SELF-REINFORCING DISCRIMINATION

The ubiquity of self-discrimination, or discrimination against one’s own group, was powerfully brought to light by a well-known experiment by the American psychologist Claude Steele, which demonstrated the power of what he called a “stereotype threat.” In his original experiment, he found that black students performed comparably with white students when told a test they were taking was “a laboratory problem-solving task.”³³ However, black students scored much lower than whites when test takers were told the test was meant to measure their intellectual ability.

Minorities aren’t the only ones vulnerable to stereotype threat. Female college students performed better on a hard mathematics test when it included at the beginning the statement “You may have heard that women typically do less well at math tests than men, but this is not true for this particular test.”³⁴ Conversely, white male math and engineering majors who received high scores on the math portion of the SAT (a group of people quite confident about their mathematical abilities) did worse on a math test when told the experiment was intended to investigate “why Asians appear to outperform other students on tests of math ability.”³⁵ These types of experiments have been repeated many times in different contexts to test different types of self-discriminatory prejudice.

Self-discrimination is often self-reinforcing; people perform differently when they are reminded of their group identity, which makes them doubt themselves even more. The same goes for discrimination against other groups. In a now infamous (once famous) experiment in psychology from the 1960s, teachers were tricked into believing one group of their students (a fifth of the class) was gifted and therefore expected to develop much faster than the rest in terms of IQ. In reality, this group was randomly selected and roughly identical to the rest.³⁶ The students for whom teachers had higher expectations gained twelve IQ points over the course of the year, while the rest gained only eight.

In France, a study of young cashiers in a French grocery store chain, a sizable share of whom were minorities of North African and Sub-Saharan African origin, showed that biased supervisors invested less in the workers they managed.³⁷ The cashiers worked with different supervisors on different days and had virtually no control over their schedule. The study showed that assignment to a supervisor more or less biased against a minority affected the performance of minority and nonminority workers differently. On days when they were scheduled to work with biased supervisors, minority cashiers were more likely to be absent. When they did come to work, they spent less time working; they also scanned items more slowly and took longer to serve the next customer. Such effects were completely absent for nonminority workers. The reason for the lower performance of minority workers when assigned to a biased manager seemed to be not so much overt hostility (minority workers did not report disliking working with biased supervisors more, or that biased supervisors disliked them) as less-effective management. Minority workers reported, for example, that biased supervisors were less likely to come over to their cashier stations and encourage them to perform better.

Discrimination against women in leadership positions often carries the same flavor of self-fulfilling prophecy. In villages in Malawi, male or female farmers were randomly selected to learn a new technology and teach it to other farmers.³⁸ Women retained more information from the training, and those who were trained by them and listened to them did in fact learn more. But most farmers did not listen. They assumed women were less able, and therefore paid less attention to them. Along the same lines, when women in Bangladesh were trained to become line managers, they were just as good as men based on an objective assessment of their leadership and technical qualities, but they were perceived as less good by their line workers. And, presumably as a result, the performance of their lines also suffered, perversely confirming the prejudice that they were worse managers.³⁹ What started as an unjustified preference against women resulted in women actually doing worse through no fault of their own, and this reinforced their inferior status.