Steele and Aronson (1995)

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

To show how stereotype threat may affect an individual’s test performance.

Question 2

Method

Answer 2

• 76 male and female African American and white undergraduates from Stanford University.
• Participants were given a standarised test of verbal ability, similar to SAT and were told one of two things:
  1. It is a test to diagnose your intellectual ability.
  2. It is a test of your problem solving.
• In the first condition the focus was on ‘verbal ability’, on the second condition it was on ‘problem solving’.
• Participants were randomly assigned conditions however there was an equal number of participants in each condition.

Question 3

Findings

Answer 3

• African Americans did poorly when they believed the test was a test of their intellectual ability, but did just as well as the white Americans when they believed that it was a test of their problem solving skills.

Question 4

Conclusion

Answer 4

• African Americans performed worse than their white counterparts in the stereotype threat condition.