Defense against prejudice / Ed Jung

Even implicit prejudices against a person's sex, race, or religion can harm our success in school, work, or sports. Researchers have found new ways to correct and prevent such effects

Neil deGrasse Tyson, known for his practice in the field of science communication, received his doctorate in astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991. At the time, there were about 4,000 astrophysicists living in the United States, and Tyson raised the total number of African-American astrophysicists to only seven. In his speech at the graduation ceremony, he spoke openly about the challenges he faced:

"According to society's perception ... my academic failures are expected, while my academic successes are attributed to others," Tyson said. "Most of my life I have fought against these views, and this exacts an emotional price equivalent to intellectual castration. This is a price I do not wish even on my enemies."

Tyson's words touch on a broader truth: prejudice and negative stereotypes create an intellectual burden on minorities and others who believe that people around them see them as inferior in some way. In many situations - at school, in the workplace or on the sports field - these people are anxious lest they fail in a way that reinforces the negative stereotype. For example, young white athletes worry that they will not excel as well as their black counterparts, and women in advanced math courses worry that they will receive lower grades than the men. These anxieties, which Tyson called "emotional cost", are stereotyped threat machines. Hundreds of studies have confirmed that stereotype threat impairs functioning and creates exactly the failure we fear. Sometimes people get caught in a vicious cycle where dysfunction leads to additional concerns, which further impair functioning.

In recent years, psychologists have better understood how stereotype threat affects, what causes it, and most importantly, how to prevent it. However, even though the threat is real, some researchers wonder how well the laboratory studies reflect the real world. They also argue that stereotype threat is only one of many factors that contribute to social and academic inequality. But this ingredient can be easily changed. In studies conducted in real schools, relatively simple intervention actions, such as writing exercises to improve self-esteem that last less than an hour, resulted in dramatic and long-term improvement. They narrowed the achievement gaps and removed the stereotypical threat from the classroom and from the students' minds. Some educators are looking for ways to expand these interventions to a national scale in the United States.

identify the threat

In 1995, two psychologists, Claude Steele from Stanford University and Joshua Aronson, who was also at Stanford at the time, coined the term "stereotype threat". Then yes today, black students across the US receive on average lower grades than their peers, and their chances of dropping out early in all stages of the education system are higher. Among the explanations offered for this disparity was the sinister proposition that black students are innately less intelligent. Steele and Aronson were not convinced and justified the gap by saying that the very existence of the negative stereotype may harm the students' success.

In the classic experiment, they gave more than 100 college students a frustrating test. When students were told that the test did not measure their ability, black and white students with similar psychometric test scores did similarly. But when Steele and Aronson told the students that the test tested their intellectual ability, the black students' scores dropped, but not their white peers'. The same effect was also obtained when the students were asked to indicate their skin color before the exam.

It was groundbreaking research. Steele and Aronson have shown that standardized tests are far from truly standardized. When presented in a way that evokes stereotype threat, even implicitly, some students find themselves at a disadvantage. "At first there was a lot of skepticism, but it is diminishing over time," says Aronson. "At first even I couldn't believe how strong the effect was. I thought, 'Someone else has to repeat the experiment.'"

And many researchers did reproduce the results. To date, hundreds of studies have produced evidence of stereotype threat in every possible group. It hurts students of low economic status in academic tests and men in tasks that require social sensitivity. White students suffer stereotype threat when they face Asian peers on math tests or black peers in sports. In many of these studies it has been found that the better students are expected to suffer greater harm. Those for whom success is most important are those who are more bothered by a negative stereotype and therefore their functioning is more impaired. Stereotype threat is a painfully ironic phenomenon.

It is still not clear how widespread stereotype threat is in real life, mainly because most studies raise the same problems that are common in most areas of social psychology. Most looked at small groups of college students, a characteristic that increases the chance of statistical error, and not all showed a strong effect. Some critics also argue that laboratory experiments are often a poor substitute for the real world. Paul Sackett of the University of Minnesota argued that outside the laboratory, stereotype threat may be less common and more easily overcome. In 2012, Hysbert Stott, then at the University of Leeds in England, and David S. Geary of the University of Missouri-Columbia reviewed every study that had ever examined stereotype threat among female math test takers, a phenomenon that Steele and his colleagues first identified in 1999. Of the 20 studies that replicated the 1999 experiment, only 11 concluded that the women's performance was less than the men's. Geary does not claim that the existence of stereotype threat should be ruled out, but its effect may not be as strong as claimed.

Ann Marie Ryan of the University of Michigan identified several possible reasons for the lack of consistency of the conclusions. In 2008, she and Hannah-Han Gwen, then at the University of California, Long Beach, compared the results of 76 different studies on stereotype threat among high school and undergraduate students. They discovered that in the laboratory scientists succeed in detecting a threat only under certain conditions, for example when they give volunteers a particularly difficult test or when they work with people who identify to a large extent with their social affiliation group.

In the last decade, physiologists stopped trying to show that stereotype threat exists and began to investigate its mechanism of action. Researchers have shown that the threat works in the same way in different groups of people: anxiety arises, motivation decreases and expectations are lowered. In view of these findings, Toni Schmeder from the University of British Columbia hypothesized that the threat affects something fundamental. The immediate culprit was working memory, that collection of cognitive skills that allows us to temporarily store and process information in our minds. This skill set is a limited resource, and stereotype threat can consume it. People may tire themselves out psychologically by worrying about other people's prejudices and trying to think of ways to prove them wrong. To test this idea, Schmeder gave 75 volunteers a difficult test that tests working memory, in which they were required to memorize a list of words while solving mathematical equations. She told some of the volunteers that the test tests their memory skills and that there may be innate differences between the abilities of men and women. Indeed, as expected, the women who were told about this supposed difference were able to remember fewer words, while their male counterparts had no problem.

Damage to working memory creates a variety of obstacles to success. People tend to overthink actions that are supposed to be automatic and become more sensitive to signals that may indicate discrimination. An ambiguous expression may be interpreted as a show of contempt, and even the feeling of anxiety becomes a signal of impending failure. Thoughts wander, and self-control weakens. In the middle of the math test, when Schmeder stopped the women and asked them what they were thinking, it became clear that those who were subject to stereotype threat daydreamed to a greater extent.

Eliminating the stereotypes

Recently, researchers have moved the study of the stereotypical threat from the laboratory to the schools and lecture halls, where they try to eliminate or prevent the threat altogether. "I see three waves of research," says Shmeder. "The first was the identification of the phenomenon and its scope. The second checked who experienced the effect and what was its mechanism of action. The third wave is now trying to translate the findings into a practical intervention."

Jeffrey Cohen, also from Stanford, achieved particularly impressive results. His method is surprisingly simple: he asks people to think about things that are important to them, whether popularity or musical ability, and then write why they are important. The exercise lasts 15 minutes and acts like a mental vaccine that increases the self-confidence of the students and helps them deal with any future stereotypical threat.

In 2003, Cohen visited middle schools in California schools to conduct a randomized controlled trial of his method. Such a study, which is the touchstone in medicine, tests the effectiveness of an external intervention by comparing it to a dummy treatment (placebo). Cohen tried the exercise among XNUMXth grade students: half of them wrote about values ​​that were important to them, and the rest about things that were unimportant to them. The experiment was conducted double-blind, meaning that neither Cohen nor the students knew who was in which group.

Black students who completed the exercise closed the academic gap of 40% between them and their white colleagues by the end of the year. And even better, the students who were at the bottom gained the most. In the two years that have passed since then, these students have received two or three reinforced versions of the original exercise. Only 5% of the weakest students who wrote about values ​​that were important to them ended up in reinforcement groups or remained in the class, compared to 18% in the control group. In the end, the weighted grade point average (GPA) of black students rose by a quarter of a point, and by 0.4 points among the weakest students.

Fractions of a point more or less may not sound like a remarkable improvement, but even small changes in self-confidence, whether positive or negative, have a cumulative effect. Children who struggle to begin with may quickly lose their self-confidence and the teachers' attention. Conversely, signs of moderate progress may encourage much greater success. Early intervention, Cohen claims, allows educators to turn negative vicious circles into positive ones.

Cohen's task is so simple that Ryan and others are not entirely convinced by the results of his research. "We had a hard time believing it, but since then we have repeated the results," says Cohen. For the past five years, he has used an exercise he developed to change the fate of black students at three different middle schools and to almost completely close the gender gap in a college physics course. But skeptics still hope other researchers will replicate the results.

Meanwhile, Cohen is looking for new ways to help students. He teamed up with Greg Walton, also of Stanford, to counter the kind of isolation that stereotype threat often causes. Many minorities fear that their classmates will not really accept them. Walton combats these concerns with statistical surveys and quotes from older students that show that such feelings are shared by everyone regardless of race and that they pass over the years. "It causes them to reframe their experiences through the lens of that message and not through the lens of race," explains Walton.

Walton and Cohen tested the hour-long exercise they developed among students in the first spring semester of their studies. Three years later, when the students completed their degrees, the achievement gap between blacks and whites was halved. The black students were even happier and healthier than their peers who did not participate in Walton's exercise, and during the three years visited the clinic less. Walton admits that such a simple exercise may seem trivial to the onlooker. But, he says, for students "who are particularly troubled by the worry of fitting in, knowing that these concerns are shared by others and that they are temporary is actually powerful knowledge."

Walton and Cohen are developing their simple intervention to be applicable not only to individual schools but also to entire countries. The duo, along with Carol Dweck and Dave Fonseco, also from Stanford, created the Project for Large-Scale Education Research (PERTS), which allows them to quickly deliver the exercises online. They can also combine the programs or compare them to each other to see who has the biggest impact.

Even if the programs work as planned, scientists who study stereotype threat admit that eliminating the threat is not a panacea for inequality. Cohen, for example, tested his initial writing exercise only in mixed-ethnicity schools, and he is not sure that the exercise would be successful in schools with predominantly minority students. "There are many reasons for achievement gaps: inequity in resources, bad schools, less skilled teachers," adds Walton. "There doesn't seem to be much hope of solving these structural obstacles. What's exciting about the stereotype threat is that we can move forward despite the obstacles."

Recent studies on the phenomenon offer a practical hope of solving some particularly stubborn social problems and overturning accepted views on them. In thwarting the stereotype threat, researchers have shown that the stereotypes themselves are baseless. The achievement gaps between black and white students or between male and female scientists do not reflect differences in ability, but changeable prejudices. "What seemed unsolvable 15 years ago is actually solvable," says Aronson, "and this is a very positive message."

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in brief

Stereotype threat, the fear of failing in a way that reinforces negative stereotypes about our social group, undermines success in school, sports, and the workplace.

Recently, researchers have developed a more sophisticated understanding of how such anxieties arise, how to combat them, and how to prevent them in the first place.

Relatively simple and short exercises to strengthen confidence reduce academic achievement gaps. Educators are now adapting these methods to the entire US.

About the author

Ed Yong (Yong) is a science reporter living in England. He writes for Nature, Wired, National Geographic, New Scientist and other magazines.

And more on the subject

Recursive Processes in Self-Affirmation: Intervening to Close the Minority Achievement Gap. Geoffrey L. Cohen et al. in Science, Vol. 324, pages 400-403; April 17, 2009.

A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students. Gregory M. Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen in Science, Vol. 331, pages 1447-1451; March 18, 2011.

The article was published in the Scientific American Israel section