Affirmative Action and Fixed Intelligence

September 6th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt

I wrote this summer about a study demonstrating a worrisome trend among minority law students: They received lower grades than white peers with similar LSAT scores, undergraduate achievements, and work experience. Part of the problem, I suggested in a second post, may stem from the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. When individuals are placed in situations in which a group stereotype suggests that they will perform badly, they do just that. Remove the stereotype threat and performance improves to match that of other individuals with similar experience and abilities.

Stereotype threat arises in part from the implicit racial bias that permeates our culture. If professors, classmates, friends, and family members see minority students as less capable than white ones, those perceptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Unconscious bias, unfortunately, is invisible only to the holders of that bias; targets readily perceive the negative assumptions and respond to them.

What About Affirmative Action?

How does affirmative action affect this dynamic? Some critics of affirmative action suggest that special admissions programs simply aggravate stereotype threat–ultimately harming the students they intend to help. Minority students, they reason, know that at least some members of their group lack the credentials of white students; they are “less qualified” to attend law school than their peers. This knowledge, critics reason, will trigger an extreme form of stereotype threat. Knowing that their racial/ethnic group is less qualified than the dominant white group–and that professors know this–minority students will perform poorly.

Does this phenomenon explain the poor performance of minority students in law schools? Should we abandon all traces of affirmative action to improve the achievements of minority students?

Not from my perspective. Instead, we need to examine our own attitudes toward affirmative action. Those attitudes, which inform a law school’s culture, spell the difference between programs that assist minority students and those that may harm them. To explain this, we also need to explore the nature of intelligence: Is an individual’s intelligence fixed at some point early in life? Or is it fluid? I will explore these issues in a series of posts.

Fixed-Intelligence Affirmative Action

Many critics of affirmative action assume that intelligence is fixed. When we admit minority students with lower LSAT scores than their white classmates, these critics assume, we know that the minority students will perform more poorly in law school. They have less law-related intelligence (as measured by LSAT tests) and, thus, are fated to lower performance.

These critics acknowledge that intelligence is not the only factor affecting achievement. Hard work, catch-up tutoring, and faculty encouragement, they concede, may improve a student’s grades. In their view, however, this simply adds to the cost of affirmative action programs. Schools must devote special resources to tutoring programs, and faculty must provide special encouragement to minority students. The pay-off, from the critics’ perspective, is small. Minority students, they argue, would fare better if they attended schools where their fixed intelligence matched that of their white peers.

Many supporters of affirmative action programs also believe in fixed intelligence. These supporters quietly assume that minority students have less law-related intelligence than their white peers, but they blame that difference on historical and contemporary discrimination. Since society has damaged minority students, these professors reason, we owe them special consideration in admissions. We should give them the opportunities they might have had if they had not experienced a lifetime of overt and subtle discrimination. With hard work, special tutoring, and faculty encouragement, at least some of these students will achieve more than their predictors indicate. Even those who finish near the bottom of the class will benefit from the reputation and network connections of a more prestigious school than one they might have attended without affirmative action.

These attitudes, whether expressed critically or supportively, may well reduce the performance of minority students. In addition to creating stereotype threat, these attitudes tell minority students: “Intelligence is fixed by the time students enter law school and, for whatever reason, yours is lower than that of your classmates.” As we’ll see in my next post, belief in fixed intelligence harms students as much as stereotype threat. Minority students, therefore, suffer a double injury when surrounded by these attitudes.

These attitudes, it’s important to note, need not be overt to affect students. Few professors announce to their classes: “Your intelligence is fixed. You’ve either got it or you don’t. See you at the end of the semester.” The beliefs, however, are there. Law school, in fact, seems centered on a theory of fixed intelligence. Our focus on LSAT scores (aggravated by the US News ranking competition), the lack of feedback designed to enhance performance, and the strict grading curves suggest that we believe our students’ intelligence is fixed.

Add assumptions about low-performing minority students to that mix, and you have a recipe for stereotype threat and reduced performance–even among minority students with entering credentials that match those of white peers.

Another Way

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to conceptualize affirmative action programs that is both more cognitively accurate and more supportive of minority students. If we can reform our law school culture to embrace the reality of fluid intelligence, we will reveal the true justification for affirmative action programs, allow minority students to reach their full potential, and improve learning for all students. In my next two posts, I will explore the concept of fluid intelligence and how it can inform our beliefs about affirmative action.