EXPECTATIONS ALSO SHAPE stereotypes. A stereotype, after all, is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has seen before. For that reason, stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent. They provide shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings. This is why we have the expectation that an elderly person will need help using a computer or that a student at Harvard will be intelligent.* But because a stereotype provides us with specific expectations about members of a group, it can also unfavorably influence both our perceptions and our behavior.
Research on stereotypes shows not only that we react differently when we have a stereotype of a certain group of people, but also that stereotyped people themselves react differently when they are aware of the label that they are forced to wear (in psychological parlance, they are “primed” with this label). One stereotype of Asian-Americans, for instance, is that they are especially gifted in mathematics and science. A common stereotype of females is that they are weak in mathematics. This means that Asian-American women could be influenced by both notions.
In fact, they are. In a remarkable experiment, Margaret Shin, Todd Pittinsky, and Nalini Ambady asked Asian-American women to take an objective math exam. But first they divided the women into two groups. The women in one group were asked questions related to their gender. For example, they were asked about their opinions and preferences regarding coed dorms, thereby priming their thoughts for gender-related issues. The women in the second group were asked questions related to their race. These questions referred to the languages they knew, the languages they spoke at home, and their family’s history in the United States, thereby priming the women’s thoughts for race-related issues.
The performance of the two groups differed in a way that matched the stereotypes of both women and Asian-Americans. Those who had been reminded that they were women performed worse than those who had been reminded that they were Asian-American. These results show that even our own behavior can be influenced by our stereotypes, and that activation of stereotypes can depend on our current state of mind and how we view ourselves at the moment.
Perhaps even more astoundingly, stereotypes can also affect the behavior of people who are not even part of a stereotyped group. In one notable study, John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows had participants complete a scrambled-sentence task, rearranging the order of words to form sentences (we discussed this type of task in Chapter 4). For some of the participants, the task was based on words such as aggressive, rude, annoying, and intrude. For others, the task was based on words such as honor, considerate, polite, and sensitive. The goal of these two lists was to prime the participants to think about politeness or rudeness as a result of constructing sentences from these words (this is a very common technique in social psychology, and it works amazingly well).
After the participants completed the scrambled-sentence task, they went to another laboratory to participate in what was purportedly a second task. When they arrived at the second laboratory, they found the experimenter apparently in the midst of trying to explain the task to an uncomprehending participant who was just not getting it (this supposed participant was in fact not a real participant but a confederate working for the experimenter). How long do you think it took the real participants to interrupt the conversation and ask what they should do next?
The amount of waiting depended on what type of words had been involved in the scrambled-sentence task. Those who had worked with the set of polite words patiently waited for about 9.3 minutes before they interrupted, whereas those who had worked with the set of rude words waited only about 5.5 minutes before interrupting.
A second experiment tested the same general idea by priming the concept of the elderly, using words such as Florida, bingo, and ancient. After the participants in this experiment completed the scrambled-sentence task, they left the room, thinking that they had finished the experiment—but in fact the crux of the study was just beginning. What truly interested the researchers was how long it would take the participants to walk down the hallway as they left the building. Sure enough, the participants in the experimental group were affected by the “elderly” words: their walking speed was considerably slower than that of a control group who had not been primed. And remember, the primed participants were not themselves elderly people being reminded of their frailty—they were undergraduate students at NYU.
ALL THESE EXPERIMENTS teach us that expectations are more than the mere anticipation of a boost from a fizzy Coke. Expectations enable us to make sense of a conversation in a noisy room, despite the loss of a word here and there, and likewise, to be able to read text messages on our cell phones, despite the fact that some of the words are scrambled. And although expectations can make us look foolish from time to time, they are also very powerful and useful.
So what about our football fans and the game-winning pass? Although both friends were watching the same game, they were doing so through markedly different lenses. One saw the pass as in bounds. The other saw it as out. In sports, such arguments are not particularly damaging—in fact, they can be fun. The problem is that these same biased processes can influence how we experience other aspects of our world. These biased processes are in fact a major source of escalation in almost every conflict, whether Israeli-Palestinian, American-Iraqi, Serbian-Croatian, or Indian-Pakistani.
In all these conflicts, individuals from both sides can read similar history books and even have the same facts taught to them, yet it is very unusual to find individuals who would agree about who started the conflict, who is to blame, who should make the next concession, etc. In such matters, our investment in our beliefs is much stronger than any affiliation to sport teams, and so we hold on to these beliefs tenaciously. Thus the likelihood of agreement about “the facts” becomes smaller and smaller as personal investment in the problem grows. This is clearly disturbing. We like to think that sitting at the same table together will help us hammer out our differences and that concessions will soon follow. But history has shown us that this is an unlikely outcome; and now we know the reason for this catastrophic failure.
But there’s reason for hope. In our experiments, tasting beer without knowing about the vinegar, or learning about the vinegar after the beer was tasted, allowed the true flavor to come out. The same approach should be used to settle arguments: The perspective of each side is presented without the affiliation—the facts are revealed, but not which party took which actions. This type of “blind” condition might help us better recognize the truth.
When stripping away our preconceptions and our previous knowledge is not possible, perhaps we can at least acknowledge that we are all biased. If we acknowledge that we are trapped within our perspective, which partially blinds us to the truth, we may be able to accept the idea that conflicts generally require a neutral third party—who has not been tainted with our expectations—to set down the rules and regulations. Of course, accepting the word of a third party is not easy and not always possible; but when it is possible, it can yield substantial benefits. And for that reason alone, we must continue to try.
Reflections on Expectations: Music and Food
Imagine walking into a truck stop off a deserted stretch of Interstate 95 at nine o’clock in the evening. You’ve been driving for six hours. You are tired and still have a long drive ahead of you. You need a bite to eat and want to be out of the car for a bit, so you walk into what appears to be a restaurant of sorts. It has the usual cracked-vinyl-covered booths and fluorescent lighting. The coffee-stained tabletops leave you a bit wary. Still, you think, “Fine, no one can screw up a hamburger that badly.” You reach for the menu, conveniently stashed behind an empty napkin dispenser, only to discover this is no ordinary greasy spoon. Instead of hamburgers and chicken sandwiches, you’re astonished to see that the menu offers foie gras au torchon, truffle pâté with frisée and fennel marmalade, gougères with duck confit, quail à la crapaudine, and so on.
Items like this would be no surprise in even a small Manhattan restaurant, of course. And it is possible that the chef got tired of Manhattan, moved to the middle of nowhere, and now cooks for whoever happens through. So is there a key difference between