Achievement gaps between social groups may result from stereotype threat effects but also from stereotype lift effects – the performance boost caused by the awareness that an outgroup is negatively stereotyped. We examined stereotype lift and threat effects in the motor domain and investigated their mediation by task involvement and self-confidence. Physiological (heart rate reactivity) and sel...

When women perform math, unlike men, they risk being judged by the negative stereotype that women have weaker math ability. We call this predicament stereotype threat and hypothesize that the apprehension it causes may disrupt women’s math performance. In Study 1 we demonstrated that the pattern observed in the literature that women underperform on difficult (but not easy) math tests was observ...

Mobile recommender systems have been proven as a promising approach in mobile scenarios to support the decision making process of users by suggesting beneficial items in a certain mobile context. The main goal of this paper is to examine whether a stereotype user model leads to better recommendations as part of such a system. For this purpose, we developed and tested a prototype for a shopping ...

We examined the impact of inducing performance-avoidance and approach goals (versus no goal) on women’s math performance in stereotype threatening versus nonthreatening situations. Two experiments showed that inducing either stereotype threat (versus nothreat) or a performance-avoidance goal (versus no goal) alone led to decreased math performance. However, inducing both stereotype threat and a...

Consensus is building that stereotype threat interferes with working memory, but how so? Grounded in the dual-process framework of Kane and Engle, the authors examined the extent to which stereotype threat interferes with one’s ability to maintain task goals in working memory and one’s ability to choose between conflicting responses. One hundred eighty-seven Montana State University (MSU) men w...

Adults 24-86 years of age read positive or negative information about aging and memory prior to a memory test. The impact of this information on recall performance varied with age. Performance in the youngest and oldest participants was minimally affected by stereotype activation. Adults in their 60s exhibited weak effects consistent with the operation of stereotype threat, whereas middle-age a...

People often base judgments on stereotypes, even when contradictory base-rate information is provided. It has been suggested this occurs because people fail to engage or complete deliberative reasoning needed to process numerical base-rate information, and instead rely on intuitive reasoning. However, recent research indicates people have some access to this base-rate information even when they...

Stereotype threat effects arise when an individual feels at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about their group and consequently underperforms on stereotype relevant tasks (Steele, 2010). Among older people, underperformance across cognitive and physical tasks is hypothesized to result from age-based stereotype threat (ABST) because of negative age-stereotypes regarding older adults' com...

This paper examines the effects of group performance anxiety on the attrition of women and minorities from science, math, and engineering majors. While past research has relied primarily on the academic deficits and lower socioeconomic status of women and minorities to explain their absence from these fields, we focus on the impact of stereotype threat—the anxiety caused by the expectation of b...

Recently researchers have debated the relevance of stereotype threat to the workplace. Critics have argued that stereotype threat is not relevant in high stakes testing such as in personnel selection. We and others argue that stereotype threat is highly relevant in personnel selection, but our review focused on underexplored areas including effects of stereotype threat beyond test performance a...