In these studies, Black and White undergraduates were
asked to complete a task involving golf skills, but the
description of the task was varied to create a condition
of stereotype threat for each group in one condition.
In Experiment 1, participants were led to believe either
that the task required natural sports ability or
required athletic intelligence. Based on
culturally-shared stereotypes, these descriptions should
introduce stereotype threat for White and Black
participants, respectively. In fact, Blacks did
perform better on the task when it was described as
reflecting natural sports ability than when it was based
on athletic intelligence, and Whites showed the opposite
pattern. Experiment 2 focused on White
participants who completed the task under high ("natural
athletic ability") or low ("sports psychology")
stereotype threat descriptions. Again, Whites
students performed more poorly when the task was
believed to reflect natural ability, but this did not
occur for students who indicated that athletic
performance was unrelated to their self-worth. In
addition, task description did not affect students if
their attention had been drawn to assessing the quality
of the lab in which the test was performed, indicating
that distraction might undermine stereotype threat. These studies show that stereotype threat is a general
phenomenon that can affect performance when a stereotype
of poor performance implicates a valued social identity.
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