The Crooked Nail Gets Hammered Down: Professionalism as a stereotype
Pt. 3 in my series on conformity: Is being serious about things useful?
The Story So Far
In Part 1. we covered the global tendency to quash individualism, “Cutting the tall poppies.” We then looked at the creation of filtering mechanisms to deal with group membership in anonymous society.
In Part 2 We covered the role of idiosyncratic credit as a mechanism for how leaders and senior members of groups can get away with paradoxical nonconformity. We then turned to entirely anonymous communities online, where reputation and idiosyncratic credit are nonexistent. Without the privilege of a filtering mechanism as a wall from the outside world, these groups have “fuzzy” boundaries instead. After that, we discussed disqualification behavior as an alternative mechanism to identity-based conformity tests.
After that, we moved on to stereotyping as a mechanism for how we enforce conformity on a peer to peer basis. Stereotyping behavior attempts to shortcut filtering by posing illusory correlations between immediately observable features and unrelated deeper qualities, such as merit and conformity.
I concluded last time by saying I doubt we’ll ever move on from stereotyping as a tool, using an example of lack of care in upkeep of the appearance of a rollercoaster as an indicator of potential lack of care in maintenance upkeep.
Utility of Stereotyping as a Cognitive Shortcut
I like the roller coaster example because it dips its toe in the heart of the matter: some judgements pertain to life & death.
The introduction to Chapter 4 of Larsen, Ommundsen, and Veer’s “Being Human: Relationships and You" describes what they call “automatic thinking” and lays the situation out extremely well:
In emergencies, decisions are time constrained.
Stereotypes are powerful cognitive tools for operating under time constraint.
Sometimes, this is bad: Police shoot minorities because of racial stereotypes.
Sometimes, this is good: emergency responders check stereotypical presentations of trauma to make quick best-guess plans for what’s wrong and how to treat it.
If an ambulance operator reports that their black patient was injured by police, a hospital dispatcher might think about prepping the OR for a gunshot wound (see what I did there?).
Under time constraint, stereotypes make sense as cognitive tools. Being Human goes on to point out, however, that automatic thinking seems to dominate the majority of social behavior. This makes sense, since even if situations aren’t life and death, we still want to be pragmatic in our use of time. See our reddit philosophy hipster from Part 2 who only wants to read brand new content, but requires that it be high quality.
Directionality
From here on out, I’m going to attempt to identify deep, unobservable qualities, and the surface level ones we’ve tied them to with stereotypes.
The example above shows that stereotypes can be directional. A police offer inferring that a suspect is dangerous because they are black is a downwards mapping from surface attribute to deep attribute. A first responder noting gunshot victims present with profuse bleeding from a small entry wound is an upwards mapping from deep attribute to surface attribute. Every stereotype is enforced bidirectionally, forming a stereotype network.
Once formed, stereotypes continue to be enforced from both directions. Through confirmation bias, cases that confirm the stereotype enforce upward directionality. Conformity and peer pressure enforce downward directionality bias by pressuring members of groups to accept widely held group beliefs, or suffer the pain of nonconformity. As we saw in Part 2, members are rewarded with idiosyncratic credit for broadcasting and enforcing these beliefs through behaviors like disqualification.
All of this is to say that we’re constantly checking in with our social structures for information, and that individuals have a very active role in enforcement. Automatic thinking promises individual efficiency on its surface, but carries with it compounding group cost. Let’s talk about professionalism.
You [Professional], Bro?
"Professionalism is not the job you do, it's how you do the job."
Based on the idea of directional stereotypes, you probably can already guess my feelings about this quote. At its base, professionalism is a downwards stereotype linking a surface set of behaviors to performance. What constitutes the set of surface behaviors is a hotly debated topic in several fields: business, medicine, education, etcetera. Unsurprisingly, professionalism as a societal concept has competitive benefits for the in-groups it creates over the out-groups. Professionalism is a willful movement away from raw performance and towards conformity. Whodathunkit.
In Troubling Professionalism, Lisa Weems historicizes the concept of professionalism in relation to race, gender, sexuality and other relevant social constructs. Weems finds sketchy underpinnings and details the use of the term as a lever and dog whistle to empower the white professional class at the expense of all others. There’s several studies showing traditionally disadvantaged groups received completely opposite responses in comparison to their in-group counterparts when showing emotion in the workplace. Materialist backing to the Weems assertions come from their historical coincidence with Piketty’s description of the rise of “super-earners” in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
The concept of professionalism at its base is a tainted one. What I’m interested in talking about regarding professionalism is what it means for affectation. Standards around dress and comportment are very industry specific.
I’d like to speak from my own experience for a moment; please forgive my unprofessional use of anecdotal evidence. I’ve worked in three different industries with three different standards of dress:
Mortgage: Full suit, always.
Professional Services (as a developer): As long as your shirt has buttons on it, you’re probably good.
Tech: Wear a shirt.
The funny thing to me is that in tech, professionalism has swung all the way around: if I encounter a developer who is dressed nice for work, I assume they don’t have enough leverage to wear whatever they want. This is likely a byproduct of having an industry that is entirely dependent on the performance of that singular role, rather than its appearance. The skilled nature of the role and difficulty of finding replacement talent only serve to increase individual leverage against conformity.
To me, this shows usefulness is a potential substitute for idiosyncratic credit. The more useful an individual, the less they have to pay attention to matching the conforming stereotypes that inform others they are good at their role.
Another way to put it is people who put effort into their surface markers of professionalism do so because they are worried about being barred from making money due to nonconformity. High earners do not worry about professionalism because they’re definitionally already professionals. This pattern is an echo of our hazing discussion in Part 1: groups mandate high upfront investment of conforming behavior before granting latitude.
Going back to life-or-death situations and using emojis as a marker of minimal effort (from Part 2), I want to call out the downwards stereotype of seriousness and merit/quality. Ultimately what we want to know about a professional is that they are serious about doing the work you pay them for.
You Serious, Bro?
Before we question whether seriousness has any utility, let’s do a quick *sigh* definition check:
Definition of serious
1
thoughtful or subdued in appearance or manner : SOBER.
a quiet, serious girl
2
a: requiring much thought or work
serious study
b: of or relating to a matter of importance
a serious play
3
a: not joking or trifling : being in earnest
b: [archaic] : PIOUS
c: deeply interested : DEVOTED.
a serious musician
4
a: not easily answered or solved
serious objections
b: having important or dangerous possible consequences
a serious injury
5
a: excessive or impressive in quality, quantity, extent, or degree
serious stereo equipment
making serious money
serious drinking
Stereotypes are of course embedded in the very language we use. The english definition of the word serious evidences a stereotype so strongly enforced that it has become embedded in our very speech. Let’s take a look at the surface level quality:
Subdued
This makes sense, when really heavy things happen we tend to cut to the point. In a life or death situation you likely don’t want your paramedics goofing off, you want them diligently working to save your life. Adopting a grave nature is a sure way of marking that you’d like to proceed with all urgency, thanks in large part to the stereotypical mapping between the two. That brings us to:
Sincere
Definition #3 includes “not joking or trifling : being in earnest.” To me, the implications of establishing humor and earnestness as opposites are scary. However, I see the reason in it. Take the joking paramedics or trolling as an example. It’s a common online behavior to waste other’s time and energy with frivolous posts as a form of “fun”, or for humor’s sake. Get burned enough times by jest, and you form a downward stereotype mapping humor to insincerity.
Significant
Every definition except for #1 deals in some way with magnitude. This is important because it shows us that stereotypes can scale continuously on both sides of the mapping: the more serious you are about something, the more serious it is.
So, gravity of nature is a useful cognitive shorthand for gravity of situation. This is a really hackable stereotype. Take Whataboutism; one way to get out of a logical corner is to raise another issue and convince others through your comportment that it’s equal or greater in magnitude to the one being discussed.
Not everyone loves levity. Serious people would have you believe that some topics are serious, and shouldn’t be joked about. What I wonder about is not whether humor has a place in thought, but whether seriousness does.
Do we conflate a subdued, humorless, and dour temperance with earnestness because we use the same word for both, or do we use the same word for both because we conflate the two? There’s no untangling it now that we’re so far down the road as an english speaking society. I’d need to do some research, but I’d bet that you see a similar stereotype in animal communities. There’s an interesting body of work out there that suggests humor evolved as a way to unwind fear responses and indicate that a potential serious threat was mistaken. No cheetah in the grass, everyone laugh. Phew.
With this in mind, serious comportment could be seen as an ideally subconscious (but all too commonly intentional) appeal to fear.
Humor
We started all the way at the top with the motivations and utility of conformity and individualism. Now we’ve climbed all the way down to humor as a physiosocial fear response. If we view humor as a mechanism for dissenting to group alarm, it’s a nonconforming action.
The cost of wrongly convincing your peers that a threat isn’t present is massive, if not deadly. Humor is a status bet. If the gambit succeeds, status(idiosyncratic credit) is won. If it fails, the status cost of making the bet could bar an individual from attempting to court the group again. See: striking out with women by telling jokes in poor taste.
So, we see an underlying mechanism begin to emerge by which jokers make bids for higher status and are either rewarded with idiosyncratic credit or put in their place by “tall poppy” behaviors. Again unsurprisingly, there is a gender skew here which is further complicated by the ability of humor to be differentiating/disqualifying (“breaking,” more strongly correlated with men) or cohesion-building(“building,” more strongly correlated with women). An interesting further direction of inquiry is whether stereotype enforcement has a tendency towards breaking or building humor.
Of course in anonymous communities like our reddit philosophy example from Part 2, the humor bet doesn’t look so good: you can’t bank the idiosyncratic credit, so joking around anonymously has much lower expected utility than doing so in public where it’s tied to reputation. With that in mind, it’s no wonder anonymous communities seeking rigor so quickly stereotype humor as an indicator that rigor isn’t present. It also gives us a clue as to why entirely anonymous communities, such as 4chan’s /b/, can turn the conformity mechanism on its head and find themselves competing to be the most offensive, disgusting, antisocial people they can be.
I’m tempted to try and establish a dichotomy by which humor = individualism and seriousness = conformity, but I don’t think the evidence exists in these articles. Maybe at some point in the future.
Conclusions
There’s a few things I didn’t get to talk about in this series, like how a lot of the impressionists people think draw like 7 year olds were only accepted after proving technical mastery (Gerhard Richter, for example, is a big deal in contemporary art. He mostly paints color fields these days, but that hasn’t always been the case).
I also didn’t get to talk about the inevitable consequences of conformity: otherness, and how resulting guilt and shame are different phenomena.
Guilt- I did a bad thing.
Shame- I am a bad person.
In general, conformity and individualism are a massive topic, and it’s impossible to ever get to discussing everything they touch, because they touch everything.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this 3 part series on the nature of conformity. My goal was that you walk away feeling you have a better understand of how forward filtering, tall poppy/bucket of crabs syndrome, stereotyping, and anonymity combine to influence group and individual comportment.