Individuals who experience stereotype threat - the pressure resulting from social comparisons that are perceived as unfavourable - show performance decrements across a wide range of tasks. One account of this effect is that the cognitive pressure triggered by such threat drains the same cognitive (or working-memory) resources that are implicated in the respective task. The present study investi...

This study examined the influence of health stereotypes on stress response among middle-aged and older men. It was hypothesized that anxiety and cardiovascular reactivity would increase when health stereotypes were activated among veterans seeking care in an outpatient setting. Among a sample of 122 veteran patients with hypertension, the level of stereotype activation varied by means of refere...

The achievement gap between White and Black students and White and Latino students remains one of the largest issues in education today despite countless efforts to reduce it. Previous reforms have focused on school-centered initiatives such as improving teacher quality or expanding Pre-Kindergarten programs. While these attempts are laudable, they have not found great success. However, recent ...

In academic and organizational domains, performance measures are often used to assess achievement or aptitude. When certain groups of people systematically underperform on such measures, a common interpretation is that the groups differ in inherent ability. However, social psychological research over the past 15 years has documented a phenomenon called stereotype threat whereby subtle situation...

descriptions appropriately describe the given behavior. However, because the different LCM categories elicit different cognitive inferences, the implicit meaning that is communicated varies as a function of level of abstraction. By describing desirable behavior of Mechanisms of linguistic bias 6 ingroup members and undesirable behavior of outgroup members abstractly, these behaviors are portray...

Research documents performance decrements resulting from the activation of a negative task-relevant stereotype. We combine a number of strands of work to identify causes of stereotype threat in a way that allows us to reverse the effects and improve the performance of individuals with negative task-relevant stereotypes. We draw on prior work suggesting that negative stereotypes induce a prevent...

0022-1031/$ see front matter 2009 Published by doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2008.07.016 q This research was supported by an NSERC Docto Doctoral Fellowship to the first author, and a SSHRC thank Dan Wegner and Vincent Yzerbyt for their fee presented in the manuscript, and Danu Stinson an comments on an earlier draft. We also thank Cory M Chatland, Richard Johnson, Juliana Parker, Rebecc Pochert for their...

Stereotype threat (ST) occurs when the awareness of a negative stereotype about a social group in a particular domain produces suboptimal performance by members of that group. Although ST has been repeatedly demonstrated, far less is known about how its effects are realized. Using mathematical problem solving as a test bed, the authors demonstrate in 5 experiments that ST harms math problems th...

Stereotyping is a technique used in many information systems to represent user groups and/or to generate initial individual user models. However, there has been a lack of evidence on the accuracy of their use in representing users. We propose a formal evaluation method to test the accuracy or homogeneity of the stereotypes that are based on users explicit characteristics. Using the method, the ...

Social perception involves the development of an attitude towards another person or group of persons. A stereotype is an attitude towards a person or group on the basis of some physical characteristic or physical fact. A stereotype is an example of an implicit personality theory. Such theories attribute internal properties to a person, such as character traits, on the basis of external properti...