Princeton Weekly Bulletin, March 23, 1998
Psychologist's research ideas focus on college populations --
including Princeton students
"People in my own environment"
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By Caroline Moseley
Deborah Prentice, associate professor of psychology, has always been interested in "studying the people in my own environment."
While "psychological theory always informs my thinking," she says, "I tend to get my ideas for research from the people and events around me." Hence, a great deal of her research has involved college populations -- including Princeton students.
As a social psychologist, Prentice studies "the ways in which individuals' thoughts, feelings and actions are shaped by being part of social interactions and relationships. I've become very interested in issues of identity and how it is shaped by the groups of which we are members -- both those to which we choose to belong, such as committees and sports teams, and those to which we just happen to belong, such as ethnic and gender groups."
Athletics, group relations
Currently, Prentice's research focuses on two main projects. One, funded by the Mellon Foundation, studies the role of extracurricular activities, especially varsity sports, in student life; the other is a lab study of intergroup relations.
Prentice initiated the project on extracurricular activities four years ago with Nancy Cantor, then professor of psychology at Princeton, now provost at the University of Michigan.
"We surveyed sophomores at Princeton, Columbia and Amherst," Prentice says. Reaching 60 to 70 percent of the classes involved, "We asked them about many aspects of their daily lives, including what groups they belong to, curricular and extracurricular. We're particularly interested in what those groups enable them to do and what they make it difficult to do." A similar project is now under way at the University of Michigan, she says.
Prentice observes, "You might expect the lives of athletes at Princeton -- a school with very successful athletic teams -- to be different from those of athletes at Columbia, for example, which has not had much success in athletics, or at Amherst, which is in Division III and therefore has a less serious athletic program. But we've been struck with the remarkable similarities, regardless of emphasis on athletics at a particular school."
One of the most interesting findings in "the mountain of data we're accruing," she says, is that it can be misleading to focus on the influence of varsity athletics on university students' lives. "This is the wrong model," she says. "Athletes and non-athletes are very different people before they ever get to college; they have different goals, values, aspirations. Their choice to engage in athletic pursuits reflects, as much as it creates, differences from other students."
In general, she says, athletes tend to be on the conservative side, valuing tradition, security and conformity more than many other students; they are more oriented toward business as a career; they tend to be more connected to their families and rate their families as important in influencing the decisions they make.
Of course, Prentice acknowledges, "Not all athletes are alike." There are important differences, most of which she is just beginning to study.
For starters, "There are obvious inter-sport differences, such as team vs. individual sports." And there are gender differences. "Women athletes are more likely than men to participate in other extracurricular activities and to have friends outside the athletic group." In addition, women "are more likely to drop out of athletics if they are having academic problems."
Though she emphasizes that "the data are still preliminary," Prentice presented a paper on "Stability and Change Across the Transition to College: The Case of the Student-Athlete" at Princeton's 250th Anniversary Symposium on the Student-Athlete in April 1997.
Why do we differ?
Concurrently with the study on extracurricular life, Prentice is engaged in a lab study on intergroup relations, carried out with Professor of Psychology Dale Miller.
"Suppose I differ with a male colleague on a curricular matter," she says. "Why do we differ? It could be something about him and me as individuals, or it could be because I'm a woman and he's a man, or it could be because I'm white and he's black."
Prentice and Miller are "bringing students into the lab to witness inter-actions between men and women and blacks and whites on video," she says. "Then we look at the inferences they draw about why the two people disagree.
"We've found that people tend to make the group attribution first. That is, they see the disagreement as relating to the groups rather than the individuals. In consequence, they try less hard to see the other point of view. If disagreements arise with someone in your own group, you don't have this easy explanation, and you try to overcome differences."
Anecdotal evidence suggests that diversity is hard to manage in institutional and organizational settings, Prentice notes. "If this is true," she says, "we think one of the explanations might be the way people interpret differences across ethnic, gender and racial group boundaries."
In connection with this research, she and Miller are currently coediting a book, "Cultural Divides: Understanding and Overcoming Group Conflict," for which they have written a chapter called "Some Consequences of a Belief in Group Essence: The Category Divide Hypothesis."
Pluralistic ignorance
A continuing research interest for Prentice is alcohol use and abuse on campuses -- including Princeton.
"When I first came here in 1988," she recalls, "an advisee told me she participated in binge drinking but had great misgivings about it; however, she said, everyone else was comfortable with it. Then I heard the same thing from other students. Many students had misgivings but did not share them, and so they had no impact." These students exhibited a phenomenon known to social psychologists as "pluralistic ignorance -- the belief that you feel differently from other people even though you are all acting the same."
In 1992 Prentice and Christine Schroeder, who was then a graduate student, designed "an intervention project," Prentice says. "We randomly assigned incoming students to two groups. One group was informed about the idea of pluralistic ignorance, and the other was not. Six months later we examined the drinking behavior of the two groups and found that the ones who understood the concept of pluralistic ignorance did, indeed, drink less."
Results of this study are to appear in "Exposing Pluralistic Ignorance to Reduce Alcohol Use Among College Students" in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
ABs in human biology, music
Prentice's interest in psychology dates from her years at Stanford University, where she earned two ABs in 1984. Considering a career in medicine, she majored in human biology, a department that combines natural and social sciences. When she took the required psychology course, she looked no further. Though she received her other AB in music and is an experienced recital pianist, she chose psychology as a profession and received her PhD in psychology at Yale University in 1989.
A 1994 winner of the President's Distinguished Teaching Award, Prentice often teaches the department's large introductory psychology course. "I'm a generalist in my interests," she says, "so I really enjoy covering all aspects of psychology." She also teaches statistics to first year graduate students, and this semester she is teaching the Psychology of Moral Behavior, a course she developed as Laurance S. Rockefeller Preceptor at the Center for Human Values from 1993 to 1996.