The Power of Stereotypes

From ABC's 20/20 courtesy of Throw away your TV:

One study showed that women who watched commercials with stereotypical ditzy females before taking a math test scored 38 percent lower than women who didn't see the ads. The Kaplan Education and Test Prep company helped us run similar tests.

And sure enough: Even in our unscientific test, the women who viewed the sexist commercials did worse.

This stereotype effect has been found in study after study, said New York University psychology professor Joshua Aronson

"We found that just reminding the women that they were college students at a selective college overcame the gender gap. However, when we reminded them that they were women, the gap widens," Aronson said.

Aronson said that when he reminds Asians that Asians do well in math, their scores go up.

Then what does the stereotype that blacks test poorly do to a black person about to take a test?

"The situation of taking an IQ test for a black kid is so loaded that it's not a direct measure of their intelligence," Aronson said.

He found he could change blacks' scores simply by what he told them before the test.

Click here for the rest.

I'm not at all a big fan of 20/20, especially one of this article's writers, John Stossel, who isn't much more than an apologist for the ravages of free market fundamentalism, but every now and then they get it right, and this is one of those instances. I remember years ago when I was a teenager how I adamantly took the view that movies, music, and television don't affect people's behavior--I had to take such a position because I was worried about being told what kind of art I could and couldn't experience; such is the life of a suburban teen. Years later, especially after taking RTF classes at the University of Texas, I had to change my opinion to some extent.

Even though the mythical effect of satanic rock music on kids is by and large untrue (that is, kid listens to Marilyn Manson and then, as a result, kid decides to shoot up his school), although there are isolated instances of somebody who was already a psycho taking inspiration from what he sees or hears, the real problem with the influence of entertainment media is the overall context it creates in society. When our culture is overflowing with images of, say, stupid women, such a message seeps in, under people's radar screens as it were, and before you know it, people tend to believe in such fantasies, all the while intellectually rejecting them. In other words, people both believe and reject media stereotypes at the same time, and get caught up in shifting back and forth between the two points of view. The inevitable result is our fucked up country, which strongly believes in equality, but also believes in inequality.

The long and short of all this is that the problem with stereotyping and other negative media influences isn't as simple as the binary choice between "has an effect" and "doesn't have an effect." There is an effect, but it's indirect, and can be rejected if we're on our guard. What makes it all so hellish is that it's pretty damned difficult to always be on guard, especially in a media saturated culture such as ours.

Short of somehow destroying Hollywood, I have absolutely no solution for this mess.

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