Page 340 - The Social Animal

322 The Social Animal

citizen, and so on. Each of these “social identities” can have different
implications for my behavior or performance—or the way I feel
about myself—depending on which identity is made salient by the
situation I’m in. In an elegant experiment, Margaret Shih and her as-
sociates demonstrated the relevance of this multiple social identity
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phenomenon for stereotype threat by giving Asian women a mathe-
matics test. Before taking the test the women were subtly reminded
of either their gender identity or their Asian identity, each of which
has very different stereotypic implications for math performance
(Asians are reputed to be especially good at math; women, not so
good).The women’s performance on the math test demonstrated the
power of these stereotypes; they performed better when primed to
think of themselves as Asians.
There is good news in this research. If merely thinking about a
negative stereotype can lower your performance on a test, then some
kind of alternative mindset that counters the stereotype should be
able to boost it. For example, in one condition of a recent experiment,
Matthew McGlone and Joshua Aronson 42 did a simple thing: They
reminded the male and female test-takers before taking a difficult
test of spatial ability that they were good students at a good univer-
sity. This reminder was enough to completely eliminate the male-
female gap they had observed in the control condition, in which the
test-takers were merely reminded of the fact that they were “residents
of the northeast.” The I’m-a-good-student mindset effectively coun-
tered the women-aren’t-good-at-math stereotype. Similar results
were found for low-income 7th-graders on their middle-school exit
exams. Research shows the performance-enhancing benefit of other
counterstereotypic mindsets, as well. For example, exposing black
test-takers to images or thoughts of successful role models from the
stereotyped group—such as the great black intellectual W.E.B.
Dubois, celebrated black astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, or even
just a black test administrator—can ease the extra burden they may
experience during the test. Similarly, reminding students that their
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abilities are improvable rather than fixed, 44 or even that anxiety on
standardized tests is common among members of stereotyped
groups, 45 helps reduce test anxiety and improve scores.

Blaming the Victim It is not always easy for people who have
never experienced prejudice to understand fully what it is like to be
a target of prejudice. For relatively secure members of the dominant