Allport's Legacy and the Situational Press of Stereotypes

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1999 by David M. Marx, Joseph L. Brown, Claude M. Steele

Also, picking up on another of Allport's concerns, we focus this discussion on an important real-world issue, that of the school-related performance of test taking. If negative group stereotypes can have situation-mediated effects on their targets, then, one might ask, do they have detrimental effects on the academic performance of groups who are negatively stereotyped in school-related domains, such as women in math or African Americans across most academic domains? Before addressing this question, however, we turn first to a brief summary of the social psychology that has been most explicitly concerned with the situational effects of negative group stereotypes, especially as they affect school performance: stereotype threat theory.

Stereotype Threat Theory

C. M. Steele (1997) has defined stereotype threat as "the event of a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs becoming self-relevant, usually as a plausible interpretation for something one is doing, for an experience one is having, or for a situation one is in, that has relevance to one's self-definition" (p. 616). Stereotype threat is something that happens to everybody, since we are all members of negatively stereotyped groups. The point of this definition is that whenever we are in a situation or doing something that is important to us, and to which one of those negative stereotypes applies, we can experience stereotype threat: a discomforting or distracting concern about being viewed and treated stereotypically. Consider the example of a man talking to women about pay equity, or of an aging professor trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture. These people are in situations, or doing things, that put them at risk of being seen through the lens of negative group-based s tereotypes. This predicament, we argue, can be upsetting and uncomfortable.

Could stereotype threat of this sort have a role in mediating the academic outcomes of groups of people who are negatively stereotyped in school-related domains? This is the central question of our article, and we reason that this could happen in two ways. First, the immediate situational pressure of possibly being seen stereotypically could directly interfere with performance. Apprehension regarding this possibility may distract a student's attention from a challenging intellectual task, or it may cause a self-consciousness that detracts from effective performance. Whereas other students must contend with the typical worries and concerns associated with high-stakes standardized exams, a Black student, for example, has an additional concern: that a poor performance may inadvertently confirm a racial stereotype of intellectual inferiority. When frustration, difficulty, or failure is experienced, the student risks being judged stereotypically. This may be enough, in the absence of a low expectancy, to depress test performance.

There may be a second consequence. A major assumption of the theory is that students must identify with schooling to be successful at it; that is, their self-regard must depend to some degree on achievement in academics. This kind of "identification" with the academic domain is seen as essential to a person's motivation and persistence in the domain (Brunstein & Gollwitzer, 1996). Now consider a student contending with the fear of stereotype-based judgment about his or her school performance. Over time, the student may tire of the apprehension and mistrust associated with this predicament, and, to escape the threat, may "disidentify" with the domain by severing the link between achievement in it and self-regard. If self-regard is no longer dependent on how one fares in the domain, then, by psychic adjustment, the stereotype is less threatening. In this way, disidentification can protect self-regard from stereotype-related threats, but it also signals a disengagement from the kind of effort needed to succeed in difficult achievement domains (Major & Schmader, 1998; Major, Spencer, Schmader, Wolfe, & Crocker, 1998).