by Adam Alter
At this point, some of the students watched a second video, in which Hannah was asked to answer a series of twenty-five questions from an achievement test. The questions were designed to assess her mathematical, reading, science, and social science skills. Instead of presenting a clear image of her ability, the video was ambiguous: sometimes she was engaged, answering difficult questions correctly, and sometimes she seemed distracted and struggled with relatively easy questions. The tape was designed to baffle the students, to leave them without a clear picture of her ability.
Hannah’s ability was difficult to discern from the video, but some of the students began watching with the labels “wealthy” and “college educated” in mind, whereas the others began watching with the labels “working class” and “high school educated” in mind. These labels functioned as tiebreakers when Hannah’s performance was neither flawless nor disastrous. The students who expected Hannah to succeed saw exactly that pattern of achievement in her responses (ignoring her missteps and distractibility), whereas those who expected less from Hannah saw exactly what the negative labels implied (ignoring her intermittent engagement and mastery of the difficult questions). In the end, the lucky Hannah was judged to have performed above her fourth-grade level, whereas her unlucky counterpart seemed to perform below fourth-grade level. The Hannah study showed that people are suggestible, willing to view the world with the guidance of labels when faced with an otherwise unbreakable tie.
Labels and Associations: Why Black and Working-Class Categories Are Dangerous
Social labels aren’t born dangerous. There’s nothing inherently problematic about labeling a person “right-handed” or “black” or “working class,” but those labels are harmful to the extent that they become associated with meaningful character traits. At one end of the spectrum, the label “right-handed” is relatively free of meaning. We don’t have strong stereotypes about right-handed people, and calling someone right-handed isn’t tantamount to calling them unfriendly or unintelligent. In contrast, the terms “black” and “working class” are laden with the baggage of associations, some of them positive, but many of them negative. When a person is labeled “black,” we’re primed to perceive the characteristics that we tend to associate with “blackness” more generally, which is why students drew racially ambiguous faces with typically black features when they were told the face belonged to a “black” person. Participants in the experiment at Princeton similarly associated Hannah’s working-class background with diminished intellect, so they tended to emphasize her failings and overlook her strengths when they watched her complete an academic test.
Sometimes, meaningless labels accidentally acquire meaning. By convention, world maps place the Northern Hemisphere above the Southern Hemisphere, though there’s no inherent reason to equate cardinal direction with vertical position. Greek astronomer Ptolemy decided that maps should place north above south, possibly because the known world was clustered in the Northern Hemisphere. Naturally, then, the undiscovered parts of the world should lie below the superior, charted territory that constituted the civilized world. Over time, people have come to conflate the two directional systems, perceiving north as above and south as below a central reference point. This association might be trivial if it didn’t have commercial consequences. In one experiment, for example, people believed that a shipping company would charge $235 more to transport goods between two locations if they were making the trip from south to north rather than north to south. The reason: the northbound trip seemed “uphill,” requiring more effort and possibly more gas. A second group of people were more willing to drive to a store located five miles south of the city center rather than a practically identical store five miles north of the city center, again because reaching the northerly store seemed to demand more effort than did reaching the southerly store. Meanwhile, a third group preferred to live in the northern part of town, presumably because its “elevated” location rendered it superior to the town’s southern suburbs.
In theory, these associations are mutable. Had Ptolemy decided to place Greece, his home, along with the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, on the bottom half of the map, perhaps people would prefer the northbound journey to its more onerous southbound counterpart. In 1979, a young Australian named Stuart McArthur proposed an alternative to the dominant Mercator world map projection: McArthur’s Universal Corrective projection. According to the McArthur map, Australia was restored to its rightful place, both above and south of the world’s remaining landmasses, much like the map below.
McArthur’s map failed to replace the canonical north-above-south projections, but it’s hard not to wonder whether children raised under the McArthur system might prefer the ease of heading north to the labor of heading south.
Almost 150 years ago, long after Ptolemy decided that the Northern Hemisphere should lie above the Southern Hemisphere, the Remington company bought the rights to a new typewriter. Instead of placing the letters alphabetically, along three horizontal rows beginning with A and ending with Z, the new layout began with the letters Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY keyboard, as it became known, is now the world’s dominant keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout was designed to separate frequently used letters, which tended to jam during bouts of rapid typing.
One accidental consequence of introducing a standard keyboard was that millions of computer users would type certain words using their left hands and other words using their right hands. For example, abracadabra, referrer, and stewardesses are left-hand words, whereas lollipop, loony, and monk are right-hand words. (In the keyboard image, the left-typed keys are highlighted in gray, and the right-typed keys are white.) Some words straddle the left-right divide, but you can quantify the right-dominance of every word by subtracting the number of left-typed letters from the number of right-typed letters. It turns out that, since people prefer typing with their dominant hands and most of them are right-handed, they come to prefer concepts with right-dominant labels. In other words, when you ask English-speakers to indicate how much they like real words (or even nonsense words like plink or sarf), they tend to prefer the words with more right-hand letters than left-hand letters. This effect is especially true for words that were coined after the advent of the QWERTY keyboard—including n00b, yucky, and woohoo. These letter strings are often typed, strengthening their association with the pleasing experience of right-handed typing or the relative difficulty of left-handed typing, so it’s not surprising that they show stronger QWERTY effects. Like Ptolemy’s decision to thereafter link the northerly direction with upward movement, Remington’s adoption of the QWERTY keyboard thereafter consigned words like wart to the pile of disliked left-typed words, and anointed words like punk to the pantheon of liked right-typed words.
These studies are more than idle curiosities, because they tell us something about how racism and prejudice come to infect the adult mind, and how we might prevent them from taking root in the minds of young children. After looking at hundreds of maps that place north above south, adults struggle to shake the notion that north inevitably sits above south. Likewise, adults live in a world that repeatedly pairs race with personality characteristics, so those racial labels are inextricably bound to character traits. Those damaging racial associations haven’t yet had time to harden into unshakeable truths for children, so their young minds remain open to other possibilities.
During the height of the civil rights struggle, one astute teacher showed just how willingly children adopt new labels. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, and the next day thousands of young American children went to school with a combination of misinformation and confusion. In Riceville, Iowa, Stephen Armstrong was the first student to arrive at teacher Jane Elliott’s third-grade classroom. As the room filled with students, Armstrong asked his teacher why “they shot that king.” Elliott explained that the “king” was a man named King who was fighting discrimination against “Negroes.” The all-white class of st
udents was understandably confused, so Elliott offered to show them what it might be like to experience discrimination themselves. The students agreed excitedly, and Elliott staged a demonstration that ultimately led admirers to call her the foremother of antidiscrimination education in the United States.
Elliott began by claiming that the blue-eyed children were better than the brown-eyed children. The children resisted at first. The brown-eyed majority were forced to confront the possibility that they were inferior, and the blue-eyed minority faced a crisis when they realized that some of their closest friendships were now forbidden. Elliott countered the students’ resistance by explaining that the brown-eyed children had too much melanin, a substance that darkens the eyes and makes people less intelligent. Melanin caused the “brownies,” as Elliott labeled them, to be clumsy and lazy.
To ensure that the brownies would be easy to identify, Elliott asked them to wear paper armbands—a deliberate reference to the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. Elliott reinforced the distinction by telling the brown-eyed children not to drink directly from the water fountain, as they might contaminate the blue-eyed children. Instead, the brownies were forced to drink from paper cups. Elliott also praised the blue-eyed children and offered them privileges, like a longer lunch break, while she criticized the brown-eyed children and forced them to end lunch early. By the end of the day, the blue-eyed children had become rude and unpleasant toward their classmates, while even the gregarious brown-eyed children were noticeably timid and subservient. The sharper brown-eyed children began to struggle with their work, while the slower blue-eyed children had the gall to criticize the brownies for holding back the class. Elliott had convinced the children that their eye color was either a label of promise or a mark of shame.
Class ended that Friday afternoon, and the children went home to their families and friends. The following Monday, they arrived at school and Elliott reversed the labels. She told the children that the brown-eyed students were actually superior to the blue-eyed students, and now the “blueys” were labeled with armbands of shame. The students adopted these new roles, but less enthusiastically than they had their original roles. Even the formerly oppressed brown-eyed students occupied their superior position with relative benevolence, perhaps because they had experienced firsthand the sting of a negative label. By midafternoon, Elliott abandoned the exercise. The blue-eyed students removed their armbands, and students from both sides of the eye-color divide hugged and commiserated.
News of Elliott’s demonstration traveled quickly, and several weeks later Johnny Carson interviewed her on The Tonight Show. The interview lasted a few brief minutes, but its effects persist today. Elliott was pilloried by angry white viewers across the country, and to this day she’s unpopular with many residents of Riceville, Iowa, her birthplace and home for many years. One angry white viewer scolded Elliott for exposing white children to the discrimination that black children face every day. Black children are accustomed to the experience, the viewer argued, but white children were fragile and might be scarred long after the demonstration ended. Elliott responded sharply by asking why we’re so concerned about white children who experience this sort of treatment for a single day, while ignoring the pain of black children who experience the same treatment across their entire lives. Years later, Elliott’s technique is still being used in hundreds of classrooms, and even in workplace discrimination training courses, where adults experience similar epiphanies. Whatever the merits or shortcomings of Elliott’s approach, it shows how profoundly labels shape our treatment of other people and how even arbitrary damaging labels have the power to turn the brightest people into meek shadows of their potential selves.
Labels Don’t Just Resolve Ambiguity; They Change Outcomes
Four years before Jane Elliott’s classroom demonstration, in the spring of 1964, two psychologists began a remarkable experiment at a school in San Francisco. The study was the brainchild of Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, who set out to show that the recipe for academic achievement contains more than raw intellect and a dozen years of schooling. The children attended a school in southern San Francisco identified as the “Oak School,” a pseudonym chosen to protect them from the prying eyes of a public that remains fascinated with the study more than a half century later. Rosenthal and Jacobson kept the details of the experiment hidden from the teachers, students, and parents; instead, they told the teachers that the test was designed to identify which students would improve academically over the coming year—students they labeled “academic bloomers.” In truth, the test was an IQ measure with separate versions for each school grade, and it had nothing to do with academic blooming. As with any IQ test, some of the students scored quite well, some scored poorly, and many performed at the level expected from students of their age group.
The next phase of the experiment was both brilliant and controversial. Rosenthal and Jacobson recorded the students’ scores on the test, and then labeled a randomly chosen sample of the students as “academic bloomers.” The bloomers performed no differently from the other students—both groups had the same average IQ score—but their teachers were told to expect the bloomers to experience a rapid period of intellectual development during the following year. Spring became summer, and the students and teachers took a three-month vacation.
When the new school year arrived in the fall of 1964, each teacher watched as a new crop of children filled the classroom. The teachers knew very little about the students, except whether or not they had been described as bloomers three months earlier. Because they were chosen arbitrarily, the bloomers should have fared no differently from the remaining students during the academic year of 1964–65. The students completed another year of school, and just before the year ended, Rosenthal and Jacobson administered the IQ test again to check whether the students’ scores had changed since the previous year. The results were remarkable.
The first and second graders who were labeled as bloomers outscored their peers by 10–15 IQ points. Four of every five bloomers experienced at least a 10-point improvement, but only half the non-bloomers improved their score by 10 points or more. Rosenthal and Jacobson had intervened to elevate a randomly chosen group of students above their relatively unlucky peers. Incredibly, their intervention was limited to merely labeling the chosen students “bloomers” and remaining silent on the academic prospects of the overlooked majority.
Observers were stunned by these results, wondering how a simple label could elevate a child’s IQ score a year later. Just as Princeton students perceived Hannah to be smarter when she was wealthier, the Oak School teachers subconsciously emphasized the students’ strengths and overlooked their weaknesses. When the teachers at the Oak School interacted with the “bloomers,” they were primed to see academic progress. Each time the bloomers answered a question correctly, the answer seemed to be an early sign of academic achievement. Each time they answered a question incorrectly, the error was seen as an anomaly, swamped by the general sense that they were in the process of blooming. During the year, then, the teachers praised these students for their successes, overlooked their failures, and devoted plenty of time and energy to the task of ensuring that they would grow to justify their promising academic labels.
It turns out that labels shape how adults see the world as well, and like the Russian students who discriminated light and dark blue more easily because they had separate labels for each color, people who speak different languages come to see the world at large quite differently. Just consider the idioms people use across the globe. In English, we deride people for being “losers” or “no-hopers,” but Germans prefer the more colorful term Gurkentruppe, literally a “troop of cucumbers.” The German word for turtle is Schildkröte, or “shielded toad.” These vivid labels are more powerful because they prompt concrete images in place of the weaker abstract images inspired by their English counterparts. Sometimes words that exist in one language
have no equivalent in other languages. In Yagan, an indigenous language on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, mamihlapinatapei means “the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but both are reluctant to start,” a concept that doesn’t exist in quite the same way for English-speakers, who romanticize a first kiss but not the moment before the kiss. Similarly, though English-speakers don’t assign gendered labels to inanimate objects, many other languages distinguish between masculine objects and feminine objects. A bridge is masculine to Spanish-speakers and feminine to German-speakers, so in one experiment Spanish-speakers described bridges as big, dangerous, strong, and sturdy, while German-speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, pretty, and fragile. Far from merely functioning as placeholders, labels craft the images that populate our thoughts.
Because different languages paint different realities, many of the greatest linguistic insights emerge when anthropologists stumble on dwindling tribal populations with unique languages or dialects. In the early 1970s, anthropologist John Haviland discovered an unusual feature of the language spoken by the Guugu Yimithirr people of far north Queensland, in northeastern Australia. The language had no words for directions like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind,” but instead the Guugu Yimithirr relied on the cardinal directions gungga (north), jiba (south), naga (east), and guwa (west). At first this seems like a trivial difference, but the directional terms that most of us use to specify locations and directions are egocentric: they only make sense if you know where a person is standing, and which way she’s facing. As soon as she turns around, an object that sat in front of her now sits behind her. This isn’t true of cardinal directions, which relate to the position of the sun rather than the position of a particular person. The Guugu Yimithirr are more familiar with cardinal directions than are English-speakers, so they’re able to determine that an object sits to the north or south just as quickly as English-speakers recognize that the object sits in front of or behind them.