Reputations can be self-fulfilling prophecies ; if you give a man a bad name, he‘ll live down to it. A new paper (pdf) by Thomas Dee shows this.
He did an experiment at Swarthmore College, asking a group of students to take a GRE test. Before the test, some students were asked about their sporting activities, and whether these conflicted with their academic work, whilst others were not asked.
And Mr Dee found that the athletes who were asked these questions performed significantly worse than the athletes who weren’t.
This suggests that when people are primed to be aware of a stereotype - “jocks are dumb” - they are more likely to behave in accordance with it.
This corroborates the finding of an immediate “Obama effect” upon blacks’ exam performance. As Obama became more prominent, the stereotype of blacks as non-cerebral declined, and so test scores improved.
This matters. It suggests even subtle or benign forms of stereotyping - not just racial ones - can have significant material effects.
What’s especially worrying here is that this effect might interact with cognitive biases to create a spiral of inequality.
Say we label a group as having some negative trait. Benefit claimants are workshy; Muslims are religious fanatics; left-handers have hairy pubes; blacks are non-academic; hoodies are criminals, whatever. The stereotype effect then leads them to behave accordingly, to a little degree (well, maybe not in left-handers' case). Then our confirmation bias kicks in - “see, I told you they were workshy/fanatics/whatever.“
Meanwhile, our group - to which we have given a positive label - lives up to that label. The self-serving bias then comes into play, causing us to further exaggerate our qualities.
The result is that there can be enormous inequalities of esteem, based upon nothing more than the labels we started with.
And the thing is, this would happen even if these labels were initially wholly false and arbitrary.
He did an experiment at Swarthmore College, asking a group of students to take a GRE test. Before the test, some students were asked about their sporting activities, and whether these conflicted with their academic work, whilst others were not asked.
And Mr Dee found that the athletes who were asked these questions performed significantly worse than the athletes who weren’t.
This suggests that when people are primed to be aware of a stereotype - “jocks are dumb” - they are more likely to behave in accordance with it.
This corroborates the finding of an immediate “Obama effect” upon blacks’ exam performance. As Obama became more prominent, the stereotype of blacks as non-cerebral declined, and so test scores improved.
This matters. It suggests even subtle or benign forms of stereotyping - not just racial ones - can have significant material effects.
What’s especially worrying here is that this effect might interact with cognitive biases to create a spiral of inequality.
Say we label a group as having some negative trait. Benefit claimants are workshy; Muslims are religious fanatics; left-handers have hairy pubes; blacks are non-academic; hoodies are criminals, whatever. The stereotype effect then leads them to behave accordingly, to a little degree (well, maybe not in left-handers' case). Then our confirmation bias kicks in - “see, I told you they were workshy/fanatics/whatever.“
Meanwhile, our group - to which we have given a positive label - lives up to that label. The self-serving bias then comes into play, causing us to further exaggerate our qualities.
The result is that there can be enormous inequalities of esteem, based upon nothing more than the labels we started with.
And the thing is, this would happen even if these labels were initially wholly false and arbitrary.
I'm going to go out and buy one of those CDs where an American woman tells you that you are clever, desirable and successful.
Posted by: Luis Enrique | February 12, 2009 at 04:18 PM
"...even subtle or benign forms of stereotyping - not just racial ones - can have significant material effects. "
And what significant material effect would different average IQs have?
Posted by: Fred Kite | February 12, 2009 at 06:45 PM
Experience suggests that it's usually right to be suspicious of all "research" results that sound like wishful thinking.
Posted by: dearieme | February 12, 2009 at 07:26 PM
@ Fred Kite:
"And what significant material effect would different average IQs have?"
Interesting you should mention that - there was a programme on the Beeb a couple of days ago called "Make me Smart" that touched on differences in IQ between groups in society: the suggestion given was that IQ tests results are heavily affected by upbringing, quality of education, and the kind of cognitive biases Chris describes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00hn277/Make_Me..._Make_Me_Smart/
About 22 minutes in to the iPlayer video.
The academic interviewed is James Flynn.
Posted by: Tom James | February 12, 2009 at 11:51 PM
Ok Chris,
so you have discovered positive feedback. So why don't economists draw the obvious conclusion and ditch the concept of equilibrium?
Posted by: reason | February 13, 2009 at 04:02 PM
This also explains how astrology works, of course.
Posted by: Heresiarch | February 14, 2009 at 12:31 PM
This is also called self-fulfilling prophecy. Louis Kestenbaum wrote a great book about this called "Clawing Your Way Up".
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