Page 338 - The Social Animal

320 The Social Animal

Taken together, results of the above studies make it easy to under-
stand why stereotypes are resistant to change. When we hold beliefs
about others, the self-fulfilling prophecy ensures that we create a so-
cial reality in line with our expectations. If we believe that women are
“more emotional” than men, for example, we will tend to notice and
recall instances that confirm the stereotype and not count the times we
see men roaring in anger or emoting jubilantly at a football game—or
the times that female CEOs, politicians, and flight attendants keep
their emotions to themselves. And even when we’re open-minded
enough to test the accuracy of our beliefs, we often unknowingly use
“testing” strategies that confirm those beliefs—even when the beliefs
are erroneous.

Stereotype Threat One outcome of self-fulfilling prophecy
caused by the mere existence of stereotypes in our culture is that
people who are targets of negative stereotypes can confirm those
stereotypes—paradoxically—by trying to disconfirm them. Let us
highlight one striking example: Put simply, among college students,
there is an academic performance gap between blacks and whites.
Although there are many possible historical and societal explana-
tions for this phenomenon, Claude Steele 38 has argued that they
cannot account for the fact that the gap in school achievement be-
tween blacks and whites is as great for students with high prepara-
tion (as measured by earlier grades and test scores) as it is for those
with low preparation. Something seems to be happening that keeps
even bright, motivated, and well-prepared black students from per-
forming as well as white students with the same level of ability and
preparation.
In researching this problem, Steele and Joshua Aronson 39 rea-
soned that a major contributing factor might involve apprehensive-
ness among black students about confirming the existing negative
stereotype of “intellectual inferiority.” Steele and Aronson dubbed
this apprehension stereotype threat. They reasoned that the extra
burden of apprehensiveness might actually interfere with students’
ability to perform well on standardized tests. In one experiment,
Steele and Aronson administered a difficult verbal test (the Gradu-
ate Record Examination), individually to black and white college
students. Half the students were led to believe that the investigator
was interested in measuring their intellectual ability; the other half
were led to believe that the investigator was merely testing the test—