快猫短视频

DEBORAH BEST tells a story about a game her two nieces, aged three and five,
were playing. 鈥淥ne of them was pretending to be sick, the other was taking care
of her鈥攁s a nurse. I asked her why she wasn鈥檛 being a doctor,鈥� says Best.
鈥淎nd she told me, `Girls can鈥檛 be doctors!'鈥� What shocked her, Best says, was
that the children had absorbed that stereotype, despite having a psychology
professor for an aunt, and even though the doctor who had cared for them since
birth was a woman.

Best has spent most of her career struggling with stereotypes. It鈥檚 not that
she鈥檚 been the subject of any particular discrimination. Her area of research,
at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is in how
stereotypes form. Just like the story she tells, her work highlights how
stereotypes influence us all鈥攁nd far more than we would like to think.

Her studies of children have revealed that stereotypes sneak into our minds
when we鈥檙e far too young to evaluate them. By the age of four, children can
describe their culture鈥檚 stereotypes of men and women, youth and age, ethnicity
and race, agreeing with stories that depict men as strong, boastful and
aggressive and women as emotional and affectionate, for example. And these
stereotypes infect us even if we personally experience exceptions to our
culture鈥檚 roles and rules.

鈥淪tereotypes reduce uncertainty,鈥� says Best. 鈥淟earning them is a normal
process, just like learning that things that look like stoves may burn you. But
sometimes the content becomes negative, you expect all people to be like the
stereotype, and you run into trouble.鈥�

Most of us would agree that negative stereotypes can be hurtful. But some
researchers fear more sinister effects. They have shifted the focus from how
stereotypes affect their targets, to how they affect all of us, finding that
tiny cues鈥攁 face, a few words, an advertisement鈥攃an dramatically
alter what we perceive, how we feel, our capabilities and even how we act. It鈥檚
now becoming clear that stereotypes that we don鈥檛 know we possess, or even those
we consciously reject, can turn on us, sometimes with dramatic consequences.

It doesn鈥檛 take much to unleash a lurking stereotype. Luke Birmingham, a
forensic psychiatrist at the University of Southampton, showed how something as
simple as a name can alter how people are judged. He asked 464 British
psychiatrists to provide a diagnosis based on a one-page description of a
24-year-old who had assaulted a train conductor. Speaking at a meeting of the
Royal College of Psychiatrists last year, he reported that when they were asked
to assess 鈥淢atthew鈥�, more than three-quarters gave him a sympathetic hearing,
proposing that he was suffering from schizophrenia and was in need of medical
help. When renamed 鈥淲ayne鈥�, however, he was given a more sinister character by
the psychiatrists. Wayne was twice as likely as Matthew to be diagnosed as a
malingerer, a drug abuser, or suffering from a personality disorder.

These names distort the diagnosis, Birmingham explains, because of the
stereotypes they evoke. 鈥淲ayne may be associated with lower social-economic
status, which may be associated with a disrupted background, which may make him
a more disruptive patient,鈥� says Birmingham. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 get away from the fact
that we are prone, just as is anyone else, to positive or negative
蝉迟别谤别辞迟测辫颈苍驳.鈥�

But stereotypes don鈥檛 just alter how we think of others. They can affect how
we think about ourselves. Jeffrey Hausdorff of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center in Boston, and Becca Levy of Yale University, are intrigued by the
effects of stereotypes of ageing on the aged. 鈥淪tereotypes present the elderly
as close to childhood or close to death,鈥� says Levy. Like Birmingham, she found
it was easy to trigger such stereotypes.

While elderly volunteers spent a few minutes concentrating on a
computer-based reaction time test, Levy subliminally exposed them to age-related
words. Half were shown negative words such as 鈥渟enile鈥�, 鈥渇orgetful鈥� and
鈥渄iseased鈥�, the others a more positive selection, such as 鈥渨ise鈥�, 鈥渁stute鈥� and
鈥渁ccomplished鈥�. The words were flashed for just 70 milliseconds each鈥攏ot
long enough to be consciously registered, but long enough to trigger a
stereotype. In a series of experiments starting in 1994, Levy has found that
negative words can make older people walk more slowly, perform poorly on a
subsequent memory test, underrate their own abilities, and even sap their will
to live.

You wouldn鈥檛 think a few words could evoke despair, but that鈥檚 what Levy
found. After exposing old people to positive or negative words, Levy asked them
if they would request an expensive, but potentially life-saving, medical
treatment without which they would die within a month. In a forthcoming issue of
OMEGA鈥擩ournal of Death and Dying, she describes how when a
positive stereotype was activated, most chose the lifesaving treatment. But
after viewing discouraging words, most turned the treatment down. Levy believes
the experiment reflects how stereotypes could bias crucial decisions.

Most recently, Levy and Hausdorff found that stereotypes can have a direct
effect on health. For 10 minutes they exposed elderly people to
stereotype-triggering words, then challenged them with a series of maths
problems. Those shown negative words became stressed鈥攖heir heart rates,
blood pressure and skin conductance all increased and stayed high for more than
30 minutes. In contrast, those bolstered by positive cues sailed through the
challenge stress-free (Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences,
vol 55, p 205). 鈥淲hat鈥檚 surprising,鈥� says Hausdorff, 鈥渋s that the way older
people view older people can significantly affect their physical
蹿耻苍肠迟颈辞苍颈苍驳.鈥�

Since many studies have linked chronic stress to disease, Levy suspects that
repeated triggering of negative stereotypes over the years may be making elderly
people ill. She is now trying to develop a therapy to reduce stress and improve
heart functioning in the elderly by systematically stimulating positive
stereotypes.

But old folks are not uniquely susceptible to such psychological tricks. In
1996, John Bargh, a social psychologist at New York University, set out to see
if negative age stereotypes might take their toll in college students too. Bargh
had some students unscramble sentences scattered with negative age-related
words. Those who had dealt with the negative words walked down a corridor
significantly more slowly and remembered less about the experiment than students
who had sorted neutral words (Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, vol 71, p 230). The images stored in our minds, Bargh says,
prime us to automatically produce stereotypical behaviour.

Hostile reaction

Bargh believes that the same sort of priming could aggravate racial
stereotypes, suspecting that racial hostility may reverberate in
self-perpetuating cycles. He and his colleagues asked participants to play a
game in which they had to help a partner guess a word. Before the game,
one-quarter of the participants, all of whom were white, were exposed
subliminally to black faces, while the others were exposed to pictures of white
faces.

Players who saw the black faces expressed more hostility towards their
partner. It proved contagious as their partners responded in kind. Closing the
loop, players whose unconscious hostility had angered their partner in the first
place perceived that partner as inexplicably hostile. Remarkably, the players
remained unaware of this entire psychodrama. From their point of view, they鈥檇
simply drawn a rotten partner. Subjects who consciously denounced racism showed
the same reaction (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol 33, p
541).

If faces can trigger stereotypes, so can other images. Paul Davies of the
University of Waterloo in Ontario, which is known for its science and
engineering programme, examined the impact of stereotype-loaded advertising on
young women studying maths there. They had all described themselves as being
good at maths, and that this was important to them. But Davies found that
watching two sexist television commercials quashed the ability of female, but
not male, undergraduates to solve difficult maths problems. In a second
experiment, female undergraduates shifted the subject they said they would like
to specialise in away from the sciences after viewing the advertisements
(快猫短视频, 4 September 1999, p 6).
The same ads also caused these highly motivated young women to avoid the
leadership role in a two-person task.

Davies attributes these effects to a reaction called 鈥渟tereotype threat鈥�,
extensively studied by Claude Steele of Stanford University. Davies thinks the
advertisements triggered a negative stereotype of women in all the participants.
But only among female subjects did that create the personal threat of being
judged as no smarter than the woman shown in one of the ads raving about her new
acne cream. According to Davies, men who hit a snag on the test can rationalise
that the test is just too hard. For women, however, the same difficulty raises a
paralysing cloud of self-doubt after they have been primed with the stereotype
of women as emotional, illogical and helpless at maths. 鈥淚t鈥檚 this additional
concern that undermines their pleasure and performance,鈥� says Davies.

Steele has also investigated the stereotype that African Americans are
intellectually inferior. He found that black college students score lower than
white students on standardised tests of school achievement, aptitude and IQ, but
only if they鈥檙e told the tests are measuring intelligence, or if race is raised
in some other way. Steele has found that he can completely erase the black-white
differences on such tests by convincing students that the particular test they
will take is not related to intelligence. Conversely, he can recreate the racial
gap by an intervention as minor as having students indicate their race on a
questionnaire.

Steele has found that stereotype threat is most devastating to the very best
students. The problem, he believes, is the fear of being unfairly judged. 鈥淚t鈥檚
really the kids with the strongest self-confidence and skills that experience
this threat the most,鈥� he says. In the real world, Steele is convinced, many
talented people learn to avoid such painful threats to their self-esteem by
devaluing education entirely, or retreating into fields free from the dark cloud
of stereotype threat.

It鈥檚 the real-world impact of gender stereotypes on women鈥檚 health that
concerns psychologist Ren茅 Martin of the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
She has found that both men and women cling to the notion that men are uniquely
vulnerable to heart attacks, while women are exempt from them鈥攅ven though,
in industrialised nations at least, heart disease is the leading cause of death
among women as well as men. This misperception resists change, she believes,
partly because young women do have fewer heart problems, but also because it鈥檚
linked to the stereotypical view of women as more emotional than men. Students
and adults showed the same bias. And, frighteningly, so did doctors.

The women were not seen as ill, but as expressing their emotional problems
through their symptoms, says Martin. A recent study of 140,000 elderly American
patients also shows that women take longer than men to seek help for heart
problems, and once they reach hospital they have to wait longer for diagnosis
and treatment.

The one thing women were 26 per cent more likely to receive than men was a
DNR鈥擠o Not Resuscitate鈥攐rder, which prohibits hospital staff from
actively intervening if a patient begins to fail. 鈥淭his finding surprised us,鈥�
says Leighton Chan, the study鈥檚 senior author, 鈥渁nd we found it quite
concerning.鈥� Martin, however, was not surprised. She believes gender stereotypes
probably influence everyone involved鈥攖he patient herself, family members,
clerks, nurses and doctors.

One reason such stereotypes take such a hold is that they seem to be
impressed deep in our brains, according to Lee Osterhout, a psychologist at the
University of Washington in Seattle. He used electroencephalograph recordings to
see what鈥檚 happening in the brains of people when stereotypes are tweaked. He
found that sentences in which gender stereotypes are violated鈥攆or example,
鈥淭he surgeon prepared herself for the operation鈥濃�攑rovoke the same surge of
electrical activity in the brain as sentences that don鈥檛 make grammatical sense,
such as, 鈥淭he cat won鈥檛 eating.鈥� The telltale signal is a strong positive
brainwave called the P600, which is often associated with surprise.

The brains of both men and women showed this stereotypical surprise, even if
they consciously found the sentence completely acceptable (Memory &
Cognition, vol 25, p 273). 鈥淚t seems that our subjects鈥� brains were telling
us one thing, while their overt responses were telling us something quite
different,鈥� says Osterhout.

Two recent studies peer even more deeply into the brain. Allen Hart, a social
psychologist at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and his colleagues used
magnetic resonance imaging to trace differing reactions to black and white faces
to a region deep in the brain called the amygdala (NeuroReport, vol 11,
p 2351). The amygdala is thought to act like a spotlight, focusing attention on
fearful or other emotionally charged events.

Elizabeth Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji also found greater amygdala activity in
white subjects who showed the strongest responses in 鈥渕ind-measures鈥� of their
unconscious feelings about black people鈥攅ither startle responses after
viewing different faces or 鈥渋mplicit association tests鈥� that look at how readily
people associate race-related words or images with positive or negative
evaluations (The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol 12, p 728).

The studies highlight the dissociation that Osterhout identified between our
conscious beliefs and unconscious responses. 鈥淔or a long time [social
psychologists] have been saying that racial evaluations have a much more subtle
way of influencing our behaviour,鈥� says Phelps. 鈥淭o show this dissociation in
the brain is powerful support for that view.鈥�

A few researchers are exploring ways to counter such automatic, knee-jerk
thinking, for example by making people aware of stereotypes they鈥檝e absorbed,
and coaching them to make positive responses to images that trigger them. Bargh,
for one, is not optimistic. 鈥淥ften the best of intentions falter,鈥� he says.

But Steele believes that progress can be made by weeding out negative
stereotypes before they take root in young people鈥檚 minds. For example, he
advises schools to push disadvantaged students rather than demean them with low
expectations. 鈥淲e鈥檝e found we can break down stereotypes and stereotype threat,鈥�
says Steele. 鈥淩educe the pressure of being judged, and you can see dramatic
turnarounds in outcomes. And that gives hope.鈥�