3 R.F. Baumeister, E. Bratslavsky, M. Muraven and D.M. Tice (1998), ibid. The authors were particularly interested in the effect of ego depletion on active versus passive responses, and this is where the strongest effect was found.
4 R.F. Baumeister, E. Bratslavsky, M. Muraven and D.M. Tice (1998), ibid; B. J. Schmeichel, K.D. Vohs and R.F. Baumeister (2003), ‘Intellectual performance and ego depletion: role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85: 33–46.
5 K.D. Vohs, R.F. Baumeister and N.J. Ciarocco (2005), ‘Self-regulation and self-presentation: regulatory resource depletion impairs impression management and effortful self-presentation depletes regulatory resources’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88: 632–57.
6 As assessed by various questionnaire measures. K.D. Vohs, R.F. Baumeister and N.J. Ciarocco (2005), ibid.
7 D.M. Tice, E. Bratslavsky and R.F. Baumeister (2001), ‘Emotional distress regulation takes precedence over impulse control: if you feel bad, do it!’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80: 53–67.
8 D.M. Tice, E. Bratslavsky and R.F. Baumeister (2001), ibid.
9 R.F. Baumeister, C.N. DeWall, N.J. Ciarocco and J.M. Twenge (2005), ‘Social exclusion impairs self-regulation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88: 589–604.
10 This was also confirmed statistically using mediation analyses.
11 ‘My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than the order of the world, and in general accustom myself to the persuasion that except our own thoughts there is nothing absolutely in our power.’ René Descartes (Discourse on Method Part III). Quoted by D.M. Wegner (1997), ‘When the antidote is the poison: ironic mental control processes’, Psychological Science, 8: 148–50.
12 See, for example, D.M. Wegner (1994), ‘Ironic processes of mental control’, Psychological Review, 101: 34–52.
13 M.E. Ansfield, D.M. Wegner and R. Bowser (1996), ‘Ironic effects of sleep urgency’, Behavioural Research and Therapy, 34: 523–31.
14 R. Ferraro, B. Shiv and J.R. Bettman (2005), ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die: effects of mortality salience and self-esteem on self-regulation in consumer choice’, Journal of Consumer Research 32: 65–75.
15 M. Muraven, R.F. Baumeister and D.M. Tice (1999), ‘Longitudinal improvement of self-regulation through practice: building self-control strength through repeated exercise’, The Journal of Social Psychology, 139: 446–57.
16 See D.M. Wegner, D. J. Schneider, S.R. Carter and T.L. White (1987), ‘Paradoxical effects of thought suppression’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53: 5–13.
17 Two other self-control exercises were used: monitoring and recording eating, and regulating mood. (This latter exercise was not particularly successful in improving self-regulation.)
18 D.M. Wegner (1997), ‘When the antidote is the poison: ironic mental control processes’, Psychological Science, 8: 148–50.
19 See M.E. Ansfield, D.M. Wegner and R. Bowser (1996), ‘Ironic effects of sleep urgency’, Behavioural Research and Therapy, 34: 523–31.
20 A. Fischbach, R. S. Friedman and A.W. Kruglanski (2003), ‘Leading us not into temptation: Momentary allurements elicit overriding goal activation’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 296–309.
21 A. Fischbach, R. S. Friedman and A.W. Kruglanski (2003), ibid. See study 4.
22 See, for example, P.M. Gollwitzer (1999), ‘Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans’, American Psychologist, 54: 493–503.
23 S.E. Milne, S. Orbell and P. Sheeran (2002), ‘Combining motivational and volitional interventions to promote exercise participation: Protection motivation theory and implementation intentions’, British Journal of Health Psychology, 7: 163–84.
24 B. Verplanken and S. Faes (1999), ‘Good intentions, bad habits, and effects of forming implementation intentions on healthy eating’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 29: 591–604; C. J. Armitage (2004), ‘Evidence that implementation intentions reduce dietary fat intake: a randomized trial’, Health Psychology, 23: 319–23; but for contrary finding for healthy-eating behaviours, see C. Jackson, R. Lawton, P. Knapp et al. (2005), ‘Beyond intention: do specific plans increase health behaviours in patients in primary care? A study of fruit and vegetable consumption’, Social Science and Medicine, 60: 2383–91; R.W. Holland, H. Aarts and D. Landendam (2006), ‘Breaking and creating habits on the working floor: A field experiment on the power of implementation intentions’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42: 776–83; S. Koole and M. Spijker (2000), ‘Overcoming the planning fallacy through willpower: effects of implementation intentions on actual and predicted task-completion times’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 30: 873–88; S. Orbell, S. Hodgkins and P. Sheeran (1997), ‘Implementation intentions and the theory of planned behavior’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23: 945–54.
25 D. Lavin and A. Groarke (2005), ‘Dental floss behaviour: a test of the predictive utility of the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the effects of making implementation intentions’, Psychology, Health and Medicine, 10: 243–52.
CHAPTER 8
The Bigoted Brain
‘Thug … tart … slob … nerd … airhead’
My husband’s first experience of Scotland was a formative one, from which I fear he has never fully recovered. We travelled across the border to Berwick for a wedding, and booked into a not inexpensive bed and breakfast. Now the Scots do have a certain reputation for, shall we say, a propensity towards thrift. We were, however, prepared to assume that the absence of any soap in our room was an oversight – until, that is, we were sharply informed, in response to our inquiry, that the provision of soap was deemed to be the responsibility of the guest. My husband was somewhat taken aback by this. In his native New Zealand, any B&B guest considers himself much neglected if large quantities of handcrafted Manuka honey soap are not lavished upon him. ‘So it’s true, what they say about Scots’, he remarked with glee, delighted to have been treated so soon to an apparent vindication of the stereotype.
But there was a far more challenging horror to greet us in the morning. We sat down to breakfast, tired and hungover after the wedding, and waited impatiently for the pot of tea to brew. Every few minutes my husband would dribble another splash of pale gold water into his cup, then return the pot to the table with an angry clatter. After about ten minutes of this, he decided that further investigation was required. He lifted the teapot lid and peered inside. His eyes, when they rose to meet mine, were wide with disbelief. In awe, he whispered to me, ‘There are no tea bags in there. Not one!’
He was quiet and thoughtful on the long drive home. Every so often he would break the silence to ask, ‘Do you suppose they use the same tea bag to make everyone’s pot of tea?’ or to speculate, ‘Perhaps each table has its own dedicated bag, which is pegged up to dry on a little line, ready for the next morning.’
Possibly, given this experience, I should have been more understanding of my husband’s response to my telling him about our bigoted brains. Over dinner, I explained how it is that pernicious stereotypes colour our every interpretation of others’ behaviour, and even have the power to generate self-fulfilling prophecies of our stereotypical beliefs. With eloquent passion, I told him of our ignoble habit of using stereotypes to boost our egos, and the subtle but devastating effects of stereotypes on stereotyped groups. Finally, my dinner cold and untouched on my plate in noble sacrifice to his edification, I described the devious tricks the brain uses to discount evidence that contradicts our stereotypical beliefs, thus condemning us all to an eternally prejudiced and damaging perspective of our fellow humans.
‘Ye-es’, said my husband hesitantly, when I had finally stopped talking. ‘But the Scots really are mean.’
As I said, given the trauma of a post-wedding breakfast without a nice strong cup of tea, I should have been more understanding.
But I wasn’t.
‘That’, I retorted angrily, ‘is just the sort of thing an affluent white male would say.’
However egalitarian you may be (or think you are), your brain is stuffed with stereotypes. You may not personally subscribe to the view that women are nurturing, that black men are aggressive, or that Jews keep a tight grip on their wallets, but you can’t pretend not to know that these are stereotypical traits of women, blacks and Jews. Stereotypes are a subgroup of the schemas that we met in ‘The Secretive Brain’, the filing system the brain uses to organise information into various categories. Like all schemas, in people schemas (or stereotypes), all the information about a certain group – homosexuals, the unemployed, Asians – is closely intertwined in the brain. This means that if you use one bit of the schema – even just to be able to say ‘Ah, an Asian’ – then all the other parts of the Asian schema get restless. As a result, information in the Asian stereotype is more likely to be used by the brain, as it goes about the difficult job of interpreting the complicated and often ambiguous behaviour of those around us.
In a classic demonstration of this, some volunteers were subliminally primed with flashes of words (mostly negative) related to the black stereotype.1 These included words such as ‘lazy’, ‘welfare’, ‘unemployed’, ‘ghetto’ and ‘basketball’. Now one of the most commonly reported traits of the black stereotype is aggressiveness, but the researcher was careful not to include any words related to aggression in the priming. She reasoned that, it being an intimate bedfellow of the other parts of the black stereotype, it would get awakened by the stirrings anyway. That this indeed happened – and its effect on the volunteers’ decoding of another person’s behaviour – was revealed by the second part of the experiment. The volunteers were asked to give their impressions of a character called Donald. Donald did things that could be viewed as either hostile or assertive, such as refusing to pay his rent until his flat was repainted. People whose black stereotype had been primed judged Donald to be significantly more hostile than did other volunteers not primed in the same way. The volunteers weren’t aware that the stereotype had been activated (they hadn’t even been aware of the flashed words) but it still had the power to colour their judgment of Donald.
The disturbing implication is that when dealing with a black man, the black stereotype is primed and ready to distort our interpretation of his every word and deed.2 We might, for example, mistake the wallet he is pulling from his pocket for a gun. In 1999, four white New York police officers were acquitted of shooting an unarmed black man on the grounds that they had made this very mistake and thought that their lives were in danger. The officers may well have been speaking the truth, but would their eyes have deceived them in the same way had their unfortunate victim, Amidou Diallo, been white? Quite possibly not, suggests research using stereotype priming. Student volunteers were shown pairs of images: a face, followed by either a handgun or a hand tool.3 They were told to ignore the face, which flashed up briefly supposedly to signal that the next image was about to appear, and to then identify the second picture as a gun or tool as quickly as possible by pressing one or other of two keys. Half of the time the face was black; the rest of the time it was white. The volunteers were much quicker at identifying the handguns when they were preceded by a black face, showing that perception itself was influenced by the racial priming. More disturbing still, however, was the discovery that volunteers, when under heavy pressure to classify the object quickly (as a police officer would often be), were more likely to mistake tools for handguns when they had just seen a black face. This suggests that the New York officers might have held their fire for a few extra, potentially life-saving milliseconds had Amidou Diallo been white.
Indeed, any suspicions we have that ethnicity might have played a part in this fatal shooting of an unarmed man by police (and other sad incidents like it) are all but confirmed by subsequent research. In a similar sort of experiment deliberately reminiscent of the killing of Marquise Hudspeth (who was shot by police officers who mistook his cellular phone for a weapon), non-black volunteers were shown a succession of pictures of different men, who were either black or white.4 Each man appeared against an innocuous background, holding either a gun or a non-lethal item such as a wallet or phone. In each case, the volunteers had to decide whether to shoot (if the man was armed) or hold fire (if the man were merely about to make a phone call, say). The appearance of a white face together with a gun had an inappropriately soothing effect on the would-be police officers: they were far more likely to mistakenly hold their fire than if it was a black man wielding a weapon. And the inequity did not end there, of course: innocently unarmed black men were in far more danger of being shot at than were unarmed white men. Indeed, so pernicious is the stereotype of the dangerous black man that it influenced black participants in just the same way: they showed just the same racial bias in the experiment.
Nor can we cling to the comforting, if improbable, hope that real law enforcement officers – painstakingly trained in racial sensitivities and ethnic sensibilities – might show a reassuring even-handedness in their propensity to shoot innocent passers-by on the street. A similar sort of ‘Shoot’ or ‘Hold Fire’ experiment that recruited police officers from Florida as its participants revealed that – when it comes to black men – they, like the rest of us, tend to shoot first and ask questions later.5 This is worrisome indeed, particularly when officers are encouraged to take a trigger-happy approach to policing – as in London following the bomb attacks in July 2005 when Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian, was wrongly identified as a suicide bomber and shot dead. Bearing the results of this research in mind, Londoners of ethnic origin may want to think twice before running to catch a bus.
It’s easy to see from these experiments, and the many others like them, how viewing other people through bigot goggles helps to reinforce stereotyped beliefs. We see what we expect to see. But does it make a difference whether or not we subscribe to those beliefs in the first place? Does the genuinely open-minded liberal see others through bigot goggles just the same, or does she rise loftily above such distortions? The answer seems to depend on how the stereotype is primed. For example, a British study primed the black stereotype by using only neutral words (like ‘Brixton’, ‘dreadlocks’ and ‘reggae’). For non-racists, this had no damaging effects on their impressions of other people’s behaviour.6 However, even this neutral priming influenced the racists – they judged that the person they were evaluating suffered from the stereotypical faults of black people: unreliability and aggressiveness. What this suggests is that only in racists will seeing a black person automatically trigger the full-blown negative stereotype.
This is good news, but there is an important proviso. If what is primed is the negative stereotype, then even the non-prejudiced are susceptible to seeing the world through the biasing lens of that stereotype. In the same British study, when pejorative priming words were used (such as ‘unemployed’, ‘dirty’ or ‘crime’), even the non-racists formed a more disapproving impression of the person they had to evaluate. What this means with regard to the real world is that no-holds-barred stereotyped portrayals of people will unconsciously affect the judgments of everyone, not just the bigot.
What, in that case, is the effect on the decent modern man of that device most beloved of advertisers everywhere: the sexy woman (or erotic part thereof)? To find out, two groups of men were shown a tape of television adverts.7 One group of men watched mostly sexist adverts in which women were portrayed as sex objects. The other men watched ads without any sexual imagery. Next, each volunteer was asked to do a supposedly unrelated experiment: deciding whether or not a string of letters flashed on a computer screen was a word. Men who had watched the sexist adverts, unlike the other men, were quicker to recognise sexist words like ‘babe’ and ‘bimbo’ than less offensive words like ‘mother’ and ‘sister’. This showed that the ads had done their job of priming the schema of women as sexual objects.
/> It was then time to see how this affected the men when they had to interact with a real, live woman. The men were asked, as a favour to the experimenter, to interview a female job candidate. The influence of the sexist ads on the dynamics of this interview was extraordinary. The men who had just watched women portrayed as sex-things – even the non-sexist men – sat closer to the interviewee, flirted more and asked her a greater number of sexually inappropriate questions, compared with the other men. The sexist adverts also biased the men’s memory of the candidate, and their ability to gauge her qualifications. The sex-primed men remembered a great deal about the woman’s physical appearance, but far less information that would help them to decide her suitability for the job. This didn’t stop them from rating her as less competent, however. Despite this, these men were still more likely than the other group to recommend hiring the woman, perhaps because they found her more friendly and attractive than did the non-primed men. A meagre comfort, indeed, for women seeking gainful employment – especially when you consider that all of these shameful changes in the men came from them watching a few sex-pots draped over cars or around beer bottles.
This experiment doesn’t just demonstrate that you should never, ever tell a woman who complains about sexist adverts to lighten up. It also highlights the second dangerous power of stereotypes: their capacity to change our own behaviour. In fact, you already saw this phenomenon in action in ‘The Secretive Brain’. Remember, for example, the volunteers who ambled at a snail’s pace down the hallway after having their elderly schema primed? Benign as this may sound, the trouble begins when you add another person into the social equation. Your behaviour has a knock-on effect on their behaviour and suddenly, without anyone having an inkling about it, you have all the ingredients of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Seeing a black person triggers the stereotype of the aggressive, hostile black. You, acting in line with the stereotype, behave aggressively yourself, which in turn leads the maligned person to respond in kind. You notice his hostility and, not realising your own role in their behaviour, the stereotype is confirmed in your mind.
A Mind of Its Own Page 18