TOADtalk: The Power of Perception

You come back to your room after check-in on a Friday night, and you and a friend fire up Netflix to put on your favorite show. Because you have excellent taste in TV, your favorite show, of course, is the sublime new TV action drama: Orange is the Anatomy of Silicon Thrones. As you watch, the main character is engrossed in a deep conversation when all of a sudden the phone rings. Dum dum dum! Oh no—a phone call. What does it mean? You feel a trickle of dread. Did somebody die? A car accident? Dire financial news? Whatever it is, you know the plot will turn on the outcome of this phone call. It certainly won’t be a telemarketer, or a political robo-call, or a wrong number, or a friendly call from Mom.

This is an example of a literary principle known as “Chekhov’s Gun.” The great playwright Anton Chekhov gave this advice to aspiring writers: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the 2^nd or 3^rd chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

There are plenty of other examples of this concept. If a character in a movie appears unusually quiet and gloomy for just thirty seconds, that means that he or she is utterly morose, unable to move on from some scarring incident, or completely lost in life. In real life, when somebody seems down in the dumps for thirty seconds, that person is probably just having a bad day or even just a tough moment. Another example: if a character on screen takes a pill from a bottle of prescription medication, you infer death or addiction. TV characters taking pills usually aren’t simply completing their five-day cycle of Z-Pac antibiotic.

Television, movies, books, plays—really, all forms of literature, all forms of storytelling—teach us to make big judgments based upon tiny signals. In fact, we are rewarded for doing so, as perceptive viewers can successfully solve the mystery being presented before them. And as human beings, we’re good at doing this. We are pattern-recognizing machines. Identifying themes and making judgments based on small clues allowed the cavemen to avoid the proverbial saber-toothed tiger.

There is a man named Dr. Steven Jones who has been to campus a few times in the last couple of years to talk to faculty, staff, and some students. He is a diversity consultant, and he has helped many of us to improve our understanding of identity groups. One of his ideas provides a particularly interesting lens through which to view this topic. He says that ninety percent of who you are is invisible to others. Even your best friends can't relate to a great majority of what makes up your overall character: the childhood memories that changed your beliefs, the stew of emotions that informs how you are feeling right at the moment, etc. At a small school and a tight community like ours, we feel as if we know each other really well, and in some ways we really do. But there is an enormous part of who we each are as individuals that nobody else sees. And yet, we make 90 percent of our judgments about other people based on the 10 percent that we do see.

In 2015 our culture is obsessed with celebrities: artists, politicians, athletes, etc. These are real people, but they seem to exist only for our entertainment; they have real lives, but those lives play out for our consumption like characters from a novel. This is usually a conscious choice on their part, as celebrities work to “brand” themselves, to sand off the rough edges and present themselves in a very carefully crafted, media-friendly way. Think about this: do you have a generally positive, negative, or neutral impression of LeBron James? You probably have an opinion, right? What about Taylor Swift? A colleague recently said to me, “If you’re an American, you’re pretty much obligated to like Taylor Swift.” I actually don’t personally have any opinion about Taylor Swift, but when I heard that, the contrarian in me immediately rebelled against the idea of liking her music. And so it gave me a laugh when a week later, I encountered an Internet article entitled, “Why is everyone so annoyed with Taylor Swift right now?” To me, at least, it feels as if there’s pressure upon us to choose a stance, not simply to live and let live.

We are trained to pass judgment quickly on celebrities based on a snap decision. Once a person is sufficiently famous, we are supposed to have an opinion as to whether or not we like him or her. And once we have put our flag in the ground, we aren’t supposed to move it. Flip-flopping your opinions on famous people is socially frowned upon. You are supposed to use your pattern-recognizing abilities to rush to judgment and stick to your guns. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that celebrities are actual people, with actual lives in the world. It is obvious to us that the non-celebrity “real” people that we interact with in our lives deserve better than instant and irredeemable assumptions. But where exactly does the distinction lie?

I’d like to give you another example of a very different area in which our capacity to recognize patterns can have significant consequences. For the last twenty-five years or so, social psychologists have been studying a phenomenon called “stereotype threat,” which is a boring name for an utterly fascinating phenomenon. This summer, I read a book about this concept entitled Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele, and I highly recommend it. The concept of stereotype threat is this: simply being at risk for group stigmatization interferes with performance, even when all else is held equal.

Let me give you a few examples. A group of researchers set up a mini golf course and brought in white and African-American college students to play on the course. They divided these students into two groups. One group was simply told to go ahead and play; the researchers recorded their scores on the course. The other group was told that the experiment was a test measuring “natural athletic ability.” Those brief instructions marked the only difference between the two groups. White students in this second group (the ones told that the experiment measured “natural athletic ability”) scored significantly worse than white students who were given no particular information about the experiment, and significantly lower than the African-American students. On the other hand, the white students who did not hear anything about “natural athletic ability” earned scores just as good as those of the African-American students. Isn’t that amazing? Those three words were the only difference between the two groups of white students, and yet white students who heard them were worse at mini golf. Meanwhile, the two separate groups of African-American students earned exactly the same scores. Researchers hypothesized that this was because there is no existing stereotype that casts African-Americans as naturally inferior athletes. So unlike for the white students, for black students there was no cloud in the air of traditionally negative assumptions regarding athleticism; there was no potential negative bias for them to have to live down, no pressure to disprove a limiting stereotype.

Here is another example. You may know that in some places, women in higher education experience a chilly climate in advanced math classes. I don’t think that this climate occurs here at Thacher; I certainly hope not. But in some places, women in higher math classes report feeling that their abilities are under suspicion, and that they perpetually have to prove themselves.

In order to test for stereotype threat in this situation, researchers gave equally qualified male and female students a difficult math test. These researchers attempted to present the test in a way that made the cultural stereotype about women’s math ability irrelevant to their performance. Again, the only difference between the experimental and the control group was the instructions. One group was simply given the test and asked to complete it. The other group heard the following: “You may have heard that women don’t do as well as men on difficult standardized math tests, but that’s not true for this particular standardized math test. On this particular test, women do just as well as men.” The women who did not hear these extra instructions earned lower scores than the male students. The women who did hear these additional instructions? They earned scores that were just as high as the men. All it took was for somebody to tell them that there was no risk of negative judgments on this particular test, and the cloud of stereotype threat over their heads dissipated. The achievement gap simply disappeared.

Later experiments confirmed these same results in a variety of different situations. In particular, they focused on stereotype threat as a potential root cause of underachievement by minority groups in higher education—a major point of interest for researchers in first developing this concept. Researchers into stereotype threat have replicated their studies hundreds of times in a wide variety of different contexts, and they have used control groups to show that this occurs even in the absence of any explicit bias. This is pretty incredible to think about!

In adding up all the information I have thrown at you in the course of this talk, I honestly have no simple solution to tell you what it all means. Oversimplifying this topic would be a dangerous exercise, because human stereotyping is a complicated matter. We see patterns and make assumptions easily and quickly, and that is often a very good thing. It’s extremely useful for problem solving; in fact, without the ability to recognize similarities to previous experiences and to apply prior knowledge, we would be functionally useless at handling new challenges. Pattern recognition is a great gift. But this gift can have unintended consequences; we can rush to judgment in destructive ways, and we’re painfully aware that other people can do so, as well.

Here are some ideas I hope you will take away from this talk. First, try to be aware of the ways in which you tend to be judgmental. Second, try to be aware of your own anxieties about other people’s judgments, and aspire to be comfortable in your own skin. And third, work to recognize more of that 90 percent below the surface of those around you—the hidden depth of character in every member of our community.