10 Facts About Stereotype threat

Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group.

Since its introduction into the academic literature, stereotype threat has become one of the most widely studied topics in the field of social psychology.

Situational factors that increase stereotype threat can include the difficulty of the task, the belief that the task measures their abilities, and the relevance of the stereotype to the task.

Stereotype threat has been argued to show a reduction in the performance of individuals who belong to negatively stereotyped groups.

Opposite of stereotype threat is stereotype boost, which is when people perform better than they otherwise would have, because of exposure to positive stereotypes about their social group.

Stereotype threat is considered by some researchers to be a contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender achievement gaps, such as under-performance of black students relative to white ones in various academic subjects, and under-representation of women at higher echelons in the field of mathematics.

Many psychological experiments carried out on Stereotype Threat focus on the physiological effects of negative stereotype threat on performance, looking at both high and low status groups.

The researchers found that women experiencing stereotype threat while taking a math test showed heightened activation in the ventral stream of the anterior cingulate cortex, a neural region thought to be associated with social and emotional processing.

Wraga and colleagues found that women under stereotype threat showed increased activation in the ventral ACC and that the amount of this activation predicted performance decrements on the task.

Stereotype threat boost occurs when a positive aspect of an individual's social identity is made salient in an identity-relevant domain.