A group of college students streams into the classroom, chatting and wondering what’s coming up in this experiment. The researcher who recruited them stands in front of the classroom welcomes them and starts passing out an exam. “Thanks for coming! This exam tests your mathematical abilities: we’re looking for gender differences in math performance. We know that this test has shown differences in performance between men and women in the past and we’re trying to see how this hypothesis holds up over time.” The women do a lot worse.

A group of college students streams into the classroom, chatting and wondering what’s coming up in this experiment. The researcher who recruited them stands in front of the classroom welcomes them and starts passing out an exam. “Thanks for coming! This exam tests your mathematical abilities. This test is a fair test: men and women perform equally well on this test.” And then it’s true.

Same people.

?

I’m not making this up: that’s the rough outline of a psychology experiment performed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The effect’s been replicated in a lot of situations; just recording your gender at the beginning of a math exam or your race at the beginning of an intelligence test leads to difference in scores that don’t show up when stereotypes aren’t activated, or students believe they are taking an exam that doesn’t show these group differences.

Same brain, same body, same knowledge, same pen: can you believe that just being reminded of stereotypes can change your performance this way? It’s like you have a secret saboteur in your own brain 🙁

Fortunately, your brain is powerful, and when you’re conscious of these effects you can take steps to counteract this sabotage. Join the email list to download a free worksheet with five proven techniques for fighting stereotype threat.

 


1 Comment

Test-taking tip: get back into your body – Am I ready for college math? · February 15, 2017 at 4:46 am

[…] out our previous posts on stereotype threat and test-taking for more ideas — or suggest your […]

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