Most of us are well aware of the explicit prejudice that exists in the world and of the discrimination that can occur as the result of such prejudice. We see these prejudices in the tribalism that is so pervasive throughout our society, and in the beliefs, one group of people will hold about another group of people. Our text makes the important point that Prejudice is, “an attitude towards others based solely on group membership”, and that “When prejudiced attitudes get translated into behavior, discrimination results.” This is an important distinction because we are often unaware of many of our prejudices until they make themselves glaringly obvious during some kind of discriminatory behavior. Much work has been done to illuminate the more wide-spread prejudices in our society, and an equally large effort has been made to explain how these prejudices manifest into discriminatory behaviors. While we are all aware of the overtly discriminatory history of our country, we might not be as cognizant of the many covertly discriminatory behaviors that still exist. In an experiment carried out by researchers at Princeton University, these covert prejudices and discriminatory behaviors were tested, and the results have profound implications.
Job interviews are stressful enough as it is, but imagine walking into your interview thinking that your race was going to influence the interviewer’s opinion of you. Furthermore, imagine that your interviewer (different race) was displaying subtle non-verbal behaviors that indicated they were less interested in you from the start. How might you respond? Would you become tense and rigid? Would you have more speaking errors? Most importantly, would your concern for potential discrimination cause you to perform less optimally during your interview, therefore, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? These are some of the questions the researchers at Princeton sought to answer.
In their study, the Princeton group ran two separate trials. In the first trial, 15 white subjects were told they had to interview a number of candidates and that their goal was to hire the most qualified individuals. The interviewees in this first trial were 2 black and 3 white high school students who were trained to respond to the interviewer’s questions similarly. The goal of this first experiment was to observe how the behavior of the interviewer changed in response to the race of the applicant. So, what were the results? Black applicants were shown less immediacy, had 25% shorter interviews, and the speech fluency of the interviewers was significantly affected. These results indicated that this randomly selected group of white interviewers acted significantly different while interviewing white vs. black candidates who acted in almost identical manors. While this finding is interesting, it only really confirms what prior research has shown, mainly that asymmetrical groups hold prejudices about each other and that these prejudices can elicit prejudiced behavior.
The second experiment is where things got really interesting. In this experiment, the original roles were reversed with interviewers as confederates and interviewees as the subjects. The goal was to see how a change in interviewer behavior would affect the performance of the interviewee. Because of the results obtained in experiment one, the researchers believed that the less immediate behaviors, poorer communications, and farther proximity of interviewers would negatively affect the interviewer’s performance, which in turn would make them appear as less qualified for the job. Indeed, these were the findings. Interviewees responded negatively to the poor non-verbal communication and were rated as less deserving of the job by independent judges who were tasked with watching tapes of the interviews. So, perfectly qualified individuals were primed by the nonverbal behavior of the interviewer to perform normally or sub-optimally during their job interview.
These findings are significant because they illuminate the ways implicit biases and prejudices can affect real-life inter-group interactions. While overt discrimination has certainly diminished, some of the more covert and nonverbal forms of discrimination carry on and have the potential to advantage some groups over others. This is important to keep in mind, especially when considering how lower-status groups of individuals may be implicitly disadvantaged in settings like the one examined in the Princeton study.
Schneider, Frank W. Applied social psychology: understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Los Angeles, SAGE pub., 2012.
Word, Carl O, et al. “The nonverbal mediation of self-Fulfilling prophecies in interracial interaction.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 10, no. 2, 1974, pp. 109–120., doi:10.1016/0022-1031(74)90059-6.
Upon reading your blog, I felt that you did an excellent job at highlighting the consistent threat that prejudice holds over modern society. Your blog post provides readers with an important background regarding prejudice as it relates to self-fulfilling prophecies as well as key definitions critical to the understanding of this concept. The phenomenon of race-related job discrimination is extremely relevant to the material presented this week.
Overall, the results of the study that you presented were extremely shocking. I was surprised to learn how different the interviews were conducted based on the race and behavior of the applicant. The results indicate that pre-determined prejudices, or attitudes toward a group, can have a profound impact throughout the hiring process. Appropriately the researchers were able to conduct a secondary experiment, exploring the behavior of the interview subjects. This study succeeds in showcasing the dual relationship between individuals as it relates to prejudice and self-fulfilling prophecies. It highlights the ability for an individual of an in group to shape the behavior and expectations of members of an out group. Additionally, the behavior of out group members can significantly influence how members of the in group perceive members of a subordinate group.