Psychiatric Labels: Exploring Indirect and Direct Assessments of Task Performance

ABSTRACT We explore the idea that performance expectations in problem-solving groups (e.g., juries, planning groups) are partially outside of group members’ awareness. We first identify a divergence between indirect and direct teammate performance assessments among participants who are working with a teammate with schizophrenia in a two-person task group. The indirect indicator is the participant’s resistance to the teammate’s problem-solving suggestions, and the direct indicator is the participant’s subsequent and private responses to a series of questions about the teammate’s task performance. We explore the divergence further by assessing the extent to which participants’ political beliefs differentially affect the two measures. Liberals are likely to hold less explicitly prejudicial views of individuals with a mental illness than do conservatives. But, if performance expectations are driven by fairly uniform status beliefs, liberals’ resistance to influence from individuals with a mental illness should be similar to conservatives’. Consistent with that expectation, liberals’ direct assessment of the task performance of teammates with schizophrenia is more positive than conservatives’, but their indirect assessment (i.e., their resistance to their influence) is the same as conservatives’. All the findings hold with controls for stigmatized behavior toward the teammate (social and physical distance), stigmatized perceptions of the teammate (teammate evaluation and teammate likability), and social desirability bias. The findings are generally consistent with the idea that deference behaviors are sometimes rooted in performance expectations that are subconsciously held. They also illuminate status processes related to mental health and suggest a new way to infer the extent to which explicit performance assessments differ from performance expectations.