Men Who Look Smart and Women Who Look Attractive Are Judged as More Human

Debates and discussions about gender now seem to be a mainstay in public consciousness. Our understanding of gender has been nudged and pulled, often through intense debate. As a result, changing ideas about gender now reverberate throughout daily life, affecting family dynamics, workplaces, and romantic relationships. In short, Western culture’s views regarding men and women seem to be changing.

It was not too long ago that men were viewed as breadwinners and women as homemakers. Prominent examples of caring men and competent women are now challenging these stereotypes, however. For instance, studies show that men are progressively taking on more domestic and parental duties compared to men of the past. At the same time, women now graduate from college in greater numbers than men do and occupy approximately one-third of senior management positions (for the first time in modern Western history).

But The Stereotypes Are Still There

With all this change, my colleagues and I asked how traditional views about men and women might still affect how they are judged based on two qualities often linked to gender: attractiveness (traditionally associated with the female gender) and intelligence (traditionally associated with the male gender). People likely still value attractiveness especially in women and intelligence especially in men.

Judging How “Human” A Person Is

Our way of getting at lingering stereotypes was to examine whether how “human” men and women appear depends on how attractive and intelligent they look. Why would we ask this—after all, isn’t everyone human? While the idea that some people may seem more or less human than others may sound strange at first, it actually has been investigated for decades. And equally notable, the rejection of another’s humanness, also called dehumanization, emerges in daily life. For instance, Nazis dehumanized Jews, calling them Untermenschen (“subhuman”); Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches” during the Rwanda genocide; and slave ownership denigrated certain humans by definition.

Dehumanization is not a phenomenon that occurs only in such extreme historical examples, however. Everyday life has examples, such as in how we will often pass a homeless person on the street without any emotional impact or how drivers impassioned by road rage can treat fellow drivers like pylons in the way.

Back To Attractiveness And Intelligence

Because of stereotypes, we proposed that people would judge attractive women as more human than unattractive women, and judge intelligent-looking men as more human than unintelligent-looking men. To study this, we took photos of 206 women’s and 206 men’s faces. We then had strangers judge those photos for how attractive and intelligent each woman and man looked. We now had a set of faces to use for our main studies.

Testing For Humanness

We then asked another group of strangers to judge those same men and women on how “human” they appeared using a scale ranging from 0 (with an associated picture of a crawling ancestral primate) to 100 (with an associated picture of an upright man). We found what we expected: the more attractive the women looked, the more human they were judged to be, and the more intelligent the men looked, the more human they were judged to be. This isn’t to say that attractiveness didn’t matter for men’s humanness or that appearing intelligent didn’t matter for women’s humanness. However, we observed that looking attractive mattered more for women’s humanness than it did for men’s, and appearing intelligent mattered more for men’s humanness than it did for women’s.

In followup studies, we asked another group of strangers to make the same humanness ratings, but they also completed a scale measuring how much they endorse traditional gender stereotypes. We found that the more a rater endorsed traditional gender stereotypes, the more they cared about women’s attractiveness when rating women’s humanness and the more they cared about men’s perceived intelligence when rating men’s humanness.

In our final study, we again presented the face photos to strangers, but with a twist. Instead of asking raters to judge the faces on how human they seemed, we described a hypothetical ethical dilemma: Raters could either save the life of the individual photographed and allow five others to die, or they could sacrifice the life of the individual photographed to save the life of five others. We found that people were most willing to sacrifice the lives of unattractive women and of unintelligent-looking men, consistent with the idea that such individuals are viewed as less human and therefore more expendable.

Despite the great progress that has been made regarding gender values, traditional views about men and women remain impactful. People still pervasively value women more for their attractiveness and value men more for their intelligence. These stereotypical gender values are so deeply entrenched that they influence how “human” men and women seem. Even more, they influence the apparent worth of men and women’s lives.


For Further Reading

Alaei, R., Deska J. C., Hugenberg, K., & Rule, N. O. (2021). People attribute humanness to men and women differently based on their facial appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000364.

Haslam, N., & Loughnan, S. (2014). Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 65(1), 399–423. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115045.

 

Ravin Alaei is a medical student at McMaster University. He obtained his PhD in psychology in 2019 from the University of Toronto and is interested in how one’s appearance and nonverbal behavior affect their social outcomes.

Pervasive Gender Stereotypes about Intelligence in the United States and Beyond

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Who’s more brilliant—men or women? Although this question is crass and usually not asked explicitly, questions like this often operate behind the scenes in people’s minds.  The answer to such a question may have serious consequences for people in the real world. If an employer is evaluating two equally-qualified candidates—one male and one female—that employer is likely to rely on his or her beliefs about men and women when making a decision on who to hire.

A few years ago, I and a few of my colleagues at the University of Illinois and Princeton University started to look into whether a stereotype exists that associates intellectual giftedness with men more than with women. Specifically, we looked at the language that college students use to describe their professors on the popular teacher evaluation website www.RateMyProfessors.com.

What we found was striking: In every academic field, students described their male professors with terms such as “brilliant” and “genius” more often than their female professors—even in fields with more female professors! At the same time, students didn’t differ in their use of the words “excellent” and “amazing” when describing male and female professors. According to students, male and female professors are equally effective in their teaching—but the male professors are more likely to be brilliant.   

In light of these findings, we decided to examine this “brilliance = men” stereotype more directly. We wanted to confirm that the stereotype exists and, if so, to understand how pervasive that stereotype might be.

A challenge in researching stereotypes is that people are generally not willing to admit that they  hold negative stereotypes and, in fact, may not even be aware that they do so.  As a result, we used a task that doesn’t require research participants to answer any questions at all. In fact, all they have to do is sort!

In this “Implicit Association Test” (or IAT, which you can take yourself at https://implicit.harvard.edu), participants were presented with images or words on a computer screen that related to one of four categories: male, female, genius, or some comparison trait (such as creative, friendly, or funny, depending on the study). When an item from one of these four categories popped up on a participant’s screen, the participant simply had to sort that item into its appropriate category (to the left or right) by pressing keys on the keyboard.

image showing two example trials of task described in article

The image above shows two example trials of this task. In both cases, the participant would need to sort the presented item—either the photo of the man or the word “brilliant”— to the left because the image of the face fits into the category “Male” and the word brilliant fits into the category “Genius,” and both of these categories are located on the left side of the screen for these trials.

Notice which categories are paired together in the two trials. On the left example, “Male” and “Genius” are both on the same side. On the right example, “Female” and “Genius” are instead together. These pairings are important. The idea behind the task is that, if a bias exists in favor of men’s intelligence, the trial on the left will be much easier than the trial on the right. That is, if a person believes that men are more intellectually gifted than women, sorting the “genius” words with the male faces will be easier than sorting the “genius” words with the female faces.  

By measuring how long it takes for participants to sort each item and by tracking how many mistakes participants make, we can pick up on participants’ gender biases without actually explicitly asking them anything!

We used different variations of this task in a variety of different groups of participants. In one study, we recruited adults from across the United States online. In another study, we recruited college students from the University of Illinois and New York University. We then tried this task on 9- and 10-year-old children, and we conducted an international study with adults from 78 countries in seven geographic regions of the world: Eastern and Southeastern Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia, Western Asia, and Western Europe.

In all of these studies—for adults and children in the United States, college students, and adults internationally—we found that people consistently tended to associate “brilliance” and “genius” more with men than with women. These results point to a pervasive and insidious stereotype against women’s intellectual abilities and in favor of men’s.

These disheartening results may have implications for women’s representation in higher education (especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields that are often said to require intellectual giftedness), career prospects, and more. Additional research is needed to understand the sources of these stereotypes about intelligence and their implications for men and women alike.


For Further Reading

Storage, D., Charlesworth, T., Banaji, M., Leslie, S. J., & Cimpian, A. (2020). Adults and Children Implicitly Associate Brilliance with Men more than Women. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 90, 104020.

Storage, D., Horne, Z., Cimpian, A., & Leslie, S. J. (2016). The Frequency of “Brilliant” and “Genius” in Teaching Evaluations Predicts the Representation of Women and African Americans across Fields. PLOS ONE 11(3): e0150194. Available at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0150194

Leslie, S. J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262–265.

Bian, L., Leslie, S. J., & Cimpian, A. (2017). Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children's interests. Science355(6323), 389–391. 

 

Dr. Daniel Storage is a professor at the University of Denver. His research program focuses on the causes of underrepresentation of both women and racial/ethnic minority groups, particularly in higher education.

 

Choosing a College Major: “How Brilliant Am I?”

What factors shape college students' decisions to major in one field rather than another? Students may consider many things when deciding what to study in college, including what they're interested in, whether they have role models in the field, and how capable they are.

Regardless of their actual abilities, students have beliefs about intelligence and stereotypes about who is intelligent. These beliefs may affect what they choose to major in. Furthermore, people of different genders may be impacted differently by those beliefs and stereotypes.

Beliefs about brilliance (very high levels of intelligence) can shape students' choices of an academic major and their trajectory in and after college. Specifically, people judge whether a major is a good fit for them by comparing how brilliant they are (or others think they are) to the brilliance they assume is required to succeed in that field. Unfortunately, the gender stereotype about brilliance—that men can be brilliant, but women cannot be brilliant—discourages women from majoring in fields assumed to require brilliance. Women may internalize this stereotype and avoid majors they think require brilliance.

Another belief about intelligence concerns whether it is innate and unchangeable or malleable. If you believe that you can't change how smart you are no matter how hard you work, you have a fixed mindset. In contrast, if you believe that you can work hard, learn, and increase your intelligence over time, you have a growth mindset. Some researchers have proposed that women tend to have fixed mindsets, which discourages them from majoring in certain fields.

Understanding college major choice is complicated by the many ways that academic fields differ. To better understand how beliefs and stereotypes about intelligence contribute to major choice, we focused on two fields that have many similarities: psychology and philosophy. These two fields share a common history and considerable subject matter overlap (for example, the study of human nature, the mind, ethics, group dynamics, knowledge, perceptions of reality, moral decision-making).

We find it striking that, despite these similarities, the gender gaps in psychology and philosophy go in opposite directions. Many more women study and work in psychology, and many more men study and work in philosophy. We wondered whether brilliance beliefs, fixed vs. growth mindsets, or both, could explain this pattern.

We collected data from 467 undergraduates enrolled in philosophy and psychology classes at universities in the United States and Canada. Students shared how much brilliance they think is required in psychology and philosophy, how brilliant they think they are (brilliance beliefs), how much they think people can get smarter through effort and over time (fixed vs. growth mindsets), and their GPAs coming into college.

As expected, there were more women than men in psychology but more men than women in philosophy. Despite having higher GPAs on average, women believed themselves to be low in brilliance, compared to men, who believed themselves to be high in brilliance. These lower brilliance beliefs explained why women opted to study psychology, which was rated as requiring lower brilliance, over philosophy, which was rated as requiring higher brilliance.

Fixed vs. growth mindsets about intelligence did not explain this pattern. In fact, women were more likely than men to view intelligence as something they could work hard to develop over time. Thus, it may not matter if you think you can work hard and improve your intelligence if society tells you that the highest level of intelligence (brilliance) is what matters most but is out of your reach.

Our findings suggest that internalized stereotypes about who can be brilliant, not beliefs that intelligence can be changed through effort, affect women's college major choice. Our findings also highlight problematic beliefs about psychology. Psychology requires the systematic thinking employed in philosophy plus the application of statistics and the scientific method. Therefore, it is not at all clear that success in psychology requires less brilliance than success in philosophy. For fields to attract people of diverse genders, it is important that stereotyped beliefs about brilliance—including who has it—change to reflect the truth. Women, too, can be brilliant.


For Further Reading

Maranges, H. M., Iannuccilli, M., Nieswandt, K., Hlobil, U., & Dunfield, K. (2023). Brilliance Beliefs, Not Mindsets, Explain Inverse Gender Gaps in Psychology and Philosophy. Sex Roles, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01406-5

Leslie, S.-J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 347(6219), 262–265. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261375

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.


Heather María Maranges is a researcher at Florida State University who studies what facilitates or undermines personal flourishing and social health, including cooperation and morality.

Who Is Wise?

Navigating through life is difficult and complicated. Problems often lack simple, well-defined solutions and instead require balancing myriad interests and caveats. To solve problems in real life, people call upon wisdom and seek those who are wise. Unlike someone who is just smart, a wise person is experienced in life and understands the human condition, knows how to balance multiple perspectives and interests, and is motivated to pursue truth and the common good. But who is wise? Does the proverbial "old sage" hold some truth to it? Do intelligent people have an edge in becoming wise? Most importantly, does wisdom really help people live a good life? Are wise people indeed happier?

These questions have been studied by many researchers. However, because different studies define and measure wisdom in different ways, and because any single study is limited, findings vary across studies. As a way to go beyond individual studies and to look at the big picture, we used a statistical technique called meta-analysis. It allowed us to summarize thirty years of empirical research on wisdom to answer important questions like those posed above. Here's what we found.

Must One Wait Until Old Age to Be Wise?

Old age itself does not bring wisdom. Wisdom increases very little (almost negligibly) with increasing age. On the contrary, wisdom declines in old age, which might be due to a general decline in cognitive abilities. Experts who study wisdom agree that life experiences and how one makes sense of them, rather than age itself, lead to the development of wisdom. For this reason, although some people may grow wiser with age, wisdom requires cultivation and is not an automatic benefit of advancing years.

Are Smarter People Wiser?

Intelligence is not related to how wisely people report they typically think, feel, and act in daily life. However, intelligent people tend to give wiser advice for especially challenging dilemmas (however, we don't know if they actually act as wisely when facing such dilemmas themselves). Even so, our previous work suggests that wisdom requires only average intelligence--beyond that intelligence ceases to matter. The type of intelligence also matters for wisdom. Crystallized intelligence, which relies on knowledge gained in the real world, is more strongly associated with wisdom than fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems without previous knowledge.

Who Then is Wise?

If age and intelligence, two obvious candidates for characteristics of wise people, do not consistently predict wisdom, what does? The personality trait of openness is related to wisdom across studies. In other words, wisdom entails flexibility in thinking, the tendency and willingness to take on different ideas and perspectives, and an exploratory orientation in life. The association between wisdom and openness is one of the most consistent findings in the literature. Many experts think that openness fosters wisdom.

Are Wiser People Happier?

Finally, wise people lead lives that are both happy and meaningful. People who report thinking, feeling, and acting wisely in daily life feel more positive emotions, less negative emotions, and more satisfaction with their lives. In addition, they are more autonomous (that is, they rely on their personal standards and do not look to others for approval), feel more masterful of their environment, have more positive interpersonal relationships, are more self-accepting, are more oriented towards growth, and feel more purpose and meaning in life. Being growth oriented and feeling more purpose and meaning in life also predict the ability to think of wise solutions to real or hypothetical dilemmas. Contrary to the idiom 'ignorance is bliss', wisdom is its own path to happiness.


For Further Reading

Dong, M., Weststrate, N. M., & Fournier, M. A. (2023). Thirty years of psychological wisdom research: What we know about the correlates of an ancient concept. Perspectives on Psychological Science18(4), 778-811. doi: 10.1177/17456916221114096

Dong, M., & Fournier, M. A. (2022). What are the necessary conditions for wisdom? Examining intelligence, creativity, meaning-making, and the Big Five traits. Collabra: Psychology8(1), 33145. doi: 10.1525/collabra.33145


Mengxi Dong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Beijing Normal University. Her research focuses on wisdom and understanding the discrepancies among measurements of the same constructs.

Nic M. Weststrate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research focuses on the development, manifestation, and transmission of wisdom across the lifespan and between generations.

Marc A. Fournier is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His research focuses on personality integration, person × situation interactions, and interpersonal processes and dynamics.

Do Growth Mindset Interventions Work?

Google "growth mindset" and you get nearly 300 million hits. Walk into an American school and you are bombarded with growth mindset messaging. Naturally, scientists, policymakers, and educators want to know if fostering a growth mindset can help people reach their goals. Do growth mindset interventions work? Before answering this question, let's first discuss what growth mindsets are. 

The What, When, and Why of Growth Mindsets

Growth mindsets are intuitively held beliefs about the potential for attributes, abilities, and human characteristics to change. Someone with a growth mindset believes that traits such as intelligence can be developed, whereas someone with a fixed mindset believes that such attributes are set in stone early in life.

These mindsets apply to a multitude of qualities ranging from beliefs about the fundamental nature of people, to beliefs about the capacity to change one's weight or basic artistic abilities. Mindsets, regardless of context, matter because they set the stage for interpreting life's experiences, especially during challenging times. For example, when students with a growth mindset struggle at school, they tend to persist, remain optimistic, and reach out for help. In contrast, students with a fixed mindset tend to shy away from working harder, become anxious, anticipate future failures, and avoid the situation. In summary, mindsets set up a pattern of motivation, with implications for achievement, and they matter most when stressors and struggles arise. 

Can These Mindsets be Changed?

Considering the potential benefits of growth mindsets, it is natural to ask whether a person's mindset can be changed (for the better). And if so, will this help people achieve positive outcomes in their lives? My colleagues and I asked these very questions in a review of all the studies that have rigorously tested these ideas. We limited our review to 53 studies that randomly assigned people either to a treatment condition in which they received a growth mindset message, or to a control condition. We focused on whether growth mindset interventions could improve academic, interpersonal, and mental health-related outcomes.  

We asked a number of distinct questions when summarizing the research. For example, do these interventions foster stronger growth beliefs that abilities and attributes can change? Do they also improve confidence and increase persistence? Do these, in turn, improve academic performance, interpersonal functioning, and mental health? Based on the evidence, the short answer is yes, growth mindset interventions foster strong growth mindsets, more persistence, improved mental health, better interpersonal functioning, and perhaps greater confidence as well. However, the direct link to improved academic performance is small, which brings us to our next point.

The answer about intervention effectiveness is not a simple yes or no. Rather, like most things in life, the answer is "it depends." Just as people who are more at risk for a heart attack benefit the most from blood pressure-lowering drugs, interventions with individuals with some indication of risk should demonstrate larger effects. Indeed, this is what we find for academic performance and mental health. Growth mindset interventions worked the best when they were delivered to people who needed them—those with some indication of risk or vulnerability.

We also considered how these interventions are delivered. The effectiveness of the intervention can only be as good as its delivery. Like taking medicine, you must take the right dose, sometimes at a particular time of day, and in the right context (such as on an empty stomach). Similarly, growth mindset interventions need to be delivered accurately, need to include key ingredients, and are more effective in contexts that support the growth mindset messaging. In our work, we could not test all these elements, yet past research makes it clear that these practices are vital.

In summary, the answer to the question "Do growth mindset interventions work?" is yes. But, there are important qualifications. They most effectively impact mental health, relative to academic achievement, and are more likely to improve outcomes when implemented well and delivered to the right people.  


For Further Reading

Burnette, J. L., Billingsley, J., Banks, G. C., Knouse, L., Hoyt, C. L., Pollack, J. M., & Simon, S. (2022). A systematic and meta-analytic review of growth mindset interventions: For whom, how, and why might such interventions work? Psychological Bulletin.

Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Taylor & Francis.

Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A view from two eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618804166


Jeni L. Burnette is a Professor of Psychology at North Carolina State University. Dr. Burnette's scholarly work is currently focused on understanding how to best implement growth mindset interventions and foster growth mindset cultures.

Crystal L. Hoyt is a Professor of Leadership Studies and Psychology and the Colonel Leo K. & Gaylee Thorsness Endowed Chair in Ethical Leadership at the University of Richmond. Dr. Hoyt's scholarship resides at the intersection of human belief systems, such as mindsets, stereotypes, ideologies, and social issues that have implications for social justice and wellbeing.

Joseph Billingsley is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Tulane University. Dr. Billingsley is particularly interested in applying evolutionary and cognitive approaches to understanding prosocial behavior, in such areas as forgiveness, kinship, and the psychology of religion.

When People Change their Beliefs about Change

From proverbs to Pinterest, the world seems to be brimming with messages that convey a simple truth about humanity: that people can’t truly change. Oh wait, no. That people can change. Because we all know that leopards can’t change their spots. Well, unless they’re turning over a new leaf. This basic tension between notions of change and stability is even reflected in a song from the Disney Movie “Frozen,” claiming in one line “We aren’t saying you can change him, ‘Cause people don’t really change” yet in another line affirming that “Everyone’s a bit of a fixer upper.”

In light of all of these contradictory cultural messages about change, how do we make sense of the information we encounter about ourselves – and others – over time?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have compellingly demonstrated that people tend to have a favorite go-to belief or implicit theory about change. Can hard work make you smarter, or do you have a certain level of braininess no matter what you try? Is your basic morality – or personality for that matter – set in stone, or can it be altered? Entity theorists believe these traits can’t truly be changed; incremental theorists are confident that attributes are malleable. Even though these implicit beliefs are really just “all in our head,” they affect how we interpret the world, and have dramatic effects on learningmotivation, and judgments.  

Even though it makes sense that people develop these habits of thinking about change or stability, intuitively I can think of cases where my own theories flip-flop. I’m an incremental theorist much of the time, but even though I firmly believe that people can change, I’ve heard myself give the exact opposite advice to a friend who was reconsidering a not-so-deserving ex. Suddenly, I was all about leopards not changing their spots – maybe because this alternate viewpoint better supported my argument.

The idea that people selectively appeal to evidence to support their position isn’t a new one. Ziva Kunda theorized that we often engage in motivated reasoning – that we’ll preferentially seek evidence, search memory, or appeal to causal theories that stack the deck in favor of the conclusion we wanted to come to all along. My colleagues and I wondered if people’s allegiance to implicit theories of change might be subject to change themselves, especially when shifting them could help support a goal.

Beliefs about change and stability matter for how we interpret information about people over time: to what extent is the past a good predictor of future behavior? There’s not always a right answer to that question – but sometimes we definitely have a preferred answer.

For example, imagine you were advising the owner of a bike shop. A likable fellow, Jack applies with the right qualifications. However, you learn that Jack served time for theft in his early 20s. He has been out of jail for five years. Should you hire him? If Jack is a stranger, your habitual belief in the old adage “once a thief, always a thief” may determine your reaction. Now, imagine that the person in Jack’s position was someone you care about– your brother perhaps, or your son. Then, even if you normally think of moral character as set in stone, you may decide – at least for a while – that people can change and deserve second chances.

In a recent paper (Leith, Ward, Giacomin, Landau, Ehrlinger & Wilson, 2014), we tested the idea that people might temporarily alter their beliefs about change and stability when a different perspective served their motives. First, we know people are often motivated to protect their egos in the face of failure. We threatened people’s feelings of competence by giving them (false) feedback on a test, telling them they’d failed. A comparison group was told they’d done especially well on the test. We then asked people how much they agreed with statements like “Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.” Although people in the two testing conditions didn’t differ from one another in their beliefs about intelligence at the start of the session, after getting their score, those who failed were much more likely to start leaning toward the view that intelligence is, in fact, changeable. It’s easier to handle failure when it’s temporary and alterable rather than enduring.

Although people are notoriously motivated to protect and defend the self, it’s not the only time they show their biases. People’s reasoning also gets lopsided when they start talking politics. For instance, voters have to evaluate political candidates by taking into account information about their current, recent, and often distant past. When voters confront the dirt dug up from their favorite candidate’s past, do they activate different beliefs about change than they do when they contemplate the skeletons in the opponent’s closet? To test this we first approached voters shortly before the last Canadian Federal election, when political hackles were naturally raised. Inspired by the content of the attack ads circulating at the time, we compiled a set of unflattering statements that each of the two leading candidates had uttered in the distant past – an average of 10 years earlier. Liberal and Conservative voters read either questionable quotations from the Liberal or the Conservative candidate. Once again, people showed a lot of flexibility in their views of change: the past missteps of their favored politician were forgiven by appealing to a belief in people’s essential malleability. On the other hand, people ensured that past mud continued to “stick” to disliked candidates by highlighting how people’s core characteristics really cannot change.

In real life, people’s beliefs about the nature of change inform their views on crime and punishment, rehabilitation, and recidivism. Once again, though, we wondered how stable those beliefs really were. In a final study, we asked American adults – about half of whom were parents – to review the case of a previously convicted child sex offender who was paroled after showing evidence of rehabilitation. We asked half of our respondents to imagine that the offender would soon be moving to a community 200 miles away; we asked the other half to imagine the offender was moving into their own neighborhood. We thought that parents who contemplated a child sex offender moving nearby would be driven by the urge to protect their family. Regardless of their habitual beliefs, this group of highly threatened parents shifted to endorse the belief that people, at the core, really don’t change. Importantly, the more they came to believe that people can’t change, the less they accepted evidence that this former offender had been rehabilitated. We recognize that this topic is fraught with legitimate ethical complexities about recidivism, public safety, and rights of the former offender, especially in light of the concrete entity assumptions inherent in the National Sex Offender registry. This research can’t directly comment on the wisdom of the registry; however, it can demonstrate a process by which emotional threat can influence policy decisions. Rather than relying on empirical evidence of rehabilitation or actual recidivism risks, people under threat may reframe a debate by shifting their underlying beliefs about whether rehabilitation is even possible.

As Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier have argued, “Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.” Our evidence suggests that one way people may win arguments (with themselves or others) is by selectively appealing to culturally-available beliefs about change and stability in ways that allow them to either disregard the past or affirm its enduring nature. How much does this matter? Short-term at least, it seems to matter a lot. People who even temporarily believed that attributes can change were more likely to agree to retake a test, to forgive a political candidate, and to acknowledge the possibility of criminal rehabilitation. Even temporary fluctuations in people’s beliefs, then, could alter in-the-moment learning, voting, and policy decisions. And conceivably, if these motivated shifts happen often enough, they could form the basis of some of the enduring theories that we come to hold about the nature of change.


Leith, S., Ward, C., Giacomin, M., Landau, E., Ehrlinger, J., & Wilson, A. E.  (2014). Changing theories of change: Strategic shifting in implicit theory endorsement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,107, 597-620doi: 10.1037/a0037699


Anne Wilson is a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on self and identity, psychological time, and motivated social cognition.

The Role of Ability Beliefs in Academic Gender Gaps

The decision to pursue a career rests in part on how we judge the following inequality:

Visualization of My Abilities being greater than or equal to the abilities required for success in this career

If we believe this inequality to be true, we might proceed1; if we decide it’s false, we might look elsewhere. Importantly, however, neither side of this inequality is easy to evaluate. Abilities are nebulous, context-sensitive things that are notoriously problematic to pin down. As a result, we often look to others for clues, leaving the door open for substantial social and cultural influences on career choices. A symposium at the 2014 SPSP conference in Austin highlighted a number of recent findings that link sociocultural influences on people’s assessment of the inequality above to the presence of gender gaps.

How do we get from sociocultural influences on this formula all the way to gender gaps? First, and most obviously, contemporary culture is rife with stereotypes about differences in men’s and women’s cognitive profiles; these stereotypes shape people’s beliefs about the quantity on the left-hand side (that is, the abilities they are likely to possess). Second, and less often discussed, practitioners of different careers may send different messages about the abilities that are required to reach the highest levels of achievement in their particular field; these messages shape people’s beliefs about the quantity on the right-hand side (that is, the abilities required for success). Putting these two elements together, we might make the following claim: One circumstance that gives rise to a gender gap in a career or discipline is when a gender group is stereotyped as lacking an ability that the people in that discipline believe is essential for success.2

The four talks in our SPSP symposium examined this idea from a variety of angles. Together, they made a compelling case for people’s beliefs about ability (and the sociocultural influences on these beliefs) as a key factor in the emergence of gender gaps.

In the first talk, Catherine GoodJennifer Mangels, and Laura Deering focused on a domain with pervasive stereotypes against females—mathematics. They asked: Would manipulating students’ beliefs about who belongs in math—about the abilities that are valued in this field—reduce the detrimental effect of stereotypes on middle-school girls’ math engagement and learning? To answer this question, Good and her colleagues randomly assigned 242 7th graders to one of three conditions that differed only in the belonging beliefs conveyed to students. In one condition, children read a brief “news article” that presented “evidence” suggesting that, in order to truly belong in math, one needs to “be a natural.” In another condition, the necessary ingredient for belonging in math was instead said to be hard work. Finally, the remaining children were assigned to a no-information control condition. Across two testing sessions, the researchers assessed students’ math performance, their engagement with math, and their learning from the first to the second test session.

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The second and third talks (featuring research by Sarah-Jane LesliemyselfMeredith Meyer, and Lin Bian) examined the influence of ability beliefs across academia. Because these two talks described aspects of the same research program, I will summarize them together. The starting point for our argument is that the pattern of women’s involvement in academia is more complex than is usually suggested. (Typically, the message is “there are few women in STEM and many women in the social sciences and the humanities.”) For example, gender gaps are far more dramatic in some STEM disciplines (e.g., physics) than in others (e.g., biochemistry). In addition, there are disciplines in the social sciences and humanities with gender gaps as large as some of those in STEM (e.g., economics and philosophy). We argued that attending to these complexities—specifically, to the variability in women’s representation within STEM, as well as the sizable gender gaps in some non-STEM disciplines—may provide new insights into the causes of women’s underrepresentation across academia. We then proposed a hypothesis that might account for this complex pattern of underrepresentation. Specifically, we proposed there is a powerful feature shared by all disciplines, regardless of whether or not they are in STEM, that predicts their female representation: namely, their practitioners’ beliefs about what is required for success. Just as individuals differ in their personal opinions on this topic (as work by Carol Dweck and her colleagues have compellingly shown), so might entire disciplines: In some disciplines success may be seen as depending on sustained effort and dedication, whereas in others it may be seen as requiring a “gift” or brilliance that cannot be taught. Because women are stereotyped as being less likely than men to possess innate intellectual talent, they may find the academic fields that emphasize brilliance as the key to success to be unwelcoming. (In case anyone doubts that the stereotypes against women’s intellectual abilities are still with us in the 21st century, they should take a look at a New York Times article from a few months ago in which the author analyzed Google searches and found that parents were 2.5 times more likely to ask Google if their sons were gifted or geniuses than if their daughters were.)

To test our hypothesis, we first conducted a nationwide study of about 1,800 academics across 30 disciplines and found that—as predicted—the more a field emphasized brilliance, the lower women’s representation at the PhD level. (Stunningly, the correlation was as strong as −.60.) Moreover, this relationship held when looking at STEM and non-STEM fields separately, as well as when a number of other competing variables were taken into account (e.g., the average number of hours worked by people in a field). We followed up this finding with a series of experiments that made the same point: When we introduced a new opportunity to participants (e.g., an internship, a major) and described it as requiring brilliance, talent, etc., women were less likely to want to pursue it relative to men (whereas this difference was absent or reversed when we described the same opportunity as requiring dedication, effort, etc.). Much to our dismay, we found exactly the same pattern in 6- and 7-year-olds. Girls were less likely than boys to want to play a new game that was said to be “for kids who are really smart,” but there was no difference between boys and girls when the game was said to be “for kids who try really hard.” Again, this research clearly illustrates the role of sociocultural messages about (1) one’s likely abilities (here, in the form of gender stereotypes) and (2) the abilities required for success (here, in the form of discipline-specific messages about requisite skills). When combined, these two elements seem to provide a powerful tool for understanding gender gaps.  

Finally, the talk by Joseph P. Robinson-CimpianSarah T. LubienskiColleen M. Ganley, and Yasemin Copur-Gencturk provided a different sort of evidence for the idea that societal beliefs about ability may give rise to gender gaps. Using a nationally representative dataset collected by the Department of Education, their research suggested that (1) teachers hold stereotypes against girls’ math ability, and (2) these stereotypes account for a substantial portion of the development of the math gender gap in the early elementary school grades. What’s the evidence that teachers hold negative stereotypes about girls? When you look just at the raw means, teachers’ ratings of girls’ math competence are actually higher than those for boys—so there seems to be no evidence of stereotyping there. However the comparison of raw means is misleading because boys and girls differ on a number of other important dimensions that need to be taken into account (e.g., teachers’ impressions of girls’ and boys’ persistence and engagement). If you adjust for these variables, you get the opposite picture. That is, when you look at boys and girls who are matched on their persistence, attentiveness, etc.—as well as their actual math performance—teachers in fact rate the boys as being more competent in math. (I should also mention that the measure of math performance used to match boys and girls was custom-made for the Dept. of Education and was quite detailed and comprehensive.)

Next, Robinson-Cimpian and his colleagues examined whether this underrating of girls influenced the development of the math gender gap. With some complex statistical techniques that allowed them to approximate causal conclusions with observational/correlational data (instrumental variables and propensity score matching), they found that teachers’ underrating of girls may have been responsible for as much as 80% of the growth of the gender gaps from kindergarten to 1st grade to 3rd grade. (The estimates vary depending on the statistical model you look at—I selected the highest to illustrate the potential power of these stereotypes in shaping the development of gender gaps. None of the estimates are lower than 45%.)

At this point, some readers may be thinking: Isn’t there a fact of the matter here? Don’t men and women actually have different cognitive skills due to biological differences? Don’t various fields actually require different amounts of intellectual talent (or different talents)? Questions about actual differences in abilities are complex and mired in vitriolic debate. (But no—I have seen no convincing evidence of biological differences in men's and women’s cognition that would be relevant to success in intellectual pursuits of the sort we care about.) Importantly, however, the mechanism I described here is likely to operate no matter what we find out about these other issues. Regardless of the purported cognitive differences between men and women, or of the abilities purportedly required to become a physicist vs. a psychologist vs. an anthropologist, the mere presence of (1) different societal beliefs about the intellectual abilities of men and women, and (2) different societal beliefs about the intellectual abilities required for success in different fields will be sufficient to give rise to (or at least exacerbate) gender gaps. At its core, this is an optimistic conclusion: Intervening to change the relevant beliefs about ability (and how they are projected to children and students) is likely to bring about greater gender equity. It won’t be easy to make such changes, of course, but the end goal is certainly worth it.


Andrei Cimpian is a developmental psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the development of human concepts about natural and social categories, as well as on issues pertaining to academic achievement (e.g., stereotypes, and people’s beliefs about ability and talent). You can find more information about his work on his lab’s website and on Twitter, @AndreiCimpian.

  1.  Assuming, of course, that we are also interested, motivated, and so on.
  2. This claim applies to other groups as well (e.g., groups based on race/ethnicity) rather than being specific to gender.