girls’ preferred learning style is an illogical one. Unfortunately for the girls in his junior school, this sort of attitude is likely to leave them with an academic self-identity unjustly tarnished in the areas of maths and science.
Negative expectations about aspects of our identity such as race, sex, age, sexual orientation and social background can have powerfully self-fulfilling effects. And it’s not just the young who suffer: even affectionate references to ‘senior moments’ may have unwanted and unnecessary effects on those in their later years. The ‘burden of suspicion’ we carry about ourselves disrupts our ability to prove the stereotypes wrong – as is revealed when this burden is removed.
Students from a low socio-economic background scored relatively badly when a verbal task was presented as a measure of intellectual prowess. Yet they did every bit as well as their more privileged peers when the same test was presented less threateningly as a test of the role of attention in memory. Another study found that people in their sixties and beyond had trouble learning new facts relative to youngsters – but only if a task was framed as one for which their age would put them at a disadvantage. So long as the word ‘memory’ didn’t appear in the task instructions, the older group remembered just as much information as the younger one.
As I take three attempts to park, gently graze the bumper of the car behind on my final try, then reach down for the hand-brake only to discover that it’s already on, it’s not hard to see why my mother has, so far, had little cause to update her mental schema of my driving capacities. And so I continue to drive appallingly badly in her presence. Similarly, researchers who study how stereotypes affect their targets are in little doubt that they can have perversely self-justifying and disruptive consequences.
But the research also offers a few scraps of hope. It can be surprisingly easy to close the gaps opened by stereotype threat simply by challenging superficial – and indeed often outdated – preconceptions. And if our self-image mirrors the views of others, then there is always the potential for change for the better, thanks to the power of gesture. As Sinclair and her colleagues suggest, ‘[c]ommunities, social institutions, and specific interpersonal relationships in which stereotypes are collaboratively challenged may protect self-evaluations from the onslaught of common stereotypes’.
In other words, those leaflets with girls smiling over Bunsen burners might just help after all. It’s also heartening to see people rise to the challenge when the cloud of stereotype threat under which they may usually work is dispersed.
So let’s take some courage from that – and do our best to keep the mirror that we hold up to others free from the smears of prejudice.
Dr Cordelia Fine is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne / Australian National University, and the author of A Mind of Its Own: How your brain distorts and deceives