Stereotype threat in intergroup relations

In 1994, a controversial book hit newsstands. Its claim was that the consistent gap in intelligent quotient (IQ) scores between Black and White students was the result of genetic differences between the races. This proposition that one class of people is intellectually inferior to another was not a new claim. In the 1800s, Sir Francis Galton was one of the early psychologists to study intelligence and held the hypothesis that members of the British upper crust were, by birth, intellectually superior to those on lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. In the early 20th century, racial differences in scores on intelligence tests were used to support efforts to restrict immigration from certain regions of the world. But the civil rights movement of the 1960s marked a growing emphasis on ensuring equal opportunity, which called into question these earlier notions of racial differences in intelligence. When Herrnstein and Murray published The Bell Curve in 1994, their hypothesis that race differences in test scores could be traced to genetic factors was reminiscent of what many hoped was a bygone era. At the same time that The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) was raising a firestorm of controversy, two scientists at Stanford University were carrying out research that would yield empirical support for a very different explanation of the race gap in intellectual performance. Those two researchers, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, published their work in 1995 showing that performance differences between groups are more about culture than genetics. Their ground-breaking theory claimed that the mere knowledge that one might be targeted by negative stereotypes (negative beliefs and expectations about one’s group) can create a psychological burden that prevents ethnic minority students from performing up to their potential on tests of intellectual ability. They called this phenomenon stereotype threat. Steele and Aronson further argued that it is the situation itself that brings these stereotypes to mind. By extension, if the situation can be altered to remove anything that could cue racial stereotypes, the racial gap on achievement tests should be reduced. Steele and Aronson (1995) tested this hypothesis with a now-classic set of experiments. When a series of verbal problems was described as a diagnostic test of intelligence, African American college students underperformed relative to their European American counterparts, consistent with the often-observed gap in performance on achievement tests. But when the other half of the sample completed the same problems described only as a laboratory exercise, African American students performed as well as their White peers after controlling for prior test scores (Steele & Aronson, 1995). In another study, simply having Black students indicate their race on a demographic sheet before beginning a test was enough to produce lower scores than when race was not salient (see Figure 17.1). Although these initial studies offered no conclusive evidence of the psychological processes underlying this performance