The consolation that you did your best may not come as much comfort when faced with the prospect of failure. Especially when it comes toexams, promotion at work and sporting prowess.
But it may not be your fault, according to a report by psychologists from Exeter and St Andrews Universities, which says that unconsciously at least, your best may never have been good enough.
Poor performance may have as much to do with believing and fulfilling negative preconceptions about the social group you consider yourselfto be in, as it is a lack of natural ability or incompetence and, say the authors, may go some way to explaining why England has a particularly bad track record in World Cup penalty shoot-outs. Understanding the social impact of stereotyping will also help us to understand and deal with the consequences of sexism, racism and homophobia.
Writing in the latest edition of Scientific American Mind, the authors draw on studies to show that so-called ’stereotype threat’ is a common cause of under-performance. In one example, women taking part in maths tests and told that women were less capable at doing sums than men, tended to perform less well than those who weren’t.
Likewise, a study in Arizona found that when white golfers were told their golfing performance would be compared to black golfers, they performed worse if they thought it was a test of ‘natural athletic ability’, playing on a stereotype that black people are better at sport, but better if they believed the test was one based on ’strategic intelligence’.
Alexander Haslam, professor of psychology at Exeter University and one of the report’s authors, says “although some have jumped to the highlycontroversial conclusion that differences in attainment reflect natural differences between groups, the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong.”
Defining yourself as a group member and accepting any negative associations with that group can give rise to side effects includinganxiety, self-consciousness and self-doubt, or what Haslam calls ‘identity-related psychological conflict’. Intrusive, negative thoughts use up mental resources needed for the task in hand, and subsequent bad performance is then wrongly equated with an inability to do the job.
If stereotypes can impact negatively, then they can also create success or ’stereotype lift’. Stephen Reicher, another of the report’sauthors, said: “If people are exposed to stereotypes about the inferiority of an out-group, then their performance is typically elevated. An ideology of superiority can give members of high-status groups a performance boost.”
In another maths-based experiment from Harvard University, a group ofAsian women performed differently in tasks depending on whether they focused on their sex or their race, producing better results based on the latter criteria based on a stereotype that Asians are better at mathematics than other ethnic groups.
Where we place ourselves as a group is also open to shift. Psychology students, for example, should experience stereotype threat if asked to perform scientific tasks compared to physicists, but stereotype lift when compared to artists.
Luckily, the authors say, we’re masters of our own fate and there area number of ways to avoid the limitations of stereotyping. Personal strategies include adopting ’social mobility’ – operating more as anindividual – and ’social creativity’- employing a mix of positive stereotypes to deflect the impact of belonging to a disadvantaged group. But this, the authors say, doesn’t tackle the underlying cause of stereotype threat.
“Traditionally, people working in this field have worked on the assumption that stereotyping is fixed, that the only way to overcome it is to use individualist strategies such as working harder.
“But actually stereotypes are negotiated and negotiable and only working individually is unlikely to bring about social change and can maintain the status quo.
“We need to challenge them at their root using collective action, precisely what activists such as Steve Biko and Emmeline Pankhurst achieved through black consciousness and feminism. They challenged the legitimacy of those comparisons and stereotypes that defined their groups as inferior,” said Haslam.
Other social behaviour tests:
To explore the notion of prejudice following the death of Martin Luther King Jr, school teacher, Jane Elliott, divided her class into two groups of children- those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. She found that telling one of the groups that they were inferior and withholding privileges had a detrimental effect on academic results and produced feelings of self-loathing and fear. The’superior’ group improved performance. The same results were produced the following day when Elliott reversed the roles.
Following the start of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi war criminal trial in 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to test people’s willingnessto obey authority figures, even if those instructions conflicted with personal conscience. Test subjects were allowed to ‘punish’ wrong answers given by a recipient to a set of questions, delivering a 45-volt electric shock, which increased each time. Test subjects were also told the recipient had a heart condition. Though most subjects paused when faced with the distress of the recipient, most continued after being told they would not be held responsible, instead exhibiting signs of extreme stress. In fact, the recipient was an actor and not receiving any real shocks at all.
