Wrestling with stereotypes
Everyone knows that men are aggressive and women are caring.
That sentence you just read is an example of stereotyping. Every one of us trades in stereotypes every day, whether we like it or not. It’s how we sort an impossibly complex world into manageable categories: man, woman, Italian, Chinese, lawyer, engineer. Stereotypes can be unfair and hurtful to many people, but the power of stereotyping is undeniable. It’s a fact of the human psyche.
But what exactly is going on in the mind when we pigeonhole someone? Is the process instantaneous and automatic, or do we deliberate over traits and categories before making judgments? A clever new study of the actual internal process of stereotyping—from basic perception to judgment—offers some provocative findings.
Tufts University psychologists Jonathan Freeman and Nalini Ambady used many common stereotypes like the gender caricature above to explore a new theory about the cognitive mechanics underlying stereotyping. Here’s the basic idea: When we catch sight of a stranger’s face, we extract information: It could be “he’s male” or “she’s female” but, since most people in the real world are a mix of traits, our perception is usually more tentative: “He’s probably male.” This tentative perception in turn triggers a tentative stereotype: He’s likely to be aggressive. In other words, our perceptions and categories are in dynamic flux, which only gradually stabilizes into a final interpretation of the stranger.
Okay, so remember the androgynous Pat from Saturday Night Live? It was impossible to tell from looking whether Pat was a man or woman, and the running joke was that celebrity guest hosts would go to all lengths to figure out Pat’s true gender. They always failed, but their frustrated attempts were funny.
What was going on in their brains as they tried to make sense of Pat? That basically is the question that Freeman and Ambady asked in the lab. They presented volunteers with photos of men and women that had been morphed into mixes of male and female traits, some more ambiguous than others. As the volunteers glanced at each photo, they moved a computer mouse as quickly as possible toward one of two adjectives—“aggressive” or “caring”—in opposite corners of the screen. The psychologists tracked the computer mouse movements, to see how quickly and directly they categorized each face by stereotypical traits.
The results were fascinating. An instantaneous stereotype would be a straight line from the starting point to one of the two adjectives—male, no question, or female. Nobody did that. Instead the movements appear as curves, suggesting some hesitation and deliberation in each judgment. But here’s the really interesting part, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: The more ambiguous the face was, the more curved the path to judgment. That is, for example, a male face with female traits would ultimately be judged as male and therefore aggressive, but not before the volunteer’s hand was tugged a bit toward the alternative stereotype of caring female.
What this indicates, the psychologists say, is that gender ambiguity triggers a cognitive “competition” between partial, opposing categories—a “fuzzy mélange” of both male and female categories—that continues until the mind settles on one or the other. And this is true for faces much less ambiguous than Pat’s.
This is of more than academic interest, Freeman and Ambady believe. Even though this partial and tentative alternative is active only for an instant, simply activating it in the mind is likely to have lasting effects on social judgments and behavior long after the initial glimpse of a stranger’s face.
For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.
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