Context and environment suggest who belongs and who does not

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Do you belong? Subtle cues including how a room looks could tell people they do not belong. This may have a big impact on questions such as why there are so few women in tech.

Meanwhile, other psychologists wondered how much you can tell about someone from the stuff in their bedrooms. Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin gave students permission to enter the dorm rooms or apartments of other students and asked them to rate the occupants on various personality traits. The participants generally agreed with each other’s assessments of the strangers, and their descriptions were surprisingly accurate.

These two ideas came together for Cheryan the summer after her first year of graduate school, when she was job hunting in Silicon Valley. She interviewed at Motorola, a cell phone company, and Adobe, a graphic design company.

Motorola looked “totally stereotypical,” she says. “Their conference rooms were named after Star Trek things. I asked them how many women they had in this research office. There were none. I would be the first woman there.”

When the interviewer asked Cheryan if she would change anything about cell phones, she said she wished there was a way to make them stop ringing from a distance. “They were like, why would you need that? People just put their phone right here,” she says, indicating her front pocket. “I said, ‘Where’s my phone right now? It’s over there, in my purse.’ I basically said, ‘You’re not designing your phones for women.’”

Adobe, on the other hand, “was a 180 in terms of their environment.” Their building was bright and beautiful, and about one-third of their programmers were women. Cheryan worked there for five years.

“It was clear to me then that I totally drew these inferences based on environment,” she says.

A study in Star Trek

When I visit Cheryan’s lab in Seattle, I expect her to sit me down at a desk like the one at Stanford: covered with science fiction, comic books, and video games. Instead I am led to a small, windowless room with Easter-egg yellow walls, containing only a desk and a computer.

Cheryan’s “geek room” study has taken many forms. The current incarnation is in the popular virtual environment Second Life. The computer prompts me to imagine that I’m signing up for a computer science class, and I have a chance to check out the classrooms before picking one.

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Video (20.4 mb): Lisa Grossman takes us into the virtual realm of Second Life, where psychologist Sepna Cheryan tests how students react to the “geeky” stereotypes of computer science classrooms and labs.
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I see the world through the eyes of my avatar, and I control its movements (I never discover its gender) with a keypad. I practice running around the halls for a bit before entering Classroom A, where I quickly discover that I can make my avatar jump on the desks. Fun!

Classroom A is the neutral room, and it feels like a dentist’s waiting room. Colorful abstract paintings and photos of autumn in the woods hang on the walls. The teacher’s desk has a potted plant and a lamp, and some of the students’ desks sport blue plastic water bottles. Magazines like Time and Travel & Leisure sit in neat rows on a shelf. There’s even a coffee maker. The only thing that marks the room as a place of programming is a message on the whiteboard: “Welcome to Intro to Computer Science.”

If Classroom A is a waiting room, though, Classroom B is a lounge. It’s a mess. The Star Trek and World of Warcraft posters are crooked. Copies of Wired and science fiction novels lie in heaps on the floor. Loose computer parts and wires from video game controllers sit in sloppy piles on the students’ desks.

But it does look more like a realistic classroom. The shelf that bore neat piles of magazines in the other room now offers textbooks on C++. And there are some endearing things, like an action figure of Yoda brandishing a green lightsaber. This room certainly has personality.

Cheryan brought her study to Second Life because of the amount of control it offered. In social psychology experiments, everything is a variable. The weather, the lighting, the experimenter’s demeanor, or the subject’s own mood can affect the outcome of the test. To make sure they’re measuring something real, psychologists must run their experiments over and over again, on hundreds of subjects and in as many different configurations as possible.

For the “geek room” study, Cheryan and her team pre-tested every object they wanted to put in the room. They asked students to rate them on geekiness and masculinity. Even the neutral room took extensive pre-testing. Cheryan’s lab manager checked out dozens of different water bottles before settling on one she thought would communicate nothing about the drinker. Second Life lets them change the posters and water bottles with a click of a button, giving the study much more flexibility.

Cheryan held her original study in a classroom in Stanford’s computer science building to make sure the participants linked the objects with computer science. If they’d decorated rooms in the psychology building, it would have been too obvious that it was a setup, Cheryan says.

The students were led to believe the room always looked like that, and given a questionnaire to assess their attitudes toward computer science. Girls in the study consistently rated themselves less interested, less capable and less similar to the inhabitants of the “geek room” than the neutral room.

But what if it had nothing to do with the objects, Cheryan asked? What if they just thought all CS majors were boys? She did the study again, this time asking students to imagine they were joining an all-female team at a company. The only difference between the two teams was the objects in their office. Girls flocked to the non-geeky job.

Every time they changed the study, the results were the same: Most women avoided the geek space. When prompted, many said it gave them a masculine vibe. The more masculine they found the room, the less they liked it.

“The extent to which women don’t like that room was pretty surprising,” Cheryan says. “No matter what we do to that room, even if we make it all female, women just don’t feel like they belong there.”

Cheryan’s work has been well received by other social psychologists. “It’s new and exciting,” says Jennifer Crosby of Williams College, who studies how environmental cues affect racial minorities. “Environmental things send really strong messages about who belongs in a domain and who doesn’t. To look at that systematically the way Sapna’s doing is really important, well beyond the realm of computer science.”

Post external references

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    http://sciencenotes.ucsc.edu/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html
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