Last week, I wrote about the controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s “Get Happy” commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, which featured a white guy with a Jamaican accent going around his office trying to cheer up his coworkers. While many Americans called the ad racist and culturally insensitive, Jamaicans seemed to thoroughly embrace it.

I didn’t find the ad racist, but I will admit that it did promote a single stereotype about the Jamaican culture, albeit a positive one. I normally really don’t like stereotypes, positive or negative, but I concluded that if Jamaicans didn’t have a problem with the ad, then neither should I.

However, today I read about a study (linked here) that has me reconsidering my opinion.  It got me thinking more about positive stereotypes and the negative consequences they may have on our perception of the world. I never really considered about how harmful they could be, but this study suggests that positive stereotypes may be even more damaging than obvious negative stereotypes.

While negative stereotypes are pretty easy to recognize and dismiss, “positive” stereotypes tend to fall into a grey area that people are more willing to believe. For example, many accept without question the idea that women are inherently more nurturing than men, as well as the stereotype that Asian people are naturally more intelligent than people of other races. These ideas don't immediately register as harmful, since they seem to flatter the groups they characterize.

In the study, researchers showed participants one of three fake scientific articles presenting “evidence” for prevalent stereotypes about African-Americans. The first article argued that black people are more athletically inclined (positive stereotype), the second showed that they more prone to violence (negative stereotype), and the third showed that they are less intelligent (negative stereotype) than people of other races.

Naturally, participants were more likely to believe the stereotypes after being exposed to the made-up data.  But what came as a shock was that exposure to the positive stereotype ("athletically inclined") seemed to lead to stronger negative beliefs about black people than did exposure to the negative stereotypes ("unintelligent” and “prone to violence").

Participants who read the article showing greater athletic propensity among black people were far more likely than participants in the other two groups to accept the evidence they read as fact. People in this group were also more likely to believe that the differences between blacks and whites were biological in nature, rather than socially learned.

At the end of the study, participants were shown pictures of people and asked to estimate the likelihood that each person might cheat or commit a crime. Of the three groups, the participants who had been exposed to the “positive” stereotype estimated the highest probability that black people would break the law. That is, people who read that African-Americans are more athletic were more likely to distrust black people than were the participants in the groups that read cases for explicitly negative attributes.

The researchers concluded that positive stereotypes "may be uniquely capable of reinforcing cultural stereotypes and beliefs that people explicitly eschew as racist and harmful."

I think this is definitely something to keep in mind, especially when coming up with ads that are going reach a huge audience. I wonder if the ad execs behind the "Get Happy" ad still would have gone through with it if they had read about this study.

A week has passed since Volkswagen aired their “Get In, Get Happy” commercial at the Super Bowl, and while the buzz it created has finally started to die down now, it has left me wondering (yet again) how far we can really get away with pushing the limits in advertising.

In case you missed the ad, here it is:

As expected, accusations of racism and cultural insensitivity instantly emerged from all over the U.S.

Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, chief Latino marketing strategist at Walton Isaacson said, "What happens in this ad is that the culture becomes a punch line, and that is offensive."

Ricki Fairley-Brown, president of Dove Marketing said, "It's pretty horrific. Why do they have a white guy from Minnesota faking a Jamaican accent?"

And possibly the worst accusation of all came from New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who said that the ad is “like blackface with voices.”

Interestingly, however, Jamaicans themselves seemed to publicly embrace the ad.

The Jamaica Tourism Board was pleased to be receiving free publicity, and officials even put together a limited-time "Get Happy in Jamaica” savings package in response. Tourism Minister Wykeham McNeill said in a statement, "I urge persons all across the globe to do exactly what the commercial portrays, which is to tap into your inner Jamaican and get happy!"

Jamaican reggae star Sean Paul also stood up for the ad, saying, “It’s just entertainment. To me it’s no different than the Italian accents in ‘The Sopranos’ or the English accent in Guy Ritchie’s movies.”

Finally, Dr Claire Nelson, the Jamaican-born president of the Institute of Caribbean Studies and Caribbean Heritage Organization, said that she and her colleagues were flattered by the ad: "In one fell swoop, the ad directors have superimposed Jamaicans' reputation for being hardworking as well as for having a laid-back, positive disposition.”

Personally, I don’t see the ad as being “racist.” For one thing, Jamaican is a nationality, not a race, and theoretically any one of the actors in the commercial could be a native Jamaican.  In fact, the Jamaican national motto is "Out of Many One People."

I suppose one could argue that the ad is offensive in other ways. It does, after all, promote a single stereotype about an entire culture (although “happy-go-lucky” is not a bad stereotype to have, in my opinion). Perhaps whether or not you view the ad as offensive comes down to your opinion on positive stereotypes.

At the end of the day, I'm not Jamaican, I don't know any Jamaicans personally, and I haven't been to Jamaica, so I really don’t think it’s my place to decide whether or not the ad is offensive. I think it’s up to Jamaicans themselves to decide, and the resounding answer seems to be that it’s not. It seems that Volkswagen has done a great job of pushing the envelope just far enough to create controversy and get people talking about their brand, while keeping it harmless enough to stay out of serious trouble. In my opinion, the ad isn't quite as outstanding as what they’ve done for Super Bowls of the past (nothing beats "The Force" in 2011), but I don’t find it racist either. Especially since Jamaicans themselves seem to love it.