Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, delivered a lecture at Hamilton on March 28 titled, "Out of the Laboratory and Into the University: Stereotype Threat and Powerful Influences on Student Achievement." Purdie-Vaughns spoke about the phenomenon of stereotype threat, in which students who face negative stereotypes about their academic abilities will perform more poorly. She discussed the research being done on the topic, and how what has been learned can be applied to efforts to alleviate achievement gaps. The lecture was sponsored by the Diversity and Social Justice Project and the Dean of the Faculty.
Purdie-Vaughns began by discussing the various achievement gaps that educational institutions around the world are concerned about. She shared data that shows black college applicants tending to have lower SAT scores than white applicants, a pattern that continues with other tests such as the LSAT. Academic achievement gaps also often affect women, particularly in the sciences. Purdie-Vaughns said that one study showed female geoscience professors to be far less proficient in producing quality published research than their male counterparts. Another study has shown that female undergraduates in the sciences tend to do more poorly than men who had their same SAT score going into college.
When people look at these achievement gaps, their analyses tend to fall into two categories, Purdie-Vaughns said. An "internal" approach would look into differences in individual characteristics and attributes, such as IQ or preparedness for the task. She said that social psychologists such as herself, however, take a more contextual approach. They examine how the social environment can affect an individual's performance regardless of their IQ or knowledge. One major aspect of this social environment is the presence of negative stereotypes about various identity groups' ability to perform certain tasks – for example, the stereotype that women are not good at math and science, or that African Americans are not good students in general. When people feel that their achievement is being viewed through these negative stereotypes, they have extra pressure, stress, and fear, all of which lead them to perform worse. This is the effect of what psychologists call "stereotype threat." Purdie-Vaughns stressed that these threats can apply to all kinds of groups, not just traditionally marginalized groups in society. She gave the example of a visibly pregnant woman working at a law firm, who may fear that she will be considered "soft" and not be taken seriously by coworkers or clients.
Many studies have attempted to bring this phenomenon into the lab and standardize it in order to understand how it works. Purdie-Vaughns gave several examples of experiments that have established the effects of stereotype threat. In one study, women and men were both given a difficult portion of the GRE Math Subject Test. Half of the participants were given no unusual instructions as a part of the procedure, while the other half were told that though men often do better on math tests than women, this particular test had been shown to result in equal scores for men and women. This experimental condition thereby removed or deactivated the negative stereotype threat towards women in regards to their mathematical ability. The results of the experiment showed that removing the stereotype threat not only made women perform better, but made men perform more poorly, indicating that the group on the other end of a negative stereotype actually benefits from that threat.
Purdie-Vaughns went on to show that this phenomenon has been seen in other experiments using stereotypes dealing with different racial groups, age groups, and student-athletes. In regards to athletes, she said that one study found that by "priming" people to focus on their identity as an athlete, rather than as a student, immediately before a test made them perform more poorly on it.
Stereotype threat can often affect a person at an unconscious level, where they feel uncomfortable or nervous in a situation, but do not realize that it is because they are aware of a negative stereotype relating to their performance. For example, women placed in a room with other women to take a test will often do better than women placed in a room with men, though they are probably not conscious of this difference. Stereotype threat creates an unconscious stress response, activating the "threat center" in the brain and triggering a galvanic skin response.
Purdie-Vaughns concluded her talk by answering audience questions and discussing what implications stereotype threat has on efforts to reduce the achievement gap. Simply making the population of students or faculty more representative of different groups cannot completely alleviate the problem as long as negative stereotypes about certain groups still exist, she said. The philosophies and policies of an educational institution, however, can have an effect on the extent to which students are reminded of negative stereotypes or made to feel stress about them, and therefore may be able to decrease achievement gaps. If professors and other educational officials were to talk about intelligence less as an intrinsic and fixed attribute and more as a learned and malleable skill, this could decrease the sense of threat to students from minority groups. Also, Purdie-Vaughns said, simply exposing students to the concept of stereotype threat can help them recognize and combat its potential effects on their own performance.
-- by Caroline Russell O'Shea '07
