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Two studies examine the consequences of self-affirmation
on women operating under stereotype threat. In
Experiment 1, male and female undergraduates who had a
history of strong math performance completed a
challenging math test. Before doing so, students
were told that the test was being administered to give
the researchers a sense of "people's impressions of the
problems" (control) or that the test measured "math and
reasoning abilities" (stereotype threat for women). An additional condition allowed some women who had
been exposed to stereotype threat to affirm an important
characteristic they possessed by writing about a time
that it had been important to them. Men's math
performance was not affected by the stereotype threat
manipulation, but women's performance was worse in the
stereotype threat compared with the control condition.
However, women who had self-affirmed under stereotype
threat performed as well as women in the control
condition. In Experiment 2, male and female
undergraduates were asked to complete a task involving
spatial rotation after informing them that stereotypes
suggest that women "have more trouble with spatial
rotation tasks." Half the students were given a
self-affirmation task and the others were not.
Performance of men on the task was unaffected by the
self-affirmation manipulation, but women performed more
poorly than men without affirmation but performed
equally well after they were allowed to self-affirm. These findings show that self-affirmation can reduce the
debilitating effects that typically arise from
stereotype threat.
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