If I were to suggest that your actions and moods are influenced by stereotypes, you'd probably blow me off, claiming to be much more intelligent and open-minded than that. Your claim would likely be true; most people are smart enough to avoid stereotypes when we consider them up front. The catch is that, as human animals, our reliance on stereotypes is not always linked to our intellect, but our behavioral instincts instead. Moreover, stereotypes not only derive from our clumsy discoveries (blondes are dumb), they also shape our actions no matter how much we vehemently deny them. To put it simply: stereotypes are both observations and self-fulfilling prophecies. Because of this duality, being both the cause and the effect, stereotypes can become an ouroboros that encircles and perpetuates many of the nagging counterpoints against our individuality.
A good friend of mine, Floreta, recently wrote a blog entry about Asiaphiles; men who are attracted to Asian females primarily because of their exotic looks and supposedly subservient dispositions. Being Asian herself, Floreta has been subjected to many come-ons that she perceives as motivated by this stereotype. She also makes the distinction that these Asiaphiles are typically Caucasian. She goes on to assert that the majority of white male & Asian female relationships are dominated by the male, with the female fulfilling her submissive role. Anecdotally, I cannot argue with this, as I am a white male whose two past relationships with Asian women figured me as the dominant half. This concept really only gets interesting when you consider which side is responsible for the justification of this stereotype.
One could argue that white men only chase after Asian females because of this stereotype, but it could be just the fact that Asian females are more attracted to white males than any other ethnicity. Statistics reported by the free online dating site OK Cupid suggest that there are some serious racial considerations going on when users decide whether or not to reply to messages sent by admirers. Asian females were most likely to respond to a message sent by a white male than to messages sent by any one else, and by a large margin. While the average response rate for Asian females to the 8 other ethnicities was a touch above 22%, white males received a return message from them 29% of the time. How about the other way around? Though all males were typically more eager to respond when receiving messages from females, white males were flaky in comparison to other ethnicities, responding at a lower rate than males of different heritage. Asian women received no special favors, landing right on the expected return rate from all males (41% from white males, 43.7% across all male ethnicities); no better and no worse than the rest of the crowd. It would be foolish to extrapolate a wide-birthing assumption from these out-of-context one-dimensional numbers, but we can acknowledge that Yellow Fever has not reached the epidemic stage.
Let's play the fool anyway in order to get some sense out of these numbers. When a white male sends a message to an Asian female, what makes her so much more likely to respond to him than to anyone else? Could it be that white males are just more tactful? Ouch. Maybe Asian women really are submissive and they recognize white males as the right balance to that. Hmm? It seems that no matter how you spin this, there are going to be some "racist" implications. The real question is this: is the stereotype true, or does the existence of the stereotype influence ordinarily rational people? To explore this, I'm afraid I have to keep picking on Asian females. Sorry.
We know that stereotypes are based off of some truth, but why is it when we really look at an individual, many of the stereotypes that could apply to them do little to actually describe that person's behaviors? That is because the keys to stereotypes are expectations. Here is where it all comes together. In a study of how expectations set the stage for our inevitable submission to the whims of stereotypical behavior, Margaret Shin, Todd Pittinsky and Nalini Ambady from Harvard University performed a mind-blowing experiment on (You guessed it!) a group of Asian-American female students. As we all know, Asians are great at math, right? Subsequently, isn't it true that women are not? What happens when you combine the two? Being that our test subjects each possessed opposing stereotypical traits, you could logically expect one of two things to happen during a math test: either the stereotypes would cancel each other out or the universe would collapse on itself.
Our experimenters decided to risk the destruction of our world as we know it and went through with the test. They divided the group into two equal parts (subgroups A and B) and administered a pre-test survey to the subjects. In subgroup A, subjects were asked questions that brought their gender identity into consideration ("List 3 reasons why you prefer single-sex dorms."). In subgroup B, subjects were asked questions that brought their ethnic identity into consideration ("Did your grandparents speak any other language than English?"). These questions were not pointed affairs, but subtle guides to prime the minds of the subjects for subsequent tasks. After this survey, all students were given the same math test to complete. Subgroup A performed decidedly worse than subgroup B. Do you hear that? That's the universe collapsing.
When primed with a gentle reminder of their female identity, the students adjusted their approach to the task, acting up to the expected performance for their role. Likewise, when primed with thoughts of their Asian heritage, the students reacted in kind, but with a different result. (It is also worth noting that most of the studies I found while researching this article centered around women and their lack of math comprehension. This is an amusing irony that not only do scientists fail to exhibit individualism in their observation and study of stereotypes, but they perpetuate the stereotype by labeling it the de facto poster child of stereotype studies.)
The takeaway here is that stereotypical behavior can be activated in us by our expectations of a situation. The existence of these stereotypes do not just describe us, but also prepare us. So, the big answer to our question of the source of the Asiaphile stereotype could very well be the stereotype itself. All other situations considered, we do a lot of things without thinking and stereotypes are what guide us toward making the safe (in the survival sense of the word) decisions without taxing our brain too hard. They are the marks that line the highway of our mind, guiding us smoothly in a single direction. When we actively defy the stereotypes, hoping to find a better path... then we're off-roading, baby!
Sources:
1. Floreta's Blog
2. OK Cupid Stats
3. Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance
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