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

These results raise the tentative hope that stereotype-disconfirming role models may be especially effective in reducing some of the detrimental effects of stereotype threat. This would add another strategy to the growing number of strategies (cf. C. M. Steele, 1997; C. M. Steele et al., 1999) that may be effective in reducing the negative effects of stereotype threat in situations that otherwise still pose the possibility of stereotype-based devaluation.

Conclusion

Gordon Allport was a comprehensive and thorough thinker. In addition to his formidable talents for defining things and being always articulate, he just didn't miss much. There is no doubt that his work covered the landscape of stereotype threat phenomena. But we tend to look back at our great forebear through the lens of our current concerns. The "current concerns" of social psychology, for some time now, have not been as situationally oriented as perhaps they were when Allport (1954) wrote The Nature of Prejudice. At any rate, it is our view that the field has not yet adequately mined these aspects of Allport's work, especially in understanding the experience of the targets of prejudice and negative stereotyping.

Allport understood fully that what goes on inside a person's head, in cognition and personality, reflects the person's lifelong and ongoing transactions with his or her environments. And more to the point of this article, he understood fully that the ongoing and situational press of prejudice and negative stereotypes could be a powerful part of that environment. We hope that the work on stereotype threat that we have reported helps to underscore this part of Allport's legacy. He first moved us by attending to the psychology of the targets of prejudice. He laid the foundation for bringing this problem into transaction within the modern empirical science of social psychology. But he also moved us by showing that he had great insight into the nature of this experience, and that whatever its consequences for internal psychological life, the experience was always rooted in ongoing transactions within the context of one's life.

DAVID M. MARX is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at Harvard University. He earned his BA in psychology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994 and his MA in social psychology from Harvard University in 1998. His primary research interests are in intergroup relations, with a special emphasis on examining why minority group members often underperform in academic domains. His most recent journal article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, co-authored with Karen M. Ruggiero, examines why high-status group members are more likely than low-status group members to blame their failure on discrimination.

JOSEPH L. BROWN completed his PhD in social psychology at Stanford University in 1999. He has since joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. He received his BS in physics at Southwest Texas State University in 1984 and his ScM in biomedical engineering at Brown University in 1990. He conducts research on the influence of negative stereotypes on the intellectual identity and performance of minorities and women, the sociocultural nature of intellectual performance, and the effects of stereotyping on decision making.