If ‘we’ can succeed, ‘I’ can too: Identity-based motivation and gender in the classroom

Abstract

Gender matters in the classroom, but not in the way people may assume; girls are outperforming boys. Identity-based motivation (IBM) theory explains why: People prefer to act in ways that feel in-line with important social identities such as gender. If a behavior feels identity-congruent, difficulty is interpreted as meaning that the behavior is important, not impossible, but what feels identity-congruent is context-dependent. IBM implies that boys (and girls) scan the classroom for clues about how to be male (or female); school effort will feel worthwhile if successful engagement with school feels gender-congruent, not otherwise. A between-subjects experimental design tested this prediction, manipulating whether gender and success felt congruent, incongruent, or not linked (control). Students in the success is gender-congruent condition described more school-focused possible identities, rated their likely future academic and occupational success higher, and tried harder on an academic task (this latter effect was significant only for boys).

Introduction

“I think girls work harder than boys. Maybe not doing your work is a sign of being cool.” (Male middle school student, Portland Press Herald, 2006)

“Girls are a lot more organized. Every homework I remember to do is because it’s still in my head. In contrast, 90 percent of the girls have the neat handwriting, the notebook, the color-tabbed notes.” (Male high school student, Portland Press Herald, 2006)

The boys quoted in the Portland Press Herald (2006) experience school as gendered. The first boy identifies working hard in school as a girl thing, something not cool for boys. The second boy identifies organization as a skill girls have and boys simply do not have. If working hard is not cool for boys and being organized seems just not possible for boys, then whenever their gender is salient, male students do not need to seriously weigh the pros and cons of choices such as studying vs. goofing off. Instead, they know they are boys, and this identity directs their choices. In that sense, their choices feel identity-based and identity-congruent but are likely to produce negative academic consequences for them as well as for other boys who identify school as gendered.

Indeed, nationwide girls seem to rule the classroom, outperforming boys on virtually all visible indicators of classroom success, particularly among low income and minority populations (EPE Research Center, 2007, Roderick, 2003). Girls participate more in academic clubs, student government, and school newspapers (Bae, Choy, Geddes, Sable, & Snyder, 2000), select harder courses (King, 2006), earn better grades (Peter & Horn, 2005), and equal (math) or outperform (language arts) boys on standardized tests (CEP, 2007). Girls finish high school (EPE Research Center, 2007) and go on to college (King, 2006) at higher rates than boys. We use an identity-based motivation perspective to consider the implications of this experience for children’s identities and effort in school. We make two core predictions: first, that both boys and girls are sensitive to gendered cues about who is likely to succeed in school; and second, that this sensitivity influences both the content of children’s identities and their willingness to work hard at academic tasks. With regard to identity content, experiencing one’s own gender as successful means that academics are more likely to be salient in one’s own imagined possible future identity. Similarly, with regard to current investment in school tasks, experiencing one’s own gender as successful means that one should be willing to persist even if a task feels difficult. With regard to expectations for adult success, experiencing one’s own gender as successful implies that one should expect success in adult career and educational endeavors as well.

The idea that current success matters for future identity construction was described in early writings by Erikson (1963). During adolescent identity development, youth seek clues in their present situations about the adult they may become. Both one’s own current successes and the successes of people like oneself are useful in predicting who one may become: one’s future adult identity. Erikson (1963) also emphasizes that identity development is rooted in socio-historical and cultural context. In his description of the ‘Eight Ages of Man,’ Erikson (1963) tasks adolescents with the challenge of integrating how they view themselves with the roles available to them in this context. This requires that they fit their individual “dreams, idiosyncrasies, roles, and skills cultivated earlier with the occupational and sexual prototypes of the day” (Erikson, 1963, p. 307). From his perspective, both boys and girls are sensitive to messages about gender as they seek information about the identities currently available to members of their group. If in the current time and place, a look around the classroom leads boys and girls to the conclusion that girls are more successful, then Erikson would predict that girls would be more likely to develop success-based identities. As reviewed next, a similar argument could be made based on the gender identity literature which provides evidence that gender is part of children’s self-image from an early age. These perspectives predict a gender effect with girls working harder than boys in school and girls having more school-focused possible selves or future identities than boys. However, what these perspectives neglect is that whether gender comes to mind and its consequences for behavior and identity content are not fixed. Instead, context dynamically determines whether gender is salient and shapes what identity content is linked to gender. As predicted by identity-based motivation theory, girls and boys are sensitive to subtle cues about what it means to be a boy or a girl but not to the source of these cues. In the current study, a small experimental manipulation shifts the salience of academic success in children’s imagined future identities (both for the coming year and as an adult) and increases boys’ current effort in school.

Why should gender matter? Gender is a core identity; it is established early, and there is evidence that it is consequential for both boys and girls. Boys and girls know their own gender before their second birthday (Martin & Ruble, 2009), and knowing whether one is a boy or girl influences what one prefers to do and what feedback matters. Preschoolers increase their effort on a maze task after being shown the successful maze completion of a same-gender child and decrease their effort on the task after being shown the successful maze completion of an opposite gender child (Rhodes & Brickman, 2008). Both boys and girls scan their environments for gender-connected information, constructing gender stereotypes about the traits, abilities, and behaviors of boys and girls (Bigler and Liben, 2007, Patterson and Bigler, 2007). Having learned their own gender, boys prefer behavior that is gender-typed as male, whereas girls prefer behavior that is gender-typed as female (for a review, Martin & Ruble, 2009). When asked about future occupations, boys express more interest in professions stereotyped as masculine, while girls are more interested in feminine-stereotyped professions (Liben, Bigler, & Krogh, 2001). Even in experimental situations in which novel toys are presented as preferred by boys or girls, girls report more liking of the toy that girls prefer (and boys like the toy they are told is preferred by boys) even if it is a less attractive toy (Martin, Eisenbud, & Rose, 1995).

Although gender stereotypes may become more flexible during adolescence, this does not mean that the influence of gender fades. There is some evidence that both genders remain interested in engaging in gender congruent action during adolescence (Alfieri et al., 1996, Martin and Ruble, 2004). It is possible that gender may become an even more salient determinant of identity and behavior during puberty. First, physical changes may make gender even more psychologically salient. Second, pubertal adolescents are rewarded for engaging in gender-congruent behavior (Eccles et al., 1983, Hannover, 2000, Hill and Lynch, 1983). Third, effects of gender identity on behavior are not necessarily consciously chosen. Consider the research on stereotype threat which documents that standardized test performance of both women and men is influenced by making gender salient (for a review, Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002). As documented by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999), effects are congruent with gender stereotypes about capabilities, with women showing declines in math performance if gender is subtly brought to mind. The effect of gender is completely eradicated if participants are either informed of the effect (Johns, Schmader, & Martens, 2005) or told that there are unlikely to be gender differences on the particular task being performed (Spencer et al., 1999).

While the stereotype threat literature has focused primarily on the negative effects of gender identity for women, there is some support for the notion that boys may be more influenced by gender than girls. First, what gender-congruent behavior entails may be more tightly defined for boys than for girls. Second, boys are more likely to be sanctioned for failing to pay attention to the gender relevance of behavior. Boys prefer gender-congruent behaviors at an earlier age than girls (Bauer, 1993). They face more criticism for engaging in gender-incongruent play activities (Fagot, 1985, Fagot, 1994) and show more interest in enforcing and adhering to gender norms (Leaper, 1994, Leaper and Friedman, 2007) than girls. Even parents reinforce more narrow gender roles for boys than for girls (Fagot & Hagan, 1991). More broadly, it is possible that boys are more sensitive to many types of environmental cues beyond information about gender. In support of this gender-specific sensitivity, findings from correlational studies examining the influence of parents (Bee et al., 1984, Morisset et al., 1995) and neighborhoods (Entwisle et al., 1994, Oyserman et al., 2010) on child outcomes indicate increased sensitivity to environmental influence among males as compared to their female peers.

Taken together, the gender identity literature documents that gender identity is established early and that from an early age children care about what their gender implies for their own actions. Gender, gender identity, and gender-based stereotypes continue to matter as shown in the stereotype threat literature, which demonstrates that contexts that make gender salient can influence outcomes outside of one’s awareness. While the gender identity literature focuses on the stability of identity content, we now turn to the identity-based motivation literature which focuses on the dynamic and situated nature of identity.

Identity-based motivation theory (IBM) assumes that the self-concept is multifaceted, including many diverse and not well integrated identity-components whose content is dynamically constructed in context (Oyserman, 2007, Oyserman, 2009a, Oyserman, 2009b, Oyserman et al., 2007). People prefer identity-congruent to identity-incongruent behaviors. Furthermore, people are more likely to use identity-congruent than identity-incongruent lenses to interpret their social and physical world. IBM specifies this underlying motivational process with three core postulates that can be termed action-readiness, dynamic construction, and interpretation of difficulty (Oyserman, 2009a, Oyserman and Destin, 2010). Action-readiness refers to the prediction that identities cue readiness to act and to make sense of the world in terms of the norms, values, and behaviors relevant to the identity. However, which actions are relevant and what sense to make of situations depends on identity content, which itself is dynamically constructed. Dynamic construction refers to the prediction that which identities come to mind, what these identities are taken to mean, and therefore which behaviors are congruent with them are dynamically constructed in context (even though identities feel stable and separate from contexts). The third postulate, interpretation of difficulty, refers to the prediction that when a behavior feels identity-congruent, difficulties in engaging in the behavior will be interpreted as meaning that the behavior is important not impossible. Therefore, effort is meaningful not pointless. Thus, the interpretation of difficulty matters because it influences judgment, choice, and behavior.

These three postulates explain both how it is that identities feel stable but are instead malleable and why it is that school success needs to feel identity-congruent. William James (1890) first articulated a version of these postulates by arguing that the self includes content, motivation, and action tendencies, that social contexts matter for who one is in the moment, and that the self is malleable. In that sense, the identity-based motivation approach is rooted in the earliest psychological formulation of the self-concept. The novel approach that the identity-based motivation model brings is twofold. First, it focuses on predicting when and how aspects of the self-concept matter by operationalizing the three core postulates (action-readiness, dynamic construction, interpretation of difficulty) in a manner amenable to experimental manipulation. Second, it focuses on experimental methodology to test the efficacy of these postulates to predict behavioral outcomes in the moment and to form the basis for interventions influencing behaviors over time. Like James, the IBM model invokes both current and possible future identities, the identities one has now and the ones a person can imagine becoming in the future. The term possible identities is used in preference to the more commonly used possible selves, because as detailed in Oyserman and James (2011), what is typically studied in the possible self literature is some possible identity or part of the future self, such as the successful in school self or the salary-earning self, not the future self in its entirety. Rather than refer to both parts and the whole as self, we refer to possible identities as composing the future self.

As outlined next, prior identity-based motivation studies have demonstrated the contextual sensitivity of social identities including race-ethnicity, social class, and being an undergraduate or graduate student. In some studies, a social identity was made salient in an experimental induction; in other studies the content of a social identity such as race-ethnicity was assessed. However, prior research has not focused explicitly on gender identities. By focusing on gender identity and manipulating contextual cues of whether one’s gender is associated with success, the current study moves beyond prior gender identity and IBM research as detailed next.

In perhaps the most relevant prior research, Oyserman et al. (2007) showed that racial-ethnic and social class identities are associated with consequential beliefs about health. Students were asked whether they themselves or people like them engage in a variety of health and health risk behavior. Healthy behaviors such as eating salads or keeping one’s weight down as an adult were generally not perceived as congruent with working class and minority racial-ethnic identities (Oyserman et al., 2007, Studies 1–2). A series of follow-up experiments documented that whether healthy or health risky behaviors felt identity congruent matters when identity is salient. Low income and minority eighth graders were asked about their social class and racial-ethnic identities either before or after a healthy behavior quiz. Students performed worse on the quiz if their social class and racial-ethnic identities had been brought to mind before the quiz, implying that health risky, not healthy behavior, felt identity congruent (Oyserman et al., 2007, Study 3). This result was replicated using a measure of health fatalism rather than a health quiz. Students reported more fatalism about their future health if their social class and racial-ethnic identities had been brought to mind first, again implying that health risky, not healthy behavior, felt identity congruent (Oyserman et al., 2007, Study 4). To test whether effects were due to the perception that health risk behavior, rather than healthy behavior was identity congruent, three follow-up experiments tested the moderating effect of identity content. As predicted, making racial-ethnic identity salient only had negative consequences for participants who perceived unhealthy behavior as identity congruent and healthy behavior as identity incongruent (Oyserman et al., 2007, Studies 5–7).

Racial-ethnic identities were also shown to matter for academic outcomes in a number of studies (Oyserman, Gant, & Ager, 1995, Study 2; Oyserman, Kemmelmeier, Fryberg, Brosh, & Hart-Johnson, 2003, Studies 2 and 3). In these studies, students were randomly assigned to describe the content of their racial-ethnic identity either before or after working on a novel math task. Students who first brought to mind their racial-ethnic identities worked harder on the math task, but only if their racial-ethnic identity included school-attainment as ingroup congruent, not otherwise (Oyserman et al., 1995, Study 2; Oyserman et al., 2003, Studies 2 and 3). These experiments pinpoint the causal effects of salient racial-ethnic identity content. Follow-up studies using short term longitudinal designs rather than experimental manipulations replicate results while increasing the ecological validity of the experimental results. In one study, African American and Latino low income students reported on the content of their racial-ethnic identity at four points in time (fall and spring of eighth grade and fall and spring of ninth grade) (Altschul, Oyserman, & Bybee, 2006). The three assessed components, termed connectedness, awareness of racism, and embedded achievement, were not only relatively stable across time but also predicted grade point average over time. In another study, the racial-ethnic identity, grade point average, and classroom engagement of entering high school students were assessed (Oyserman, 2008). Here too, racial-ethnic identity content at the beginning of high school predicted change in grades and engagement four years later. Thus, whether racial-ethnic identity was induced to be salient with an experimental manipulation or simply assessed over time, identity content mattered as predicted by the IBM model.

Other research has sought to manipulate the content of a relevant social identity and demonstrate the effect of identity content in this way. In one experiment, a group of Stanford undergraduates were made to believe that graduate students were particularly heavy consumers of alcohol. These undergraduates subsequently reported less interest in and less consumption of alcohol, an effect interpreted as signaling distance from the undesired identity of graduate student (Berger & Rand, 2008). In another field study, Livestrong wristbands were distributed to a campus dorm, and wristband wear was measured among dorm residents. A week later, wristbands were distributed to a neighboring academic dorm known for being the “campus geeks.” After the second distribution, wristband wear decreased by a third in the target dorm, as wearing the wristband could signal an undesired “geek” identity (Berger & Heath, 2008). These studies imply that associations between particular identities and certain products or behaviors can be successfully manipulated. Effects have also been found for health promotion behaviors. Health messages to reduce caffeine consumption were more persuasive to East Asian participants when they were collectively-focused and more persuasive to European American participants when they were individually-focused, but only when the relevant cultural frame was first primed (Uskul & Oyserman, 2010). Similarly, cancer awareness leaflets (published by Cancer Research UK) that described prevention strategies increased readiness to take preventive action among participants who described themselves as cautious and prevention-focused if they were first reminded of this identity (Uskul, Keller, & Oyserman, 2008).

Moreover, experimentally induced effects are robust; Oyserman and colleagues used the identity-based motivation model as the basis for intervention in schools (Oyserman et al., 2006, Oyserman et al., 2002). They designed classroom-based activities to create a sense that school success is a possible identity, congruent with other important social identities, and to encourage an interpretation of difficulty as meaning that engaging in school is important (rather than a sign that success is impossible). Follow-ups at one and two years post intervention showed effects for academic outcomes (grades, test scores) and effort (attendance, homework, in-class behavior). Effects were mediated by changes in students’ school-focused possible identities (Oyserman, et al., 2006). In intervention but not control group students, believing that success in school was a possible future identity was positively associated with racial-ethnic identity (Oyserman, et al., 2006). Following these experimental manipulations of identity-congruence based on identity-based motivation theory, the current study explicitly tests the malleability of gender identity in relation to motivation at school.