The person experiencing stereotype threat is always multitasking, and multitasking reduces performance. What mechanism underlies stereotype threat? Constantly thinking about whether your performance on a difficult task is potentially letting down your entire group takes up mental bandwidth that then can’t be used for the task at hand. – Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi, pages 98 That’s what makes the prospect of confirming the negative stereotype upsetting enough to interfere with that performance. Research has found but one prerequisite: the person must care about the performance in question. No special susceptibility is required to experience this pressure. (also see footnote below for an uncontrolled but very interesting exploration of stereotype threat)Īnd here’s perhaps the most disturbing aspect of stereotype threat: stereotype threat most strongly affects strong, motivated students. – Finally, as evidence that all groups can experience stereotype threat, if white students were told that a golf task they were given was diagnostic of athletic ability, they did significantly worse on it than when they were told it was diagnostic of athletic intelligence. Black students did significantly worse than white students in the high and standard threat treatments, but did as well as white students in the low threat treatment. Students were given one of three instructions before the exam: that it was a measure of “observation and clear thinking” (which they refer to as the “standard threat” treatment), that it was an IQ test that measured intelligence and ability (which was the “high threat” treatment, as it would invoke stereotype threat for the black students), or that it was a set of puzzles (which was the “low threat” treatment). – White and black students were given the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices task. (It is important to note that this is an underestimate of the effect of stereotype threat, because the women who indicated their gender after the exam still surely experienced stereotype threat, just not to as great an extent as those who indicated their gender before the exam.) It’s kind of shocking that simply filling in a bubble to identify oneself as female can significantly lower performance on an exam. Based on the size of the effect they measured, asking women to indicate their gender after exam, rather than before, would lead to 16.7% more women starting college with calculus credit. – A study by the Educational Testing Service (reported on page 188 of Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi) tested whether women’s performance on the AP calculus exam was influenced by whether they had to indicate their gender before or after the exam. Thus, reminding students of a negatively stereotyped component of their identity reduced performance, but reminding them of a positively stereotyped component improved it. Interestingly, there was also a treatment group that was reminded of their ethnic identity, which experiences a positive stereotype associated with math performance students in this treatment group did significantly better than the control group on the exam. – When Asian-American women taking a math test were given a pre-test questionnaire that reminded them of their gender, they performed significantly worse than the control group, which was not reminded of their gender. But, to get you started, here are a few studies that provide evidence of stereotype threat: Whistling Vivaldiby Claude Steele is a really interesting book on the subject. There is a lot of evidence at this point that supports stereotype threat this page gives a list of over 300 studies on stereotype threat. But this is what the data on stereotype threat suggests: because of negative stereotypes of certain groups (e.g., that women are not good at math as men, that blacks are not as intelligent as whites), members of those groups underperform in high-pressure situations such as exams.* So, the idea that we might systematically be underestimating the abilities of a large portion of our students is something most of us would find disturbing. These posts also link with an earlier post of mine on the implicit biases that we all have.Īs scientists, we like to think that we are measuring things accurately, and tend to be disturbed at the idea that we might be systematically biased in our measurements. There will also be a post with a transcription of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s thoughts on the obstacles he’s had to overcome. Future posts will cover ways to try to reduce the effects of stereotype threat, and how stereotype threat might influence ally work. Note: This is the first of three posts about stereotype threat, which is the idea that negative stereotypes about a particular group can cause members of that group to underperform.
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