Episode 11: Stereotype Threat

Have you ever felt frustrated that your test scores don’t adequately reflect your knowledge and abilities? Have you ever looked around an exam room and felt nervous because nobody else looks like you? If so, you probably experienced something called “stereotype threat”. This term was developed by psychology researchers who were trying to understand why black and Latinx students get lower grades on average in college compared to their white classmates, and why women tend to do worse in subjects like math and engineering than males. They found that students can face a lot of internal pressure to disprove negative stereotypes about their group (such as the stereotype that women are bad at math), and this internal pressure can affect how their brains function during a test, leading to lower test scores. In this episode, we review many examples of stereotype threat at work, discuss our own experiences facing it, and explore some strategies that can help you combat it. We highly recommend reading the book, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us And What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele to learn more about this fascinating topic.