When do stereotypes work

Search within Show Summary Details Stereotypes at Work. Stereotypes at Work. Clair Judith A. Keywords stereotypes diversity inclusion fairness equity bias cognition. You do not currently have access to this article Login Please login to access the full content. Subscribe Access to the full content requires a subscription. Oxford University Press.

In fact, stereotypes are a bit like air: invisible but always present. We all have multiple identities and some of them are likely to be stigmatised. False beliefs about our abilities easily turn into a voice of self doubt in our heads that can be hard to ignore. And in the last couple of decades, scientists have started to discover that this can have damaging effects on our actual performance.

The phenomenon was first uncovered by American social psychologists in the s. In a seminal paper, they experimentally demonstrated how racial stereotypes can affect intellectual ability. However, when this description was excluded, no such effect was seen. Clearly these individuals had negative thoughts about their verbal ability that affected their performance.

Black participants also underperformed when racial stereotypes were activated much more subtly. Just asking participants to identify their race on a preceding demographic questionnaire was enough. Stereotype threat effects are very robust and affect all stigmatised groups. And which groups we use in social categorization can change over time and in different situations. You are more likely to categorize yourself as a member of your college or university when your rugby or football team has just won a really important game, or at your graduation ceremony, than you would on a normal evening out with your family.

In these cases, your membership as a university student is simply more salient and important than it is every day, and you are more likely to categorize yourself accordingly. During the presentation, each member of the discussion group made a suggestion about how to advertise a college play. The statements were controlled so that across all the research participants, the statements made by the men and the women were of equal length and quality.

Furthermore, one half of the participants were told that when the presentation was over, they would be asked to remember which person had made which suggestion, whereas the other half of the participants were told merely to observe the interaction without attending to anything in particular. After they had viewed all the statements made by the individuals in the discussion group, the research participants were given a memory test this was entirely unexpected for the participants who had not been given memory instructions.

The participants were shown the list of all the statements that had been made, along with the pictures of each of the discussion group members, and were asked to indicate who had made each of the statements. The research participants were not very good at this task, and yet when they made mistakes, these errors were very systematic.

As you can see in Table The participants evidently categorized the speakers by their gender, leading them to make more within-gender than across-gender confusions. Interestingly, and suggesting that categorization is occurring all the time, the instructions that the participants had been given made absolutely no difference.

There was just as much categorization for those who were not given any instructions as for those who were told to remember who said what. The conclusion is simple, if perhaps obvious: Social categorization is occurring all around us all the time. Indeed, social categorization occurs so quickly that people may have difficulty not thinking about others in terms of their group memberships see Figure The tendency to categorize others is often quite useful.

If you found yourself lost in a city, you might look for a police officer or a taxi driver to help you find your way. In this case, social categorization would probably be useful because a police officer or a taxi driver might be particularly likely to know the layout of the city streets. Of course, using social categories will only be informative to the extent that the stereotypes held by the individual about that category are accurate.

If police officers were actually not that knowledgeable about the city layout, then using this categorization heuristic would not be informative. The description of social categorization as a heuristic is also true in another sense: we sometimes categorize others not because it seems to provide more information about them but because we may not have the time or the motivation to do anything more thorough.

According to this approach, thinking about other people in terms of their social category memberships is a functional way of dealing with the world—things are complicated, and we reduce complexity by relying on our stereotypes. Although thinking about others in terms of their social category memberships has some potential benefits for the person who does the categorizing, categorizing others, rather than treating them as unique individuals with their own unique characteristics, has a wide variety of negative, and often very unfair, outcomes for those who are categorized.

One problem is that social categorization distorts our perceptions such that we tend to exaggerate the differences between people from different social groups while at the same time perceiving members of groups and particularly outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are. This overgeneralization makes it more likely that we will think about and treat all members of a group the same way. Tajfel and Wilkes performed a simple experiment that provided a picture of the potential outcomes of categorization.

As you can see in Figure In one of the experimental conditions, participants simply saw six lines, whereas in the other condition, the lines were systematically categorized into two groups—one comprising the three shorter lines and one comprising the three longer lines. Lines C and D were seen as the same length in the noncategorized condition, but line C was perceived as longer than line D when the lines were categorized into two groups.

From Tajfel Tajfel found that the lines were perceived differently when they were categorized, such that the differences between the groups and the similarities within the groups were emphasized. Specifically, he found that although lines C and D which are actually the same length were perceived as equal in length when the lines were not categorized, line D was perceived as being significantly longer than line C in the condition in which the lines were categorized.

Similar effects occur when we categorize other people. We tend to see people who belong to the same social group as more similar than they actually are, and we tend to judge people from different social groups as more different than they actually are.

Patricia Linville and Edward Jones gave research participants a list of trait terms and asked them to think about either members of their own group e. The results of these studies, as well as other studies like them, were clear: people perceive outgroups as more homogeneous than their ingroup. Just as White people used fewer piles of traits to describe Blacks than Whites, young people used fewer piles of traits to describe elderly people than they did young people, and students used fewer piles for members of other universities than they did for members of their own university.

This prevents us from really learning about the outgroup members as individuals, and as a result, we tend to be unaware of the differences among the group members. Once we begin to see the members of outgroups as more similar to each other than they actually are, it then becomes very easy to apply our stereotypes to the members of the groups without having to consider whether the characteristic is actually true of the particular individual.

If men think that women are all alike, then they may also think that they all have the same positive and negative characteristics e. And women may have similarly simplified beliefs about men e. The outcome is that the stereotypes become linked to the group itself in a set of mental representations Figure Our stereotypes and prejudices are learned through many different processes.

This multiplicity of causes is unfortunate because it makes stereotypes and prejudices even more likely to form and harder to change. And there is often good agreement about the stereotypes of social categories among the individuals within a given culture. In one study assessing stereotypes, Stephanie Madon and her colleagues Madon et al. The participants tended to agree about what traits were true of which groups, and this was true even for groups of which the respondents were likely to never have met a single member Arabs and Russians.

Even today, there is good agreement about the stereotypes of members of many social groups, including men and women and a variety of ethnic groups. Once they become established, stereotypes like any other cognitive representation tend to persevere.

We begin to respond to members of stereotyped categories as if we already knew what they were like. Yaacov Trope and Eric Thompson found that individuals addressed fewer questions to members of categories about which they had strong stereotypes as if they already knew what these people were like and that the questions they did ask were likely to confirm the stereotypes they already had.

In other cases, stereotypes are maintained because information that confirms our stereotypes is better remembered than information that disconfirms them. If we believe that women are bad drivers and we see a woman driving poorly, then we tend to remember it, but when we see a woman who drives particularly well, we tend to forget it. This illusory correlation is another example of the general principle of assimilation—we tend to perceive the world in ways that make it fit our existing beliefs more easily than we change our beliefs to fit the reality around us.

And stereotypes become difficult to change because they are so important to us—they become an integral and important part of our everyday lives in our culture.

Stereotypes are frequently expressed on TV, in movies, and in social media, and we learn a lot of our beliefs from these sources. In short, stereotypes and prejudice are powerful largely because they are important social norms that are part of our culture Guimond, Because stereotypes and prejudice often operate out of our awareness, and also because people are frequently unwilling to admit that they hold them, social psychologists have developed methods for assessing them indirectly.

One difficulty in measuring stereotypes and prejudice is that people may not tell the truth about their beliefs. Most people do not want to admit—either to themselves or to others—that they hold stereotypes or that they are prejudiced toward some social groups.

To get around this problem, social psychologists make use of a number of techniques that help them measure these beliefs more subtly and indirectly. Interestingly, people express more prejudice when they are in the bogus pipeline than they do when they are asked the same questions more directly, which suggests that we may frequently mask our negative beliefs in public.

Other indirect measures of prejudice are also frequently used in social psychological research; for instance, assessing nonverbal behaviors such as speech errors or physical closeness. People who sit farther away are assumed to be more prejudiced toward the members of the group. In these procedures, participants are asked to make a series of judgments about pictures or descriptions of social groups and then to answer questions as quickly as they can, but without making mistakes.

In the IAT, participants are asked to classify stimuli that they view on a computer screen into one of two categories by pressing one of two computer keys, one with their left hand and one with their right hand. For instance, in one version of the IAT, participants are shown pictures of men and women and are also shown words related to academic disciplines e.

The basic assumption is that if two concepts are associated or linked, they will be responded to more quickly if they are classified using the same, rather than different, keys. Implicit association procedures such as the IAT show that even participants who claim that they are not prejudiced do seem to hold cultural stereotypes about social groups. Even Black people themselves respond more quickly to positive words that are associated with White rather than Black faces on the IAT, suggesting that they have subtle racial prejudice toward their own racial group.

Because they hold these beliefs, it is possible—although not guaranteed—that they may use them when responding to other people, creating a subtle and unconscious type of discrimination. Do you hold implicit prejudices? Sport Management Review, 14 4 , Fiske, S. Stereotypes and prejudice create workplace discrimination.

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