Evaluating the actions of others

We make decisions about the characteristics of other people from their actions.  We decide that someone is aggressive if they yell, make rude comments, and try to push people around.  Often, though, a specific behavior is ambiguous.  It is not entirely clear what it signals.  For example, if someone goes skydiving, he might be adventurous or he might be reckless.  How do you decide?

One factor that influences the way you evaluate other people is the concepts you are already thinking about.  That is, if you are already thinking about danger, then that active concept can affect your interpretation of someone’s behavior.  The way this works is a bit complicated, though, as described in a paper in the July, 2010 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Marlone Henderson and Cheryl Wakslak. 

They looked at the effects of active concepts and distance on evaluation of people’s behavior.  Quite a bit of work (some of which I have described in previous entries) suggests that when people think about things that are near to them in space or time, they tend to think about them much more specifically than when they think about things that are far away from them in space or time.  So, if you find out that someone is skydiving in a town nearby, you are more prone to think about the specific aspects of strapping on a parachute and jumping out of a plane than if they are going to skydive in a city far away.  When they are far away, you treat the action abstractly.

Henderson and Wakslak suggested that the concepts you are thinking about are much more likely to have an effect on your evaluation of someone’s actions when you are thinking about their actions specifically than when you are thinking about them only generally. 

In one study, they got people to think about recklessness (which is a negative trait) or adventurousness (which is a positive trait) by having them do a word search puzzle that had lots of words that related to either to being reckless (like dangerous and cautious) or to being adventurous (like exciting and bravery).  After doing the word search people evaluated a person shown in a picture skydiving.  That person was described as either skydiving in a nearby town or across the country. 

When the person was skydiving nearby, then people had a more positive evaluation of them when they were thinking about adventurousness than when they were thinking about recklessness.  Their active concepts had no reliable influence on their evaluations when they person was skydiving far away.   So, active concepts only affect the interpretation of actions when you are thinking about someone specifically. 

So what effects your evaluation of someone when they are far away?  Henderson and Wakslak also did a study in which they had people give their general attitude toward another behavior that could be thought of as reckless or adventurous (riding a motorbike).  They found that this general attitude did not affect people’s evaluation of someone motorbiking nearby, but it did have a reliable effect on their evaluation of someone motorbiking far away.  So, when someone is mentally distant from you, then you tend to use your general attitudes to evaluate them.

This research is also related to work on stereotypes.  Stereotypes are a general attitude about a group.  When someone is psychologically distant from you, then you often use your stereotypes to evaluate them.  However, when someone is psychologically close to you, then you tend to evaluate them based on their specific actions.  On the positive side, that means that if you hold a negative stereotype about a group, that will not affect your evaluation of people close to you.  On the negative side, the positive characteristics of people who are close to you and are also part of a stereotyped group will not make you think better of the group in general. 

For example, there is a widespread stereotype that women are worse at math than men.  You might know a lot of women who are quite good at math.  Because those women are psychologically close to you, however, their math ability may not affect your general impression that women are bad at math.  Ultimately, combating stereotypes requires thinking generally about a group and recognizing that there is no basis for a general attitude that you hold.    

Why girls drop math III: Stereotype threat

In the previous two posts, I talked about two factors that lead girls to drop math:  their belief that math is a talent not a skill, and their desire to pursue careers that have lots of social interaction.  I mentioned data from Jacquelynne Eccles that looked at reasons why girls drop math.  Another factor that strongly affects girls is math anxiety.  The more math anxious girls get, the less likely they are to continue taking math.

One important part of math anxiety is a vicious circle.  Girls hear from parents, friends, and sometimes teachers that girls in general don’t do well in math.  So, there is a stereotype out there in the culture that girls are bad at math.  That stereotype then leads to anxiety when girls are confronted with tests that will demonstrate their math ability.  That anxiety causes girls to do worse on math tests than they would if they were not aware of the stereotype.  Their poor performance on tests convinces them that they are bad at math, and the stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This pattern was first demonstrated by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, who called it stereotype threat.  They found that when people are in a situation in which they might confirm a negative stereotype about a group to which they belong (based on gender, race, or ethnicity, for example) they perform worse in that evaluation than they do when they are not aware of the stereotype.  This finding has been obtained in many settings since it was first reported in 1995.

What can be done?

Research from our lab by  Lisa Grimm, Todd Maddox, Grant Baldwin and I (published in a 2009 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) had college men and women take a hard math test (using questions from the GRE exam that is used for entrance to graduate school).  In one condition, people got points for each question they answered, but they got more points for correct answers than for incorrect answers.  In this case, we observed the typical stereotype threat effect.  The women got about 10% more of the questions wrong than the men did. 

In a second condition, though, people started off with a number of points, and they lost points for each question they answered.  They lost fewer points for correct answers than for incorrect answers, and so they were trying to minimize the number of points that they lost.  In this case, the women actually performed somewhat better than the men.  In fact, the women who were trying to minimize the number of points they lost did just as well as the men who were trying to maximize the number of points they gained.  That is, the stereotype threat effect disappeared.

Why?

We suggested that having a negative stereotype puts you in a defensive motivational mode.  You are prepared for negative outcomes in the environment.  If the environment actually has positive outcomes in it (like gaining points), then you act cautiously, and your performance in testing situation suffers.  If you are prepared for negative outcomes and the environment actually has negative outcomes in it (like you are losing points), then you are less cautious, because the environment is as you expect it to be.

There is still a long way to go to figure out how to use results like this to demonstrate to girls that they do not need to fear math.  But now, at least, we know that the effects that negative stereotypes on girls can be counteracted.  Hillary Clinton bashed the glass ceiling in politics.  Hopefully the ongoing research in Psychology will bash the glass ceiling in math and science as well.

Why girls drop math II: Who wants to be alone?

We know that girls are less likely to go into math and “hard science” careers than boys.  There are lots of reactions people have to this news.  Some, like Lawrence Summers (who became the former president of Harvard in large part because this remark in 2005) suggested that women may not have the same innate abilities in math as men.  Others suggest that the school system is somehow failing girls in school.  Still others are concerned about social pressure that girls might feel to shy away from looking smart when there are boys around.

These last two ideas have some traction in popular and political culture.  There has been movement to create all-girls’ schools to give girls an environment to thrive.  Indeed, my home town of Austin Texas has a public all-girls school (named after former Texas governor Ann Richards).  I think there is much to like about the idea about an all-girls school for middle-schoolers.  One question we should ask, though, is whether the mass exodus of girls from math (and to some degree hard sciences) is being caused by a failure of the educational system.

Psychologist Jacquelynne Eccles has studied this question extensively.  One of her more surprising findings is that girls tend to attach less value to math than boys.  There are a few sources of the difference in value that boys and girls place on math.

For one, parents may give their children beliefs about how important math ought to be to them.  Eccles’ evidence suggests that girls are less likely to value math and to take advanced math courses when their parents do not believe that math is as important for girls as it is for boys.  So, girls are internalizing the beliefs of their parents.

For another, there is a pervasive stereotype that mathematicians lead a lonely existence.  When we think about mathematicians, we imagine the lone genius hunched over a desk writing incomprehensible formulas that have lots of Greek letters in them.  On occasion, these lonely figures may emerge from their cramped messy dens to shout Eureka and post the solution to a problem that five people in the world care about on a blackboard in a university hallway. 

Girls find this prospect much less appealing than boys.  Girls are much more likely than boys to state that want a career that has lots of social interaction as a part of it.  When girls start making decisions about the classes they are going to take, they are much more likely to gravitate toward sciences like biology and psychology than toward math, chemistry or physics.  Biology usually leads to pre-medical study in college, and the medical professions are seen as very social.  Likewise, psychology, social work, and other helping professions are seen as social. 

This research suggests that one big reason why girls are less likely to stick with math than boys is a difference in life goals. 

The big question, then, is whether the stereotype about math and the hard sciences is true.  In fact, much of modern science is highly collaborative.  Scientists must find ways to work together to solve difficult problems.  The myth of the lone scientist is just that—a myth.  And that means that science has a public relations job to do.  If we want more girls to go into math and science professions, we are going to need to do more work letting girls know what those careers will really involve. 

I do want to be clear about one thing, though.  There are lots of reasons to think that some girls will be more likely to succeed in a school environment without boys.  So, I am not suggesting that we close all-girl schools.  I am suggesting that the reason to open such schools is not because our current schools are failing to give a good math and science education to girls.  However, we might use venues like all-girl schools to start the process of teaching girls more about what careers are possible with a good math and science education.