A multibillion-dollar company’s primary marketing message is a hurtful stereotype aimed at people like me.
The company is Planet Fitness. The stereotype is aimed mostly at very muscular men. Planet Fitness calls me a “Lunk.”
One of VCreek’s methodologies is to “use the benign to study and discuss the pernicious because the mechanisms of action are often the same.”
Planet Fitness’ labeling muscular men and very fit women as “Lunks” is mostly benign, with a minor impact on the targets—which makes it suited to explore how stereotypes function, are transmitted and sustained in U.S. culture.
The human impulse to stereotype is likely as old as human kind. The ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus (371-287 B.C.) wrote a collection of personality sketches that are essentially stereotypes of Athenians from his era. In the modern scholarly research on stereotypes, there are several broad schools of thought ranging from stereotypes being probability judgements about an individual, to exaggerated or “overgeneralized attributes associated with the members of a social group”1 to negative evaluations and prejudices against members of a group.
The stereotype judgements and assessments we make about others happen fast. “People judge each other within a fraction of a second,” writes Princeton’s Susan Fiske. These automatic snap stereotype judgements “anchor subsequent thinking” about a person and are difficult to undo.1
Skim through a few of Planet Fitness’ humorous and well produced television ads then ask—how frequently do these scenarios really happen? And, what makes them funny?
In research on stereotypes, especially the benign ones, some argue that many stereotypes are based on statistical probability. This is often called, the Bayesian Brain. Writing in the journal Nature, the University of Warwick’s Perry Hinton says “The Bayesian brain develops its statistical probabilities from experience in life and learnt about through the media.” 2
The Bayesian Brain hypothesis prompts several questions for our discussion. How often do people see very muscular men and fit women in real life? How often in a gym setting? How often in other settings? How many media representations are observed throughout their life? How often do people interact with muscular or fit people? How many do they actually know? How often is the Lunk stereotype confirmed or contradicted? How often do the scenarios depicted in Planet Fitness’ TV ads really happen?
Statistically, very muscular men and very fit women are likely to be rare.
According to the CDC, 42% of Americans are obese.3 Seventy-three percent of Americans are either overweight or obese and only 23% exercise 150 minutes a week.
The math would indicate there not very many extremely muscular or fit people and the only place to see them with any relevant frequency is in a gym. And even in most gyms, very muscular men and very fit women are a minority--except in gyms where serious enthusiasts congregate like Pure Muscle and Fitness in Toronto, Canada; Armbrust Pro Gym, Denver; Die Hard Gym, Phoenix; etc.
Many, if not most, stereotypes are based on similarly limited real-life information. Think of the benign stereotypes about accountants, computer programmers, engineers, plumbers, video gamers, etc. How often are the stereotypes confirmed or contradicted in real life?
According the Bayesian Brain hypothesis, each confirmation or contradiction of the stereotype would update the rapid—and very generalized—statistical stereotype calculation. Either the stereotypes are accurate enough, or there are other mechanisms of action that perpetuate them.
Generalized benign stereotypes could persist and resist Bayesian updating because the consequences for being wrong are minimal. We can all think of instances where the generalized stereotype of an accountant was contradicted, but how often did the error have material consequences like losing money or social consequences like serious embarrassment? Absent the incentive to get it right the next time, the updating may not occur. And in some circumstances, people don’t learn anything from mistakes because our egos get in the way.
Across a series of experiments University of Chicago, Booth School of Business professors Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach found that people did not learn from failure—even when learning was incentivized.4
One of the experiments quizzed inbound telephone customer services representatives about the telephone customer service sector. On the initial quiz, the average score was 56% correct. One group was given feed-back confirming their correct answers. Another group was given feed-back correcting their wrong answers. When quizzed again, the group of getting feed-back on their correct answers scored 62%. The group with feed-back on their wrong answers only scored 48% on the second quiz.
The professors concluding conjecture was, “Our key result is that people find failure feedback ego threatening, which leads them to tune out and miss the information the feedback offers.”
They also explain that these minor errors are different from large, or physically, or psychologically painful errors. “It is possible that for large failures, the attentional pull of the negative experience overrides the motivation to tune out. Many failures are small…yet they accumulate a significant amount of information that people might fail to learn from.”
The errors caused by benign stereotypes are often small and may not warrant updating by the Bayesian Brain.
For an individual person, the effects of those errors could have major consequences over a person’s life in the form of missed opportunities.
For a business the accumulated errors could be very large and, over time, very costly for businesses and professionals, especially in sales and marketing.
If a sales representative quickly dismisses a probable lead because the prospect does not fit the stereotype of a valuable client, it could mean a lost sale. The sales representative may not even realize their rapid judgement and dismissal burned the lead, and fail to receive any updating information for the Bayesian Brain calculations.
And stereotypes can cause sub-optimal decisions and performance across a range of corporate functions. Stanford Professor Cecilia Ridgeway in her book Status makes a compelling conjecture backed by reams of data that stereotypes are used to create status hierarchies in groups working together to achieve an objective. When a cross-functional business team comes together to work on a project, the individual members must determine who the most competent and effective members of the team are. Professor Ridgeway argues that “people grant influence and deference to others in proportion to their perceived ability to make valuable contributions to the goal effort.” Ridgeway emphasizes the perception aspect, which has a powerful influence in the initial stages of a meeting or organizing a project.5
The perceptions, according to Ridgeway, are based on agreed cultural norms of competence, which is a stereotype. Those initial observations and decisions can linger for the duration of the project.
One stereotype strongly associated with competence is confidence. This dynamic was brilliantly captured in an experiment published under the title The Social Advantage of Miscalibrated Individuals.6
The study measured college students on social status and had them take a trivia test. The confident, high-status students did not outperform low status students on the trivia test. Then as part of a mock job interview, the students played the role of a corporate spokesperson at a media event. The performance of the students was video recorded then judged by a group of independent observes on whether they would hire them for a managerial position. The Result: “Individuals with relatively high social class were more overconfident, which, in turn, was associated with being perceived as more competent, and, ultimately, more hireable in the eyes of independent observers.” (emphasis added)
The corporate world is filled with stereotypes that can be detrimental to business performance.
Even more troubling, the exercising of the rapid judgment can reinforce the stereotype.
This mechanism is a type of confirmation by omission. Even just recalling a memory or a concept strengthens the memory or concept. A person could see a very muscular man in the gym training very hard with heavy weights. The Lunk stereotype surfaces. And because the observer never gets any information beyond the visual cue, the stereotype is confirmed and strengthened by omission of contradicting data.
The derogatory nature of the Lunk stereotype--depicting Lunks as vain, dumb, shallow and one-dimensional-- in some of Planet Fitness’ TV ads, is possibly the result of another mechanism that perpetuates some stereotypes.
In the gym domain, the Lunk is successful at what many people consider relevant to the fitness culture--building muscle, losing fat or improving their physical appearance or physical capabilities. This can create a strong reaction from some people who are less successful in their exercise endeavors and care about that success.
University of Kentucky psychologist Richard H. Smith has studied the conditions that create envy and how people treat those they envy.7 The primary conditions for envy are similarity, relevance, inability and unfairness.
--Observer sees themselves as somewhat similar to the target.
--The domain is relevant to the observer’s identity or goals.
--The observer does not think they will be able to reach the target’s level of success
--The observer thinks the target has an unfair advantage.
When these elements combine, the emotional result in the observer can be strong. As Harvard Business School’s Karen Huang writes in a working paper on envy in business environments, “When individuals display their successes, the people around them often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion aimed at harming the envied individual.”8
Smith says, “Perhaps the most simple way to channel such defensive ill-will and, at the same time, to repair the damage done to one's self-estimation is to find ways to derogate the envied person.” Some people may take this derogation to the extreme and lash out, i.e. the abusive social media hater.
More common would be the observer making a comparison to the target on another dimension.
“It may be difficult to deny an ability difference, to convince oneself that a self-relevant domain is unimportant, or to do much to close this difference,” Smith explains. “But it may be quick and easy to construe the envied person as morally flawed.” Or flawed in another way. The Lunk is dumb, shallow, vain, one-dimensional, and has nothing going for them other their physique.
I have engaged in this behavior before. We all have. And we all will again.
The Lunk is dumb because others need to feel better about themselves in an unrelated comparison dimension. What bears further study is not the derogation itself, but how the negative evaluation is so universally known and used as part of the stereotype. Why is the Lunk always dumb? (For that matter, why is the math/science/computer whiz always scrawny and un-athletic?)
Professor Hinton, quoted previously, gives a direction of investigation “The Bayesian brain develops its statistical probabilities from experience in life and learnt about through the media.”
The average American watches 2 hours and 48 minutes of television a day9 and there is a large body of content analysis detailing the various stereotypes contained in that 168 minutes.10
Writing about television sitcoms and dramas, the late Travis Linn, former Dean of the University Nevada Reno, Reynolds School of Journalism, said, “Stereotypical views of others are part of our shared culture. We participate in these views even when we consciously reject them. It is this reality upon which the writers of sitcoms rely.”11
For the stereotypes in a sitcom to be funny “the humor depends partly on the recognition that stereotypes are stereotypes, that they are not universal truths…the jokes wouldn’t be understandable if we didn’t share at least the knowledge of the stereotype. Our reaction would be ‘what’s that about?’”
Planet Fitness’ Lunk ads would not be amusing or effective if people didn’t know the stereotype.
Television characters need to fit easily recognizable types and those types must be believable for the dramatic narrative to have impact. Linn writes that for television dramas “Stereotypes are used as a way of gaining credibility. A stereotype is, after all, an artifact of common belief.”
As an example, Linn discusses the stereotypes of gang members in television crime dramas. “Most people believe that most gang members are Latino or African American because law enforcement officers tell us that is the case, and the evening news confirms it,” Linn writes. “Thus, the use of this stereotype in a dramatic program is one that appears to fit reality, and, because it appears to fit reality, the program gains the confidence of the viewer in that regard.”
Linn explains that the use of a stereotype in a television show or commercial reinforces the common belief around the stereotype through repeated exposure.
One-hundred and sixty-eight minutes a day of stereotypes--for decades--is a massive amount of stereotype programming. Adding in the programming from social media and other digital media, screen-time experience might drown out lived In Real Life experience among heavy users.
Returning for a moment about the study of high-status college students who appeared more confident, there comes a question-- why do people like the ‘independent observers’ in the experiment mistake confidence for competence?
In the experiment it is likely that the observers may have used the news media as a reference point. What may have been tested was not really impressions of competence but conformance to acceptable norms of press secretaries, pundits and news personalities. As Philip Tetlock said of television talking heads, “they are not in front of the cameras because they possess any proven skill at forecasting. The one undeniable talent that talking heads have is their skill at telling a compelling story with conviction.”12
You may never have worked closely with a true expert, but you have seen them on TV. Or least, think you are seeing them on TV. Tetlock conducted a multi-year study on the accuracy of expert forecasts with some special focus on the ones who appear on television. The television expert’s forecasts were wildly inaccurate. Their bookings and interviews were not based on their track record of accuracy but their value to attract viewers.
The “independent observers” were likely rewarding students who looked like what they thought competent people should look and act like on screen. What the experiment shows, as much as anything, is that upper class college students are adept at mimicking the confidence of television pundits, press secretaries and news personalities.
“Personality traits like being extroverted or dominant can lead to initially assertive behavior that in turn is perceived as competent,” says Professor Ridgeway. “Yet the evidence suggests that neither personality trait is particularly correlated with actual competence.”
Thinking back to the Bayesian Brain, are people more likely to know the Lunk stereotype through repeated personal experience, or repeated exposure through media? The actual number of very muscular men and very fit women is incredibly small. It is likely that there are more portrayals of the type in the media than people ever encounter in reality.
There is no Department of Stereotypes, it is not a governmental agency or a nefarious plot. The most common source and perpetuators of stereotypes are writers of television sitcoms and dramas; movie studios; advertising agencies; newsrooms; social media content creators and influencers; generating thousands of hours of programming each year that rely on stereotypes, reinforce stereotypes and distort the Bayesian Brain.
The benign stereotypes about accountants, computer programmers, engineers, plumbers, video gamers and Lunks are reinforced weekly, if not daily on television and other media. More hurtful and pernicious stereotypes are perpetuated the same way.
The power and influence of stereotypes is like air pressure. You cannot feel it, but it is strong enough to keep an 83,000 pound aircraft flying. How then, can the consequences of stereotype errors be mitigated in life and business?
Businesses and other organizations face three broad challenges with stereotypes-- Assessing Customers, Selecting New Hires and Promoting/Appointing Managers.
A way to beat the stereotypes of the Bayesian Brain is to actually use a little of the math of Bayes Theorem. Thomas Bayes was an 18th Century Presbyterian minister, statistician and philosopher who developed a formula for calculating probabilities of events. The formula, known as Bayes Theorem, is an excellent way to analyze a problem, even if you don’t formally work through the math because it makes you slow down, think and maybe even do a little research--All of which short-circuit the reflexive stereotype judgement. Bayes inserts two steps that human mind normally skips—and always skips in rapid stereotype judgements: 1. What are the base rate odds, and; 2. What is the probability your initial evaluation is wrong?
Let’s work it through in the Lunk context. You see a very muscular guy at the gym. The Lunk stereotype comes to mind and you might be 90% certain he conforms to the stereotype. BUT what are the base rate odds he is actually “dumb”? As we know from IQ testing—as flawed as it is—there is a large cluster of people (~30%) around the average of 95 to 105, ~25% are in the 105-115 range and 13% of people have IQs in the Bright range of 115-130. Sixty-eight percent of the people you encounter randomly are in the range of Normal Average to Smart to Bright. Kinda knocks down the probability of the Lunk stereotype being an accurate assessment.
Next, Bayes Theorem does something completely foreign to most humans—asking “what is the probability I’m wrong?” How many times have initial stereotype judgements failed you? How many times have people stereotyped YOU and been wrong?
Just slowing down for a minute and thinking about some probabilities decreases the strength of the stereotype.
This deliberate slowing down is described as a Phase 2 assessment by Columbia Business School Professor Heidi Grant Halvorson. Phase 1 is the rapid judgment. Phase 2 is the “correction phase” of a stereotype or first impression, and it is “difficult, effortful and not at all automatic.” Halvorson says “Often it takes something really attention grabbing to push us into it” otherwise people “will just stick with the first impression he or she formed during Phase 1.”13
Occasionally doing a minute of mathematics can drastically change how you see the world.
For bigger business decisions, there should be many minutes or hours of using the Bayes template for careful calculation.
After studying and consulting on Multi-Billion-Dollar Mega-Projects, Bent Flyvbjerg has found that the projects actually completed on-time and on-budget had a much longer planning cycle than the ones that seem to drag on in the construction phase for years. In his book How Big Things Get Done and academic research he advises “reference class forecasting” which is looking at how long, how difficult and how expensive other Mega-Projects turned out AND the problems they encountered in the building phase.
Flyvbjerg is essentially advising project managers to use Bayes Theorem to improve the accuracy of project estimates and timelines.
Nobel Prize winning economist and psychologist Daniel Khaneman in his recent book Noise advises structured processes for corporations making multi-million dollar decisions. The terms ‘base rate’ and ‘reference class’ appear all throughout the chapter titled “The Mediating Assessments Protocol.”
Khaneman and Flyvberg’s key advice is to slow down the planning and decision making process to engage in deeper quantifiable analysis. Flyvberg calls it “think slow, act fast” and uses the design processes of architect Frank Gehry as a prototype.14
“Gehry’s planning process may burn considerable time and feel slow, but overall his approach is much faster,” Fyvberg writes in the Harvard Business Review. “And cheaper, because planning and delivery costs are wildly asymmetric: making thousands of iterations on a computer may not have been cheap in an absolute sense, but it cost a small fraction of what it would have to fix the same problems had they been discovered during installation. Relatively speaking, planning is cheap, delivery is expensive. And taking the time to think through the design means you can act much faster later.”
The same concept of slowing down an analysis applies to life in general. Professor Ridgeway’s work is mainly focused on groups and, at first, seems that it mostly applies to businesses or organizations where there is a clear goal to be achieved. On further reflection, Ridgeway’s thesis scales up to society at large, down to individuals and laterally into social circles—there are always goals to be achieved even if vague or low-stakes.
If luck is ‘skills meeting opportunity’ how can a person improve their skills at spotting opportunities to achieve non-work, non-career, non-business goals like….an activity partner, hobby teammate or romantic interest or even, a spouse?
Slowing down and doing a little Bayes Theorem is always a good process. And so is expanding abilities to read signals and the scope of signals you can interpret.
The first signal we interpret is usually visual. You see the Lunk at the gym and at this point we know what happens. And we know we can do a little Bayes calculation. And what would be the data that would confirm or refute the analysis? A little deeper observation over time including, maybe even, talking to them. How often do you actually talk to the Lunk? A person’s vocabulary, word choice, enunciation and pacing are strong Signals.15
Many economists and specialists in mathematical game theory define Signals as “observable characteristics attached to the individual that are subject to manipulation by him.”16 (emphasis added) There are two broad categories of Signals: Costly and Cheap. Signals that are difficult to fake are often called Costly Signals. Cheap Signals are easy to fake. Many academics have built careers cataloging Costly Signals which can range from expensive luxury goods (Panerai watches) to the pursuit of extremely difficult activities and hobbies (Triathlons). Many of the most reliable costly signals, are nearly invisible (maxing the Roth IRA year-in-year-out). Some not-so-expensive luxury goods fall into the category of relatively Cheap Signals (Gucci sunglasses). As noted above, confidence can be a Cheap Signal. True competence takes time to evaluate….but life is short, opportunities are fleeting and we don’t have time to evaluate everything!
Is there a ‘hack’? Sort of. It is actually more of a set of wide concepts.
The brilliant social critic W. David Marx notes that cues are more informative than signals. “Anyone can enhance their status claims by acquiring luxury goods and other high status signals,” Marx writes. “Cues on the other hand, develop as the result of unconscious or long-term conditioning.” Cues are observable results of how a person lives year in, year out over the long term.17
Marx then flips the shallow conventional wisdom of status signaling 180 degrees, “very high-status individuals should seem detached from active attempts to gain status. In fact, the most successful status claims should never appear to be status claims.”
This is similar to what I call The Rolex Rule: The more widely recognized a luxury brand or status symbol is, the weaker its strength as a signal of unique identity. Rolex advertises on billboards along freeways. Panerai barely advertises.
The concept applies widely. What we have been programmed to interpret as signals of status, competence, etc., through various media are stereotypes. People who actively conform to a status stereotype are often trying to signal status.
To do this it is helpful to understand the components basic status formula. The basic status signal calculation goes like this: I have so much excess ____X____ I can ____Y____. (I have so much money, I can spend it on a Panerai watch, Rolex, etc.) The key variable is the recognizability and/or cost of the “Y”. If “Y” is NOT recognizable, there is no discernable indication of “X”. If “Y” is immediately recognizable by a wide cross-section of the population, then “X” can be evaluated. Following Marx’s dictum, a widely recognized “Y” should cause an observer to reduce the weight of its signal value. The more easily it is obtained, the steeper it should be discounted.
Look instead for costly cues and signals of unique identity while being skeptical of attention getting eccentricity.
Discerning the reliable signals takes awareness, attention and probing. Pay attention and look for the signals that are difficult to fake.
Lucky people meet more people, according to research by University of Hertfordshire Professor, Richard Wiseman.18 Meeting people is not just extroversion, it is overcoming the urge to categorize a person, or even dismiss them, based on a rapid stereotype judgement.
The late Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura studied the factors of how chance encounters can alter a person’s life trajectory and concluded they are a “fundamental issue of what determines people's life paths.”19 To understand Bandura’s conjecture, just think of the impact of a few chance encounters with people and you will begin to realize their magnitude. What people do less often, is ask about the impact of missed opportunities because they dismissed a person based on a rapid stereotype judgement formed through media and learned social constructs.
Notes:
1. Social Cognition, 4th Edition
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201786
3. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
5. Ridgeway, Cecilia L. Status
6. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000187.pdf
7. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-life-of-emotions/envy-and-its-transmutations/EB1C2AEEBDBBBDE7E22F87DBE62A0EBC https://psychology.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Smith2004.pdf
8. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/18-080_56688b05-34cd-47ef-adeb-aa7050b93452.pdf
9. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11A.htm
10. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2017&q=stereotypes+content+analysis+television&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
11. Images That Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, chapter 3 “Media Methods That Lead to Stereotypes”
12. Tetlock, Philip Superforcasting http://www.nieuwsspotten.nl/Everybody%20is%20an%20expert.pdf
13. Halvorson, Heidi No One Understands You
14. https://hbr.org/2023/01/how-frank-gehry-delivers-on-time-and-on-budget
17. Marx, David W. Status and Culture
19. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0003-066X.37.7.747
Комментарии