Situational disengagement and persistence in the face of adversity

Abstract

Research suggests that the experience of belonging to a group whose academic abilities are negatively stereotyped fosters disidentification over time, that is, the psychological insulation of the self from academic evaluations and outcomes (Crocker, Major, & Steele, 1998). This research tests whether the process of disidentification can ironically improve motivation when mobilized in response to specific situations. Black and White participants were given negative feedback on an ability-diagnostic or non-diagnostic task. Subsequently, all participants were given the opportunity to persist on the task and their level of disengagement was assessed. As hypothesized, Black participants in the diagnostic condition displayed the most persistence as well as the most disengagement and this persistence response was mediated by their disengagement. The results suggest that, in contrast to chronic disengagement, situational disengagement may help facilitate motivation and persistence.

Introduction

In light of the negative stereotypes that African American students often have to contend with in academic domains, they can come to feel that their social identity is devalued in the school setting. Research suggests that in response to repeated experiences of such devaluation, these students may adapt through a process of task disengagement that may sometimes lead to full disidentification with the academic domain, psychologically insulating them from feedback (Crocker et al., 1998, Steele, 1992). This process includes the disengagement of these students’ self-esteem from the evaluations they receive, thereby protecting their feelings of self-worth from a possibly devaluing environment (Major and Schmader, 1998, Major et al., 1998). This process of disengagement and disidentification has been hypothesized to be detrimental to students’ motivation in the domain, leading to lower levels of achievement and dropping out (Crocker et al., 1998, Major and Schmader, 1998, Schmader et al., 2001, Steele et al., 2002). The present research seeks to address the question of how some students manage to persist in a domain when their identification with it makes them vulnerable to being negatively stereotyped.

The current reasoning about disidentification raises the question of how people who are negatively stereotyped in an unavoidably important domain like schooling—a domain where it is extremely costly to disidentify—remain motivated and identified. That is, some domains of life are difficult to disidentify with because they are simply so important to a person’s overall welfare and future (e.g., school). The threat of being negatively stereotyped might cause considerable distress in these domains. But leaving the domain—disidentifying with it—could have even worse consequences. How then do people in such a situation remain identified? What psychological strategies or resources enable them to do this? The research reported in this paper considers the possibility that people in this predicament may remain identified with the domain through temporary or situational disengagement. That is, they may lose the battle to win the war; they may distance themselves from the ego implications of particular performances within the domain so that they can remain ego identified and committed to the larger domain.

When students identified with a domain in which they are the target of a negative stereotype receive negative feedback they are faced with a dilemma: if they successfully persist despite the negative feedback they may be able to disprove the allegation, but if they continue to struggle while persisting then they are at risk of confirming the allegation. Disidentification is one solution to this problem, but it incurs the cost of failing in the domain.

As a chronic adaptation, arising from repeated instances of such disengagement, academic disidentification is assumed to have a detrimental effect on African American students’ motivation in the domain (Crocker et al., 1998, Major and Schmader, 1998, Steele et al., 2002). The severing of the link between feedback and feelings of self-worth presumably undermines the incentive to succeed, potentially leading to increased dropout rates (Steele, 1992, Steele, 1999). However, it is also true that not all African American students become disidentified; many maintain high levels of motivation and persist in academics despite the negative stereotyping they encounter in the domain.

In the current research, we explore another possible resolution of this dilemma; specifically, whether the process of disengagement can itself enable persistence—not when it is a permanent adaptation, but when it is employed in response to a specific situation. For example, could it be that African American students who are identified with academics situationally disengage from feedback in order to deflect feelings of devaluation and maintain their motivation and identification over the long term? Thus, rather than permanently disidentifying, a student under stereotype pressure may simply disengage from a particular performance by denying its relevance to his or her self-worth and thus be able to persist in the domain even in the face of frustration. In the present research, we examine whether this adaptation to stereotype threat—which may have negative effects if transformed into a chronic adaptation—may actually serve to maintain identification and motivation in the domain when used as a situational coping tactic.

Theorizing about the process of academic disidentification has evolved significantly over the past decade. Initially, in response to the predicament of African Americans withdrawing from academics, Steele (1992) posited that repeated exposure to the experience of coping with stereotype threat leads African American students to insulate themselves emotionally and psychologically from the domain of academics. While this may be true (Osborne, 1995, Osborne, 1997; but see Morgan & Mehta, 2004), in recent years the story surrounding disidentification has been updated and expanded. A revised disidentification hypothesis, summarized by Steele and his colleagues (2002) argues that despite being forced to contend with negative stereotypes, African Americans continue to value school (Major and Schmader, 1998, Major et al., 1998). Major and Schmader and their colleagues have further analyzed the factors leading to disidentification.

Major and Schmader’s (1998) research uses the term academic disengagement to denote “the detachment of self-esteem from external feedback […] such that feelings of self-worth are not dependent on successes or failures in that domain” (Major & Schmader, 1998, p. 220). According to this line of research, disengagement is the consequence of one or both of two separate psychological processes, devaluing and discounting. Devaluing refers to the process by which the importance of the domain of academics is dismissed, thereby making a student’s self-worth immune to negative feedback (e.g., “It usually doesn’t matter to me one way or the other how I do in school.”). The alternate route to disengagement is discounting, or the rejection of academic feedback as a valid measure of one’s academic ability or potential (e.g., “Most intelligence tests do not really measure what they are supposed to.”). Major and Schmader maintain that either of these processes can lead to disengagement (e.g., “I really don’t care what tests say about my intelligence.”).

Their findings reveal that while African Americans tend to discount more relative to European Americans, there are no differences between the groups in terms of how much each group values academics (Major and Schmader, 1998, Major et al., 1998). They also find that African Americans eclipse their European American counterparts in terms of disengagement both on self-report measures (Major & Schmader, 1998) and in terms of the lack of reactivity of their self-esteem in response to academic feedback (Major et al., 1998). Apparently, then, to the extent that African American students are disengaged, it is not because they do not value school, but because they do not accept the feedback they receive as indicative of their ability. On Major and Schmader’s account, disengagement appears to be an appropriate and effective coping strategy that allows African Americans to protect themselves from the consequences of their stigmatized status, but it may also be costly in terms of its negative impact on motivation.

It is worth noting that Major and Schmader’s (1998) findings relate for the most part to chronic disengagement, which is presumably caused by repeated experiences of coping with stigma. When academic disengagement is chronic, the self is insulated from feedback in the domain and the motivation to succeed or persist in the face of adversity is understandably undermined. However, it may be the case that the effects of situational disengagement—a defensive response to feedback in a particular situation—are different. As a temporary defensive response, situational disengagement may be useful in dampening the psychological severity of feedback without necessarily having detrimental effects on underlying motivation. In fact, situational disengagement may prevent existing motivation from being weakened by the psychological unpleasantness caused by unfiltered negative feedback.

Major and her colleagues (Major et al., 1998) have already demonstrated that disengagement can vary as a function of the context in which feedback is received. In one experiment (Major et al., 1998, Study 2), African Americans’ self-esteem did not decrease after negative feedback on a difficult test when race was made salient to them, but it did decrease when race was not mentioned. Thus, academic disengagement may sometimes be activated situationally in response to the threat of devaluation in a specific situation and then serve to reduce the psychological impact of negative feedback. The question that remains to be answered is whether situational disengagement is harmful to a student’s motivation or whether it can actually facilitate persistence after negative feedback. In the current research, we propose to investigate whether, when faced with the possibility of devaluation, African American students situationally disengage and, if they do, whether this disengagement harms their subsequent motivation leading them to give up or drop out, or whether it enables them to persist.

In an experimental test of our hypotheses, European American and African American participants were given negative feedback on a difficult test that either elicited stereotype threat or did not, and their persistence and disengagement were measured. In light of our interest in the relationship between negative feedback and dropping out (see Miller & Porter, 1999), we understood persistence to entail the willingness to continue with a task on which one has received negative feedback as opposed to switching to another task (see Heine et al., 2001). Accordingly, our primary prediction was that African Americans in the diagnostic condition would be the most persistent following negative feedback, and that their persistence would be mediated by their self-reported disengagement. African Americans in this condition were expected to be motivated to persist in order to avoid fulfilling the allegation of inferiority implied by their group’s stereotype. Moreover, by disengaging their self-esteem from the feedback received, the potential psychological costs of persistence—made more salient by stereotype threat—would be mitigated, enabling these students to persevere in the face of adversity.

In addition to the Disengagement subscale of Major and Schmader’s Intellectual Engagement Inventory (IEI; 1998), we also included several other measures including the Discounting and Devaluing subscales of the IEI, as well as measures of Self-Esteem (Rosenberg, 1965), Contingencies of Self-Worth (Crocker, Luhtanen, Cooper, & Bouvrette, 2003) and Osborne’s School Perceptions Questionnaire (SPQ; 1995) which was designed to measure disidentification. For the IEI subscales, we expected to replicate previous results finding that African Americans value academics to the same extent as European Americans but that they are more likely to discount the validity of feedback. In keeping with previous findings (Major et al., 1998), we did not expect Devaluing to be affected by our manipulations since it reflects stable attitudes that are not likely to fluctuate over a short period of time. Our prediction for the Discounting subscale was more tenuous; although this subscale refers to more general attitudes towards standardized tests than the Disengagement subscale, it is possible that participants’ attitudes could vary as a function of our manipulation. Measurements of self-esteem, academic contingencies of self-worth, and school perceptions were included to ensure that the groups did not differ significantly and were not expected to be responsive to the situational manipulation. Our main hypothesis was that while participants in the four experimental conditions would be similar on several relevant measures, those who were made vulnerable to stereotype threat would respond specifically by situationally disengaging (Disengagement subscale of IEI) and that this response would ultimately lead to greater persistence by reducing the self-relevance of potential failure.