You’re perched on the edge of your seat, the surface of the desk cold beneath your fingers. Your trembling hand holds a freshly sharpened #2 pencil. The paper in front of you has hundreds of letters stamped in dark blue ink: A, B, C, D. Your heart begins to pound, because this is no ordinary standardized test. Your performance on this test will reflect on your entire race.
From the SAT to the GRE, standardized tests have immense power over one’s academic future and self-esteem. Nonetheless, most test-takers feel that the impact of these tests is limited to a few years and that they will have no implications outside of their own academic lives. However, racial minorities and other marginalized groups often feel added stress in the form of stereotype threat, which is the fear of confirming negative stereotypes about one’s group. Seemingly innocuous information on standardized tests can trigger the feeling that the test-taker’s performance will reflect on their entire race, gender, or ethnicity. Beyond performing well on tests for their own sake, these test takers feel that they must perform well enough to negate stereotypes about their entire group.
These stereotypes have been perpetuated in the United States since the country was first founded. Even after slavery was abolished, African-Americans were denied basic rights like property ownership and the right to vote. Jim Crow laws and Black Codes in the South promoted segregation and discrimination. During this period, the stereotype that African-Americans were somehow less intelligent or mentally capable than White Americans grew in popularity. Similarly, women were historically denied rights given to men. Often, women were viewed as the property of their fathers and husbands. No college would educate women; consequently, females were unable to get jobs and rarely owned property. Similarly to African-Americans, this inequality gave rise to the idea that women were less capable than men in terms of intellectual and physical ability. Along with Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, women and African-Americans are especially vulnerable to experiencing stereotype threat because of their long histories of oppression.
Stereotype threat can be triggered by the smallest details in members of these marginalized groups. Describing a test as “diagnostic of ability” caused Latino-Americans to perform worse than White Americans. Otherwise, the two groups performed similarly [1]. Simply asking test-takers to indicate their race on a test has also been shown to affect the performance of African-Americans [2]. This impact is not limited to racial minorities; it can also affect older adults on memory tests and women taking math assessments [1,3]. It can even impact majority groups that are rarely stereotyped. In one study, White men performed worse on a math exam when they were told they would be compared to Asian men [4].
The mechanism behind this principle is not entirely understood. However, working memory—memory involved in immediate conscious processes—may be involved. Stereotype threat has been shown to increase anxiety in the affected group, and anxiety is known to detract from working memory. Schmader et al. administered working memory tests to women and Latino-Americans immediately after priming them with negative stereotypes about their gender or race, and it was found that working memory was significantly impacted. Furthermore, the difference in working memory between threat and non-threat conditions mediated the difference in test performance, which demonstrates that working memory differences could explain why stereotype threat causes such stark differences [1].
Although stereotype threat impacts people of every race and gender, the solution is surprisingly simple: education.
Cadinu et al. investigated the role of expectancy in stereotype threat. Prior to taking a test of logical-mathematical ability, female participants were told that women perform worse, equal to, or better than men. In the first case, women experienced stereotype threat and performed significantly worse than men. In the other two test cases, it was found that the female subject’s expectation to perform equal to or better than men mediated the effect of stereotype threat on performance. Cadinu et al.’s study suggests that the gender gap in test performance is not due to men’s alleged natural intelligence, or women’s biological lack of it. It’s because of the stereotypes that are perpetuated by education systems, public media, and the world—and it can be remedied simply by changing those stereotypical expectations [5].
An even easier solution may exist. Johns et al. gave a set of difficult math problems to both men and women, framing the test in the control case as a problem-solving set, and in the test case as a math assessment. In the test case, women performed significantly worse than men, a finding consistent with previous studies. However, in a second test case, women were taught about stereotype threat and how it can impact performance prior to taking the test. This time, the women performed equal to the control case and equal to men. Johns et al.’s work suggests, like Cadinu et al., that the female subjects expected to perform worse than the men due to widely propagated stereotypes about their gender. However, when the women were made aware that the stereotypes were not based on fact, their expectations changed—and so did their performance. These studies show that making members of stereotyped groups aware of the effects of stereotype threat can “buffer their performance on stereotype-relevant tasks” [6].
Despite their simplicity, these solutions have yet to be implemented in most schools and universities. Minorities and stereotyped groups continue to struggle to succeed, not because of any inherent lack of ability, but because of the idea that only people of a particular race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status can prosper—an idea that has been reinforced for years. If this research becomes more widely disseminated and education systems implement the proposed practices outlined in the research papers of Johns et al. and Cadinu et al., stereotype threat may soon be nothing but a distant memory.
[1] T. Schmader, M. Johns, “Converging Evidence that Stereotype Threat Reduces Working Memory Capacity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, 440–452, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.440.
[2] J. Stone, A. Chalabaev, C. K. Harrison, “The Impact of Stereotype Threat on Performance in Sports,” Stereotype ThreatTheory, Process, and Application, 2011, 218-230, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732 449.003.0014.
[3] Thomas Hess et al., “The Impact of Stereotype Threat on Age Differences in Memory Performance,” The Journals of Gerontology, January 1, 2003, 3–11, https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/58.1.P3.
[4] J. Aronson et al., “When White Men Can't Do Math: Necessary and Sufficient Factors in Stereotype Threat,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1999, 29-46, https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1998.1371.
[5] M. Cadinu et al., “Stereotype Threat: The Effect of Expectancy on Performance,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 2003, 267-285, https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.145.
[6] M. Johns, T. Schmader, A. Martens, “Knowing Is Half the Battle: Teaching Stereotype Threat as a Means of Improving Women’s Math Performance,” Psychological Science, 2005, 175–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00799.