The Careers We Never Imagine: How Society Quietly Shapes Our Ambitions
Monday, June 29, 2026 This is for BetteSue Hamilton
The Careers We Never Imagine
What one of the largest international psychology studies on career choice reveals about social expectations, identity, and the invisible boundaries of human possibility
Most of us like to believe our ambitions are our own.
Ask someone why they became an engineer, a teacher, a therapist, or a physician, and the answer usually arrives with reassuring confidence.
"I've always loved solving problems."
"I've always wanted to help people."
"It just suited my personality."
Perhaps.
But psychology has always asked a slightly more uncomfortable question.
Where did that personality learn what to want?
Not because our choices are illusions.
Not because we are merely products of culture.
But because human beings are social creatures before they are autonomous ones.
Long before we possess the vocabulary to describe ourselves, we have already spent years watching who occupies which roles, who receives admiration, who earns status, who nurtures children, who fixes machinery, who leads organizations, and who quietly disappears into the background.
By adulthood, those observations have become so familiar that we experience them as intuition.
The remarkable achievement of culture is that it rarely feels like instruction.
It feels like common sense.
A new study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology explores this phenomenon from an unexpected angle.
Rather than asking which careers lesbian, gay, and bisexual folks prefer, the researchers asked a deeper psychological question: How strongly do society's gender expectations become our own career interests?
Their answer, drawn from one of the largest multinational samples ever assembled for this topic, suggests that the relationship between social expectations and personal ambition is more complicated—and perhaps more hopeful—than we once imagined.
We inherit more than opportunities
Every child inherits a world that appears already organized.
Some occupations seem populated almost entirely by men.
Others seem populated almost entirely by women.
Children notice these patterns long before anyone explicitly explains them.
This observation lies at the heart of social role theory, one of the central ideas behind the new research.
The theory proposes that people learn what men and women ought to do by observing what men and women typically do.
Occupational patterns gradually become social expectations, and social expectations eventually become internalized standards about what feels appropriate—or inappropriate—for someone like us.
Notice how subtle this process is.
Nobody needs to say, "Girls shouldn't become engineers."
Nobody needs to announce, "Boys don't belong in early childhood education."
Culture almost never works by issuing commands.
Instead, it establishes familiarity.
And familiarity is persuasive because it disguises itself as reality.
Psychologists refer to these unwritten expectations as injunctive norms—shared beliefs about what members of particular groups should do. Unlike laws or formal rules, injunctive norms are enforced through approval, expectations, belonging, and sometimes simple surprise.
This distinction matters because folks rarely experience these expectations as external pressure.
They experience them as preference.
A Remarkably Ambitious Study
Testing ideas like these requires more than a handful of college sophomores completing surveys for course credit.
Katharina Block and an international team of more than one hundred collaborators recruited 18,351 university students from 119 universities across 46 countries.
Their final sample included more than 15,000 heterosexual participants and over 3,300 participants who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
The surveys were translated into participants' primary instructional languages, allowing the researchers to examine these questions across a striking range of cultural contexts.
Participants answered three related sets of questions.
First, they reported how interested they were in careers such as science, engineering, healthcare, education, and social work.
Second, they indicated what they personally believed men and women should do in those occupations.
Third, they estimated what they believed society expected men and women to do.
That design deserves attention.
The researchers were not simply measuring stereotypes.
They were examining the relationship between perceived social expectations and personal aspirations.
In other words, they were asking whether the social world quietly becomes the private mind.
The findings were both simple and surprising
Some of the results confirmed existing research.
Lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants generally reported career interests that were less traditionally gender-stereotyped than their heterosexual peers.
Gay and bisexual men expressed greater interest in healthcare and education than heterosexual men.
Lesbian and bisexual women expressed greater interest in science and technology than heterosexual women.
Interesting.
But not the most interesting finding.
The more consequential result involved how strongly societal expectations predicted personal interests.
Among heterosexual participants, the relationship was clear.
When souls believed society expected members of their gender to pursue a particular field, they were substantially more likely to express interest in that field themselves.
Among lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants, that relationship became dramatically weaker.
In science and technology, the association even shifted in the opposite direction. Perceived societal expectations no longer appeared to function as reliable predictors of career interest.
That is an elegant finding.
Not because it settles anything.
Because it reframes the question.
The study raises a larger question
The paper does not demonstrate that lesbian, gay, or bisexual folks are inherently more independent thinkers.
It does not prove they are less conformist.
It does not establish that questioning one social norm automatically leads people to question others.
Those would all exceed the available evidence.
Instead, the findings invite a more careful question.
How does society become psychologically persuasive in the first place?
Some folks appear to absorb prevailing expectations more readily than others.
Why?
The present study cannot answer that.
But asking the question may be as valuable as answering it.
Psychology advances not only by discovering facts.
It advances by asking increasingly precise questions.
The difference between observation and expectation
One of the most elegant aspects of social role theory is that it begins with something true.
Women have historically been overrepresented in nursing and education.
Men have historically been overrepresented in engineering and construction.
Children observe these realities accurately.
The psychological leap occurs later.
Human beings have a remarkable tendency to convert "this is common" into "this is appropriate."
An observation gradually becomes a prescription.
A pattern becomes a preference.
An expectation becomes part of identity.
The present study suggests that this progression may not unfold in exactly the same way for everyone.
That is a subtle claim.
But subtle claims often have long intellectual lives.
The careers we never imagine
Listen carefully to enough biographies and a curious sentence appears again and again.
"It never even occurred to me."
People say this about careers.
About marriage.
About parenthood.
About moving abroad.
About graduate school.
About starting businesses.
About becoming artists.
The sentence sounds like preference.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it reflects something quieter.
The boundaries of imagination are often established long before we begin making adult decisions.
This study cannot tell us where those boundaries originate.
It does remind us that they exist.
The importance of restraint
One of the strengths of this research is the authors' own caution.
The participants were university students rather than nationally representative samples.
The investigators measured career interests, not actual career outcomes.
Economic realities, educational opportunities, discrimination, family responsibilities, and labor markets all influence the careers people ultimately pursue.
The study also combined lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants into a single analytical group and could not adequately examine transgender or nonbinary participants, whose experiences may differ substantially.
Good science rarely claims to answer every question.
It defines the boundaries of what can presently be known.
This paper does exactly that.
FAQ
Does society influence career interests?
Yes. Decades of psychological research suggest that career interests develop through a combination of personal aptitude, lived experience, family influences, educational opportunities, and cultural expectations. The current study found that perceived gender-role expectations predicted career interests more strongly among heterosexual participants than among lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants, suggesting that social norms do not influence everyone equally.
What is social role theory?
Social role theory proposes that people develop beliefs about what men and women should do by observing what men and women typically do in society. When certain occupations are dominated by one gender over long periods, those patterns can become social expectations that influence future generations' career interests.
What did the researchers discover?
The researchers surveyed more than 18,000 university students across 46 countries. They found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants reported less traditionally gender-stereotyped career interests than heterosexual participants. More importantly, perceived societal gender expectations were much weaker predictors of career interests among sexual minority participants.
Does this study prove that LGBTQ+ people are more independent thinkers?
No. The study did not measure independence, creativity, authenticity, or personality. It examined how strongly perceived gender-role expectations were associated with career interests. The reasons for these differences remain an open question and require further research.
Why didn't the study include transgender and nonbinary participants?
The authors explain that transgender and nonbinary individuals often encounter different social expectations and career experiences than cisgender participants. Because those experiences require different theoretical and methodological approaches, the present study could not adequately address them.
Can career interests change over time?
Absolutely.
Career interests often evolve through education, life experience, mentorship, changing opportunities, and shifts in personal identity. While early social expectations matter, they do not permanently determine career paths.
What are injunctive norms?
Injunctive norms are shared beliefs about what people should do based on the social groups to which they belong. They differ from descriptive norms, which simply describe what people typically do. The researchers argue that these expectations can shape the careers they imagine for themselves.
Beyond Careers
The authors conclude that occupational gender segregation cannot be fully understood by examining gender alone.
Sexual orientation also appears to shape how we relate to gender-role expectations surrounding work.
That conclusion is well supported by the data.
Yet I suspect the study's broader contribution lies elsewhere.
It quietly reminds us that our ambitions develop inside social worlds.
We inherit languages.
Families.
Religions.
Neighborhoods.
Schools.
Friendships.
Occupational landscapes.
And yet, none of these determine who we ultimately become.
But all of them help define what initially seems possible.
Perhaps that is the enduring question this study leaves us with.
Not whether society influences our choices.
Of course it does.
The more interesting question is when influence quietly becomes identity.
At what point does an expectation become so familiar that we stop recognizing it as an expectation at all?
Psychology has not answered that question.
Perhaps it never will.
But studies like this encourage us to ask it with greater humility.
Every generation hands the next a map of the possible.
Some paths are brightly illuminated.
Others are barely visible.
One of the quiet triumphs of human development is discovering that the map we inherit is not necessarily the only one we are capable of drawing.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Block, K., He, J. Y., Olsson, M. I. T., Van Grootel, S., Martiny, S. E., Schmader, T., Van Laar, C., Meeussen, L., Hässler, T., Croft, A., Wee, S. X. R., Sun, M. S., Ainsaar, M., Aarntzen, L., Adamus, M., Atkinson, C., Avicenna, M., Bąbel, P., Barth, M., ... Anderson, J. (2026). "Free to Be Me?": Gender role norms constrain career interests less for lesbian, gay and bisexual people than for heterosexual people. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication.