A Replication Attempt of Stereotype Susceptibility ()

Abstract

Awareness of stereotypes about a person’s in-group can affect a person’s behavior and performance when they complete a stereotype-relevant task, a phenomenon called stereotype susceptibility. Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady (1999) primed Asian American women with either their Asian identity (stereotyped with high math ability) or female identity (stereotyped with low math ability) or no priming before administering a math test. Of the three groups, Asian-primed participants performed best on the math test, female-primed participants performed worst. The article is a citation classic, but the original studies and conceptual replications have low sample sizes and wide confidence intervals. We conducted a replication of Shih et al. (1999) with a large sample and found a significant effect with the same pattern of means after removing participants that did not know the race or gender stereotypes, but not when those participants were retained. Math identification did not moderate the observed effects.

Open Education Science

“…In some instances, large-scale replications and meta-analyses have complicated research lines by failing to confirm original findings in scope or direction or casting doubt on the causal effect (if any) of derived interventions. Examples include ego-depletion (Hagger et al, 2016), implicit bias (Forscher et al, 2017), stereotype threat (Gibson, Losee, & Vitiello, 2014), self-affirmation (Hanselman, Rozek, Grigg, & Borman, 2017), and growth mindset (Li & Bates, 2017). Calls for a stronger focus on the replicability of education research are not new.…”

A Social Identity Model for Education

“…Moreover, a different comparison group can produce boost or threat. For example, Asian American women performed better on a math test when their Asian identity was made salient, but worse when their gender identity was made salient (in comparison to when no identity was made salient; Gibson, Losee, & Vitiello, 2014;Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999). Finally, we must be careful not to attribute all such context effects to threat.…”

The Seesaw Self: Possessions, Identity (De)activation, and Task Performance

“…For example, when Chinese Americans had their Chinese identity activated by seeing the face of another Chinese (vs. Caucasian) person, they suppressed their American identity, as indicated by their impaired fluency in English (Zhang et al 2013). Similarly, Asian American women performed better on a mathematics test when their Asian identity was activated than when their gender identity was activated (Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady 1999; see also Gibson, Losee, and Vitiello 2014;Moon and Roeder 2014).…”