How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure) | Hacker News Reader

How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure)

sciam.com

29 pointstarkin214 comments

Great find. This is part of what I was getting at in this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144616

Specifically, where I say that "Sometimes people manage to acquire the necessary values and thus the skills necessary to do well, despite starting off in adverse conditions. But they're the exceptions, and were psychologically and sociologically positioned to be that way." When some folks try to deny that there are any serious psychological and sociological barriers to success by pointing to those rare individuals who overcome socioeconomic adversity, they are ignoring the very phenomena these researchers are talking about. Some individuals are simply better positioned than their peers when it comes to dealing with the same conditions.

Thankfully, the research also has the effect of helping us to figure out how to overcome debilitating stereotypes, but one can hardly expect someone who grew up in the inner city to be reading SciAm.

Stereotype threat is such an interesting concept. It's closely connected to the idea of malleability of intelligence as explained in e.g. this article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

It raises interesting issues of what people actually mean when they want someone who "is smart and gets things done". Just the basic expression "smart people" seems to imply that you have rejected the idea of malleability of intelligence and think that people are either smart or not. I'm not really arguing that there is not an innate random quality to "aptitude", but if you believe that article you don't want someone who is smart, you want someone who has worked hard to acquire important skills, since people who just think of themselves as "smart" are more likely to cave when faced with difficulty.

Stereotypes probably do reinforce themselves somewhat. But this doesn't change my opinion that they are almost always true. Or at least, they are always grounded in fact. They may be exaggerated, outdated or oversimplified, but even so I think they are usually correct.

If by "stereotypes are usually correct" you mean that if there is a stereotype that says "people of group G have property P" then people in group G are statistically more likely than average to have property P than the general population, then you may very well be right that stereotypes are correct more often than they're incorrect, but it kinda misses the point of why stereotyping is a bad idea.

What point am I missing? That we should ignore reality to avoid hurting people?

I object to the article's claim that

> the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes.... women’s performance on spatial and mathematical tasks is created by ... the stereotype of their spatial and mathematical inferiority

Stereotypes may contribute slightly to group differences, but they are not the primary cause of them.

The point is that stereotypes are almost always spurious on account of being greatly oversimplified. There's a big difference between applying proper statistics to a situation and applying a stereotype.

I voted you up not because I necessarily agree with you, but because you make a good point. We do ignore the basis of stereotypes when we shouldn't. We need to realize there is such a thing as natural and good elitism. This is an important "thing that is not said."

That being said, while stereotypes do have some kind of basis in reality (something has to perpetuate them) the problem comes when we say certain people are inherently inferior and do not have a free, moral accountable will.

The problem is that people are notoriously bad at inductive reasoning. They routinely ignore cases that contradict their hypothesis.

If they see a woman who's bad at math, they think "aha! the stereotype is right!". If they see a woman who's good at math, they think, "oh well, there's bound to be exceptions" and promptly forget about her. They only remember the ones that fit the stereotype, so the stereotype is reinforced.

You need to repeatedly hammer irrefutable evidence into people's heads before they'll start to forget stereotypes.

"Stereotypes may contribute slightly to group differences, but they are not the primary cause of them."

No, they are probably not the primary cause. The proximate cause is probably bigotry, imho, with societal structure as the ultimate cause. It's definitely not genetic or something innate to the afflicted persons.

In any case, an individual belonging to a group with a negative stereotype attached should not be punished merely for being a member of the group. In this case, yes, truth really can hurt you, and I don't think that's fair.

> To be selected to participate in Beilock and her colleagues’ first study of mathematical performance, for example, women had to perform baseline tasks with greater than 75 percent accuracy, and they had to agree with the statements “I am good at math” and “It is important to me that I am good at math.” Why do these things matter?

So people give up a little when others tell them that they are bad at what they've worked so hard to do well at, or do a little extra if superiority appears to be within reach. Seems like a whole lot of fluff for such a simple observation.

I think you missed the point. It's not that "people give up a little when others tell them that they are bad..." The effect is self-afflicted, you just have to think that there is a negative stereotype that affects you, and your performance will suffer. Moreover, the effect is actually stronger if you think that you are pretty good at whatever the stereotype says you should be bad at.

The point is that, regardless of whether the stereotype is true or not, this is a scientifically established psychological reaction that causes people to perform below their capacity, and it only affects those that are from a stereotyped group. This means that, in your example above, women will constantly be at a disadvantage compared to men in math performance.

Does it matter? If you were a member of such a group, I'd wager you would think it unfair, and doubly so since you are already trying to break a negative stereotype.

Giving up is not self-afflicted?

No causality relationship was proven. Much less I have no idea what was actually established given a total lack of numbers. A 1% drop? A 15% drop? Big difference.

People afflicted by stereotype threat don't just give up. (If anything they try harder.) It's a physiologically measurable effect. Think of it as an added level of anxiety that non-afflicted people don't have to face. Studies have shown that it for examples results in lowered short-term memory capacity.

No-one is immune to this effect. A study was done on white male engineering students on a math test. The ones that were told that the purpose of the test was to figure out why "Asian students are better at math" systematically underperformed compared to those who were not.

Some people may want to brush this effect away and just claim that the disadvantaged groups don't "have it" or that everyone has advantages and disadvantages, but remember that this strikes disproportionately at members of some groups of people, through no fault of their own.

Regarding research results, it was a popular article. The numbers exist and are closer to 15% than 1%. If you want to learn more, check out http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/, it has an extensive bibliography.

my first thought (after reading the first page) for some reason was about athletics. needless to say, there are some pretty big stereotypes specifically regarding sports (in the US at least)

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