Page 336 - The Social Animal

318 The Social Animal

set, men were more likely than women to come back and win the sec-
ond and third sets. Women were more likely to lose a match in
straight sets. This phenomenon occurs even among professional ten-
nis players, who surely regard themselves as talented and able.
Marlene Turner and Anthony Pratkanis carried the notion of
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debilitating self-attributions a step further by demonstrating that
negative attributions generated by the manner in which women are
selected for a job can impede their actual performance on the job.
Specifically, Turner and Pratkanis were interested in investigating
some possible unfortunate side effects of affirmative action pro-
grams. Affirmative action programs have been generally beneficial,
inasmuch as they have created employment opportunities for tal-
ented women who had been previously overlooked when applying
for high-level jobs. Unfortunately, there can be a downside, as well:
Some of these programs unintentionally stigmatized talented women
by creating the illusion that they were selected primarily because of
their gender rather than their talent. What effect does this have on
the women involved? In a well-controlled experiment, Turner and
Pratkanis led some women to believe that they were selected for a job
because they needed to hire more women, while others were given a
difficult test and were then told they were selected for that job on the
basis of their high performance on the test. Those women who were
told they were selected because of their sex (not their merit) later
denigrated their own abilities. In addition, they tended to engage in
self-handicapping behaviors; that is, when the task required a great
deal of effort, the women who believed they were selected because of
their sex simply did not try as hard as the women who believed they
had been selected because of their abilities.

Self-fulfilling Prophecies Even if we never find ourselves in
the position of interviewers who have the power to hire people who
are unlike us, we interact with all kinds of people every day—men,
women, young people, old people, blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos,
straight people, gay men and lesbians, fat people, thin people, Mus-
lims, Catholics, Jews, and so on. And our preconceptions about what
they’re like often influence our behaviors in such a way as to elicit
from them the very characteristics and behaviors we expected in the
first place. I have referred to the phenomenon elsewhere as the self-
fulfilling prophecy. For example, imagine that you and I had never