Dr. Shellie

Continuing with the theme of my all-time favorite psychology researchers, we have Professor Julie Norem of Wellesley College for her work on defensive pessimism.

Do you back up your PowerPoint slides on a memory stick before each talk, just in case you lose/break/drop your computer? Do you make a list of nasty questions that someone just might ask and write up the answers on index cards? Do you look up the publication records of the speakers preceding you in your conference session to make sure you didn’t forget to cite any of their major, related works? Well, then you are using a "defensive pessimist" strategy.

The brilliant thing about Norem’s work is that she has quantitatively shown (through controlled experiments) that defensive pessimists are just as successful as their counterparts, so-called "strategic optimists"– you know, the ones who just sort of believe that everything is bound to go to well. However, both groups will do worse than usual if their normal strategy is disturbed. If you interrupt a defensive pessimist’s ability to do last-minute (over?)preparation tasks, his or her performance will suffer. Likewise, if you disturb a strategic optimist from spending his or her last minutes before a high-pressure test "relaxing" blissfully, his or her performance will also go down.

The most important implication of this work? Anxiety and self-doubt do not necessarily compromise performance.

Find out more here:

• Are you a defensive pessimist? Take the quiz at Norem’s website.
• CNN review of her book, "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism To Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak"
• Article in the University of Chicago’s alumni magazine

My hero of the week: social psychologist Professor Claude Steele of Stanford University, for his work on stereotype threat. Through carefully controlled lab experiments, Steele and coworkers have shown that people tend to underperform when they fear that their performance might reflect badly on the larger group with whom they identify. So, for example, when a group of math students take a very difficult math test, the female students may worry that their poor performance would be interpreted as evidence that women have less mathematical ability then men. Just worrying about this possibility deflates their scores. When that worry is eliminated, their scores equal men’s. In the experiments, the worry can be removed by telling all of the women and men that on the particular test they are taking, it is well known that women and men perform equally.

Stereotype threat can apply to all people– not just women and minorities– in any situation where someone feels that people "like them" suffer from a negative stereotype for the activity at hand. For example, says Steele, a white person talking to a black person about race is likely to worry that he or she might be seen as racist, and will be more likely to make conversational blunders as a result. Ironically, stereotype threat affects people most when they really care about doing well at what they are doing– e.g. not being racist, or acing at math tests.

My sister, who has had chemotherapy, two stem cell transplants, open-heart surgery, and radiation, all in the last 2 1/2 years, has just swum 1.2 miles and biked 56 in a half-Ironman race.

Inspired?

There are a lot of things I like about the National Academy of Science’s "I was wondering…" website, designed to encourage girls’ interest in science. First off, I like the personal approach– 10 women scientists are featured on the site. For each woman, a comic tells a story about her life and work. Scrapbook web pages talk about her childhood, how she got interested in science, and what she does in her job. I don’t know what 8th grade girls find interesting (other than MySpace?), but I thought this was cool. Another nice thing– the range of science covered is broad, including a physicist, a medical researcher, an engineer, a social scientist, a marine biologist, and others. And lastly, the site is a refreshing breather from the elitism of academic science (more on this later). While a fair number of the women are professors, the site doesn’t overemphasize their academic pedigrees. The emphasis is where it should be, on their life and work as active scientists, and the impact of their work for society.

I don’t know about the teenage girls, but this site encouraged me!

A postdoc named Jake studies flying snakes. Check out his photos here. I particularly like the stopped-motion sequence showing how a snake gains acceleration when taking off from a tree branch!