In this video I consider that while broad environmental factors like nutrition and education can’t fully account for racial gaps in IQ, more subtle effects on individuals may help to explain some of these differences. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson propsed a theory of stereotype threat which suggests that anxiety relating to confirming negative stereotypes may hinder performance. This isn’t just for race and can include other aspects of identity which may have relevant negative stereotypes associated with them (for gender, orientation, age, etc.). This means that stereotypes could negatively impact performance even when we have valid, reliable, and unbiased tests, unbiased administrators, and subjects who don’t actually believe the negative stereotypes.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In previous videos we’ve considered the role of environmental factors like nutrition and education on average IQ score and one thing that’s worth noting is that gaps in performance on the basis of race in terms of average IQ persist even when we control for socio-economic status. So what I mean by that is, if we look at a community where everyone is high socioeconomic status we still find gaps on the basis of race in terms of average IQ performance. And what this means is that these broad environmental factors like nutrition or education are probably not responsible for the gaps because it’s not the case in these communities that any children are malnourished or that they don’t have access to education.

So this doesn’t fully explain the existence of these gaps. And in the previous video we considered that expectations could be part of the explanation. So it could be the case that teachers have different expectations for different students and that these expectations create self-fulfilling prophecies and they actually cause the expected results in the students’ performance. We saw this with the Rosenthal and Jacobson study, now we could consider that maybe teachers have different expectations for students on the basis of race and that this then influences the performance of those students. So we can imagine that students who are in the same school or even have the same teacher in the same classroom are experiencing slightly different environments because of different teacher expectations. But it could also be the case that the individuals expectations are influencing their performance.

So this brings us to some research by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson. What Steele and Aronson did was they took black and white Stanford students and they gave them GRE questions. So the GRE is the Graduate Record Examination and it’s kind of similar to the SAT. So they gave them test questions from the GRE but half of the students were told that this was an assessment of their innate intelligence and the other half were told that this was just a problem-solving task.

And the question was “would these different descriptions of the same questions cause differences in performance?”. And what Steele and Aronson found was that it did cause a difference in performance and this difference occurred for black students who believed that these questions were assessing their innate intelligence. These students had a tendency to do worse than would be expected.

So the comparisons were made between black and white students on the basis of their prior SAT scores. So what I mean by that is, if you took two students a black student and a white student who had similar SAT scores before, so they had basically the same SAT score in the past, but now you give them these GRE questions, you would expect that they would perform comparably. But if you describe it as an intelligence test suddenly the black student does worse than the white student. If, however, you describe it as a problem-solving task then their performances are comparable.

Now it’s important to note that this is compared to their prior SAT scores and that’s something that’s been left off some popular descriptions of this study and it’s even been left off in some academic publications. And the reason that that’s relevant is that we’re not completely eliminating the gap. So there is a gap in SAT performance between black and white students and this is not to suggest that this is going to completely eliminate that gap but rather that suggesting that you’re doing an intelligence test can actually increase the gap. It causes the black students to do even worse than would be expected.

Ok, so what’s causing these black students to do worse when they think they’re taking an intelligence test? Well what Steele and Aronson proposed was a theory of stereotype threat. They said what happens is the situation is different if you’re a black student or a white student. When you’re given this description of this being an intelligence test because, they said, for a black student this creates anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype. So the idea is that there are negative stereotypes for blacks and intelligence and that being told you’re taking an intelligence test is going to activate that negative stereotype and you’re going to have this additional anxiety of not wanting to confirm this. You don’t want people to think that this stereotype is true. You want to make sure that do well on this intelligence test to show them that the stereotype is not true. But this means you’re experiencing more anxiety than the white student next to you taking the same test.

And the idea of stereotype threat is that this additional anxiety is what actually hinders your performance. So that because you are worried about confirming a negative stereotype and the white student doesn’t have this concern, then you’re actually going to do worse on the test, right? Now this isn’t just for race and intelligence. This could be for any identity contingency. So this refers to any aspect of a situation that might be relevant to some part of your identity.

So Claude Steele has described this in his book “Whistling Vivaldi”. He talks about these possible identity contingencies and he mentions that they’re not just for race. So while we could have some aspect of a situation that might be associated with stereotypes related to your race, you could also have some activation of stereotypes related to gender. So, for instance, females taking a math exam might have the activation of negative stereotypes about females and math performance and this could then hinder their performance compared to males. Or it could be the case that could be something about your sexual orientation in certain situations becomes relevant. So being gay or straight in some situations might activate certain stereotypes and that could have an effect on your behavior.

And it could even be for things like your age. So if you’re an older person you might know there’s negative stereotypes about aging so that maybe these are stereotypes related to, you know, poorer memory or maybe inability to use new technology, right? This might be a stereotype we have about older people and if you’re an older person now surrounded by young people and, you know, you’re working with some, you know, new gadget or something you might have this fear of confirming this negative stereotype. “Oh, they’re gonna, I’m gonna look like the old guy in the room if I screw this up” and that additional anxiety might actually cause you to screw it up.

So an important point about these identity contingencies is that it’s about awareness of the negative stereotypes not belief. We’re not saying that you have to believe these negative stereotypes in order for them to hinder your performance. So you don’t have to believe that females are worse at math in order for that stereotype to influence your performance and you don’t have to believe that certain races are, you know, less intelligent or that your age prevents you from learning new technology or anything like that. You don’t have to believe that but simply being aware of it and recognizing that other people might have that stereotype could be enough to hinder your performance.

So an important point here is that these are subtle cues in the environment. These are not overtly prejudiced things that we’re saying. It’s not somebody saying to you, you know, “hey you’re taking an IQ test and you’re black, you’re gonna do poorly” or something or somebody saying “you’re too old to learn how to use a that technology” or something. It’s not an overt situation like that. It’s a subtle cue. It’s just this suggest that you know the stereotype exists and it’s activated by something in the environment.

At the same time we should remember that these are also subtle effects. So we’re not seeing huge drastic changes in performance and, as I said before with the stereotype threat for race and intelligence, it can’t completely account for the gap. And that’s related to this idea that it was connected to prior SAT scores. So it wasn’t the case that, you know, suddenly the entire gap disappeared. That’s how it’s sometimes described but that’s not really accurate.

So these are subtle effects but they are effects nonetheless and they could be accounting for some of this difference. So what this means is we can have a situation where we have something like an IQ test, we could say this is a perfectly valid IQ test; it’s very reliable and it’s not culturally biased and it’s being administered by people who are not biased either. Or in the case of like teacher expectations it might not be the case that teachers have differing expectations by race but just the idea that there’s a stereotype associated with that means that the testing environment is slightly different for students of one race or another. And if that could be having an effect on their score and that means it would account for some of the gap in performance. Ok, I know this is a little bit complicated but I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!