Were adolescent girls always so mean? Did previous generations manipulate their parents and dump on their friends with such practiced nastiness?
A recent New York Times Magazine article launching that classroom discussion cited a growing body of academic literature on relational aggression and declared the “seething underside of American girlhood” a “certified social problem.” But students enrolled in Psychology 215: Mind, Culture and Society couldn’t help questioning the underlying assumptions of the story.
“How much of this adolescent moodiness do we see because we’re expecting it?” one student asked. “And how much is really happening?”
“I was really frustrated by [the article’s] pigeonholing of adolescent girls,” another student offered. “I’m not sure that’s fair.”
Those responses are gratifying to psychology professors Hazel Rose Markus and Claude Steele, who co-teach the graduate core course. They see their students beginning to understand that human behavior is malleable and is shaped by people’s perceptions and experiences.
“To say that girls are mean because they have traits of meanness, or that we’re somehow growing girls with mean qualities, is an easy story to write,” Markus says. “But in this class we’re really talking about the study of social influence. And whether or not we agree with them, various representations of race, ethnicity, religion and gender are out there, and they do influence us.”
Markus is widely credited with creating the field of cultural psychology, and Steele is known for his research about how internalized racial stereotypes can interfere with minority students’ academic performance. Together they have taught the course for five years, updating the syllabus with new topics that often draw on the headlines of the day, from recent investigations into grade inflation to the centuries of distrust that have shaped the Middle East.
By looking at how sociocultural factors influence psychological processes, and vice versa, Markus and Steele are taking their discipline in new directions. “It’s a shift away from psychology that tries to explain the person by opening up the head or the body and looking inside to see how the parts are working or not working,” Markus says. “Instead, we’re saying, ‘Step back and look at the context, because that’s going to be your best bet to understanding just about everything.’”
Steele likens the course’s investigation of social psychology to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious: “Freud says you see unconscious stuff manifesting itself in basic psychological functioning, and we’d like to claim that we’re discovering the role of context in shaping the psychology of a person.”
In addition to attracting students of psychology and sociology, the course draws from the schools of business, law and education. An increasing percentage of those who enroll have taught in California public schools for several years and want to better address the increasing diversity of their classrooms. “People sometimes make outlandish claims about issues of race and ethnicity, and we want students to understand that there’s now a great deal of scholarship out there,” Markus says.
Each week, Markus and Steele lecture during one class session and open the second to a discussion of assigned readings. The discussion, in turn, is driven by brief “reaction papers” students submit about the readings. In her paper about aging, for example, Cara Rice, ’96, cited the “pervasive tendency of psychologists to identify old age as a time of prevalent psychopathology, including presumably elevated rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness.” That concerned her, Rice added, because data increasingly suggests that “aging is associated with lower rates of every form of psychopathology aside from the dementias.”
The observations Rice and her classmates make in their reaction papers are excerpted and then photocopied for the entire class to read. Students comparing one another’s comments almost guarantees a lively class discussion, Steele says. “The larger mission of the course is to think carefully and in a scholarly way to understand the phenomena,” he adds. “We want them to take a more examined view.”
