![]() MALE VOICE: “In this booklet, the men and women are actually of equal height. Here are some of the instructions they heard: For every man who was 6’2”, there was a woman who was 6’2”. OLIVIA KANG: For every woman who was 5’3”, researchers made sure there was a man who was 5’3”. I should say men actually were not taller than women in the sample. When I first heard this, I thought: “So what? Everyone knows that men, on average, are taller than women.” Depending on who they were looking at, “tall” could mean 5’9” or 6’1”. Participants might call both a man and woman “tall”… but they were consistently guessing that the men were several inches taller than the women. Men and women were equally likely to be called “tall”, “short”, and anything in between.īut when the researchers asked them to guess exactly how tall… something shifted. Remember, when people in the study simply rated height on a 1-7 scale, they showed no bias. OLIVIA KANG: Professor Biernat’s study showed just how strong this “natural process” is: So it is, I think, I think, a really natural process. So, you know, I say, ‘My cat is huge!’ but no one’s surprised that my big cat can fit in a small car because we know that ‘small’ and ‘big’ means something different depending on what’s being described. We’re going to judge people relative to within-group standards. It’s that when you make any sort of a judgment: how big an object is how nice a person is, you might use different standards depending on who you’re judging. MONICA BIERNAT: So the basic idea is a pretty simple one. OLIVIA KANG: What are shifting standards? No surprises there.īut when people had to guess height in feet and inches, their answers changed… and presented the first evidence of a phenomenon we now know as shifting standards. On a 1-7 scale, the tallest men and women were rated high, the shortest were rated low, and men and women were equally likely to be seen as tall, average, or short. Now for the first group, the results were exactly what they should be. They look at pictures of people as they stand next to doorways and sit near desks – and then guess how tall each person is, in one of two ways: They either rated how tall the person was on a scale of 1 to 7 (where 1 is “very short” and 7 is “very tall”), or they had to be specific, and actually guess each person’s height in feet and inches. In these studies, her participants do something simple. She’s describing experiments she conducted in the 1990s at the University of Michigan. OLIVIA KANG: This is Professor Monica Biernat, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas. We tried to take them both standing and sitting next to some object so that there was some basis for judging. You’re seeing photographs we took of people around Ann Arbor. OLIVIA KANG: So, if I’m a participant in this study, what am I seeing?
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