The Pros And Cons Of Social Stereotypes

Throughout history stereotyping has been used to generalize a race class. Although when a race is being stereotyped it can be done in a positive way, in many cases it has also been done in order to keep a minority group inferior. In the article, “Thin Ice” by Claude M. Steele, Steele shows how African Americans who are stereotyped or have the mental image of being stereotyped negatively can affect their success in their academic success. In the other hand, in Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s “The Asian American Achievement Paradox” demonstrates when a stereotype is positive it can feed one’s ego and deliver better outcomes in a people’s academic achievements. Even though a large population of people can be stereotyped in a certain way through false concepts, it can affect the mindset of a single individual.

Knowledge of negative stereotypes can influence people’s performance. Stereotype threat creates extra performance pressure through apprehensiveness about conforming to negative stereotypes (Woolfolk &

Stereotypes are socially constructed, over-generalized views regarding a particular group of persons with certain characteristics that are widely accepted, and usually expected, in a society. The dominant group of a certain society, which in this case is probably Caucasians and men, usually creates these social constructions. Claude M. Steele, a researcher from Stanford University, performed multiple research studies on the idea and psychological effects of stereotypes on its victims. In his studies, he coins the term “stereotype threat” as the “social-psychological predicament that can arise from widely-known negative stereotypes about one's group,” which implies that “the existence of such a stereotype means that anything one does or any of one's features that conform to it make the stereotype more plausible as a self-characterization in the eyes of others, and perhaps even in one's own eyes” (Steele 797).

Author Shankar Vedantam in his science article “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance” implies that if a person is subjected to stereotypes it can affect your performance. The author develops this idea by first introducing his theme with a question, then he tells of experiments others have made to support this idea, and finally he wraps it up by telling us that companies and schools are victim to stereotypes and needs to stop. The author’s purpose is to explain to us how stereotypes can affect our lives in order to call out to people so we can lower the rates of stereotyping. The author establishes a educated tone for people who are interested in research and global

Cultural influence affects not only the formation of a stereotype, but also its acceptance. According to the tripartite model of attitudes, a stereotype is the cognitive component of prejudiced attitudes. Many contemporary theorists suggest prejudice is an inevitable consequence of the stereotyping process (Devine, 1989). This makes learning attitudes and stereotypes of social groups inevitable. There is strong evidence that stereotypes are established in children’s memories before they have the ability to use cognitive processing to accept or reject the stereotypes. In this developmental process, the stereotype is easier to access for the child than personal beliefs; therefore, the culture an individual lives in makes it impossible not to apply stereotypes in daily life (Devine, 1989).

To stress the prevalence of the effects of stereotypes, Steele repeated his first experiment with white men and Asian men as the subjects. As the dominant group, white people are often unaffected by the stereotype, but in this particular experiment they underperformed greatly. Stereotypes even exist within racial groups. In one experiment, Steele had older people and younger people try to memorize 30 words for two minutes. Afterwards, they would try to write down as many words as they can. The group of older people who read an article confirming that age impairs memory wrote down significantly fewer words than the group of older people that did not receive the treatment. This is also an example of ageism (Henslin, 2017). A common motif in Steele’s experiments is a reminder of the stereotype, referred to as a cue. The experiments demonstrate that the smallest hint of a stereotype is enough of a cue to cause underperformance. In an experiment with girls and boys ages five to seven, the only difference between the treatment and control group was coloring a picture of a doll.

Stereotype threat inclusion/omission: whether including or omitting information that could potentially indicate gender bias would affect performance.

Many theories have been suggested to try to explain the low performance of Hispanic and African American students compared to their white peers. Stereotype threat theory proposes that the possibility of being judged in terms of a negative stereotype in a particular domain negatively affects one’s performance. African American students are even more vulnerable to this social-psychological threat that occurs when students anticipate the possibility of fulfilling a negative stereotype. Some of the effects of stereotype threat include anxiety, low academic standards and low test scores. (Steele,

An example of this is when a psychological study asked the participants to play mini golf and the test would measure natural athletic ability. The test group was all white. The study found that the white people who thought it was testing natural athletic ability did worse than the ones who didn’t. After hearing the game was going to determine, the players performance was impaired by the awareness of the stereotype that white people aren’t naturally athletic.

Results from numerous studies suggest that African Americans are likely to experience stereotype threat related to performance in Caucasian dominated tasks. Steele & Aronson (1995) conducted a study that examined the effects of stereotype threat of African Americans on standardized tests. The participants included African American and Caucasian Stanford University students who completed a modified version of the verbal GRE examination (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Participants were randomized into two testing groups, the diagnostic condition, which tested intellectual ability and exposure to stereotype threat, and the non-diagnostic condition, which involved laboratory problem solving tasks unrelated to stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

perpetuate in different social groups. Stereotype threat, as defined by Steele, is “being at risk of

Devine (1989) argues that stereotypes are inevitable on the basis that stereotypes and prejudice coexist and that stereotyping occurs automatically. Devine attempts to prove this hypothesis in three experiments. Devine reasons that “as long as stereotypes exist, prejudice will follow.” This hypothesis is rooted in a correlation. Prejudice and stereotypes are related, however there is no clear evidence of causality; Knowledge of a stereotype does not mean an individual agrees with it.

When social psychologist Claude Steele began writing about the problem of stereotype threats in the 1990s, many other researchers began to do the same thing. Steele offered that when members of certain groups can be stereotyped in a negative way, they will be seen “through the lens of diminishing stereotypes and low expectations” (1999, p.44). According to Kassin, Fein, and Markus, stereotype threat is defined as “The experience of concern about being evaluated based on negative stereotypes about one’s group.” Steele concluded that stereotype threat can be achieved in two ways: reactions to “threat in the

There have been many studies on stereotype threat and self-esteem and their negative effects on task performance. These studies have focused primarily on minorities such as women, blacks, Latinos and Asians and have found that stereotype threat and self-esteem have influenced negatively in task performance. Steele (1997) investigated how self-esteem and stereotype threat affects task performance and has found that most of task failures have to do with the individual social environment. For instance, a study was conducted in which black students completed a difficult task with either a black or white experimenter. The task was described as intelligent test (Steele & Aronson, 1995). When the experimenter was white, the student performed more

The first effect of stereotyping is a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat” that occurs in a situation where a person is in fear of unintentionally confirming a negative stereotype. Several studies have been conducted to discover the effects of stereotype threats. For example, I discovered that Toni Schmader, an assistant professor of the UA psychology department, and Michael Johns, a UA graduate (ethos), conducted studies that showed, “college women score lower on tests of mathematical ability, and Hispanic students might score lower on tests of intelligence, not because they have less ability, but because reminders of negative stereotypes temporarily decrease their ‘working memory capacity’ (UA News Services, “Exploring the Negative Consequences of Stereotyping”, UANews.Arizona.edu).” This demonstrates that the students did not do worse on the test due to their lack of skills, but rather due to negative stereotypes. In a similar study by professors Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, African American and White college students took the same intelligence test under two conditions. In the stereotype threat condition the students were told the test would evaluate their intelligence, and in the