Page 162 - The Social Animal

144 The Social Animal

terms (as opposed to others), we base our expectations about future
interactions on the accompanying stereotypes. Suppose I go into a
cafe that a friend has categorized as a “bar” as opposed to a “fine din-
ing establishment.” I will probably think of the place in different
terms and act in a different way—and, if the categorization is erro-
neous, my behavior might be foolish and might even get me into se-
rious trouble.
An interesting study by John Darley and Paget Gross demon-
45
strates the power of expectations to influence the way we think and
make judgments about people. In their experiment, they told four
different stories about “Hannah”—a fourth-grade schoolgirl. After
hearing one of the four stories, college students were asked to esti-
mate Hannah’s academic ability. In the first two stories, subjects
merely saw a videotape of Hannah playing in either a high-class
neighborhood or a poor, run-down neighborhood.This was designed
to create stereotypic expectations about Hannah’s background. In the
second two stories, subjects saw one of these videotapes of Hannah
playing and, in addition, viewed a film of Hannah completing 25
achievement test problems. Hannah’s performance on these tests was
ambiguous; she sometimes answered tough questions and missed
easy ones.
Darley and Gross found that when subjects saw just one of the
two videotapes of Hannah playing in the park, they rated her ability
as average; Hannah was just like everyone else in her class. In other
words, subjects who saw these videos did not apply their stereotypes
about rich kids and poor kids to their judgments of her ability. How-
ever, when subjects also watched the film of Hannah solving achieve-
ment test problems, the effects of the stereotypes became apparent:
Subjects rated Hannah as having less ability when she came from the
low as opposed to the high socioeconomic background; they also in-
terpreted her ambiguous performance as consistent with their judg-
ments—evaluating the test as easier and estimating that Hannah
solved fewer problems when she came from a poor background. Two
lessons can be learned about stereotypes from this experiment. First,
most people seem to have some understanding of stereotypes; they
seem reluctant to apply them in the absence of solid data. Second,
despite this understanding, our stereotypes still influence our percep-
tions and judgments when there is additional ambiguous informa-
tion that lends a false sense of rationality to the judgment.