Shifting Standards

Definition

Much of people's conversation about others includes descriptions such as “he's very tall” or “she's smart” or “he's really aggressive!” The concept of shifting standards refers to the idea that these descriptions are made with reference to some standard of judgment, and that this standard may shift depending on the person or object being described. How tall is tall? Presumably, standards of tallness—what qualifies as tall versus short—differ depending on whether a man or a woman (or a child) is being described. Similarly, standards for judging intelligence, aggressiveness, or any other attribute may shift or vary for different categories of people. Research on shifting standards has suggested that stereotypes about groups, such as beliefs that men are more aggressive than women or that African Americans are better athletes than White Americans, may lead to the use of different (shifting) standards to judge individual members of these groups. The result is that the same description or adjective label may mean something substantially different depending on whom it describes. For example, because standards for height and aggression are lower for women than men, a woman might be labeled “tall” if she were 5′9" whereas a 5′9" man would not; “interrupting a conversation” might warrant a label of “assertive” in a woman more so than in a man.

Background

Many psychologists have been interested in how judgments are made—whether they involve objects (such as estimating the brightness of lights or the heaviness of weights), other people, or the self. Every type of judgment must be made with reference to some standard, [Page 873]and usually that standard is based on the immediately preceding context, or on what a person has come to expect. As psychologist Harry Helson noted in his theory of adaptation level, a normally lighted room will seem bright if you've been adapted to the dark, but will seem dark if you've previously been exposed to bright sunlight. With regard to judgments of people, a 1986 experiment by Paul Herr demonstrated that an individual may seem hostile if you've recently been thinking about nonhostile people such as Santa Claus or the Pope, but rather nonhostile if you've previously been thinking about hostile people such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. The previous exposure provides the context in which the new target stimulus or person is judged.

Monica Biernat and her colleagues first argued in a 1991 paper that stereotypes about groups function in the same way as other context effects. Stereotypes provide people with expectations about what other people will be like, and therefore serve as standards against which we judge them. If one expects that men have lesser verbal skills than women do, or that African Americans are more athletic than Whites are, the standards will shift depending on whether one is judging men or women, African Americans or Whites. The result could be, paradoxically, that a man is judged even more verbally skilled than a comparably performing woman, or that a White actor is judged more athletic than a Black actor (because standards are lower in each case). But this doesn't mean that no stereotyping has occurred, or even that reverse stereotyping has occurred. Instead, the stereotype gives rise to different standards, which leads people to judge individual members of groups in comparison with expectations for their groups as a whole.

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