Re: the First Point
1.1. There is a psychological phenomenon known as ‘Stereotype Threat’
Steele and Aronson (“Contending with Group Image: The Psychology of Stereotype and Social Identity Threat,” by Claude M. Steele, Steven J. Spencer, and Joshua Aronson, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2002.) & very many later studies have found that stereotype threat affects performance.
In their initial study, after adjusting for initial differences in SAT scores, black students at Stanford University who took a challenging verbal test answered approximately 10 percent fewer questions correctly than whites did—but only if they believed that the test was a measure of their ability. If they were told that the test measured “psychological factors involved in solving verbal problems,” the black-white test score difference was eliminated.
These studies have been replicated many times, and are undiputed, both in terms of their results and in terms of their methodology.
1.2. Stereotype Threat is a Real Psychological State for which there is Direct Evidence
“what we needed next was direct evidence of thesubjective state we call stereotype threat. To seek this, we looked intowhether simply sitting down to take a difficult test of ability was enough to make black students mindful of their race and stereotypes about it. This may seem unlikely. White students I have taught over the years have sometimes said that they have hardly any sense of even having a race. But blacks have many experiences with the majority "other group" that make their race salient tothem.
We again brought black and white students in to take a difficult verbal test. But just before the test began, we gave them a long list of words, each of which had two letters missing. They were told to complete the words on this list as fast as they could. We knew from a preliminary survey that twelve of the eighty words we had selected could be completed in such a way as to relate to the stereotype about blacks' intellectual ability. The fragment "__ce," for example, could become "race." If simply taking a difficult test of ability was enough to make black students mindful of stereotypes about their race, these students should complete more fragments with stereotype-related words. That is just what happened. When black students were told that the test would measure ability, they completed the fragments with significantly more stereotype-related words than when they were told that it was not a measure of ability. Whites made few stereotype-related completions in either case.”
1.3. Stereotype Threat is not the Same Thing as Self-Doubt
(Aronson J, Lustina MJ, Good C, Keough K, Steele CM, Brown J. When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 29-46. 1999).
The researchers told white male students who were strong in math (they all had nearly perfect scores on the SAT 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 -- high-achieving white men who are very strong in math.
“In science, as in the rest of life, few things are definitive. But these results are pretty good evidence that stereotype threat's impairment of standardized-test performance does not depend on cueing a pre-existing anxiety.”
Alternatively
Studies (e.g. Kray, Laura, Reb, Jochen M., Galinsky, Adam D. and Thompson, Leigh, "Gender Stereotype Activation and Power in Mixed-Gender Negotiations") show that women do worse on challenging tests of mathematical and scientific material, both when they are primed to think that the test demonstrates gender differences in math ability and when they are not primed about the test’s content (and thus are reacting purely on their knowledge that society expects women to be bad at math). The male-female gap is eliminated only when women are led to believe that the test is gender- neutral.
Or
White athletes did worse than black athletes in a golf exercise when they thought their scores demonstrated “natural athletic ability” (a stereotypically black trait), whereas blacks did worse than whites when they thought it tested “sports strategic intelligence” (a stereotypically white trait).
1.4. Stereotype Threat Affects the Most Able, most Qualified, and Most Motivated Members of a Group
Claude Steele -- “Is everyone equally threatened and disrupted by a stereotype? One might expect, for example, that it would affect the weakest students most. But in all our research the most achievement-oriented students, who were also the most skilled, motivated, and confident, were the most impaired by stereotype threat. This fact had been under our noses all along--in our data and even in our theory. A person has to care about a domain in order to be disturbed by the prospect of being stereotyped in it. That is the whole idea of disidentification--protecting against stereotype threat by ceasing to care about the domain in which the stereotype applies. Our earlier experiments had selected black students who identified with verbal skills and women who identified with math. But when we tested participants who identified less with these domains, what had been under our noses hit us in the face. None of them showed any effect of stereotype threat whatsoever.”
Ironically, and poignantly, the data show that
“what exposes students to the pressure of stereotype threat is not weaker academic identity and skills but stronger academic identity and skills. They may have long seen themselves as good students--better than most. But led into the domain by their strengths, they pay an extra tax on their investment--vigilant worry that their future will be compromised by society's perception and treatment of their group.”
What exactly is happening under Stereotype Threat?
“In some of our experiments we administered the test of ability by computer, so that we could see how long participants spent looking at different parts of the test questions. Black students taking the test under stereotype threat seemed to be trying too hard rather than not hard enough. They reread the questions, reread the multiple choices, rechecked their answers, more than when they were not under stereotype threat. The threat made them inefficient on a test that, like most standardized tests, is set up so that thinking long often means thinking wrong, especially on difficult items like the ones we
used.”
and, it has physiological manifestations
A study (Blascovich, J., Spencer, S., Quinn, D., & Steele, C. (2001)). African-Americans and high blood pressure: The role of stereotype threat. Psychological Science, 12, 225-229) found that the blood pressure of black students performing a difficult cognitive task under stereotype threat was elevated compared with that of black students not under stereotype threat or white students in either situation.
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