Christine Logel

Interacting with sexist men triggers social identity threat among female engineers

Social identity threat is the notion that one of a persons many social identities may be at risk of being devalued in a particular context (C. M. Steele, S. J. Spencer, & J. Aronson, 2002). The authors suggest that in domains in which women are already negatively stereotyped, interacting with a sexist man can trigger social identity threat, undermining womens performance. In Study 1, male engineering students who scored highly on a subtle measure of sexism behaved in a dominant and sexually interested way toward an ostensible female classmate. In Studies 2 and 3, female engineering students who interacted with such sexist men, or with confederates trained to behave in the same way, performed worse on an engineering test than did women who interacted with nonsexist men. Study 4 replicated this finding and showed that womens underperformance did not extend to an English test, an area in which women are not negatively stereotyped. Study 5 showed that interacting with sexist men leads women to suppress concerns about gender stereotypes, an established mechanism of stereotype threat. Discussion addresses implications for social identity threat and for womens performance in school and at work.

The Cost of Lower Self-Esteem: Testing a Self- and Social-Bonds Model of Health

The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later, and this association was explained by subjective reports of poor social bonds. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 but used a longitudinal design with 6 waves of data collection, assessed self-reports of concrete health-related behaviors (i.e., number of visits to the doctor and classes missed due to illness), and measured both subjective and objective indicators of quality of social bonds (i.e., interpersonal stress and number of friends). In addition, Study 2 showed that poor-quality social bonds predicted acute drops in self-esteem over time, which in turn predicted acute decreases in quality of social bonds and, consequently, acute increases in health problems. In both studies, alternative explanations to the model were tested.

The Role of the Self in Physical Health Testing the Effect of a Values-Affirmation Intervention on Weight Loss

Obesity is a major risk factor for chronic disease (World Health Organization, WHO, 2000). Maintaining a healthy body mass index (BMI) requires two things: the ability to cope with stress, which increases caloric consumption (Dallman, 2009), and the ability to maintain self-control, which is needed to avoid overeating in a society with an abundance of caloriedense food. Given these requirements, an intervention that bolsters psychological resources for well-being and selfcontrol could promote healthful weight loss. One such intervention is a values affirmation. Participants write about self-defining values, such as relationships or religious beliefs. This affirms their sense of personal worth or self-integrity (Sherman & Cohen, 2006; Steele, 1988). Affirmations can bolster self-control by focusing people on higher values rather than on immediate impulses (Schmeichel & Vohs, 2009; Sherman & Cohen, 2006). By reminding people of what is really important, affirmation also buffers people against mundane stressors that might otherwise sap mental resources, which are needed for self-regulation and effective coping (Creswell et al., 2005; Koole, Smeets, Van Knippenberg, & Dijksterhuis, 1999). Even when brief, affirmations can have lasting effects if they interrupt ruminative cycles that worsen outcomes over time (Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009). Because women are likely to be especially vulnerable to weight-related stress (Miller & Downey, 1999), this study focused on females. Participants completed either an affirmation or a control exercise, and BMI was assessed at baseline and 2.5 months later. Working memory, a critical component of self-control (Hofmann, Friese, Schmeichel, & Baddeley, 2010), was also assessed, on the assumption that an affirmation of a person’s values should free his or her working memory from stressful preoccupations (Klein & Boals, 2001).

The Regulatory Function of Self-Esteem: Testing the Epistemic and Acceptance Signaling Systems

The authors draw on sociometer theory (e.g., Leary, 2004) and self-verification theory (e.g., Swann, 1997) to propose an expanded model of the regulatory function of self-esteem. The model suggests that people not only possess an acceptance signaling system that indicates whether relational value is high or low but also possess an epistemic signaling system that indicates whether social feedback is consistent or inconsistent with chronic perceived relational value (i.e., global self-esteem). One correlational study and 5 experiments, with diverse operationalizations of social feedback, demonstrated that the epistemic signaling system responds to self-esteem consistent or inconsistent relational-value feedback with increases or deceases in epistemic certainty. Moreover, Studies 3-6 demonstrated that the acceptance and epistemic signaling systems respond uniquely to social feedback. Finally, Studies 5 and 6 provide evidence that the epistemic signaling system is part of a broader self-regulatory system: Self-esteem inconsistent feedback caused cognitive efforts to decrease the discrepancy between self-views and feedback and caused depleted self-regulatory capacity on a subsequent self-control task.

Rewriting the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Social Rejection Self-Affirmation Improves Relational Security and Social Behavior up to 2 Months Later

Chronically insecure individuals often behave in ways that result in the very social rejection that they most fear. We predicted that this typical self-fulfilling prophecy is not immutable. Self-affirmation may improve insecure individuals’ relational security, and this improvement may allow them to express more welcoming social behavior. In a longitudinal experiment, a 15-min self-affirmation improved both the relational security and experimenter-rated social behavior of insecure participants up to 4 weeks after the initial intervention. Moreover, the extent to which self-affirmation improved insecure participants’ relational security at 4 weeks predicted additional improvements in social behavior another 4 weeks after that. Our finding that insecure participants continued to reap the social benefits of self-affirmation up to 8 weeks after the initial intervention demonstrates that it is indeed possible to rewrite the self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection.

Perceived risk and quitting behaviors: results from the ITC 4-country survey.

OBJECTIVE To rigorously test the relation between perceived risk (i.e., belief about the likelihood of harm) and quitting smoking. METHODS Data from a longitudinal study with a nonrestrictive sample of smokers (N = 4307) from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia were examined to predict quitting behaviors at 8-12 months. RESULTS Perceived risk predicted plans to quit, quit attempts, and, to some extent, sustained quitting. The relation was stronger for relatively simple (e.g., plans to quit) than for complex behaviors (e.g., sustained quitting). CONCLUSION Perceived risk plays a significant role in predicting quitting smoking, more so for relatively simple behaviors.

Perceived Regard Explains Self- Esteem Differences in Expressivity

Baumeister, Tice, and Hutton proposed that individuals with low self-esteem (LSEs) adopt a more cautious, self-protective self-presentational style than individuals with high self-esteem (HSEs). The authors predicted that LSEs’ self-protectiveness leads them to be less expressive—less revealing of their thoughts and feelings—with others than HSEs, and that this self-esteem difference is mediated by their perceptions of the interaction partner’s regard for them. Two correlational studies supported these predictions (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, LSEs became more expressive when their perceived regard was experimentally heightened—when they imagined speaking to someone who was unconditionally accepting rather than judgmental (Study 3) and when their perceptions of regard were increased through Marigold, Holmes, and Ross’s compliment-reframing task (Study 4). These findings suggest that LSEs’ expressiveness can be heightened through interventions that reduce their concerns about social acceptance.

Stereotype Inoculation: An Elegant and Practical Model

Nilanjana Dasgupta’s stereotype inoculation model brings together important theorizing about identity, belonging, and achievement to propose that ingroup members can be a “social vaccine” from the negative consequences of stereotypes and other cues of nonbelonging. We review highlights of the model, briefly describe two lines of new research that are consistent with it, and then pose questions that may help set boundary conditions for when the model will best predict behavior. One exciting aspect of Dasgupta’s stereotype inoculation model is her recognition of the classic social psychological insight that just because people feel they made a choice does not mean that this choice was truly unconstrained. As research in the forced compliance dissonance paradigm has demonstrated (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), when people believe they have freely chosen a course of action (even if it was essentially coerced), they expend considerable effort rationalizing it. As Dasgupta argues, women may well be constrained in their “choice” to abandon STEM fields, but because their action feels freely chosen, they may spend substantial effort rationalizing it. It seems probable that social forces restrict women’s choices in ways that they do not recognize. It is noteworthy that Dasgupta integrates the role of social belonging into her model by proposing that ingroup peers and experts create environments that foster social belonging. In this way, Dasgupta’s research builds on the important work of Walton and Cohen that demonstrates that the achievement of minorities and women in science is enhanced when members of these groups feel they belong in the social environment (Walton & Cohen, 2007, 2011). Thus, social belonging is more than a process through which ingroup peers and experts affect minorities and women in math and science; rather, it is the crucial psychological state that allows these groups to succeed and leads to positive changes in self-efficacy, increased challenge, and decreased threat. The stereotype inoculation model brings together social belonging research with theorizing on social identity. It argues that identification with ingroup peers and experts moderates the degree to which these group members foster a sense of belonging—those who are highly identified with their group gain more from successful ingroup peers and experts than those who are less identified. This raises an interesting question: Does such identification always increase feelings of belonging and enhance achievement? What if there are many ingroup peers in the environment, but they are performing poorly and feeling like they don’t fit in? In such a situation, identification with ingroup peers is likely to reduce belonging and undermine achievement. Indeed, we reason that the potency of ingroup experts and peers as an inoculation against stereotyping will depend at least to some extent on their success in the environment. If a woman in engineering, for example, repeatedly sees female professors denied tenure and their fellow female engineering students failing out of school, then these ingroup experts and peers are unlikely to provide a powerful inoculation against stereotyping. Thus, underperforming ingroup members may have a negative influence in some situations. But what is the role of outgroup members in shaping the impact of ingroup experts and peers? It seems likely that outgroup members will also have a potent effect in shaping the environment and, consequently, the sense of belonging that women and minorities experience in it. Indeed, research has demonstrated that the sexism of women’s male peers is a source of stereotype threat that leads to women’s underachievement in STEM fields (Logel et al., 2009). Given these findings, one might expect that how outgroup members treat ingroup experts and peers may have a crucial role in the degree to which they provide inoculation against stereotyping and feelings of nonbelonging. If outgroup members treat ingroup experts and peers with respect and acceptance, then they ought to be a more effective source of inoculation against stereotypes than if they are treated with disrespect and derision. In situations when ingroup members are successful and outgroup members do not behave in a way that undermines them, will inoculation in one environment