Stereotype Threat (ST) is the psychological phenomenon where people fear confirming some negative stereotype about a social group they belong to. This fear may even lead to behavioral changes that reaffirm the negative stereotype, or heightened anxiety that further impairs performance.
Psychologists have connected ST to people’s desire for social acceptance, suggesting that their sense of belonging unconsciously influences their performance in tests and their actions. Examples of ST range from girls thinking that boys are better at mathematics than they are, or black students thinking that they are academically inferior to their white counterparts. The findings suggest that students may alter their behavior—even to their disadvantage—to reduce friction between and within their social groups. Other studies extend these findings to one’s occupation: in one experiment, bankers were either primed to think about their hobbies or their occupation before completing a task that was easy to cheat in. Those primed to think of their occupation cheated significantly more, suggesting that occupational identity can invoke dishonest behavior.
The impacts of ST are crucial when people in power unknowingly give preferential treatment to those they are biased toward. In one study, teachers were tricked into thinking that a certain group of students who were roughly equal to their peers actually had “higher IQ”. This “gifted” group ended up performing better than their peers in an IQ test a year later (12 IQ points over 8 IQ points in the control), a phenomenon termed the ‘Pygmalion effect’. Another study found that supervisors invested less in workers they perceived as lazy or inefficient because of their ethnicity—the biased managers checked in on and encouraged these workers less than average.
When prejudice is widespread, it can result in positive feedback loops that perpetuate discrimination across society. For example, men who discriminate against women in in leadership positions are less likely to cooperate with them, resulting in lower scores on metrics that measure her ability to foster cooperation or in people management. This could develop into ST if she is told that her shortcomings were due to her gender and then reminded of it in subsequent assessments. If she quits her position, the lower representation of women in leadership positions may reinforce such stereotypes further.
One method frequently suggested to combat ST is to raise awareness of its effects. People who are aware of it can better adjust their behavior to compensate for their biases, though empirical data to support its effectiveness remains dubious. Alternative strategies are to remind people of role models and to increase representation of minorities. This may help boost confidence in oneself, thereby reducing the effects of ST.
References
Aronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When White Men Can’t Do Math: Necessary and Sufficient Factors in Stereotype Threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35(1), 29–46. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1998.1371
BenYishay, A., Jones, M., Kondylis, F., & Mobarak, A. M. (2016). Are Gender Differences in Performance Innate or Socially Mediated? World Bank, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-7689
Cohn, A., Fehr, E., & Maréchal, M. A. (2014). Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry. Nature, 516(7529), 86–89. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13977
Glover, D., Pallais, A., & Pariente, W. (2017). Discrimination as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from French Grocery Stores*. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(3), 1219–1260. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx006
Liu, S., Liu, P., Wang, M., & Zhang, B. (2021). Effectiveness of stereotype threat interventions: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(6), 921–949. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000770
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” Urban Review 3, no. 1 (1968): 16–20.
Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35(1), 4–28. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1998.1373
Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797–811. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.5.797
Stone, J., Lynch, C. I., Sjomeling, M., & Darley, J. M. (1999). Stereotype threat effects on Black and White athletic performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1213–1227. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1213
See Also: Perceived Gender Gap In Mathematics Performance
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Hyde, J. S., & Mertz, J. E. (2009). Gender, culture, and mathematics performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(22), 8801–8807. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0901265106
Among the mathematically gifted, there may be as many as 2- to 4-fold more boys than girls depending on precisely where the cutoff is set. However, this gender gap, too, has been closing over time at all levels, including even in the IMO. Thus, there is every reason to believe that it will continue to narrow in the future. Moreover, the gender ratio favoring boys above the 99th percentile is not ubiquitous and correlates well with measures of a country’s gender equity, strongly indicating that the gap is due, in large part, to sociocultural and other environmental factors, not biology or gender per se.
- Countries with greater gender inequality display greater variance in test scores among males and females in math and science. This variance extends to the top percentiles, showing negligible differences.
- Knowing whether a child was raised in Denmark or Tunisia is a better predictor of test scores as opposed to their sex
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Multon, K. D., Brown, S. D., & Lent, R. W. (1991). Relation of self-efficacy beliefs to academic outcomes: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 38(1), 30–38. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.38.1.30
- After investigating the relationship between self-efficacy and academic performance, this study finds a statistically significant relationship between self-efficacy beliefs and academic performance
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Reardon, S. F., Fahle, E., Kalogrides, D., Podolsky, A., & Zarate, R. C. (2018). Gender Achievement Gaps in U.S. School Districts. https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/gender-achievement-gaps-us-school-districts
- In the US, there is correlation in the gaps between boys and girls math test scores and gender wage gaps within the same district.
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Reardon, S. F., Kalogrides, D., Fahle, E. M., Podolsky, A., & Zairate, R. (2018). The Relationship Between Test Item Format and Gender Achievement Gaps on Math and ELA Tests in 4th and 8th Grade. Educational Researcher, 47(5)(47(5)). https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/relationship-between-test-item-format-and-gender-achievement-gaps-math-and-ela-tests-4th-and-8th-grade
- Methods used to test mathematics performance between the sexes vary across literature. Different question types favor different sexes, making it a possible confounder.
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Zander, L., Höhne, E., Harms, S., Pfost, M., & Hornsey, M. J. (2020). When Grades Are High but Self-Efficacy Is Low: Unpacking the Confidence Gap Between Girls and Boys in Mathematics. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.552355
- Self-confidence tends to correlate with performance. One study on the gender confidence gap finds that boys have higher self-efficacy in their math abilities than girls which may explain why men are more represented in STEM than women.
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