Attributional ambiguity Attributive ambiguity refers to the uncertainty that members of stereotyped groups experience in interpreting the causes of others' behavior toward them. Stereotyped individuals who receive negative
feedback can
attribute it either to personal shortcomings, such as lack of ability or poor effort, or the evaluator's stereotypes and prejudice toward their social group. Alternatively, positive feedback can either be attributed to personal merit or discounted as a form of
sympathy or
pity.
Crocker et al. (1991) showed that when black participants were evaluated by a white person who was aware of their race, black subjects mistrusted the feedback, attributing negative feedback to the evaluator's stereotypes and positive feedback to the evaluator's desire to appear unbiased. When the black participants' race was unknown to the evaluator, they were more accepting of the feedback. Attributional ambiguity has been shown to affect a person's
self-esteem. When they receive positive evaluations, stereotyped individuals are uncertain of whether they really deserved their success, and consequently, they find it difficult to take credit for their achievements. In the case of negative feedback, ambiguity has been shown to have a protective effect on self-esteem, as it allows people to assign blame to external causes. Some studies, however, have found that this effect only holds when stereotyped individuals can be absolutely certain that their negative outcomes are due to the evaluators' prejudice. If any room for uncertainty remains, stereotyped individuals tend to blame themselves. Stereotype threat occurs when people are aware of a negative stereotype about their social group and experience anxiety or concern that they might confirm the stereotype. Stereotype threat has been shown to undermine performance in a variety of domains.
Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson conducted the first experiments showing that stereotype threat can depress intellectual performance on
standardized tests. In one study, they found that black college students performed worse than white students on a verbal test when the task was framed as a measure of intelligence. When it was not presented in that manner, the performance gap narrowed. Subsequent experiments showed that framing the test as diagnostic of intellectual ability made black students more aware of negative stereotypes about their group, which in turn impaired their performance. Stereotype threat effects have been demonstrated for an array of social groups in many different arenas, including not only academics but also sports,
chess and business. Some researchers have suggested that stereotype threat should not be interpreted as a factor in real-life performance gaps, and have raised the possibility of
publication bias. Other critics have focused on correcting what they claim are misconceptions of early studies showing a large effect. However,
meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.
Self-fulfilling prophecy Stereotypes lead people to expect certain actions from members of social groups. These stereotype-based expectations may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, in which one's inaccurate expectations about a person's behavior, through social interaction, prompt that person to act in stereotype-consistent ways, thus confirming one's erroneous expectations and validating the stereotype. Word,
Zanna, and Cooper (1974) demonstrated the effects of stereotypes in the context of a
job interview. White participants interviewed black and white subjects who, prior to the experiments, had been trained to act in a standardized manner. Analysis of the videotaped interviews showed that black job applicants were treated differently: They received shorter amounts of interview time and less eye contact; interviewers made more speech errors (e.g.,
stutters, sentence incompletions, incoherent sounds) and physically distanced themselves from black applicants. In a second experiment, trained interviewers were instructed to treat applicants, all of whom were white, like the whites or blacks had been treated in the first experiment. As a result, applicants treated like the blacks of the first experiment behaved in a more nervous manner and received more negative performance ratings than interviewees receiving the treatment previously afforded to whites. A 1977 study by Snyder, Tanke, and
Berscheid found a similar pattern in social interactions between men and women. Male
undergraduate students were asked to talk to female undergraduates, whom they believed to be
physically attractive or unattractive, on the phone. The conversations were taped, and analysis showed that men who thought that they were talking to an attractive woman communicated in a more positive and friendlier manner than men who believed that they were talking to unattractive women. This altered the women's behavior: Female subjects who, unknowingly to them, were perceived to be physically attractive behaved in a friendly, likeable, and sociable manner in comparison with subjects who were regarded as unattractive. A 2005 study by J. Thomas Kellow and Brett D. Jones looked at the effects of self-fulfilling prophecy on African American and Caucasian high school freshman students. Both white and black students were informed that their test performance would be predictive of their performance on a statewide, high-stakes
standardized test. They were also told that historically, white students had outperformed black students on the test. This knowledge created a self-fulfilling prophecy in both the white and black students, where the white students scored statistically significantly higher than the African American students on the test. The
stereotype threat of underperforming on standardized tests affected the African American students in this study. In
accountancy, there is a popular stereotype which represents members of the profession as being humorless, introspective
beancounters.
Discrimination and prejudice Because stereotypes simplify and justify social reality, they have potentially powerful effects on how people perceive and treat one another. As a result, stereotypes can lead to discrimination in labor markets and other domains. For example, Tilcsik (2011) has found that employers who seek job applicants with stereotypically male
heterosexual traits are particularly likely to engage in discrimination against gay men, suggesting that discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation is partly rooted in specific stereotypes and that these stereotypes loom large in many labor markets. Similarly, experiments suggest that gender stereotypes play an important role in judgments that affect
hiring decisions. Stereotypes can cause
racist prejudice. For example, scientists and activists have warned that the use of the stereotype "Nigerian Prince" for referring to
Advance-fee scammers is racist, i.e., "reducing
Nigeria to a nation of scammers and fraudulent princes, as some people still do online, is a stereotype that needs to be called out".
Self-stereotyping Stereotypes can affect self-evaluations and lead to self-stereotyping. For instance, Correll (2001, 2004) found that specific stereotypes (e.g., the stereotype that women have lower mathematical ability) affect women's and men's evaluations of their abilities (e.g., in math and science), such that men assess their own task ability higher than women performing at the same level. Similarly, a study by Sinclair et al. (2006) has shown that Asian American women rated their math ability more favorably when their ethnicity and the relevant stereotype that Asian Americans excel in math were made salient. In contrast, they rated their math ability less favorably when their gender and the corresponding stereotype of women's inferior math skills were made salient. Sinclair et al. found, however, that the effect of stereotypes on self-evaluations is
mediated by the degree to which close people in someone's life endorse these stereotypes. People's self-stereotyping can increase or decrease depending on whether close others view them in a stereotype-consistent or inconsistent manner. Stereotyping can also play a central role in depression when people have negative self-stereotypes about themselves. According to
Cox,
Abramson,
Devine, and Hollon (2012).,
Substitute for observations Stereotypes are traditional and familiar symbol clusters, expressing a more or less complex idea in a convenient way. They are often simplistic pronouncements about gender, racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and they can become a source of misinformation and delusion. For example, in a school, when students are confronted with the task of writing a theme, they think in terms of literary associations, often using stereotypes picked up from books, films, and magazines that they have read or viewed. The danger in stereotyping lies not in its existence but in the fact that it can become a substitute for observation and a misinterpretation of a
cultural identity. Promoting
information literacy is a pedagogical approach that can effectively combat the entrenchment of stereotypes. The necessity for using information literacy to separate multicultural "fact from fiction" is well illustrated with examples from literature and media. ==Etymology==