thieme

Stereotype threat

As I am involved in a project that aims to raise the math level of so-called ‘vulnerable groups’ in Latin America, this is a rather relevant topic. Stereotype threat is a phenomenon in social psychology that describes how an experience of anxiety or concern emerges in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about their social group (Wikipedia). It has been widely researched, especially within universities and how stereotyping affects academic performance.

Here an interesting article in the Atlantic about the topic:

Joshua Aronson, Michael Lustina, Kelli Keough, Joseph Brown, Catherine Good, and I devised a way to find out. Suppose we told white male students who were strong in math that a difficult math test they were about to take was one on which Asians generally did better than whites. 

White males should not have a sense of group inferiority about math, since no societal stereotype alleges such an inferiority. Yet this comment would put them under a form of stereotype threat: any faltering on the test could cause them to be seen negatively from the standpoint of the positive stereotype about Asians and math ability. If stereotype threat alone—in the absence of any internalized self-doubt—was capable of disrupting test performance, then white males taking the test after this comment should perform less well than white males taking the test without hearing the comment. That is just what happened. Stereotype threat impaired intellectual functioning in a group unlikely to have any sense of group inferiority.