Blog Against Disablism: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Today's post is part of the Goldfish's Blog Against Disablism project. There are already lots of interesting-looking posts up and I'm sure more and more will be added throughout the day.

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Of all the group labels I'm aware of, none is so potentially problematic as "disabled." While other group labels focus on what the member groups are in either positive or negative terms, "disabled" inherently focuses on what group members are not. It's a definition of lack and I have to think that the weight of such a definition on an individual would be greater than the alternatives.

Scientific American Mind was kind enough to publish, in April, two articles that are going to all but write my Carnival posts themselves. Fortunately the one I'm using for today's Blog Against Disablism post is available free on the internet: How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure). The article discusses in general terms stereotype threat--the well-documented process whereby being confronted with a reminder of the inferior status of a group to which one belongs causes one to conform with that stereotype by performing below one's natural abilities.

"This pattern of findings has been replicated with many different groups on many different dimensions of stereotype content. For example, Sian L. Beilock of the University of Chicago and her colleagues reported in a 2007 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology that if female students are made aware of the stereotype that men have greater mathematical ability than women do, they tend to perform worse on complex mathematical tasks than they do if they are not alerted to this stereotype. Likewise, elderly people have been found to perform worse on memory tests if they take them after being made aware of stereotypes that associate aging with deteriorating cognitive ability.

"In the domain of athletic performance, studies of golf putting have shown that expert golfers tend to leave their putts farther from a target than they would otherwise do if they are exposed to a stereotype that members of their sex are worse at putting than members of the opposite sex."

If someone reminds you that you are not supposed to do well at something because you are black/female/poor/etc., you will in fact do worse than you would if someone had not reminded you. Being aware of the stereotype, even unconsciously, will cause you to conform with it.

The article didn't discuss the impact of stereotype threat on people with disabilities, but when the very name of the group reflects a collective perceived inability, how can it not affect people?

(Stereotype threat, by the way, is one of my favourite theories from the last five years. It's so perfectly brilliant! Because whatever stereotype someone throws in your face and then "proves" with a whole bunch of statistics relating "actual" differences in performance and ability can now be challenged with the idea that the differences in performance or ability are not innate but are constructions of a stereotype. Girls are "actually" worse at science? Boys "actually" are more violent or aggressive? How much of the difference would be explained as an effect of the stereotype itself?)

So the first thing to take from this, I think, is that all of the things society generally believes that people with disabilities can't do may actually cause people with disabilities not to be able to do them, or to do them less well. In other words (speaking as a non-disabled person): it's not them, it's us. The persistent societal beliefs held largely by non-disabled people that folks in wheelchairs, say, aren't very bright; that people with Down syndrome can't go to college or university; that blind people will make less competent parents; will actually help to make those things true.

Which is terrible.

The authors of the article were nice enough to include three possible solutions to the problem of stereotype threat:

"The first is to adopt a strategy of “social mobility,” which involves individual-level activities that serve to downplay the impact of the group on the self. .... The limitation of this solution is that it protects the individual by working around the problem but, in the process, leaves the problem itself unresolved. As two of us (Haslam and Reicher) note in a 2006 article in the Journal of Applied Psychology, such activities thus involve attempting to cope with the stress of threats to self through a strategy of personal avoidance. This approach may be cognitively sophisticated but politically naive.

"A second strategy is one of “social creativity,” which invokes different in-group stereotypes that deflect the impact of belonging to a disadvantaged group. Traditionally, researchers and laypeople alike have tended to think of stereotypes as fixed and invariant representations of social groups that are impervious to change. In fact, however, the large body of evidence reviewed in the mid-1990s by Penelope Oakes and her fellow social identity researchers at the Australian National University suggests that stereotypes—of both ourselves and others—are inherently flexible.

"...Leaders and other agents of change are thus able to promote changes to in-group stereotypes by altering the dimensions of comparison, the comparative frame of reference or the meaning of particular attributes. [Andrea: for instance, women could say, "Sure, we're worse at math, but we're better at parenting!"] There is a sense, however, in which these strategies of social creativity still work within a prevailing consensus rather than doing anything directly to change features of the social world that give rise to a group’s stigmatization and disadvantage.

"A third alternative, then, is to advocate group-based opposition to the status quo through a strategy of social competition that involves engaging in active resistance. [Andrea: otherwise known as: activism.] Here group members work together to challenge the legitimacy of the conditions (and associated stereotypes) that define them as inferior—trying to change the world that oppresses them rather than their reactions to the existing world. They work to counter the stereotypes that are tools of their repression with stereotypes that are tools of emancipation. This strategy was precisely what activists such as Steve Biko and Emmeline Pankhurst achieved through black consciousness and feminism, respectively. They challenged the legitimacy of those comparisons and stereotypes that defined their groups as inferior and replaced them with expressions of group pride."

An example here would be the recent redefinition of deafness as a "culture" instead of a "disability."

You have to know how happy this makes me. Can you hear me crowing? I'll bet you can.

Activism--feminism, anti-racism, anti-classism, and most relevantly anti-disablism--by challenging stereotypes actually makes them less true. Isn't that brilliant? Doesn't that give you hope?

The article concludes, and I can't add anything to it: "Thus, the literature on stereotype threat delivers two fundamental lessons. The first is to beware of equating performance and ability, especially when dealing with differences between groups, and to understand the power that the expectations of others has over what we do. The second is to realize that we are not doomed to be victims of oppressive stereotypes but can learn to use stereotypes as tools of our own liberation. In short, who we think we are determines both how we perform and what we are able to become."

Posted by Andrea at May 1, 2008 9:22 AM under Change Addict

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