You only confront prejudice when you believe people can change.

One of the more embarrassing social situations you can be in happens when someone you are in a conversation with someone you do not know well and they make a racist or sexist comment or joke.  In that moment, there is a whole calculus you end up going through.  On the one hand, if you do not say anything, you are implicitly endorsing the comment.  On the other hand, if you step up and say something, you can create an awkward social situation.

Obviously, there are many aspects of a situation that will affect whether you choose to confront prejudice.  For example, if the person making the remark has power over you (like a boss or a customer), then it can be difficult to say something.  It can also be more difficult to say something if you are in a group and feel that you are the only one who objects to the comment.

A paper in the July, 2010 issue of Psychological Science by Aneeta Rattan and Carol Dweck suggests that people are also more likely to confront a prejudiced remark when they believe that people can learn to change their behavior.  Dweck and her colleagues have done quite a bit of work demonstrating that there are different mindsets that people have about psychological qualities like intelligence and personality.  Some people have an entity mindset, in which case they believe that the quality is one that people are born with and that they cannot change.  Some people have an incremental mindset, in which they believe that qualities like intelligence or personality can change and adapt. 

In one study, Rattan and Dweck measured people’s beliefs about personality and classified them as believing that personality is relatively fixed (an entity mindset) or that it is relatively changeable (an incremental mindset).  The participants in this study were all members of racial or ethnic minority groups.  Later in the study, people interacted in a chat room with someone else who identified himself as a white male (it was actually the experimenter.  The discussion in the chat room was supposed to focus on diversity in college admissions.  Early on in the conversation, the white male made a comment displaying prejudice.  The experimenters were interested in whether the participant would say anything to confront the prejudice.  They found that participants were four times more likely to say something about the remark if they believed that personality is changeable than if they believed that it is fixed.

In another study in this paper, the experimenters had participants read an article made to look like it came from Psychology Today that either suggested that personality is relatively fixed or that it is relatively changeable.  They read this article as part of a study designed to determine whether the paper would be of interest to high school students.  Then, they participated in a second study that they were told was unrelated to the first.  In this study, they were asked a number of questions about what they would do if they were in a situation in which someone made a remark displaying prejudice.  They rated how likely they would be to confront the individual, to avoid them, and to withdraw from future interactions with them.

The people who read an article saying that personality is changeable rated themselves as more likely to confront the prejudice and less likely to withdraw from future interactions with the individual than people who read an article saying that personality is relatively fixed.

I want to highlight two interesting aspects of these studies.

First, the simple belief about whether psychological characteristics can change has a huge influence on people’s behavior.  After all, if you do not think that people can change the way they behave, what point is there in confronting their bad behaviors, particularly if that confrontation would come at some personal cost to you?  Thus, it is worth recognizing that people frequently change their behaviors when they learn new things.

Second, people’s theories about psychological characteristics like personality and intelligence can change.  In the last study I described, people read a single article, and that had an effect on their behavior (at least for the duration of the experiment).  This result suggests that with some continued support, many people can come to believe that most of their psychological characteristics can be changed.

Why girls drop math I: Beliefs about Math

Here in Texas, it may be 105 degrees, but marching band practice started, and there have been orientations at my kids’ schools, so it must be time for them to go back.  That got me thinking about a big problem in math and science education.  In elementary school, boys and girls are about even in their performance in math and science.  By middle school, girls start to lag behind, and few women go on to pursue math in college.  What is going on?

There are lots of answers to this question, but I’ll explore a few over the next week.  Think of this as the back-to-school portion of the blog.

One factor that leads girls to drop math is that boys and girls seem to differ in their beliefs about math.  Psychologist Carol Dweck (author of the fantastic book Mindset) argues that people can have two different sets of beliefs (or mindsets) toward academic topics.  

Entity theorists treat academic topics as if they were talents.  You either have them or you don’t.  So, you could be good at math or bad at math.  If you’re good at math, then you’ll learn it.  If you’re bad at math, then at some point, you’ll reach a type of math that goes beyond your abilities.

Incremental theorists treat math as a skill to be acquired.  Stick with math, and eventually you’ll get even the really hard stuff.

Dweck and her colleagues find that people who treat math (or any other academic subject) as a skill will stick with it longer and try harder when it gets difficult than when they treat it as a talent. 

The way this affects boys and girls is that Dweck has collected evidence that boys and girls get different feedback about math from early on in their schooling.  Eventually, everyone hits a topic in math that they struggle with.  When talking to girls, teachers are likely to emphasize that math is hard.  Talking about math as being difficult makes it sound like something that either you can do or you can’t.

Boys tend to get feedback that treats math as a skill to be acquired.  When they hit a hard topic, they are told to try harder and they’ll eventually get it. 

Because girls are more likely than boys to get feedback that treats math as a talent, they are more likely to end up with an entity theory of math.  The truly hard stuff in math comes in middle school, when kids are first exposed to algebra and geometry and later trigonometry and calculus.  Eventually, one of these topics is going to derail everyone, at least for a while.  Because of their beliefs about math, then, girls are more likely than boys to conclude that they have reached the limits of their talent and give up.

That isn’t the whole story, of course, and I’ll pick up on this in my next post.