Stereotype Threat

Question 1

What is Stereotype Threat?

Answer 1

• Involves the risk of unintentionally confirming negative stereotypes about one’s group.
• Arises in situations where individuals feel tense, scrutinized, and when their group membership becomes salient.
• Occurs when a person recognizes that a negative stereotype applicable to their group is relevant to them in a specific situation.
• Leads to emotional distress as individuals anticipate potential stereotyping and discrimination based on their group membership.
• The threat’s impact is powerful, even with a slight possibility of prejudicial treatment.
• Can impair performance when the individual perceives the activity as important for them.
• Example : Being profiled as likely to underperform in academics would only affect the individual student if they perceive academics as something important to them.

Question 2

How to Reduce Stereotype Threat?

Answer 2

• Making the negative stereotype irrelevant to performance is a method to reduce stereotype threat.
• Example : Presenting tests as non-diagnostic of ability resulted in African American students performing as well as skilled White participants.
• Disindetifying with domains where one is devalued and instead, identifying with domains where one is valued. This approach aims to mitigate the impact of stereotype threat (Steele, 1998).

Question 3

Illustrative Studies (Steele & Aronson, 1995)

Study 1

Answer 3

• Aimed to investigate the impact of stereotypes on individuals who were stereotyped, focusing on the stereotype about African Americans’ intellectual abilities.
• Proposed that stereotype threat would be high in challenging or frustrating intellectual achievement situations, impairing performance regardless of participants’ personal beliefs about the stereotype.
• Involved 600 African American and Caucasian American students with SAT scores exceeding 600. They underwent a 25-minute test with difficult items from the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).
• Participants were assigned to two conditions: diagnostic (test involving reading and verbal reasoning skills with feedback on strengths and weaknesses) and non-diagnostic (test focusing on psychological factors in solving verbal problems with future test-related feedback).
• Both groups were informed that the test was very difficult, with instructions not to expect perfect scores.
• African American participants in the diagnostic condition performed worse than the other groups, with their adjusted scores being half of those in the non-diagnostic condition. They also attempted the fewest number of items.
• The experiment demonstrated that when warned about the test measuring their abilities, African American students performed poorly and hesitated to attempt the activity compared to those in the non-diagnostic condition.

Question 4

Illustrative Studies (Steele & Aronson, 1995)

Study 2

Answer 4

• In expanding on the first study, researchers aimed to illustrate the processes involved in the stereotype threat effect.
• Thought association measures revealed several activated processes in African American participants with diagnostic instructions.
• Association regarding their ethnic group membership was significantly higher for African American participants in the diagnostic group than for any other group.
• Self-doubt associations were significantly higher for the diagnostic group, being twice as many as for any other group.
• On a self-report measure of activity preferences and personality characteristics, African Americans in the diagnostic condition avoided agreeing with ethnically stereotypic descriptions more significantly than any other group.
• Only 25% of the African American diagnostic group indicated their race on the post-experimental questionnaire, while all members of the other groups did so.
• Three items assessing self-handicapping responses were significantly highest for the African American diagnostic group, including claiming fewer hours of sleep, indicating a lower ability to focus, and reporting finding standardized tests unfair and tricky.

Question 5

Illustrative Studies (Steele & Aronson, 1995)

Study 3

Answer 5

• Aimed to demonstrate how easily stereotype threat can be triggered, using the same difficult test without mentioning testing abilities and providing non-diagnostic instructions.
• The crucial manipulation involved a brief questionnaire just before the test, asking about participants’ age, year in school, major, number of siblings, parents’ education, and, for the threat group, their race.
• Despite the simplicity of the questionnaire, it served as a priming event, activating the stereotype threat. The African American primed participants had lower adjusted SAT scores and attempted the fewest questions.
• Participants were unaware that the stereotype threat effect had occurred and claimed not to have been distracted recording their race, considering it a common event in their life.
• The experiment concluded that subtle instructional differences can impair the intellectual test performance of African American students, and lifting this threat can significantly improve their performance.

Question 6

Research Implications

Answer 6

• Stereotype threat easily activates, especially through unintended means like demographic conditions.
• Steele (1996) proposes disidentification as a protective measure for self-esteem against threatening domains.
• Non-diagnostic conditions suggest a way to counter stereotype threat, offering hope for improving African American student performance.
• The experiments partly explain why African Americans may underperform on standardized tests.