Steele and Aronson, Stereotype Threat
Steele and Aronson:
- In this essay the authors discuss the ill effects of stereotype cues and stereotype threat both psychologically, and to a lesser degree, psychosomatically. Do you believe that stereotype threat has the propensity to physically affect, when activated, negatively stereotyped students?
- The authors write: "From hundreds of interviews that I've conducted with black college students, it's clear that many believe that the stereotype places them in situations freighted with unnerving expectations. Some report feeling a sense of unfairness, that there will be less patience for their mistakes than for white students' mistakes, and that their failure will be seen as evidence of an unalterable limitation rather than as the result of a bad day." How has this thinking been engender/proliferated, and by whom? Please explain.
Although the article is a thorough study of the stereotype threat responsible for the achievement gap between white and African American students, it can be generalized to wider range of situations. Steele mainly focuses on the psychological effects that negative stereotype can have on African American students, which appears in the form of task-irrelevant worries, interfering self-consciousness, or over-cautiousness. Through series of tests Steele conveys the reader that stereotype threat is very much the responsible criminal behind achievement gap between AF AM and EU AM. Furthermore, I think it is possible that stereotype threat can physically affect students as well. Based on the test results that have been presented in this article I am sure that it is quite evident that stereotype threat has very destructive and leaves chronic effects on stereotyped students’ mental health; hence, it is quite reasonable that in some cases there will also be physical affects as we know that psychological and behavioral factors can affect ones quality of life.
ReplyDeletePeople, the sector of our society, point to the poor test scores to affirm their own prejudice against African Americans, and these prejudice are contributing to the poor test scores by proliferating the negative stereotype, which then feeds back to the prejudice. As we can see this becomes a vicious cycle that is played across a wide variety of settings. It is like a chain reaction that increases the destructiveness of stereotype threat and leaves long-lasting scars on the African American students mentality.
As Maris stated above, I do believe that stereotype threats have the potential to manifest in the physical. As we have discussed in class, psychosomatics have the ability to take these situations and make them “more real” for people. What I mean by “more real” is that many times in United States’ culture symptoms must be physical to be deemed “real.” Though this can be true in some situations, it is incredibly problematic and damaging to only allow situations to be seen as damaging and “real” if they manifest beyond the psychological. So while I do believe that stereotype threat has the ability to physically affect students, I also think we must critically analyze all the ways in which these negative stereotypes work to affect students.
ReplyDeleteThe othering of a group works to create a divide. When students are classified as pertaining to a certain “other” group, or are tokenized, there can be extra stress placed upon the marked other. This can be done by anyone but is mainly perpetuated by and through the educational system, society and culture as a whole. If there is a constant proliferation of negative stereotype threats throughout an area, this stereotype is going to affect the ways in which an individual, a group, etc. works. As Maris stated, thinking therefore becomes cyclical. Working to dismantle and really analyze this work and system of othering has the potential to relive many.
In the reading, Steel and Aronson highlight the negative effects that the stereotype threat has on the academic performance of marginalized minority groups. Through the application of varies studies, it was evident that African American participants not only performed significantly less then their European American counterparts, but also suffered anxiety and had a greater tendency to disassociate themselves from what is often deemed as being apart of the African American culture while told that they were being tested on their cognitive ability. Although this is evident of the numerous psychological effects that the stereotype threat has on minority group, I believe that it also illustrates just how this detrimental effect can foster itself systemically. I believe that the anxiety that was suffered by the African American participants while undergoing these test, was not only psychologically crippling but can also be physically crippling to African Americans, as well as other minority groups, quality of life. Whether it be that that when negatively activated a student suffers a life threating condition, i.e. heart attack, or they continuously develop a habit of underperformance due to this fear, both are qualifiers of the physical/ tangible effects that the stereotype threat can have in the lives of minority groups.
ReplyDeleteYes, I definitely think that stereotype threat has the propensity to physically affect, when activated, negatively stereotyped students for many different reasons. The major one is presented in the text, and the presenters in class provided a very clear metaphor called the "vicious circle". African Americans have a negative stereotype against them when looking at test scores and performance in school compared to European Americans. Because of this stereotype, African Americans are negatively affected by the discrimination and then fail to perform to their highest ability. With that being said, they do worse in school and in turn prove the negative stereotype against them. This is a vicious circle because it is setting them up for failure and causing them to think that they do not have the skills or ability to do well. In the studies, it was a reoccurring pattern with African Americans performing worse than European Americans mostly due to thinking that they were not smart enough or stressing too much and having too much anxiety when it came to testing their educational levels and looking at their performance.
ReplyDeleteIn a response to the second question regarding Steele and Aronson’s article Stereotype Threat, one aspect of Stereotype Threat that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the negative effects of popularizing the notion of the stereotype threat. This is an idea I’m still wrestling with and am not 100% sure how I feel about it, but could this idea of the stereotype threat be exploited or used by minority students as an excuse for underachieving? While there is definitely a great deal of truth to what Steele and Aronson discuss and I think that the stereotype threat is unfortunately a more common occurrence than many Americans probably realize or appreciate, could this idea be exploited? Could minority students use this as an excuse for underperforming and underachieving and simply chalk it up to the stereotype threat? No doubt many students probably could make claims that they have been negatively affected by the stereotype threat, whether or not it is true or not. The very notion of this concept could potentially give students who are capable of academic success an excuse and a crutch for poor achievement.
ReplyDeleteThe type of thinking that the African American college students showed during the interviews has certainly been proliferated because of stereotypes, but I think another major contributor is the media. Every year, the news reports about standardized testing and the usual focus of the score data is on student performance in relation to race and socioeconomic status. It's ironic because the school district leaders bring up concerns about the achievement gap and try to create awareness so that teachers can work to help the underachieving students catch up; at the same time, that awareness can turn into stereotype threat for the minority students, because the statistics just keep churning out every year and every year the data points to them as students who need extra help. As a result, as Steele and Aronson’s research indicated, telling these students that the test aims to measure intellect becomes a type of priming. It may or may not affect them on a conscious level, but either way the subconscious can kick in, and stereotype threat can still occur. If this does happen, perhaps the student can turn the feelings of unfairness into that of motivation, in order to push himself to do his best instead of letting those feelings weaken his performance.
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