Three traps set by stereotypes

“A fath­er and son have a ser­i­ous car acci­dent. The fath­er falls into a deep coma. The son is injured and needs emer­gency sur­gery. He is taken to hos­pit­al. As they enter the oper­at­ing room, the sur­gic­al intern looks at the child and says: ‘this is too emo­tion­al for me, I can­’t oper­ate on him: he’s, my son!’” How can this be? Take a minute to think about the above ques­tion, and before we dis­cov­er the answer, let’s start by explor­ing the com­mon world of stereotypes. 

Shared? Well yes, ste­reo­types are impres­sions that all mem­bers of a group share about all mem­bers of anoth­er group or about their own group¹. They are build­ing blocks of our men­tal func­tion­ing, just like cog­nit­ive biases, heur­ist­ics, and oth­er short­cuts of thought. They help us to think quickly and effort­lessly, to under­stand the world through sim­pli­fied cat­egor­ies, to pre­serve our ego through often advant­age­ous com­par­is­ons with oth­ers, and to foster social con­sensus. How­ever, behind these self-evid­ent facts lie three traps that we should anti­cip­ate to main­tain a min­im­um of free will in our judge­ments and decisions.

Ety­mo­lo­gic­ally, the term ste­reo­type comes from the print­ing industry and refers to the rigid mat­rix used to impreg­nate motifs in a repeated and identic­al man­ner. Trans­posed to psy­cho­logy, ste­reo­types thus cor­res­pond to repet­it­ive and fixed men­tal images – not always con­scious, but always exag­ger­ated – which col­our our per­cep­tion of oth­ers by sim­pli­fy­ing it. Motiv­ated by a mech­an­ism of sim­pli­fic­a­tion of the world, they con­cern the cat­egor­ies of first impres­sion: phys­ic­al appear­ance, ori­gin and geo­graph­ic­al affil­i­ation, pro­fes­sions, sex, age range, etc. The most attract­ive people are, for example, attrib­uted skills and psy­cho­lo­gic­al bal­ance that they do not neces­sar­ily pos­sess. As a res­ult, they are listened to more dur­ing a group dis­cus­sion, they are rated bet­ter dur­ing an eval­u­ation, they are eas­ily per­ceived as hon­est and cha­ris­mat­ic²…

Of course, each per­son will attrib­ute to his or her own group pre­ju­dices that are rather favour­able: “what is intel­li­gent, thrifty and spon­tan­eous for one’s own group becomes resource­ful­ness, greed and impuls­ive­ness for the oth­er group³”. Moreover, not all ste­reo­types are false, and some are even based on well-estab­lished facts. What can be prob­lem­at­ic is their overgen­er­al­isa­tion and often simplist­ic nature, as well as their rigid­ity and per­sist­ence. Many ste­reo­types emerge in the absence of any real­ity, based on isol­ated cases or rumours⁴, con­veyed by the media, opin­ion mul­ti­pli­ers or cer­tain pres­sure groups, and now more eas­ily with the Inter­net and social media. 

Research in social psy­cho­logy has shown how ste­reo­types affect our judge­ments inde­pend­ently of our aware­ness, and what is more, often where we do not expect them. There­fore, exper­i­ment­al research meth­ods are an excel­lent way to reveal them to ourselves.

Let’s illus­trate this with an ingeni­ous study by Madeleine Heil­man and Julie Chen⁵ from 2005. They pro­duced two strictly identic­al pro­fes­sion­al reports, fea­tur­ing Domi­n­ique, some­times a man, some­times a woman, in charge of a ser­vice com­pany, five years seni­or­ity, and man­ager of four people. The report presents Domi­n­ique’s activ­it­ies dur­ing a typ­ic­al day. Domi­n­ique ends the day by being asked by a col­league to do them a small ser­vice related to a delay in a file. In one ver­sion of the report, Domi­n­ique agrees to stay and help the col­league, while in anoth­er ver­sion, Domi­n­ique refuses. Hence, there are four ver­sions of the story. Four dif­fer­ent groups of human resource pro­fes­sion­als are then exposed to one of the stor­ies and asked to eval­u­ate Domi­n­ique on sev­er­al dimen­sions, includ­ing job performance.

If Domi­n­ique is a man and agrees to help a col­league, then his job per­form­ance is judged to be super­i­or to that of the woman who helps her col­league! Sim­il­arly, if Domi­n­ique-male does not help his col­league, then he is not under­val­ued, where­as Domi­n­ique-female is. Why is this? Well, because the ste­reo­type “it is in the nature of women to help oth­ers” implies that if a woman helps a col­league, it is con­sidered nor­mal. Where­as if the woman does not show altru­ism, we look for a reas­on, for example, we con­sider that she is not that pro­fes­sion­al… On the oth­er hand, a man who does not help does not pose a prob­lem, since it is not part of social expect­a­tions. Where­as a man who helps is noticed… to the point of con­sid­er­ing that it is linked to his pro­fes­sion­al skills! This pos­it­ive or neg­at­ive con­tam­in­a­tion is the res­ult of a halo effect, like a wave that irrig­ates judge­ments based on a first impres­sion. These phe­nom­ena are rarely con­scious, which makes them par­tic­u­larly pernicious. 

As we can see, there are real social con­struc­tions behind our judge­ments and decisions, which to a cer­tain extent, impose them­selves on our way of think­ing. It is time to return to our ori­gin­al enigma: who is the sur­gic­al intern? The step­fath­er? The adopt­ive fath­er, the adulter­er, the father­’s spouse? Yes, these are all pos­sible, but there’s a sim­pler solu­tion: it’s the child’s moth­er! Did the ste­reo­typ­ic­al asso­ci­ation sur­geon = man work for you?

Ste­reo­types and their neg­at­ive aspects, pre­ju­dices, can be a real threat and psy­cho­lo­gic­al bur­den to the people they tar­get⁶. Bad repu­ta­tions⁷ are a stigma and a source of self-cen­sor­ship, the effect of which is unfor­tu­nately to con­firm beliefs: we speak of self-ful­filling prophecies.

To illus­trate these phe­nom­ena, Laura Kray and her col­leagues at the Uni­ver­sity of Berke­ley⁸ have car­ried out a very inter­est­ing study on gender ste­reo­types in the abil­ity to nego­ti­ate in the busi­ness world. 

We are in an MBA pro­gram, and the stu­dents are doing a case study in which they are giv­en a file on a biotech com­pany whose sale they will have to nego­ti­ate as best they can. The com­pany is val­ued at between $17–26m, they have a com­plete file on its bal­ance sheet and its mar­ket, and they will be faced with a cli­ent whose object­ive is to buy the com­pany as cheaply as pos­sible. It is up to them to find the argu­ments to sell it for the highest pos­sible price. 

Two groups of stu­dents are formed. For the first group, called “exer­cise”, the case study is presen­ted as fol­lows: “This exer­cise is designed as a way for you to famil­i­ar­ise your­self with the basic con­cepts of the nego­ti­ation activ­ity. This is a prac­tice exer­cise, use it as a learn­ing tool”. For the second group (referred to as “real life”), the study is presen­ted as fol­lows: “You are tak­ing part in this nego­ti­ation exer­cise because it will be a very use­ful test of your nego­ti­ation skills, com­pet­ences, and short­com­ings. Accord­ing to our school’s back­ground, this test is a good indic­at­or of your nego­ti­ation per­form­ance in your pro­fes­sion­al future”. As you can see, in this ver­sion the pres­sure is on, and the chal­lenge is to show what you can do. 

The fol­low­ing graph shows the per­form­ance rate of stu­dents in both groups.

We see in the “exer­cise” assign­ment that men and women per­form equally well. How­ever, as soon as the stakes in the situ­ation become high (“real-life”), men are stim­u­lated, and women are held back. Why is this? The authors ana­lysed this res­ult using the concept of stig­mat­isa­tion: nego­ti­ation in the busi­ness world requires assert­ive­ness, com­pet­i­tion and even aggress­ive­ness, qual­it­ies that are con­sidered to be male attrib­utes, which have a motiv­at­ing effect on men in the “real life” con­di­tion. The oppos­ite is true for women. This pro­cess is not con­scious, and this is pre­cisely the issue with self-cen­sor­ship due to stereotyping. 

But what hap­pens if we make this expli­cit? Will women become aware and rebel? This is what the authors did in the second stage of the research, with a new class of stu­dents. We still have two groups: the “real-life” group, which has the same instruc­tions as before. And a new group, called “aware­ness”, with the fol­low­ing instruc­tions: “This exer­cise allows you to eval­u­ate your nego­ti­ation skills in the busi­ness world. It will allow you to check wheth­er you have the neces­sary qual­it­ies: high stand­ards, logic, abil­ity to express your ideas without let­ting your emo­tions show and without being too accom­mod­at­ing. These are qual­it­ies for which large vari­ations in per­form­ance have been meas­ured, for example in the dif­fer­ences between men and women.” The res­ults speak for them­selves: this instruc­tion acts as pos­it­ive stim­u­la­tion for the women!

The res­ult obtained in this second phase seems prom­ising: it shows that it is pos­sible to over­come ste­reo­types, if we talk about them and expose them. It is a ques­tion of trans­form­ing a risk into an oppor­tun­ity, and to do this, ste­reo­types must not be allowed to oper­ate in the back­ground: they are pro­cesses that oper­ate in the shad­ows, and their impact is all the great­er if they are not brought to light. Mak­ing them vis­ible, mak­ing them expli­cit and denoun­cing them is an excel­lent oppor­tun­ity to shake them up! But is it enough?

Is the fact of hav­ing under­stood the above and agree­ing with what is being said a guar­an­tee of con­trol over one’s own ste­reo­types? Cer­tainly not! Para­dox­ic­ally, research shows that there is a rebound effect⁹: by ask­ing people to dis­reg­ard their ste­reo­types too much, they end up devel­op­ing an illu­sion of con­trol which weak­ens the reg­u­la­tion of their own ste­reo­types. Mod­esty must there­fore remain the guid­ing prin­ciple of an assumed reg­u­la­tion of ste­reo­types: even if we con­sider ourselves to be non-racist, non-miso­gyn­ist, non-homo­phobic, etc., we must keep in mind that we all have ste­reo­types and that we must not lapse into an inef­fect­ive mor­al­ising vis­ion. To think that hav­ing ste­reo­types would make us an out­cast is absurd: ste­reo­types are embed­ded in our “social DNA¹⁰”, cul­ture shapes our minds, even in its most cari­ca­tured form. 

For this reas­on, a good way of main­tain­ing our vigil­ance regard­ing our own beha­viour is to meas­ure our own impli­cit ste­reo­types using pro­ced­ures that are now well val­id­ated, such as the “Impli­cit Asso­ci­ation Tests » (IATs)¹¹, for which there are online tools that will serve as a use­ful fol­low-up to this art­icle. This type of exer­cise allows us, without mor­al­ising, to be con­fron­ted with our own non-con­scious judge­ment­al biases, and to be motiv­ated to cor­rect them: as a last resort, it is the pro­cess of psy­cho­lo­gic­al inhib­i­tion that is bene­fi­cial in learn­ing to res­ist a part of ourselves¹².

You can take Impli­cit Asso­ci­ation Tests here : 

https://​impli​cit​.har​vard​.edu/​i​m​p​l​i​c​i​t​/​c​a​n​a​d​a​f​r​/​s​e​l​e​c​t​a​t​e​s​t.jsp