Stereotyping as Inductive Hypothesis Testing

Klaus Fiedler, Eva Walther

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135471040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Traditional social hypotheses have a built-in tendency to verify themselves and so involuntarily resist attempts at stereotype change or correction. This is the insight demonstrated and discussed as the start point for an alternative approach to the problem of stereotyping and hypothesis testing. Stereotyping as Inductive Hypothesis Testing explicates the proposition that many stereotypes originate not so much in individual brains, but in the stimulus environment that interacts with and constitutes the social individual. This cognitive-ecological approach is then used to analyse the different aspects of language, sign systems and communication that can implicitly govern hypothesis testing procedures and lead to circular or reinforcing outcomes. The authors describe factors in tests such as judgment, memory and expectation and go on to suggest viable ecological learning approaches to them. An original research project based on a classroom situation is used to demonstrate and verify findings. The cognitive-ecological approach is then contextualised in relation to both the traditional approaches it can replace and the contemporary statistical sampling practices it can improve. Written with a profound understanding of the link between theoretical rigour and good empirical research practice this monograph will be invaluable to anyone with an interest in stereotyping or who wishes to enhance the reliability and self-awareness of their research methods.

1 The topic of social hypothesis testing

At the end of a recently held seminar on the topic of this volume, social hypothesis testing, some ambitious students confessed that they had been initially threatened by the seminar announcement, expecting mainly formal statistics and methodology. Although they learned, later on, that models borrowed from statistics were indeed not irrelevant, they nevertheless discovered an extremely exciting topic behind the title. Research on social hypothesis testing is at the heart of many intriguing phenomena that have occupied scholars in social psychology, cognitive psychology, and decision making for many decades. It tells stories about cognitive fallacies and shortcomings, collective illusions, and sources of stereotypes and superstition, but also stories about adaptive cognition and amazing subtleties of information processing and communication.

Moreover, seminar participants ought to have noticed, as a side effect, that being concerned with the psychology of social hypothesis testing in everyday settings raises critical thinking and emancipation with regard to societal hypothesis testing. As one begins to understand the formation and persistence of stereotypes (e.g., about ethnic groups, gender, mentally ill people, homosexuals, etc.) as a consequence of hypothesis testing, one inevitably becomes more skeptical in judging how political, economical, and educational hypotheses are treated in public. An emancipated student of hypothesis testing may begin to reconsider the epistemological status of such societal issues as: the enhanced criminality rates of fugitives, the alleged superiority of boys over girls in mathematics and science, the impact of salary level on economic growth, the influence of highway speed restrictions on ozone intoxication, or many beliefs about stigmatized or marginalized groups such as gay people, physically handicapped, or psychotics. Note that many of these everyday hypotheses refer to ill-founded beliefs lacking any strong evidence or solid ground: Some of these hypothetical beliefs may even turn out to be completely false and misleading, reflecting a collective bias in hypothesis testing. In the remainder of this volume, however, we are mainly concerned with hypothesis-testing processes in the context of social stereotypes

Last but not least, participants in our seminar may have noticed that the same lesson can be expanded to scientific hypothesis testing. After all, the way in which researchers favor, or even fall in love with, certain hypotheses, while ignoring others, is only slightly different from the symptoms of the everyday lay hypothesis tester. The history of many theories covered by the present book provides vivid examples for this claim. Just like a persistent, hard to abolish stereotype, many common claims and theories would persist for decades, often in the face of strong contradictory evidence, simply because researchers are reluctant or sometimes even resistant to consider alternative hypotheses

In the present volume, to repeat, we delineate the common characteristics of hypothesis testing with special reference to the formation and maintenance of social stereotypes. The overarching theme connecting all following chapters is the claim that social hypotheses appear to have a built-in device for verification. Merely considering or focusing on a hypothetical attribute suggested by a stereotype will often increase the belief that the focused attribute is really there (Fiedler, 2000c; Gilbert, 1989; Snyder, 1984). Considering one explanation for an observed phenomenon often entails blindness to other possible explanations. Let us illustrate this phenomenon with a well-known experiment conducted by Mark Snyder and his colleagues (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977) on the what-is-beautiful-is-good stereotype (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). Male college students were shown a photograph of an unknown female student with whom they would supposedly have a telephone conversation. In one condition, participants were shown a highly attractive woman, whereas in another condition the woman on the picture was less attractive. In actuality, both groups held a telephone conversation with a randomly paired female student. Later analyses of the phone calls demonstrated that those men who thought they were interacting with an attractive woman behaved in a more sociable, outgoing, self-confident, and warm fashion than men in the other group. Interestingly, the women in turn matched the positive interaction style when they interacted with a partner who thought they were attractive, in contrast to those who talked with men who did not think they were attractive.

The genuinely social nature of this experimental setting highlights the interplay of several factors that can potentially contribute to the process of hypothesis testing and verification. On the one hand, the hypothesis testers’ stereotypical expectations and his one-sided information search (i.e., looking for sympathetic properties in allegedly attractive females) may play an important role. Moreover, the hypothesis tester’s need to form a consistent impression may lead him to discount disconfirming (i.e., unfriendly) reactions and observations. On the other hand, the behavior of the female target is no less important. Being flattered by the charming utterances of the male, females will often cooperate and reciprocate the style of the interaction partner. In doing so, they comply with conversational norms and situational demands. However, interestingly, even when the female target does not confirm the male’s expectations, merely imagining and mentally simulating how an attractive person might behave will provide surrogate evidence for the guiding stereotype that attractive people are high in social skills.

Apparently, then, the reasons why social interaction will often end up with hypothesis confirmation are manifold. Some of these reasons are intuitively plausible and not very surprising. Other reasons, however, are not visible at first sight and would hardly be discovered without experimental research—and without a clearly spelled out theoretical framework. What Snyder and colleagues demonstrated in their experimental setting holds true for scientific inquiry and everyday reasoning alike. Researchers do not like to face alternative hypotheses that could challenge their preferred hypothesis; likewise, politicians, physicians, decision makers, or jurors would rather avoid and suppress alternative hypotheses than face them.

Don’t round up the usual suspects

However, it is quite interesting that under certain conditions we are not that blind for alternative hypotheses, suggesting that we are not concerned here with an absolute restriction of the human mind. People who are trained in “hypothesis-testing games” may develop a problem-solving set that makes them sensitive to alternative, sometimes even far-fetched, hypotheses. For example, somebody whose primary hobby is solving detective-story puzzles may have acquired a chronic strategy not to believe in the most plausible, best-fitting hypothesis. Such an individual would rather look out for uncommon solutions that often require to abstract from salient but misleading features of the story. Indeed, one goal of the present book is to encourage the reader to take a similar perspective as the whodunit reader and look out for alternative hypotheses—both in science and everyday encounters. Thus, we want to impart a perspective that goes beyond the usual suspects. Maybe, this was also the take-home message that the seminar participants gained from the course in social hypothesis testing.

The mentioned experiment on social perception and attraction clearly speaks to social psychological process of stereotyping. How can we carry over the essence of such experimental studies to more natural settings in which hypothesis testing is an even more complex endeavor? The reader is invited to recognize various analogies to the above experiment in the following short story. The narrative style of a short story will offer a more refined and embellished sketch of the many traps and misleading paths of hypothesis-testing processes in real life.

A short story

Professor Johnson was a little tense as he approached the huge porch of the building. After all, this was the first interview after he received tenure from his home university more than 15 years ago. He was well aware that he was neither attracted by the salary (which was only slightly higher than what he gets right now), nor by the busy atmosphere created by all these extremely young colleagues (actually, all these clever and ambitious young guys frightened him a little). No, after his divorce last year he just wanted to demonstrate to himself that he was not too old for a change, that he was still able to compete for a job, that he was still flexible enough to adapt to a different working place. He also held the tacit hope that a new start in a different city might help him to cope with the loneliness he experienced since Alice left him.

While all these thoughts were running through his mind, he was now waiting in the secretary’s room to meet the dean of the department who was supposed to be his first interview partner. Looking at his wristwatch for the third time in the last 2 minutes Professor Johnson nervously realized that he had to visit the bathroom. Because of construction work on this wing of the building, the secretary explained that he must leave the building, turn to the right, then to the left, walk for approximately. . . . Mr. Johnson tried to concentrate on this apparently endless description, but knowing that he was never good at spatial orientation he stopped listening after the fourth “to the left” and stumbled through the door. There he tried hard to remember at least the beginning of the description, and followed the sidewalk between two smaller buildings which he did not dare to enter because he was afraid that someone would realize that he was lost. Unfortunately, he met nobody to ask and after a while he desperately decided to relieve himself behind a bush. It was the same moment he was seen by Dr. Higgins, the new chief psychiatrist, who showed some members of the donation around the hospital. Fumbling at his trousers and trying to hide himself behind the thicket with an anxious expression in his eyes in the midst of the clinic bungalows, Professor Johnson presented the prototypical picture of a lunatic, who tries to steal away from the hospital.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Higgins, who are you?” Dr. Higgins cried in his most friendly voice with which he wished to impress the donation members. “I’m Professor Johnson,” Professor Johnson yelled back at him. “Of course you are, here are several professors and also kings and popes,” Dr. Higgins replied, and provoked a collective laughter in the group. “What are you doing Professor?” Dr. Higgins asked, now sure that this would be one of his more entertaining patients.

“I have an appointment with the Dean,” Professor Johnson answered faithfully. Laughter again,

“I’ll take you there,” Dr. Higgins promised after he briefly excused himself and guided Mr. Johnson to the ambulance. There Dr. Higgins handed over Professor Johnson to the nurse on duty. “Here is a new patient, I think paranoid-schizophrenic. Make the usual tests, I’ll take a look at him later,” he told the nurse, and left the room.

Ten minutes later Mr. Johnson tried to defend himself against the two male nurses who led him away to a small room. “I am Professor Johnson,” he shouted. “I have a very important appointment with the Dean. Let me go,” he yelled.

“You are in good company,” one of the male nurses remarked. “We have two other professors here on the ward.” “Yes,” the other one giggled, “you can hold conferences.”

One hour later, an exhausted-looking Professor Johnson was sitting vis-à-vis the diagnostician in the interview room, a nurse bending over her memo-pad behind him. “If I cooperate and answer all questions truthfully, they must realize that I am a real Professor and let me go,” Prof. Johnson said to himself, feeling new hope that this horror would end soon.

“Who are you?” the diagnostician started the interview.

“I repeat it for the thirteenth time, I am Professor Johnson,” he answered, hardly able to suppress his impatience. “I am Professor Johnson and I have a very important appointment right now with Dean.”

“Do you often lose your temper, Mr. Johnson?” the physician asked.

The—admittedly far-fetched, but not at all unrealistic—short story about the sane person in an insane place illustrates a number of important points concerning the vicissitudes of social hypothesis testing. First, we can see the distinction between three roles, or participants in the social interaction: the agent (diagnostician) who runs the hypothesis test; the target person (Professor Johnson) whose behavior is the focus of the test; and the passive observer (the nurse), who perceives the agent’s interaction with the target. All three roles participate in a characteristic fashion. The agent promotes the confirmation of the hypothesis that the target person is psychotic in the way he conducts the interview, interprets the patient’s utterances, retrieves information from memory and from inferences shaped by prior knowledge. The target himself facilitates the confirmation process in that he provides responses that match (though they try to disconfirm) the assumptions underlying the question, and by his own self-doubts and reactions to the psychiatric terror. Last but not least, the nurse who only kept the record in the observer role cannot help but adopt a similar impression, namely that this person is obviously of the same kind as most other mad patients in the hospital. After all, that’s why this person was sent to hospital. Madness is thus a suitable baseline hypothesis in the given environment. Notably, however, the nurse does not remain totally passive. Eventually, she also takes on an active role in that she communicates with other people (e.g., staff) and thereby spreads the confirmed hypothesis that has now become social reality.

The story also conveys a sketch of the psychological process stages that determine the outcome of hypothesis testing. First and foremost, the whole process of information search is guided by the suspicion that the target person is psychotic. Although Professor Johnson’s behavior is sort of unusual, it would not have instigated the impression of a lunatic in a context different from a psychiatric hospital. But the mere context of behavior provides cues that lead to a certain hypothesis. Based on this starting hypothesis, the diagnostician asks test questions, figuring out whether the target is irritated, mentally confused, or paranoid. One might have also asked questions about his sufficient characteristics, assets, or skills, but for pragmatic reasons the clinical staff cannot pursue all plausible hypotheses and have to confine themselves to the one hypothesis that is most plausible in the given context. As time and resources are restricted in a hospital, and as the goal of this institution is to diagnose psychiatric illness rather than adaptive behavior or social skills, it is very likely that agents concentrate on psychiatric hypotheses. Thus, concentrating on information that matches the focal hypothesis—a process called positive testing (Klayman & Ha, 1987)—is not even irrational or narrow-minded; it is a natural consequence of the institutional environment.

Second, the agent engages in schema-consistent encoding of the target’s utterances and behaviors. Based on the agent’s prior knowledge (i.e., psychiatric education), he interprets very common and harmless utterances as constituents of pathological episodes, going way beyond the information given. Such inferences need not be driven by negative motives or instrumental goals. Drawing inference is what all experts are expected to do; that is, a professional diagnostician has to interpret observed behaviors as symptoms of pathological laws. Of course, another agent, with a different objective in mind and with different background knowledge (e.g., whodunit reader), might have drawn different inferences, being attentive to the rather unlikely hypothesis that sometimes a sane person happens to intrude a psychiatric hospital. However, from the psychiatrist’s point of view, the pathological inferences drawn from the present patient’s behavior suggest themselves, and may even be justified.

A third process is accentuation. The perceived difference between the target under focus and the comparison standard of a normal person is accentuated, because the target person not only deviates in his behavior but also in his appearance, his language, and his biography. Such a coincidence of several distinctive features serves to increase the perceived distance of the target from other persons, even when the correlated distinctions as such are of restricted diagnostic value (Corneille & Judd, 1999; Eiser & Stroebe, 1972; Krueger & Rothbart, 1990; Tajfel,1957).

Another characteristic process is the tendency to discount, or interpret away many observations that are incompatible with the picture of a psychotic person. For example, the target’s apparent insider information about psychiatry and his normal responses on a projective test might be compatible with the notion that he is a normal patient. But it was quite easy to maintain the hypothesis, assuming that this patient belongs to a subtype of psychotics who exhibit many normal intellectual functions. This type of discounting or immunization from disconfirming evidence is commonly referred to as subtyping in research on stereotyping (Johnston & Hewstone, 1992; Kunda & Oleson, 1995; Rothbart & John, 1985; Maurer, Park, & Rothbart, 1995).

As time passes by and the agent meets the target again the next day, selective memory comes into play. For several reasons, it may happen that the agent can remember more details of yesterday’s interview that fit the hypothesis than details that do not fit. In the meantime, the evidence was even enriched with constructive memory intrusions. For instance, the agent has thought about the new patient overnight and considered some interview questions he might have asked, but did not. In doing so, the agent has thought of potential answers that the target may have given, and these self-generated fantasies have also been integrated in the overall memory representation. Later on, the agent was no longer sure which part of this representation was based on actual observations and which part was due to constructive intrusions.

A related, very serious source of bias in hypothesis testing is the agent’s meta-cognitive blindness for external constraints. For example, that the target speaks about his success as a “professor” is counted as further evidence for a psychotic cause, although the agent ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• 1. The Topic of Social Hypothesis Testing
• 2. Stereotyping As a Cognitive-Environmental Learning Process: Delineating the Conceptual Framework
• 3. Learning Social Hypotheses: Stereotypes As Illusory Correlations
• 4. The Auto-Verification of Social Hypotheses
• 5. Information Search In the “Inner World”: Stereotype Origins In Constructive Memory
• 6. Testing Social Hypotheses In Tri-Variate Problem Space: Further Variants of Environmental Stereotype Learning
• 7. Explicit and Implicit Hypothesis Testing In a Complex Environment
• 8. The Vicissitudes of Information Sampling In a Fallible Environment: An Integrative Framework
• 9. Epilogue: Locating CELA In Modern Stereotype Research
• References