Stereotypes, Math Tests…and Ice Cream!

Let’s be honest. How many of us here, at one point or another, had made a judgement about a person based on superficial characterisitcs, like gender or ethnicity? Who would you most likely approach for help with a crying baby? An Aunt or an Uncle? Who would you ask for help when it comes to mathematics? And if someone driving in front of you forgets to signal and suddenly switches lanes, what would your guess be? Who was driving?

You can’t deny it, I’m sure most of you reading this post will have some automatic idea of who would most likely be doing what. And I’m sure most, if not all, are familiar with the word Stereotype.

Although it has a mildly negative connotation, stereotypes aren’t all that bad. Stereotypes are actually cognitive schemas, or frameworks, that help us make decisions and judgements when we are in a novel situation. Of course, we don’t grow up knowing every single thing in the world, and when we do encounter something new, our first instinct is to remember everything about that first encounter, and then use that knowledge as a guide to dealing with other similar things in the future. That way, we don’t have to act as if we are encountering everything as new all the time. We have these prototypes- a set of expected behaviour that lightens up our cognitive load, allowing us to focus on other things in our environment.

And just because you have knowledge of stereotypes, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Rest assured that there is a difference between knowing them, and actually letting these schemas guide your actions.

The trouble with these cognitive short cuts though, is that most of the time, once we put something in our mental framework, we tend to stick with it, no matter what. We’d rather pay attention to consistent information, rather than having to assimilate new knowledge and modify our models. This is when stereotypes become harmful. When we generalize too much, we may not know it, but it affects the way we act and behave around others.

And if you belong to a group that is unfortunately negatively stereotyped, believe it or not, it can actually affect the way you perform in some tasks.

This is known as stereotype threat, a concept by Steele and Aronson (1995). Imagine for example, that you belong in a group that is known to take really bad pictures. When you are put in a situation where they make your group identity really salient, then suddenly ask you to take photos, you are more likely to take photos that are worse off, had you not been reminded what group you belonged in.

Of course we would try as much as possible to defy those stereotypes, and these efforts usually lead us to deplete our cognitive resources. In other words, we become too tired from trying to prove ourselves, that the prior effects of the stereotype spill over into a supposedly non-stereotypical situation.

A very interesting experiment on the spill-over effects of stereotype is from Michael Inzlicht and Sonia K. Kang’s study. They used an existing stereotype and had women volunteers attempt a very hard mathematics test. When told that men usually do better in these kinds of tests (and thus making the stereotype salient), women performed worse as expected.

In addition to that, when the researchers had the volunteers participate in a taste-test where in they simply had to rate their ice-cream preferences, women who faced stereotype threat were found to eat more of the sample ice cream flavors than the women who weren’t in the stereotype threat condition (and that’s three bowls of ice cream!). Here we see that because the women in the stereotype threat condition expended all their energy trying to do better in the mathematics test, they had no cognitive resources left to control their eating behavior.

Which strangely enough, reminds me of another stereotypical image of women…ever watched a scene where in a heartbroken girl eats a tub of ice cream on her sofa? Hmmm…thoughts? 🙂

because ice cream makes everything better!