Stereotype Threat

"Stereotype threat" is a problem that pervades American life, according to Claude Steele, an internationally recognized social psychologist and professor at Stanford University. In an insightful and engaging talk, Steele maintained that overcoming stereotype threat is key to achieving integration of our society that goes beyond statistics and "allows people to flourish in an integrated setting." Steele's basic premise is that a person's "social identity"- defined as group membership in categories such as age, gender, religion, and ethnicity-has significance when "rooted in concrete situations." Steele defines these situations as "identity contingencies"-settings in which a person is treated according to a specific social identity. As we all know when a person's social identity is attached to a negative stereotype, that person will tend to under perform in a manner consistent with the stereotype. This can be attributed a person's anxiety that he or she will conform to the negative stereotype. The anxiety manifests itself in various ways, including distraction and increased body temperature, all of which diminish performance level. Stereotype threat is not limited to historically disadvantaged groups, and that every person suffers stereotype threat in certain contexts. For example, a study testing stereotype threat among white engineering students. When the white students took a test after being told that Asians typically outperformed whites on that test, the whites performed significantly worse than they would have otherwise. While racism exists, stereotype threat is a far more pervasive barrier to a truly integrated society. A person's fear of being negatively stereotyped according to race-whites as racist, blacks as intellectually inferior, for example-creates a general level of discomfort in racially mixed settings. There is still hope because abilities are expandable and that there is no truth to allegations that a particular group lacks a particular capacity. Stereotype threat will continue as the "default setting" until steps are taken to counteract it. At an institutional level, we must promote "identity safety," implicit efforts to establish that diverse social identities add integral value to a setting.