Stereotype threat effects occur when members of a stigmatized group perform poorly on a task because they fear confirming a negative stereotype that is associated with their ingroup. The present study investigates whether the observed achievement gap in standardized testing between high-and low-socioeconomic status (SES) American students can be due, in part, to this phenomenon. Participants were placed in one of four conditions that varied in level of ''threat'' related to socioeconomic status. Results show that when socioeconomic identity is made salient before taking a test, or when the test is presented as diagnostic of intelligence, low-SES students perform significantly worse, and report much lower selfconfidence, than low-SES participants in the non-threatening conditions. When threatening conditions converge, performance of low-SES students is at its worst level. These results help us better understand the role stereotyping plays in the academic performance of low-SES students, and may partly explain the disparity on standardized test scores between low-and high-SES students.

Ideological beliefs have long attracted the attention of social psychologists, who have investigated their genesis as well as their influence on a host of social phenomena. Conservatism, from the Motivated Social Cognition framework, stems from epistemic and existential needs of the individual, and notably the fear of death. However, Terror Management Theory proposes a view of conservatism and its contrary, liberalism, as equivalent cultural worldviews, equally fit to fulfill such needs. In the present contribution, results are presented from five studies, which test the contrasting hypotheses derived from these two perspectives. A new perspective is considered that accounts for these and previous findings.

Three studies examined whether animality is a component of low-SES stereotypes. In Study 1a–c, the content of “white trash” (USA), “chav” (UK), and “bogan” (Australia) stereotypes was found to be highly consistent, and in every culture it correlated positively with the stereotype content of apes. In Studies 2a and 2b, a within-subjects approach replicated this effect and revealed that it did not rely on derogatory labels or was reducible to ingroup favoritism or system justification concerns. In Study 3, the “bogan” stereotype was associated with ape, rat, and dog stereotypes independently of established stereotype content dimensions (warmth, competence, and morality). By implication, stereotypes of low-SES people picture them as primitive, bestial, and incompletely human.

Since the mid-1980s, when juvenile arrests for violent crime increased dramatically, interest has focused on juvenile offenders who commit violent acts. Legislatures across the United States have enacted a variety of measures to "get tough" with juveniles in response to escalating crime rates and the perceptions that longer sentences were needed. This manuscript provides follow-up data on 59 juveniles who were committed to the adult Department of Corrections in Florida during the period January 1982 through January 1984 for one or more counts of murder, attempted murder, or, in a few cases, manslaughter. Although many of these adolescents received lengthy prison sentences, more than two-thirds had been released from prison prior to November 1999. This article presents data on amount of time served and recidivism over the 15 to 17 year period. Results indicated that 60 percent of sample subjects released from prison were returned to prison, and most of those who failed did so within the first three years of release. Findings from the present study, when examined in the context of previous comparative follow-up studies of delinquent youths, suggest that the dialogue on how to handle violent youths must be continued if juvenile homicide offenders are going to be released to society at some point in the future.