7.5:
Stereotype Threat and Self-fulfilling Prophecies
When someone learns of a negative stereotype affecting a group to which they belong—like being a woman—they can feel threatened and act in a way they normally wouldn’t, paradoxically supporting a feedback loop.
For example, at breakfast a father notes his daughter is studying for a calculus exam. He tells her not to worry if she fails, reminding her of the stereotype that men are naturally better mathematicians than women.
Upon arriving at class, the girl fears that if she receives a bad grade, she’ll be viewed by her teacher and peers under the “women are bad at math” stereotype. This phenomenon is called stereotype threat—a risk that occurs when an individual worries their actions will provide evidence supporting a negative assumption about a particular social group.
She begins the test, and is initially determined to excel and disprove her father. However, as time passes, she feels more anxious and starts to believe that she can’t solve the problems given her sex.
Most of her energy is spent trying to reassure herself, which impairs her memory, making it difficult to concentrate on the equations. She becomes dejected, and isn’t motivated to complete the last questions.
This results in a self-fulfilling prophecy—an arbitrary belief or expectation about a future event that leads to behavioral changes which then fulfill the inaccurate projection.
In other words, the student fails—not because she’s less intelligent than her male counterparts, but because her preoccupation with a misleading stereotype harmed her score.
Thus, feeling threatened by a negative label can lead to observable outcomes that reinforce the stereotype. In this case, when the girl’s father asks to see her grade—which he predicted would be poor—he has direct evidence of the “women are bad at math” stereotype.
Fortunately, these effects can be lessened, for example by parents—like the girl’s mother—denying the stereotype, and emphasizing that math exams haven’t shown gender-based differences.
7.5:
Stereotype Threat and Self-fulfilling Prophecies
When we hold a stereotype about a person, we have expectations that he or she will fulfill that stereotype. A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation held by a person that alters his or her behavior in a way that tends to make it true. When we hold stereotypes about a person, we tend to treat the person according to our expectations. This treatment can influence the person to act according to our stereotypic expectations, thus confirming our stereotypic beliefs. Research by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) found that disadvantaged students whose teachers expected them to perform well had higher grades than disadvantaged students whose teachers expected them to do poorly.
Consider this example of cause and effect in a self-fulfilling prophecy: If an employer expects an openly gay male job applicant to be incompetent, the potential employer might treat the applicant negatively during the interview by engaging in less conversation, making little eye contact, and generally behaving coldly toward the applicant (Hebl, Foster, Mannix, & Dovidio, 2002). In turn, the job applicant will perceive that the potential employer dislikes him, and he will respond by giving shorter responses to interview questions, making less eye contact, and generally disengaging from the interview. After the interview, the employer will reflect on the applicant’s behavior, which seemed cold and distant, and the employer will conclude, based on the applicant’s poor performance during the interview, that the applicant was in fact incompetent. Thus, the employer’s stereotype—gay men are incompetent and do not make good employees—is reinforced. Do you think this job applicant is likely to be hired? Treating individuals according to stereotypic beliefs can lead to prejudice and discrimination.
Another dynamic that can reinforce stereotypes is confirmation bias. When interacting with the target of our prejudice, we tend to pay attention to information that is consistent with our stereotypic expectations and ignore information that is inconsistent with our expectations. In this process, known as confirmation bias, we seek out information that supports our stereotypes and ignore information that is inconsistent with our stereotypes (Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972). In the job interview example, the employer may not have noticed that the job applicant was friendly and engaging, and that he provided competent responses to the interview questions in the beginning of the interview. Instead, the employer focused on the job applicant’s performance in the later part of the interview, after the applicant changed his demeanor and behavior to match the interviewer’s negative treatment.
Have you ever fallen prey to the self-fulfilling prophecy or confirmation bias, either as the source or target of such bias? How might we stop the cycle of the self-fulfilling prophecy? Social class stereotypes of individuals tend to arise when information about the individual is ambiguous. If information is unambiguous, stereotypes do not tend to arise (Baron et al., 1995).
This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.