Talking from 9 to 5 by Deborah Tannen

Author:Deborah Tannen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Although all these forces are at work when individuals speak one way or another, it would be misleading to imply that everything that happens to us is a reaction to something we said or did. Much as this goes against our beliefs in how the world should be, some-times others treat us in ways that have far less to do with who we are as individuals than with their assumptions about who we are based on the group we seem to belong to.

We would all like to believe that we judge others and are judged by competence, performance, and hard-and-fast results, not stereotypes. But there is overwhelming evidence from studies in many different fields that people’s judgments of others are influenced by appearance and other characteristics that cause us to see them as members of groups about which we have preexisting assumptions.

All other things being equal, when confronted with a woman and a man they do not know in managerial positions, many people assume the man is more competent than the woman. Veronica Nieva and Barbara Gutek reviewed a large number of studies in which this conclusion was reached. Subjects were asked to evaluate hypothetical people who are described identically, except for their sex. Study after study had similar results: Well-qualified people in managerial roles were evaluated more highly if they were identified as male. But when managers were identified as unsuccessful or not well qualified, then evaluators were harder on men than women— as if they expected less of women to start with.

In these studies, it is simply the image of women as women that affords them low status, not anything they have done as individuals. Offensive as the realization may seem, expectations about us, based on preconceptions, can affect and even determine how we are heard—and if we are heard at all. A German man who lived in Japan for many years and spoke Japanese fluently reported that the Japanese assumption that foreigners cannot learn Japanese made it impossible for some Japanese people to understand him when he spoke their language—if they were looking at him. When he spoke Japanese on the telephone, no one ever had trouble understanding him. But frequently, when he spoke to people face-to-face, they simply stared at him in incomprehension. Convinced he could not be speaking Japanese, they simply failed to process what he said.

The effect of expectations on comprehension is also supported by research. Speech-communication professor Donald Rubin was concerned with complaints by students at his university that they had trouble understanding foreign-born teaching assistants. Rubin suspected that their preconceptions about foreign-looking speakers being difficult to understand might be playing a powerful role. To test this idea, he tape-recorded a four-minute lecture given by an American-born woman from Ohio, then played the tape to two groups of students at two different times. As the students listened to the lecture on tape, they saw projected on a screen a photograph of the person they were told was the lecturer.

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