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