Stereotype Threat

11 Key excerpts on "Stereotype Threat"

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  An Introduction to Implicit Bias

  Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind

  • Erin Beeghly, Alex Madva, Erin Beeghly, Alex Madva(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  (Rydell et al. 2010)

  When someone belongs to a group that is viewed negatively through the lens of stereotypes, a reminder of politically salient social features of the self—such as race, gender, class, age, sexual orientation, or disability—can trigger a sense that one is subject to stereotyping. This awareness of negative stereotypes, and a concern to avoid confirming them, is the basis of the conscious and unconscious responses that are called Stereotype Threat.

  Academic studies that seek to document the effects of Stereotype Threat often depend on experiments that involve test-taking. Such experiments are designed to measure a difference in performance after someone is primed with the awareness of a stereotype. Stereotype Threat can affect thoughts, behavior, and motivation in numerous ways. Some of these responses are explicit and some are more implicit. Shapiro and Aronson (2013) suggest several further implications of Stereotype Threat, beyond the immediate performance difference on a task. They review evidence on how Stereotype Threat reduces self-perceptions of efficacy, lowers confidence, redirects career aspirations away from the stereotyped domain, and incurs numerous negative effects on wellbeing, such as heightened anxiety and feelings of dejection, and even on physiological indicators, such as blood pressure (97). This wide range of effects suggests more than actual underperformance on a test or task. These implied effects, which are more persistent, are consequences that can impact personality, motivation, and attitudes towards oneself or certain subjects or tasks. Such global effects are more difficult to measure than the results of controlled experiments, and may not be related to underperformance. Therefore, the single explanatory concept of Stereotype Threat should not be taken as the defining feature of more complex phenomena without careful argument. Thoman and colleagues (2013) move the discussion of Stereotype Threat to more persistent traits than underperformance on a test or task, by linking Stereotype Threat to a diminished sense of belonging, lower interest, and decreased motivation (see also Freeman 2017; Goguen 2016). But such wider traits may have more complex sources that are overlooked when Stereotype Threat is the sole focus.

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  Stereotypes

  The Incidence and Impacts of Bias

  • Joel T. Nadler, Elora C. Voyles, Joel T. Nadler, Elora C. Voyles(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Members of negatively stereotyped groups who do overcome obstacles to healthy career interest development may nonetheless struggle to overcome additional challenges in the workplace. Many of the same Stereotype Threat mechanisms that impact performance undermine employees’ ability to thrive in the workplace as well, causing applicants under Stereotype Threat to underperform on selection tests used to make hiring decisions (Kirnan, Alfieri, Bragger, & Harris, 2009) and in interviews (i.e., Latu, Mast, & Stewart, 2015). In organizations, Stereotype Threat may lead employees to demonstrate high absenteeism (Walton, Murphy, & Ryan, 2015), report low work engagement and motivation (Roberson & Kulik, 2007), and experience impaired well-being (von Hippel et al., 2015). Threatened employees from negatively stereotyped groups may also be seen as poor performers who aren’t competitive for promotions, which could inform stereotypically disadvantaged group members’ greater turnover intentions relative to members of stereotypically favored groups (Hom, Roberson, & Ellis, 2008; Walton et al., 2015).

  Stereotype Threat may also weaken organizational return on investment in some programs designed to foster a culture of inclusivity and respect. For example, Stereotype Threat may cause female employees to perceive that participating in family-friendly programs at work would be associated with negative career consequences (von Hippel, Kalokerinos, & Zacher, 2017). When training opportunities and management styles are explicitly designed to assist specific groups that are vulnerable to Stereotype Threat (i.e., when age-awareness Human Resource Management (HRM) practices are used to help older workers), they may have the unintended effect of worsening Stereotype Threat rather than buffering it (Oliveira & Cabral-Cardoso, 2018). Furthermore, the discomfort and concern that these programs elicit may generalize beyond the specific social groups that they were designed to help (Cundiff, Ryuk, & Cech, 2018).

  Health and Well-Being

  Assessments of health and well-being include both examinations of temporary fluctuations in health and observations of long-term health patterns and outcomes. Unfortunately, research has revealed that health disparities exist across many social groups in society and that Stereotype Threat may contribute to these disparities (e.g., Fingerhut & Abdou, 2017). Rather than eliciting a broad effect, research suggests that Stereotype Threat undermines health and well-being in multiple specific ways.

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  The Routledge International Handbook of Gender Beliefs, Stereotype Threat, and Teacher Expectations

  • Penelope W. St J. Watson, Christine M. Rubie-Davies, Bernhard Ertl, Penelope W. St J. Watson, Christine M. Rubie-Davies, Bernhard Ertl(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Situations in which the stereotype is relevant, and thus potentially confirmable, create concerns for the individual that their behaviours could confirm the societal stereotypes about the stigmatised group(s) to which they belong. The resulting emotional tax of potentially fulfilling the stereotype leads to a (temporary) depletion of resources that can lead to the very deficits suggested by the stereotype (Pennington et al., 2016). Stereotype Threat and Academic Performance Steele and Aronson’s (1995) seminal work on Stereotype Threat showed that Black Americans underperformed on standardised tests compared to White Americans when students took difficult tests that were framed as diagnostic of underlying intelligence (e.g., SAT or Graduate Record Exam), and when they indicated their racial-group membership prior to solving difficult problems. Furthermore, cultural stereotypes were activated for Black (but not White) students under these diagnostic conditions. Because the framing of the task and the act of identifying racial-group membership affected only the performance of Black students, and because these procedures activated race-based stereotypes only for Black students, these situations created identity threats related to the experience of being a Black person in American society and, specifically, to the stereotype that Black people are intellectually inferior to White people. Since that seminal study, Stereotype Threat has been implicated in the achievement gaps for women’s STEM performance (Spencer et al., 1999), Latinos’ verbal performance (Gonzales et al., 2002). low-socioeconomic-status students’ verbal performance (Croizet & Claire, 1998), and girls’ mathematics performance as early as sixth grade (Good et al., 2003). Stereotype Threat is not just a laboratory phenomenon; it also has been implicated in classroom performance

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  Stereotyping and Prejudice

  • Charles Stangor, Christian S. Crandall(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Almost twenty years have passed since these first studies were published. The research conducted in the wake of these seminal findings has uncovered mounting evidence for the pernicious effects of Stereotype Threat: Women underperform in math and science domains, political contexts, and chess (e.g., Maass, D’Ettole, & Cadinu, 2008; McGlone, Aronson, & Kobrynowicz, 2006; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999); Latinos underperform on academic tasks (Schmader & Johns, 2003); older adults underperform on memory tests (e.g., Levy, 1996); Whites underperform on measures of racism (Frantz, Cuddy, Burnett, Ray, & Hart, 2004; Goff, Steele, & Davies, 2008); and students who have a mental illness underperform on rational thinking tests (Quinn, Kahng, & Crocker, 2004). And this is just a small sample of the groups and domains represented in the Stereotype Threat literature.

  When a negative stereotype exists about a group—any group—to which one belongs, one is at risk for Stereotype Threat. Indeed, there is some research that suggests an individual need not even possess the negatively stereotyped identity— they just need to believe there is a chance others will categorize them as having this identity. For example, when gay men were asked to disclose their sexual orientation in a childcare context (threatening for gay men in light of stereotypes about gay men posing a risk for children), they appeared more anxious and were judged to have inferior childcare skills compared to gay men who were allowed to conceal their sexual orientation or heterosexual men who revealed their sexual orientation (Bosson, Haymovitz, & Pinel, 2004). However, when heterosexual men were not able to disclose their sexual orientation—a situation in which they could be mistaken for belonging to the negatively stereotyped group—their behavior mirrored the behavior of the gay male participants in the disclosure condition. That is, when heterosexual men were not able to disclose their sexual orientation (a condition in which they could be mistaken for gay men), they demonstrated increased anxiety and poorer childcare skills (Bosson et al., 2004). These data demonstrate that, in some situations, the possibility of being misclassified as belonging to a negatively stereotyped group can put someone at risk for Stereotype Threat (see also Bosson, Prewitt-Freilino, & Taylor, 2005).

  Most Stereotype Threat research focuses on its implications for intellectual performance (e.g., math performance among women, IQ performance among Black students). Yet its scope of influence goes beyond test performance. For example, Stereotype Threat increases self-handicapping behaviors or the self-defeating tendency to put obstacles in the way of one’s success (e.g., not studying, staying out late the night before a test). These obstacles provide explanations for one’s performance that are not as deprecatory as low ability (“I didn’t get any sleep last night” versus “I’m not smart enough”). For example, research suggests that, compared to non-Stereotype Threatened participants, Stereotype Threatened participants are likely to spend less time and energy practicing and more time and energy generating excuses for failure, both of which can help people deflect feelings of incompetence (e.g., Brown & Josephs, 1999; Keller, 2002; Steele & Aronson, 1995; Stone, 2002). Stereotype Threat also yields reduced self-efficacy (Aronson & Inzlicht, 2004); lowered confidence that one will do well in the stereotyped domain (Stangor, Carr, & Kiang, 1998); lowered aspirations to pursue stereotype-relevant careers (Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002; Davies, Spencer, & Steele, 2005); and negative physical and psychological health consequences, including increased general anxiety (Ben-Zeev, Fein, & Inzlicht, 2005; Bosson, Haymovitz, & Pinel, 2004), blood pressure (Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, & Steele, 2001), and feelings of dejection (Keller & Dauenheimer, 2003).

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  Social Psychology

  Revisiting the Classic Studies

  • Joanne R. Smith, S Alexander Haslam, Joanne R. Smith, S Alexander Haslam, S. Alexander Haslam(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The ‘first wave’ of research building upon Steele and Aronson’s (1995) article demonstrated the generalizability of the Stereotype Threat effect to different domains and different groups. Researchers from many different labs began reporting evidence for the notion that essentially any group, given the right context, could feel threatened by a negative stereotype in ways that might undermine performance. In addition to the original effects among African Americans taking a verbal ability test, Stereotype Threat effects have been documented among Latinos, individuals of low socioeconomic status (SES), and psychology majors (compared with science majors) taking a challenging test of intellectual ability (Gonzales et al., 2002; Croizet et al., 1998, 2004). Other studies of cognitive performance have shown that Stereotype Threat can affect elderly individuals completing a memory assessment, individuals with a history of mental illness taking an intellectual test (Quinn et al., 2004), or head trauma patients taking a neurological test (Kit et al., 2008). Considerable follow-up research has applied the theory to understand the often-found gender gap in mathematical testing (Logel et al., 2012; Spencer et al., 1999).

  Beyond effects on intellectual or cognitive performance, Stereotype Threat has also been shown to impair other kinds of behaviours. Stereotype Threat can affect Whites completing what was assumed to be a test of athletic ability (Stone et al., 1999), women engaging in negotiations with men (Kray et al., 2001), and women completing driving simulations (Yeung and von Hippel, 2008). In more social contexts, Stereotype Threat can lead Whites concerned with appearing racist to experience mental load in interracial interactions (Richeson and Shelton, 2003) or exhibit greater activation of bias on an implicit association test (Frantz et al., 2004). Stereotype Threat can lead men to underperform on measures of social sensitivity (Koenig and Eagly, 2005) and elevate anxiety among gay men led to believe they would be interacting with children (Bosson et al., 2004). In all of these studies, priming negatively stereotyped individuals with their group membership in an evaluative setting led to effects on performance or other outcomes consistent with the theory. The breadth of these effects and the reliability of evidence across so many different groups and domains, and as demonstrated by many different researchers, gives greater credence to the scope of the theory and to the impact Stereotype Threat can have on human behaviour.

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  Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living

  Let the Conversation Begin

  • Paul Marcus(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The protective side of the human character can be aroused by the mere prospect of being negatively stereotyped, and that, once aroused, it steps in and takes over the capacities of the person—to such an extent that little capacity is left over for the work at hand. It shows that this side of the human character, aroused this way, affects our thoughts, emotions, actions and performances in ways that have nothing to do with our internal traits, capacities, motivations, and so on. And that these effects contribute importantly to group differences in behavior, ranging from math performance to the interest when in interracial conversations to playing golf.

  (2010, p. 214)

  Steele more precisely elaborates why he believes Stereotype Threat can have such a negative impact on the person, saying, “Even the mild short-lived doses of Stereotype Threat that can be implemented in these experiments are enough to raise your blood pressure, dramatically increase ruminative thinking, interfere with working memory, and deteriorate performance on challenging tasks” (ibid., p. 132). And even worse, if you carry on for an extended period of time to care and labor in a domain “where your group is negatively stereotyped, disadvantaged, and discriminated against,” the likelihood of having serious health problems like hypertension greatly increases (ibid.). Aspects of Stereotype Threat and performance are hotly contested, and it “continues to be an intensely debated and researched topic in educational, social and organizational psychology” (Spencer et al., 2016, p. 415). Thus, a more in-depth understanding of some of the mediating and moderating factors animating this harsh situational predicament is warranted.

  The bases of Stereotype Threat

  Steele et al. (2002) have emphasized that an important source of Stereotype Threat is related to the social cues that put the threat into sharp emotional focus, a fertile breeding ground for later psychological problems that contribute to impaired performance. While the psychoanalyst would be inclined to look for dispositional factors, such as lack of self-confidence, an over-reactivity to potential discrimination or poor frustration tolerance, Steele and his colleagues looked at other contextual factors to explain what governs how much an individual is impacted by Stereotype Threat (Steele, 2010, p. 138).9

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  Prejudice

  The Target's Perspective

  • Janet K. Swim, Charles Stangor(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Because the achievement of these students is lower at every level of skill and preparation, factors such as genetic differences and socioeconomic disadvantage cannot be the sole causes of their underachievement. Some other factor or factors must play a role. The central thesis behind our research is that an important, but unappreciated factor in this underperformance is the psychological burden posed by stereotype- based suspicions of inferiority in achievement domains. We refer to this burden as Stereotype Threat. Stereotype Threat, we argue, undermines academic achieve- ment both by interfering with performance on mental tasks, and, over time, by prompting students to protect their self-esteem by disengaging from the threatened domain. Stereotype Threat DEFINED Stereotype Threat can be thought of as the discomfort targets feel when they are at risk of fulfilling a negative stereotype about their group; the apprehension that they could behave in such a way as to confirm the stereotype--in the eyes of 86 ARONSON ET AL. others, in their own eyes, or both at the same time. If the threat is strong enough, it can interfere with social interaction and intellectual performance. Consider the African American student trying to solve difficult items on a test, or a woman called upon in math class to answer a complex question. As for anyone, low performance in such situations brings with it the risk of discouragement or shame about not doing well. But members of stereotyped groups face an extra threat because of the long-standing and widely proliferated cultural stereotypes alleging a group-based limitation of ability. The mere existence of such stereotypes poses for targets the additional risk of being seen and treated stereotypically, of having their access to and belongingness in the domain limited by stereotype-driven perceptions and treatmentmand of calling their own abilities into question.

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  Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue

  • Abrol Fairweather, Owen Flanagan(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  4.1 Stereotype Threat to racial and ethnic minorities In particular, I want to suggest that the combination of Stereotype Threat for minority test-takers and stereotype lift for majority test-takers may account for as much as half of the race and gender gaps in various meas- ures of academic achievement and ability. Stereotype Threat was discovered in 1995 by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson. They began with the idea Mark Alfano 164 that if you’re worried that others will treat your performance on a task as emblematic of your group, and your group is stigmatized as low-perform- ing or low-ability on that task, then you will experience a level of threat that people from another group might not. In particular, since there is a stereotype in the United States that African Americans are poor students, they will experience a level of threat that white students do not experience on the same task. This experience in turn mediates performance: the more nervous you are about the inferences others might draw about your group based on your individual performance, the worse you do on the test. To demonstrate this, Steele and Aronson (1995) conducted an experi- ment with African American undergraduates at Stanford University. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Only the first group was told that the test they were about to take was diagnostic of ability. Thus, their threat level was increased: if they performed poorly, it could reflect poorly on their whole group. As predicted, the students in the first group underperformed their matched peers in the second group. That is to say, merely being told that the test they were about to take was indicative of ability led to performance decrements. Now, one might respond to this by saying that it demonstrates nothing about stereotypes in particular.

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  Gender and Social Hierarchies

  Perspectives from social psychology

  • Klea Faniko, Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi, Oriane Sarrasin, Eric Mayor(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2008 ): blatant (explicitly stating the targetgroup’s inferiority, for example that women are not as good atmath as men), moderately explicit (stating that a math test, forexample, produces gender differences without specifying which grouptends to perform better), and implicit (making gender salient,through emphasizing test diagnosticity, exposing women to genderstereotypic commercials, or manipulating the gender composition ofthe group).

  In terms of outcomes, across several studies, women who were primedwith negative gender stereotypes showed decreased performance onmath tests (Schmader & Johns, 2003 ; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999 ) as well as decreasedinterest in quantitative domains, such as mathematics, engineeringand computer science (Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein,2002 ). Overall,Stereotype Threat has an important, negative effect on women’sperformance and self-related cognitions in STEM (science,technology, engineering, and mathematics). The idea is thatwomen’s concerns about confirming negative stereotypes abouttheir gender group (e.g. the stereotype that women are not good atmath) can interfere with their performance and self-relatedcognitions, possibly because of unsuccessful attempts to suppressself-relevant stereotypes (Logel, Iserman, Davies, Quinn, &Spencer, 2009 ) andsubsequent decreased workingmemory capacity (Schmader & Johns, 2003 ) or increased arousal (Ben-Zeev, Fein,& Inzlicht, 2005 ).

  Although the evidence is sparser, Stereotype Threat seems also toaffect women’s self-related cognitions in leadership domains.Women exposed to TV commercials depicting women in genderstereotypical roles (e.g. homecoming queen) were less interested inchoosing a leadership role in a subsequent task (Davies, Spencer,& Steele, 2005 ).Similarly, gender Stereotype Threat activation decreasedwomen’s entrepreneurial intentions (Gupta & Bhawe, 2007 ) and women’sconfidence in their likelihood of reaching their career aspirations(von Hippel, Issa, Ma, & Stokes, 2011

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  Social Psychology

  • Saba Safdar, Catherine A. Sanderson(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Participants were then assigned into two conditions: the stereotype-consistent condition and counter-stereotype condition. Results indicated that women who were in the stereotype-consistent condition endorsed performance-avoidance goals (e.g., “My fear of performing poorly on this exam is what motivates me,” “I think to myself, what if I do badly on this exam?”; Smith, 2006). Furthermore, women who endorsed performance-avoidance goals did so at a greater extent when experiencing ste- reotype threat compared to when the stereotype was countered (Smith, 2006). Researchers believe that Stereotype Threat is a situational threat, meaning individuals do not have to believe the stereo- type for it to have affect on their performance (e.g., academic performance). Women who adopt performance-avoidance goals are highly motivated to dissociate themselves with the stereotype in an attempt to prove others wrong of that said stereotype. When experiencing Stereotype Threat, find- ings show that women who realize the intergroup inequalities (e.g., that women are discredited in STEM) will likely feel the need to be “on guard” to avoid failing in certain math condition. Researchers have also found that we require fewer examples to confirm our beliefs about a trait when coming from an in-group member versus an outgroup member (Sacchi, Rusconi, Russo, Bettiga, & Cherubini, 2012). For example, if your friend misplaces his or her keys, you assume that person is just being forgetful. But if an older person misplaces his or her keys, you may assume that person may be experiencing serious memory loss. CONFIRMATION BIAS. Confirmation bias describes the tendency to search for information that supports one’s initial view. When people have expectations about a particular person, they may seek out evidence that is consistent with their beliefs (Hernandez & Preston, 2013).

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  An Introduction to Social Psychology

  Global Perspectives

  • James Alcock, Stan Sadava(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Finally, some individuals will not accept and internalize the stereotype imposed on their group and may express anger about it (Dion, 2002). For instance, stereotypes about aging people may include positive attributes such as wisdom and experience, but also may include being slow, rigid, even cognitively incapable. However, many resist the stereotype by not identifying themselves as ‘old’ or ‘elderly’, finding positive information about themselves, and developing compensatory behaviour that staves off the self-fulfilling prophecy of the stereotype (Zebrowitz, 2003). However, the stereotype, when activated, can still influence the behaviour of others towards aging individuals.

  Stereotype Threat effect

  When members of a negatively stereotyped group are placed in a situation involving performance, they are at a disadvantage, having to struggle with the stereotype that they may have internalized and that they feel others will have accepted. The resultant apprehension and anxiety will undermine their performance. This is known as the Stereotype Threat effect (Steele, 1997).

  Steele & Aronson (1995) demonstrated this effect in an experiment in which black or white students were led to anticipate that they would be taking a ‘very difficult’ test. The test was defined for them as being ‘diagnostic of intellectual ability’ or ‘just a lab exercise’. The researchers reasoned that because the test was indeed difficult, all participants would struggle with it. However, if the test was framed as about intellectual ability, Afro-American participants would feel anxiety about the stereotype of black intellectual ability as well as about the test itself, and so their performance would be impaired. And that is what happened. Where the test was just about a ‘lab exercise’, black and white participants performed equally well. But when it was about intellectual ability, the performance of blacks was much lower than that of whites. Another study looked at gender differences in mathematical performance (Figure 13.7

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