psychology, idea technology, and ideology

Psychology, Idea Technology, and IdeologyAuthor(s): Barry SchwartzSource: Psychological Science, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 21-27Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062841 .

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PSYCHOLOGY, IDEA

TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

By Barry Schwartz Swarthmore College

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

General Article

Scientific development leads to a technology of ideas - idea technology - no less than it leads to a technology of objects. But idea technology can have insidious effects that the technology of objects does not. First, ideas can suffuse through a culture before people notice they are there. And second, ideas can have profound effects even when they are false - when they are nothing more than ideology. These effects can arise because sometimes when people act on the basis of ideology, they inadvertently arrange the very conditions that bring reality into correspondence with the ideology. This potential effect of ideology is discussed in connection with the behavioral psychology of Skinner and the claim by Herrnstein and Murray that intelligence is, for all practical purposes, unmodifiable . I suggest that, in general, psychologists must be on the lookout for positive feedback loops between theory and practice that contribute to theory confirmation and thus mislead psychologists into interpreting historically and culturally contingent truths as universal ones.

We live in a culture and an age in which the influence of scientific technology is obvious and overwhelming. As I word

process this document, later to send it via modem to get hard

copy from the laser printer in my office, my microwave oven is defrosting tonight's dinner, my video cassette recorder

(VCR) is taping a movie on cable television for time-shifted

viewing, and my digital compact disc player is delivering back-

ground music of extraordinary quality. All around me, people are having high-tech medical scans, fetuses are being moni-

tored, genes are being spliced, organs are being transplanted, atoms are being smashed to provide power, and computers are

"smartening up" people's lives. None of this is news. Adjust- ing to ever-advancing technology is a brute fact of contempo- rary life. Some of us do it grudgingly, and some of us do it

enthusiastically, but everyone does it. The technology of VCRs, nuclear power, and micro-

waves - what might be called thing technology - is what most of us think of when we think about the modern impact of science. But science produces another kind of technology that has just as big an impact on us as thing technology but is harder to notice. We might call it idea technology. In addition to

creating things, science creates concepts, ways of understand-

ing the world and our place in it, that have an enormous effect on how we think and act. If we understand birth defects as acts of God, we pray. If we understand them as acts of chance, we

grit our teeth and roll the dice. If we understand them as the

product of prenatal abuse and neglect, we take better care of

pregnant women. It hardly needs to be said that people are profoundly af-

fected by the material conditions of their lives - by the living standards of the societies they inhabit. The availability of ne- cessities like food and shelter and the means by which individuals may obtain them make all other influences on life seem

insignificant. People without food will starve whether they accept their conditions beatifically as God's will, accept them with depressed resignation as indications of their own inad-

equacy, or respond to them in anger as social injustice. No matter what ideas people appeal to in order to explain their lack of food, their bellies remain empty.

And yet it is clear that ideas also matter, and they matter a

great deal, even in the case of an obvious material condition like the availability of food. What a squirrel foraging for food in the park does in times of scarcity has nothing to do with how the squirrel understands this scarcity. The squirrel is not about to pray for food, cultivate trees, or organize other squirrels to rise up in protest against people who have polluted the envi- ronment and diminished the squirrel's food sources. But what

people do about their lack of food depends a great deal on how

they understand it. Beatific acceptance, depressed passivity, and angry uprising are all possible human responses, as are new methods of cultivation. Ideas have much to do with whether massive food shortages yield resignation or revolution.

If we understand the concept of technology broadly, as the use of human intelligence to create objects or processes that

change the conditions of daily life, then it seems clear that ideas are no less products of technology than are computers. However, there are two things about idea technology that make it different from most thing technology. First, ideas are not

objects, and thus cannot be sensed directly. They can suffuse

through the culture and have profound effects on people before

they are even noticed.

Second, idea technology, unlike thing technology, can have

Address correspondence to Barry Schwartz, Department of Psychology, 500 College Ave., Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081; e-mail: bsch war 1 @ swarthmore.edu .

VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 1997 Copyright © 1997 American Psychological Society 21




Psychology and Ideology

profound effects on people even if the ideas are false. Com- puters, microwaves, nuclear power plants, and the like gener- ally do not affect people's lives unless they work. Companies cannot sell technological objects that do not do the job. Tech- nological objects may do bad things that people do not want them to do, but at least there is little reason to worry about them unless they can also do the things they were designed to do in the first place. In contrast, untrue ideas can affect how people act as long as people believe them. Let us call idea technology that is based on untrue ideas ideology. Because idea technology, often goes unnoticed and because it can have profound effects even when it is ideology, it is in some respects more in need of vigilant monitoring than is the thing technology whose dangers people are so accustomed to worrying about.

SKINNERIAN PSYCHOLOGY

I can illustrate the potentially powerful role of ideology with an example, a critical interpretation of the work of B.F. Skinner that I developed with two colleagues several years ago (Schwartz, Schuldenfrei, & Lacey, 1978; see also Schwartz, 1986, 1988, 1990). Skinner's central claim was that virtually all behavior is controlled by its reinforcing consequences. Most of Skinner's critics over the years challenged him for denying the importance, or even the existence, of such things as mind, freedom, and autonomy. The nature of these criticisms was that, in one way or another, Skinner's account was inadequate; if one looked with any care at human behavior, one would find numerous phenomena that did not fit the Skinnerian world- view. Skinner and his followers would usually respond to such criticisms by offering Skinnerian interpretations of these puta- tively disconfirming phenomena.

Our own approach was different. We suggested that just a casual glance at the nature of life in modern industrial society would provide ample justification for the Skinnerian world- view; that is, we agreed with Skinner that virtually all behavior was controlled by contingencies of reinforcement. If one looked at the behavior of industrial workers in a modern workplace, it would be difficult to deny that rats pressing levers for food had a great deal in common with, for example, human beings pressing slacks in a clothing factory. We than asked why this might be so. And our answer, unlike Skinner's, was that this similarity was not a reflection of basic, universal facts about human nature, but rather a reflection of the conditions of human labor ushered in by industrial capitalism. We argued that the organization of work was restructured over the centu- ries in which industrial capitalism developed so that work came to look just like rats' lever pressing. The last stages of this restructuring, influenced by the scientific management movement of Taylor (1911/1967), were quite deliberately designed to eliminate all influence on the rate and quality of human labor other than the wage - the " reinforcement" - for by doing this, the manager could exercise complete control over the work by

manipulating wage rates and schedules. The world in which Skinner developed his own theory was one in which all around him, people spent much of their time behaving just as he said they would.

What followed from our argument was that human behavior could look more or less like the behavior of rats pressing levers depending on how the human workplace, and other social institutions like schools, mental hospitals, and prisons, were structured. And the more that these institutions were structured in keeping with Skinner's theory, the more true that theory would look - no, the more true that theory would be. In support of our historical-plausibility argument, we cited laboratory research on the over justification effect to show how the intro- duction of contingencies of reinforcement to tasks that are normally undertaken without them can change both people's motives to engage in the tasks and the manner in which the tasks are performed (see Lepper & Greene, 1978; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973; Schwartz, 1982, 1988, 1990).

To summarize, the general structure of our argument about Skinner's view of human behavior was that Skinner's theory had substantial plausibility in the social and economic context in which it arose, though it would not have been plausible in other contexts. Moreover, and more important, as the theory was embraced and applied, by introducing behavioral engi- neering techniques broadly throughout society, it would come to look more and more plausible. Thus, someone growing up in a post-Skinnerian world in which contingencies of reinforcement were routinely manipulated by parents, teachers, clergy, physicians, and police would surely come to the view that the control of human behavior by external contingencies of reinforcement was universal and inevitable. Such a person would be right about the universality, but not about the inevitability.

It is important to understand that we were not arguing that Skinner's view of the world was an invention. It captured a

significant social phenomenon that he saw all around him. Our

argument was that that very social phenomenon was itself an invention, and that once it was in place, it made Skinner's view of the world seem plausible. Further, we were not arguing that

simply believing Skinner's view of the world was sufficient to make it true. Rather, our argument was that believing Skinner's view of the world would lead to practices that shaped social institutions in a way that made it true.

THE BELL CURVE

In the years since our argument first appeared, psychologists, like other social scientists, have grown increasingly sen- sitive to problems of ideology. Nevertheless, the subtlety of its

possible influence requires vigilance. My concern with the insidious effects of ideology was aroused by the publication of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994). The book has received an extraordinary amount of attention. Most of the attention has been critical (see Fraser, 1995, for a collection of critical essays). Nevertheless, thousands of people have bought

22 VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 1997




Barry Schwartz

the book, and some of those who bought it have probably read it. Any many people, I suspect, whether they have read the book or only read about it, accept its main conclusion that intelligence (including differences between racial and ethnic groups) is for all practical purposes unmodifiable.

People criticize The Bell Curve for logical inconsistency, for selective citation of data, and for theoretical inadequacy. They criticize it for reifying test scores into "intelligence," itself a problematic concept. They criticize it for its policy recommen- dations, suggesting that it is really only racist (or elitist, or eugenicist) politics disguised as science. Some of these criticisms are hysterical, and some thoughtful (e.g., Hunt, 1995; Nisbett, 1995, especially his focus on the evidence that IQ can be modified; Sternberg, 1995; and see Neisser et al., 1996, for a recent American Psychological Association task force report on the nature of intelligence that was inspired by the contro- versy surrounding the book). Many of these criticisms may be true and important. Yet one would expect that if The Bell Curve were just unacceptable politics disguised as science - and bad science at that - in the fullness of time its inadequacies as science would be revealed, and its effects on political attitudes and social policies would subside. This is not to under- estimate how devastating its effects could be in the short run, but it is to say that, ultimately, science corrects its mistakes.

To me the most serious danger posed by the book is not that it is false, but that, as ideology, it can have effects on the culture's self-understanding that make it true. I derive this concern from ideas developed and studied by Dweck. Dweck and her associates (e.g., Diener & Dweck, 1980; Dweck, 1975; Dweck & Bempechat, 1983; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Elliot & Dweck, 1988; Leggett, 1985) have spent many years studying the different kinds of goals that govern children's learning throughout the educational process. They have uncovered two fundamentally different approaches to learning that can often lead to profound differences in how well children learn. Some children have what Dweck calls performance goals; the others have what she calls mastery goals. Children with performance goals are interested primarily in gaining favorable judgments of their competence. They want to do well on tests. They want social approval. Children with mastery goals are interested primarily in increasing their competence rather than demon- strating it. They want to encounter things that they cannot do and to learn from their failures. As Dweck has put it, performance- oriented children want to prove their ability, whereas mastery- oriented children want to improve their ability.

Children with performance goals avoid challenges. They prefer tasks that are well within the range of their abilities. Children with mastery goals seek challenges. They prefer tasks that strain the limits of their abilities. Children with performance goals respond to failure by giving up. Children with mastery goals respond to failure by working harder. Children with performance goals take failure as a sign of their inadequacy, and come to view the tasks at which they fail with a mixture of anxiety, boredom, and anger. Children with mastery

goals take failure as a sign that their efforts, and not they, are inadequate, and often come to view the tasks at which they fail with the kind of relish that comes when one encounters a worthy challenge. Dweck and her associates have shown that when classroom tasks become moderately difficult, mastery- oriented children perform substantially better than performance- oriented children (e.g., Diener & Dweck, 1978, 1980).

What is it that determines whether people will go through life with a performance or a mastery orientation? A complete answer to this crucial question is not yet at hand, but Dweck has shown that beneath these two orientations lie two quite different conceptions of the nature of intelligence. Some children have entity theories of intelligence. They believe, like Herrnstein and Murray, that intelligence is essentially immu- table. These are the children who tend to be performance oriented. What is the point of seeking challenges and risking failure if one cannot get any smarter? Much more sensible is to seek approval and avoid any chance of failure. In contrast to these entity theorists, other children have incremental theories of intelligence. They believe that intelligence is not a fixed quantity - that people can get smarter. These children tend to be mastery oriented, seeking in their schoolwork to do what they believe is possible for everyone.

It is not yet known what factors determine which kind of theory of intelligence a child will have, though Dweck's research suggests that these differences in theories of intelligence can appear early in childhood. But it is certainly easy to imagine that if the entire culture accepts the conclusions of Herrn- stein and Murray and subscribes to an entity theory of intelligence, the culture's children will also have such a theory. And if they do, they will seek approval, avoid challenge, give up in the face of failure, and learn less in school.

Dweck's research is concerned with the mastery of skills, not with the growth of intelligence. But suppose, contra Herrn- stein and Murray, that intelligence could be increased and that a mastery orientation in learning situations was critical to its increase. If this were true, but children (partly as a result of the effect of the Herrnstein-Murray thesis) subscribed to entity theories of intelligence, then they would be performance rather than mastery oriented. As a result, their intelligence would not grow, and they would confirm the Herrnstein-Murray thesis that intelligence is fixed, with most of us unaware of the causal role that that very thesis had played in its own confirmation.

Evidence consistent with this possibility can be found in the cross-cultural research of Stevenson and his colleagues (e.g., Newman & Stevenson, 1990; Stevenson, Chen, & Lee, 1993a, 1993b; Stevenson, Lee, & Chen, 1994). This research has con- sistently demonstrated that East Asian children score higher than American children in various tests of academic achievement, and that at least sometimes, the differences grow larger with age. The research has also shown that East Asian parents are more likely to attribute academic performance to effort, rather than innate ability, than are American parents. Although improvements in academic performance are not the same as

VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 1997 23





improvements in intelligence, and attributing performance to effort is not the same as believing that intelligence can be increased, these data at least suggest that in cultures that place less emphasis on innate ability than U.S. culture, the pattern of academic achievement observed will be inconsistent with what the Herrnstein-Murray thesis implies.

My argument about The Bell Curve and the immutability of IQ is intended as an exact parallel to the argument about Skin- ner. I am not suggesting that The Bell Curve is creating a truth out of nothing. As with Skinner, The Bell Curve made a case for a proposition that many people already believed, and for which there was some evidence. That is, the arguments in The Bell Curve arose in a context in which some (perhaps social) factors had already made them plausible. What I am suggesting is that these arguments can now influence the structure and practice in relevant social institutions (e.g., by inducing policy- makers to cut support for various enrichment programs tar- geted at students who are at risk for poor school performance) so that over time these arguments become not merely plausible, but irresistible.

OTHER POSSIBLE EXAMPLES

Having been alerted to the potential role that ideology might play in psychology's ultimate assessment of the arguments made in The Bell Curve, one can find similar potential in other studies of intellectual functioning. One possible area concerns changes in intellectual functioning that accompany aging. It is the accepted wisdom in our culture, buttressed by psychological research, that at least some types of memory deteriorate with age (e.g., Baddeley, 1986; Light & Burke, 1988; Ryan, 1992; Schacter, Kasziniak, & Kihlstrom, 1991). What is less clear is why this decline occurs. Some people view it as the result of inexorable physiological decay. But others view it as a result of the expectation that memory declines with age. In an effort to assess the source of memory decline, Levy and Langer (1994) administered a battery of memory tests to old members of three different groups: American hearing, American deaf, and Chinese hearing. In addition, Levy and Langer assessed attitudes toward aging in the three groups. The rationale for the selection of groups was that in American deaf and Chinese cultures, the aged are held in high esteem and regarded as a resource, not a burden. Levy and Langer found that American deaf and Chinese participants had more positive attitudes toward aging than did American hearing participants. And consistent with their hypothesis, American deaf and Chinese participants outperformed their American hearing counterparts on the memory tests. These results suggest that a culture's attitude toward aging gets reflected in the attitudes of individual members of that culture, and is in turn reflected in their intellectual performance. This causal claim was supported by a path analysis, which failed to find a significant direct relation between culture and memory performance but did find significant rela-

tions between culture and a positive view of aging and between a positive view of aging and good memory performance.

Another domain in which ideology may play a role concerns claims about gender differences in mathematical ability. The received view for quite some time has been that males are better at math than females, and that the difference gets larger with age and with increasing selectivity of samples (Benbow & Stanley, 1980; Halpern, 1986). Recent data suggest that al-

though males do outperform females on some types of mathematical tasks, and that the male-female difference does get larger with age and with extremely select samples, gender differences are in general quite small and, over the years, have been getting smaller (Hyde, Fennema, & Lamon, 1990). This

finding of small (and decreasing) effects is also true of attitudes toward the study of math and of affect (so-called math anxiety) triggered by it (Hyde, Fennema, Ryan, Frost, & Hopp, 1990). The one substantial gender difference in attitudes toward math is that males are much more likely than females to regard math as a male domain. This finding may combine with the persis- tent cultural stereotype about mathematical ability and gender to induce male teachers to discourage females from pursuing training in high-level mathematics and mathematically related careers, and it may induce male students to display negative attitudes toward their female peers that are also discouraging. This negativity may be quite subtle and unintended, but as I

suggest in the next section, ideology does not require obvious and dramatic routes to have effects. If, as a result of this gender stereotyping, one generation of females is in fact discouraged from pursuing mathematics, the implied lesson will not be lost on the next generation.

A final example of the possible effects of ideology concerns claims about racial differences in intellectual performance. Steele and Aronson (1995; see also Steele, 1992) recently ex-

plored some of the factors that influence the performance of African Americans on standardized tests of intellectual ability. Steele and Aronson argued that when African Americans con- front a test of intellectual ability, they are simultaneously fac-

ing an assessment of their own ability as individuals and an assessment of the cultural stereotype of black intellectual in-

feriority. This additional burden - the threat of confirming a

negative stereotype - puts added pressure on black test takers that can interfere with their performance in a variety of ways. In support of this argument, Steele and Aronson showed that when black and white participants took a test consisting of difficult items from a Graduate Record Examination study guide, whites significantly outperformed blacks when the test was identified as diagnostic of individual ability. However, when the test was identified as part of a study of ' 'psychological factors involved in solving verbal problems," the racial differences largely disappeared.

Perhaps even more startling was the finding that race differences in performance appeared even when the tests were described as nondiagnostic of individual ability if participants were simply required to identify their race as part of the de-





Barry Schwartz

mographic information they supplied at the top of the examination. Thus, just making race salient had a deleterious effect on the performance of black participants. Given this finding, it is not hard to imagine how, in a culture in which claims about racial differences in intellectual performance are pervasive and salient, blacks will carry this burden into every examination they take. And the consequence of the extra burden - diminished performance - will only go to strengthen claims about racial differences in intellectual performance. Note that the argument here is not that black test takers will go into an exam expecting to do badly and thus will do so, thereby confirming their expectations. Rather, the argument is that they will go into the exam with an extra, culturally imposed burden that they must do well, which will have the unfortunate effect of confirming the culture's negative expectations.

POSSIBLE MECHANISMS

There are probably many different mechanisms through which false or only partly true psychological theories can become self-fulfilling by influencing social institutions in a way that subsequently influences individuals. Some of these mechanisms may be quite obvious. For example, if certain career paths requiring training in mathematics were formally and ex- plicitly closed to women because of their alleged inferiority in mathematics, the self-fulfilling, positive feedback loop between theory and confirmation would be clear. That this would constitute an example of ideology is of course less clear. That is, it could simply be true that women are less gifted than men in mathematics. Determining whether a psychological claim is ideology or not often takes real effort, even if the route by which the claim has significant social influence is apparent.

But sometimes the mechanisms that constitute the positive feedback loop may be extremely subtle. And when they are, even being attuned to the possibility that ideology may be operating so that it can be investigated will be problematic. An example of a subtle mechanism by which ideology could have effects comes from the literature on what is called implicit learning, the induction of rules or detection of regularities that occurs without people trying to discover these regularities, or sometimes even realizing they are present (see Reber, 1993, for a review). A particularly striking demonstration of implicit learning was reported by Lewicki, Hill, and Sasaki (1989; sell also Lewicki, 1986; Lewicki, Hill, & Czyzewska, 1992). In several experiments, each involving different stimulus materials, Lewicki et al. exposed participants to complex stimuli that differed in some extremely subtle fashion. During the training phase of the experiments, participants were presented with about 40 exemplars and told into which of two classes each exemplar belonged. They were then given 80 test trials in which they saw an exemplar and had to classify it. During these test trials, no feedback was provided. The key finding in these experiments was that over the first 40 test trials, classification was essentially at chance. In contrast, over the second

40 test trials, classification became increasingly accurate. This improvement or "

learning" occurred despite the fact that participants were given no feedback whatsoever about their performance over the course of the test trials. Further, having the classificatory categories was critical. Other participants given the same stimulus materials as a perceptual discrimination task, without labeled categories, showed no evidence of learning the discrimination simply on the basis of the visual properties of the displays (see Rumelhart & Zipser, 1985, for a connectionist model that operates in just this fashion). Lewicki et al. argued that having categories influences the encoding of new information in a way that is self-perpetuating, even when people have absolutely no awareness of the basis on which their encoding decisions are being made. These encoding biases have powerful effects on the organization of information. And note, these tendencies to classify in accord with previously given categories become stronger with experience even in the absence of any feedback that would encourage them.

It is not hard to see how, if these processes operate in the social domain, their effects can be insidious. Encoding biases about gender and math, age and memory, race and intellect, the limits of what one can achieve through intellectual effort, or how much of human behavior is reward driven, can affect how people interpret new data without people realizing that these biases even exist, and in the absence of clear empirical confirmation. It is not hard to imagine how biases like these could contribute to an ideological positive feedback loop of the sort that is the concern of this article.

PSYCHOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY

It is possible to view my argument about ideology as an example of a constellation of ideas that is very much in the air these days. These ideas, which encourage a critical stance toward the hypothetico-deductive methods of science, often em- phasize the role of theory in selecting and even creating or constructing data. Some advocates of this critical stance argue that social "facts" in general are constructed, not discovered, and the construction of so-called scientific facts is just a special case of a much more general process (e.g., Gergen, 1985, 1994a, 1994b). Many researchers who spend their time in the laboratory thinking they are discovering facts rather than constructing them lack much patience for this critical, constructionist stance. They regard it as excessively skeptical, perhaps even nihilistic, and they go about their own business ignoring this approach, confident that if there is a domain of phenomena to which this constructionist approach properly applies, it is not their domain, and it probably should not be a part of science. Within psychology, one may be especially likely to encounter this attitude among psychologists who study "basic" psychological processes (e.g., perception, cognition, memory, learning) and are perhaps slightly disdainful of their cousins who work in social psychology or the psychology of personality, to






whose work the constructionist critique might well be seen to apply.

Although the discussion of examples in this article bears a family resemblance to social constructionist arguments, I believe there are important differences (though it should be noted that social constructionism comes in many varieties, some of which are much closer to my arguments than others). First, my arguments do not deny that there are social facts that can be discovered. Second, they do not deny that claims about the importance of reinforcement, the immutability of IQ, the effects of aging, gender and math, or race and intellect could be true. Indeed, on the contrary, they accept those claims (for purposes of argument, at least) and then offer an account of them that is quite different from accounts like Skinner's or Herrnstein and Murray's. Specifically, my arguments offer an alternative to what might be called the essentialism that char- acterizes both Skinner and Herrnstein and Murray. In these respects, my discussion is no different from what occurs in countless scientific disputes, with contending parties offering different interpretations of an agreed-upon set of facts. What makes my arguments unusual in comparison with what might be called normal science is the central causal role played by the Skinner and Herrnstein-Murray theses themselves. I am saying that these theses can become variables that are causally effi- cacious in their own confirmation (see Gergen, 1973).

The difference between my view and a social constructionist view is apparent in the fact that my argument about the Herrnstein-Murray thesis relies on a set of psychological gen- eralizations (from Dweck) that a social constructionist would probably regard as just as problematic as the generalization they are used to criticize. My argument is not an argument about social facts in general. It is neither a metaphysical argument about the nature of social reality nor an epistemological argument about what can be known. It is a much more nar- rowly empirical argument, that certain social "facts" are being improperly understood as revealing universal and eternal char- acteristics of human nature rather than historically contingent ones. And my argument does not even deny that the particular Herrnstein-Murray social fact may be true. It merely suggests that the factors that make that fact true are not nearly as inevitable as the Herrnstein-Murray thesis suggests.

None of my examples of possible ideology are idealist in the sense that I am claiming that reality is just what people take it to be. The causal role played by a theory in its own confirmation is indirect, not direct. Perhaps the theory puts unhelpful pressure on people, changing the way they approach life tasks. Perhaps the theory contributes to a change in social practice, by making an existing social practice more widespread, as in the case of Skinner, or by undercutting the justification for a social practice that might falsify the theory, as might happen to educational intervention in early childhood as a result of The Bell Curve. In either case, it is the change in social practice that causes the confirmation of the theory. In this respect, these

arguments have much in common with phenomena often de-

scribed as self-fulfilling prophesies, which have been studied extensively in social, developmental, and educational settings (e.g., Jussim, 1986). Most commonly, self-fulfilling prophesies involve expectations on the part of some agent with regard to some subject that lead the agent to behave in a certain way toward the subject that in turn leads the subject to behave in a

way that confirms the expectations of the agent. Typically, self-fulfilling prophesies are studied at the level of individual agents (e.g., teachers) and individual subjects (e.g., students). That self-fulfilling prophesies operate at the level of individuals makes them somewhat easier to diagnose than the processes I am discussing, because there will usually exist other subjects, about whom the agent has different expectations, to provide a contrast. When expectations, in the form of theories, are held universally, and applied universally, the contrasting cases van- ish. As a result, the self-fulfilling feedback loop is much harder to identify. This is why ideology can be so insidious.

Does the psychological literature contain other possible examples of the ideological processes I am describing? I do not know. The more broadly accepted and well entrenched a theory is, the more difficult it will be to identify a self-confirming feedback loop if it exists. When evaluating psychological theories, we can protect ourselves from being influenced by these feedback loops only if we are aware that they might be present. It is only if we are mindful of the possible presence of ideol-

ogy - even in connection with so-called basic psychological processes - that we can root it out and prevent it from con- taminating our search for the truth.

Acknowledgments - I thank Lee Jussim, Deborah Kemler Nelson, John Kihlstrom, Hugh Lacey, Clark McCauley, Paul Rozin, Myrna Schwartz, Bernd Wittenbrink, and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful suggestions.

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Diener, C.I., & Dweck, C.S. (1980). An analysis of learned helplessness: II. The processing of success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 940-952.

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Dweck, C.S., & Bempechat, J. (1983). Children's theories of intelligence. In S. Paris, G. Olsen, & H. Stevenson (Eds.), Learning and motivation in the classroom (pp. 239-256). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Fraser, S. (Ed.). (1995). The bell curve wars. New York: Basic Books.

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Barry Schwartz

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(Received 11/20/95; Accepted 12/29/95)




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