The threat of appearing lazy, inefficient, and slow? Stereotype threat in the public sector

Public employees are stereotyped as lazy, inefficient, and slow. When made aware of such stereotypes, they may experience stereotype threat that impairs their task-performance. Across two pre-registered, large-scale between-subjects experiments (n1 = 1,543; n2 1,147), we found performance in terms task correctness, processing time, effort was unaffected by information negative public employee stereotypes. Our results do not indicate effects for This finding offers valuable theoretical practical implications the understanding sector stereotypes reputation.