Page 335 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 317

how will they interpret evidence of a woman’s doing well on a diffi-
cult task? In 1996, Janet Swim and Lawrence Sanna carefully ana-
31
lyzed more than 50 experiments and found remarkably consistent
gender effects: If a man was successful on a given task, observers
tended to attribute his success to ability; if a woman was successful
on that same task, observers tended to attribute her success to hard
work. If a man failed on a given task, observers tended to attribute
his failure either to bad luck or to lower effort; if a woman failed, ob-
servers felt the task was simply too hard for her ability level—she
didn’t “have what it takes.” This prejudice is often subtly transmitted
even to young children. In one study, Janis Jacobs and Jacquelynne
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Eccles explored the influence of mothers’ gender stereotypic beliefs
on the way these same mothers perceived the abilities of their 11-
and 12-year-old sons and daughters. Jacobs and Eccles then looked
further to see what impact this might have on the children’s percep-
tions of their own abilities. Those mothers who held the strongest
stereotypic gender beliefs also believed that their own daughters had
relatively low math ability and that their sons had relatively high
math ability. Those mothers who did not hold generally stereotypic
beliefs did not see their daughters as less able in math than their sons.
These beliefs, in turn, had an impact on the beliefs of their children.
The daughters of women with strong gender stereotypes believed
that they did not have much math ability. The daughters of women
who did not hold strong gender stereotypes showed no such self-
defeating belief.
This phenomenon of stereotyping and attribution has some in-
teresting ramifications. Suppose a male tennis player loses the first set
in a best-of-three-sets match by the score of 6–2. What does he con-
clude? Probably that he didn’t try hard enough or that he was un-
lucky—after all, his opponent did have that incredible string of lucky
shots. Now, suppose a female tennis player loses the first set. What
does she conclude? She might think she is not as skilled a player as
her opponent—after all, she did lose 6–2. Here comes the interesting
part: The attributions players make about their failure in the first set
may, in part, determine their success in subsequent sets. That is, men
may try harder to come from behind and win the next two sets and
the match. However, women may give up, thus losing the second set
and the match. This is, in fact, what seems to happen. In a systematic
investigation of this phenomenon, 33 the outcomes of 19,300 tennis
matches were examined. In those matches where a player lost the first