Positive Stereotypes, Negative Outcomes: Reminders of the Positive Components of Complementary Gender Stereotypes Impair Perform
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1 British Journal of Social Psychology (2018) © 2018 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com Positive stereotypes, negative outcomes: Reminders of the positive components of complementary gender stereotypes impair performance in counter-stereotypical tasks Rotem Kahalon1* , Nurit Shnabel1 and Julia C. Becker2 1Tel-Aviv University, Israel 2Osnabruck University, Germany Gender stereotypes are complementary: Women are perceived to be communal but not agentic, whereas men are perceived to be agentic but not communal. The present research tested whether exposure to reminders of the positive components of these gender stereotypes can lead to stereotype threat and subsequent performance deficits on the complementary dimension. Study 1 (N = 116 female participants) revealed that compared to a control/no-stereotype condition, exposure to reminders of the stereotype about women’s communality (but not to reminders of the stereotype about women’s beauty) impaired women’s math performance. In Study 2 (N = 86 male participants), reminders of the stereotype about men’s agency (vs. a control/no- stereotype condition) impaired men’s performance in a test of socio-emotional abilities. Consistent with previous research on stereotype threat, in both studies the effect was evident among participants with high domain identification. These findings extend our understanding of the potentially adverse implications of seemingly positive gender stereotypes. While the message that negative stereotypes are anti-egalitarian and socially unacceptable is reinforced in contemporary Western society, positive stereotypes are prevalent and considered socially acceptable (Czopp, Kay, & Cheryan, 2015). The present research tested whether, despite their subjectively positive tone, positive gender stereotypes might lead to negative outcomes. In particular, we examined whether highlighting the positive stereotypes about women’s communality and men’s agency can lead to stereotype threat effects. Stereotype threat denotes group members’ concern about confirming negative stereotypes regarding their ingroup’s inferior ability (Steele, 1997). Stereotype threat is typically induced by exposure to reminders of these negative stereotypes (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002). Ironically, the fear of stereotype confirmation among members of stigmatized groups causes stress (Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, & Steele, 2001) which affects precisely the cognitive systems and behavioural strategies required for optimal performance (Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008) – resulting in systematic performance deficits (Steele et al., 2002). *Correspondence should be addressed to Rotem Kahalon, The School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel (email: [email protected]). DOI:10.1111/bjso.12240 2 Rotem Kahalon et al. In the case of gender stereotypes, accumulating evidence shows that unless the negative stereotype about their gender is explicitly refuted (Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999), taking math examinations can be a psychologically threatening experience for female students, resulting in impaired math performance (see Walton & Spencer, 2009, for a meta-analysis). Similar effects were obtained when examining women’s performance in other stigmatized domains, such as driving (Yeung & von Hippel, 2008). Interestingly, even when neutral tasks in non-stigmatized domains (e.g., non-verbal reasoning) were described as producing gender differences which favoured men, women’s subsequent performance on these tasks was impaired (Pavlova, Weber, Simoes, & Sokolov, 2014). These findings show that, besides the negative stereotypes about women’s inferior ability in particular domains (such as science, technology, engineering, and math; Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002), there is also a broader negative stereotype about women’s general incompetence (Glick & Fiske, 2001), which may lead to stereotype threat effects. With regard to stereotype threat among men, research revealed that men’s performance in a social sensitivity test was impaired when participants were told that the test assessed social sensitivity – a domain in which men are stereotypically perceived to have inferior ability than women (Briton & Hall, 1995) – yet improved when participants were told that the test measured information processing (Koenig & Eagly, 2005). In a similar vein, male participants who were reminded that men are not as good as women in processing affective information made more errors in classifying affective (but not non-affective) words in a lexical decision task than did men who were not reminded of this negative stereotype (Leyens, Desert, Croizet, & Darcis, 2000). Taken together, the above studies demonstrate that negative gender stereotypes operate as self-fulfilling prophecies, undermining women’s and men’s performance in counter-stereotypical tasks. According to the Integrated Process Model of Stereotype Threat (Schmader et al., 2008), the detrimental consequences of stereotype threat on performance should be particularly pronounced in the three following conditions. The first is when one’s group membership becomes salient. To illustrate, when women took a difficult math test while having a solo status (i.e., being the only woman present in the room), their performance was impaired as compared to women who took the same test in the presence of other women (Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000). The second type of circumstances is when ego involvement is high. This leads to the ironic result that those who care most about doing well in the stigmatized domain are more vulnerable to stereotype threat. For example, women with high math identification (who perceive math as internally and externally rewarding; Smith & White, 2001) were found to suffer the most from the effects of stereotype threat both psychologically (e.g., bifurcation of their feminine identity; Pronin, Steele, & Ross, 2004) and in terms of their math performance (Good, Aronson, & Harder, 2008; Keller, 2007). The third type of circumstances that increase susceptibility to stereotype threat is when the stereotype’s salience is high. For example, describing a given math test as producing gender differences in favour of men substantially worsened female participants’ test performance (Spencer et al., 1999). Previous research has found that making negative gender stereotypes (e.g., about women’s math incompetence, Spencer et al., 1999; or men’s socio-emotional insensi- tivity, Koenig & Eagly, 2005) salient has a detrimental impact on women’s and men’s performance in the stereotyped domain. The goal of this study was to test the novel hypothesis that heightened salience of positive gender stereotypes can also lead to impaired performance among women and men in tasks in which their gender is Positive stereotypes, negative outcomes 3 stereotypically perceived to have inferior ability. This hypothesis is based on previous research which has found that stereotypes about groups are often compensatory (Kervyn, Yzerbyt, Judd, & Nunes, 2009). The complementary nature of stereotypes Accumulating converging evidence suggests that there are two fundamental content dimensions along which social targets (i.e., individuals and groups) are perceived and judged (Abele & Wojciszke, 2013). One dimension represents traits such as good nature, morality, trustworthiness, nurturance, and sociability, whereas the other dimension represents traits such as intelligence, capableness, status, confidence, ambition, dominance, and power (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007). Different theories use different labels to denote these dimensions. For example, Resources Theory (Foa & Foa, 1980) uses the terms ‘status’ and ‘love’, the Big Two theory (Abele & Wojciszke, 2013) uses the terms ‘agency’ and ‘communion’, and the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) uses the terms ‘competence’ and ‘warmth’ when referring to these different dimensions. Despite these differences, it has been argued that these labels describe ‘what boil down to virtually the same two dimensions’ (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008, p. 65; see also Kervyn, Yzerbyt, & Judd, 2010). Most relevant to the purposes of the present research is the Stereotype Content Model. According to this model, stereotypes fall into four quadrants reflecting different combinations of warmth and competence. For example, people often stereotypically perceive their own ingroup to be high on both these dimensions, whereas other groups, such as drug addicts and homeless people, are perceived to be low on both competence and warmth (Fiske et al., 2002). The model further argues that the content of group stereotypes is often mixed, such that groups that are stereotypically perceived to be competent are also perceived to be cold and immoral, whereas groups that are stereotypically perceived to be high on warmth are also perceived to be incompetent and dependent. Hence, opposite to the judgement of other individuals, for whom the two dimensions correlate positively (resulting in a ‘halo effect’; Rosenberg, Nelson, & Vivekananthan, 1968), when judging other groups ‘warmth and competence often correlate negatively’ (Fiske et al., 2007, p. 79) – resulting in complementary stereotypes. Gender stereotypes, which portray men as agentic and women as communal (e.g., Eagly & Wood, 1999; see Rudman & Glick, 2008, for a review), provide a striking example of such complementarity. With the exception of some subgroups (e.g., feminists, or gay men; Fiske et al., 2002), men are stereotypically