Chapter 10. Self Esteem Threats

Introduction

We often judge members of ingroup more favorably than we judge outgroup members (Aberson, Healy, & Romero, 2001). This preference is referred to as ingroup bias. However, certain aspects of the individual and the situation can influence this bias. For example, individuals who identify strongly with the ingroup will be even more likely to derogate outgroup members. In the situation where individuals perceive that the two groups are competing for valuable resources, they will judge the outgroup member more negatively than if no threat is perceived (Levine & Campbell, 1972).

For this task we want you to examine how college students evaluate one particular outgroup: teachers and/or professors.

Instructions

For the first part of this task, we would like you to think about a former teacher/professor who gave you a bad grade on a test or in a course.

Then, we want to rate your perception of yourself, as well as your former teacher/professor who gave you a bad grade on a test or in a course on a number of domains.

To ensure that there are an equal number of male and female teachers/professors represented in the survey, we ask that you write about both a male and female teacher/professor.

Experiment

Results

Debriefing

Many variables influence our impressions of other people. In this task, we examine how self-esteem threats (like bad grades) bias our perceptions of other people. No one likes receiving negative evaluations. This type of information makes us derogate the evaluator. In addition, research has shown that it also increases the accessibility of negative stereotypes related to the evaluator’s group membership, which is believed to make us feel better about ourselves (cf., Fein & Spencer, 1997; Spencer et al., 1998).

In this task, you were asked to write about a female and male instructor who had previously given you a bad grade. Based on the idea that self-esteem threats activate negative stereotypes, in this case, beliefs associated with the competence of women, we predicted that you would rate the female instructor’s level of competence lower than the male instructor's. That is, we predicted that after thinking about a threating situation as a means to protect their self-esteem, participants would be more likely to apply these negative stereotypes towards women. This prediction is based on Sinclair and Kunda’s (2000) research showing that students who do well in courses give instructors similar course evaluations regardless of the instructor’s gender, but students who do poorly in their courses are more likely to give female instructors harsher evaluations. Importantly, these findings demonstrate how the activation of stereotypes can lead to discrimination. Clearly, females don’t deserve lower evaluations for displaying the exact same behavior as their male counterparts!

Quiz