New research is discovering that the ?ambient environment,? the passive context in which activities and decisions occur, can have a big impact. ?In a paper by psychologist Sapna Cheryan and three colleagues, they recount how the ambient environment affected men?s and women?s interest in majoring in computer science and their sense that they were capable of doing so.
To test this, they invited some of the respondents into a neutral room, while others entered a room?covered in ?computer geeky? things: a Star Trek poster, comic books, video game boxes, empty soda cans and junk food, technical magazines, and computer software and hardware. ? (Don?t kill the messenger; these were items that other college students had agreed were typical of a ?computer science geek.?)
Cheryan and colleagues found that men (the dark bars in the graph below) were unfazed by the geekery (they were slightly more likely to be interested if the environment was stereotypical, but the difference is within the margin of error). Women who encountered the geeked up room, however, were much less likely to say that they were considering a computer science major (the light bars).
This research is a great example of the ubiquitousness of the cues that tell us what types of interests, careers, hobbies, and activities are appropriate to us. ?Our ambient environment is rich with information about whether we belong. ?And that stuff matters.
Source: Cheryan, Sapna, Victoria Plaut, Paul Davies, and Claude Steele. 2009. Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender Participation in Computer Science. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, 6: 1045-1060.
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
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