The stereotype content model (SCM) proposes potentially universal principles of societal stereotypes and their relation to social structure. Here, the SCM reveals theoretically grounded, cross-cultural, cross-groups similarities and one difference across 10 non-US nations. Seven European (individualist) and three East Asian (collectivist) nations (N = 1, 028) support three hypothesized cross-cultural similarities: (a) perceived warmth and competence reliably differentiate societal group stereotypes; (b) many out-groups receive ambivalent stereotypes (high on one dimension; low on the other); and (c) high status groups stereotypically are competent, whereas competitive groups stereotypically lack warmth. Data uncover one consequential cross-cultural difference: (d) the more collectivist cultures do not locate reference groups (in-groups and societal prototype groups) in the most positive cluster (high-competence/high-warmth), unlike individualist cultures. This demonstrates out-group derogation without obvious reference-group favouritism. The SCM can serve as a pancultural tool for predicting group stereotypes from structural relations with other groups in society, and comparing across societies.
Students from poorer families perform worse on intellectual tasks than do other students. The authors tested the stereotype threat hypothesis as a possible explanation for this difference. Students from relatively poor backgrounds, such as members of other stereotyped groups, risk confirming a negative reputation of low intellectual ability. The authors predicted that, on a stereotype-relevant test, members of this group would experience apprehension about confirming their negative reputation and that this susceptibility to the stereotype would impair their performance. The study varied stereotype threat by manipulating the instructions accompanying the test that each participant completed. When described as a measure of intellectual ability, low socioeconomic status (SES) participants performed worse than high SES participants. However, when the test was presented as nondiagnostic of intellectual ability, low SES participants' performances did not suffer, contesting claims of SES differences in intellectual ability.
Research on stereotype threat has repeatedly demonstrated that the intellectual performance of social groups is particularly sensitive to the situational context in which tests are usually administered. In the present experiment, an adaptation of the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices Test was introduced as a measure of cognitive ability. Results showed that individuals targeted by a reputation of intellectual inferiority scored lower on the test than did other people. However, when the identical test was not presented as a measure of cognitive ability, the achievement gap between the target and the control group disappeared. Using heart rate variability indices to assess mental workload, our findings showed that the situational salience of a reputation of lower ability undermined intellectual performance by triggering a disruptive mental load. Our results indicate that group differences in cognitive ability scores can reflect different situational burdens and not necessarily actual differences in cognitive ability.
This research extended stereotype-threat effects outside of the academic domain and to a nonstigmatized group. Female and male students performed three decision tasks: lexical, valence, and affective processing. Half of the participants were told that, in general, men are poorer performers than are women in affective processing tasks. No differences between conditions were observed for the lexical and valence tasks. By contrast, for the affective task, threatened men made significantly more errors than did participants in the other three conditions. More precisely, threatened men tended to accept as affective words that were not affective. This latter result suggests that threatened men decreased their threshold for affectivity “to prove” the inapplicability of the stereotype to themselves. Moreover, stereotype endorsement did not mediate the results. Identification with the affective domain, on the other hand, moderated the effect of stereotype threat. Discussion considers the consequences of these findings for everyday interactions.
Working memory capacity, our ability to manage incoming information for processing purposes, predicts achievement on a wide range of intellectual abilities. Three randomized experiments (N = 310) tested the effectiveness of a brief psychological intervention designed to boost working memory efficiency (i.e., state working memory capacity) by alleviating concerns about incompetence subtly generated by demanding tasks. Sixth graders either received or did not receive a prior 10-min intervention designed to reframe metacognitive interpretation of difficulty as indicative of learning rather than of self-limitation. The intervention improved children's working memory span and reading comprehension and also reduced the accessibility of self-related thoughts of incompetence. These findings demonstrate that constructing a psychologically safe environment through reframing metacognitive interpretation of subjective difficulty can allow children to express their full cognitive potential.
Three studies conducted among fifth and sixth graders examined how school contexts disrupt the achievement of working-class students by staging unfair comparison with their advantaged middle-class peers. In regular classrooms, differences in performance among students are usually showcased in a way that does not acknowledge the advantage (i.e., higher cultural capital) experienced by middle-class students, whose upbringing affords them more familiarity with the academic culture than their working-class peers have. Results of Study 1 revealed that rendering differences in performance visible in the classroom by having students raise their hands was enough to undermine the achievement of working-class students. In Studies 2 and 3, we manipulated students' familiarity with an arbitrary standard as a proxy for social class. Our results suggest that classroom settings that make differences in performance visible undermine the achievement of the students who are less familiar with academic culture. In Study 3, we showed that being aware of the advantage in familiarity with a task restores the performance of the students who have less familiarity with the task.
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