Not long ago, as part of an experiment, an American psychologist named Sian Beilock recruited a number of female university students and asked them to take a maths test. (Sometimes it seems as if the whole of social psychology is built on research among students, which you'd have thought might skew the discipline's insight into the human condition in some vaguely amusing ways. But I digress.) The women were divided into two groups, one of which was told that the purpose of the research was to understand why men, in general, do better than women at maths. The other group was given no such explanation. Here's what happened: the students who were reminded of the stereotype that women are worse at maths did worse at maths, performing 10-15% less well than the others.
The reason for their poor showing, Beilock argued, was the phenomenon known as "stereotype threat" - the way anxiety stops us succeeding precisely because we know we're expected to fail. This is surely one of the brain's most frustratingly self-defeating characteristics: it means that stereotypes about what certain people can do, however unjustified to begin with, become true because they eat away at us; we make them real. The same happened when elderly people were asked to do memory exercises: those who'd been reminded that memory declines with age proved more forgetful. You don't even need to be reminded about the stereotype in detail: merely asking school children to tick a box to indicate their ethnicity, before completing an intellectual ability test, causes black pupils to do worse than if there's no tick box. (Interestingly, this can enhance performance, too: according to research reported in Scientific American Mind magazine, south-east Asian women at one US university did badly in maths tests when reminded that they were women, but much better when reminded that they were south-east Asian, and therefore presumed - according to stereotype - to be good at maths.)
Stereotype threat is doubtless most pronounced where race and gender are concerned, and maybe it's frivolous to leap from these big questions of social discrimination to more minor matters. Even so, it's a little troubling to speculate whether many of us, whatever our race or gender, might not be subconsciously sabotaging ourselves because we've internalised the belief that being a certain sort of person entails demonstrating certain characteristics: that being retired, for example, must mean gradually becoming less and less active.
And perhaps, on reflection, this is the one sense in which I'm prepared to accept there might be some validity in that scandalously bestselling work of nonsense, The Secret. Expectations can indeed become reality, just as the book claims. The problem is, it's other people's conventional expectations we're living up to - and more often than not, we're living down to them, instead of up.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
