Page 339 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 321

and that the investigators were not interested in evaluating their in-
tellectual ability.
The results were clear: White students performed equally well re-
gardless of whether they believed the test was being used to measure
their intelligence. However, black students were highly affected by the
way the test was described: The evaluative nature of the situation ac-
tivated stereotypes in their minds and made them anxious—and they
performed about half as well as those led to believe the test was not
being used to evaluate them. Such is the power of stereotypes; when
people think their behavior may confirm a negative reputation about
themselves or their group, the resulting anxiety interferes with their
performance.
The effects of stereotype threat are not limited to African Amer-
icans. Researchers have found similar results for other groups, such
as women working on math problems and Latinos working on tests
of verbal ability—because the stereotypes portray women as inferior
to men at math and Latinos as inferior to Anglos in verbal ability.
Indeed, Steele and Aronson argue that any group stereotyped as in-
ferior to some other group can experience stereotype threat to a
meaningful degree. This can happen to a group even if, by all objec-
tive standards, that group excels in the relevant domain. For exam-
ple, Joshua Aronson and his associates gave white male engineering
40
majors, all of whom had near-perfect scores on their math SATs, a
difficult math test. Before the test, they were told that the test was a
measure of their math ability. In addition, half of them were con-
fronted with a stereotype threat: The experimenter informed them
that he was trying to understand why Asians appear to have superior
math ability. This group performed dramatically worse on the test.
This finding underscores the situational nature of stereotype threat.
The exotic situation imposed upon the white engineering majors—
an unflattering comparison with a supposedly superior group—is
commonplace for blacks and Latinos; they contend daily with such
comparisons in any integrated academic setting.That such obviously
bright and accomplished engineering students can falter on a test
when faced with stereotype threat should make us think twice about
casually assuming that the low performance of blacks and Latinos in-
dicates a lack of ability.
What happens, the astute reader may wonder, when we belong
to more than one stereotyped group—as nearly all of us do? I am a
white male, for instance, but also a professor, a Californian, a senior