Stereotype Threat: a Case of Overclaim Syndrome?

The theory of Stereotype Threat (ST) predicts that, when widely accepted stereotypes allege a group’s intellectual inferiority, fears of confirming these stereotypes cause individuals in the group to underperform relative to their true ability and knowledge. There are now hundreds of published studies purporting to document an impact for ST on the performance of women and racial minorities in a range of situations. This article reviews the literature on stereotype threat, focusing especially on studies investigating the influence of ST in the context of gender. It concludes that there is currently no justification for concluding that ST explains women’s underperformance compared to men on standardized tests of mathematics ability, or in scientific fields more generally. The current experimental literature provides no information about the magnitude of ST’s influence relative to other possible causes of gender or race disparities in academic performance generally, or in women’s underperformance in math more specifically. Existing studies are fully consistent with a minimal role for ST in accounting for observed patterns. In addition, there are unexplained inconsistencies and puzzles in the ST literature that further undercut the possibility of drawing firm conclusions about the magnitude of ST effects or the importance of ST to observed group disparities. The article concludes by proposing new ST research methodology that would help to address unanswered questions about the significance of ST as compared to other possible causes of observed gaps. These modifications would allow researchers more precisely to measure the magnitude of ST effects, and thus to determine whether ST accounts for all, most, some, or only a little of observed racial and gender performance differences on standardized tests of verbal and mathematical ability

Disability, Reciprocity, and \u27Real Efficiency\u27: A Unified Approach

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires private employers to offer reasonable accommodation to disabled persons capable of performing the core elements of a job. Some economists have attacked the statute as ill-advised and inefficient. In examining the efficiency of the ADA, this article analyzes its cost-effectiveness against the following social and legal background conditions: First, society will honor a minimum commitment to provide basic support to persons - including the medically disabled - who, through no fault of their own, cannot earn enough to maintain a minimally decent standard of living. Second, legal and pragmatic factors, including sticky or rigid compensation schedules and job classifications, sometimes prevent employers from paying wages that perfectly reflect workers\u27 marginal productivity. Because disabilities sometimes compromise productivity or require costly accommodations, employers may find it difficult to avoid overpaying some disabled employees who otherwise qualify for particular jobs. The article argues that effective enforcement of the ADA under these conditions will often be efficient for society as a whole, but may not be for all employers. That is, the ADA will sometimes create a divergence between private and social benefits. Because the ADA mandates that employers hire and accommodate workers they otherwise would shun as too expensive, the statute avoids the dead-weight loss, generated by imperfections in labor markets, of keeping potentially productive disabled persons in idleness. But because many disabled workers hired under the ADA\u27s commands are likely to be paid too much, the statute effectively shifts from the public at large to employers the expense of subsidizing disabled workers - including, most notably, those workers whose earnings, if truly reflective of net productivity, would otherwise be too meager to sustain a decent standard of living. In short, the ADA, although good for potentially productive disabled persons and for taxpayers, is potentially unfair to employers. The article examines some implications of these observations for reforming and restructuring the ADA. It also explores the suggestion, which arguably follows from its analysis, that many disabled persons - like other persons who, for reasons unrelated to medical disability, are not productive enough to achieve full economic self-sufficiency - should be regarded as having an obligation, as well as a right, to contribute something to their own support through work

Debating Immigration Restriction: the Case for Low and Slow

This article critiques our current politics of immigration, which is dominated by moralized and sentimental rhetoric. It argues for a more honest and balanced discussion of the merits of the status quo. A more mature debate would take into account many factors that now receive insufficient attention from politicians, academics, and the mainstream media, including the interests of voters and citizens as well as newcomers, legitimate nationalistic concerns both economic and cultural, the need for unity, stability, and cohesion through assimilation to a common culture, the primacy of American sovereignty through the maintenance of secure borders, and the integrity of the rule of law, which mandates the consistent enforcement of democratically enacted immigration laws. It should be incumbent on all sides to generate concrete reform proposals that give weight to all these concerns

Diverging Destinies Redux

My recent “where to live” conversation with a newly hired colleague yielded an unsurprising list of “possibles”: selected blocks of Mount Airy and Germantown, plus the Main Line towns of Bryn Mawr, Ardmore, Haverford, Villanova, Gladwyne, and so forth. Despite my colleague’s professed open mind about potential neighborhoods, Jenkintown — my own somewhat obscure and distinctly unfashionable (but much more affordable) suburb — drew a blank stare, as did a dozen other solidly middleclass areas I mentioned. By my calculation, there are over 400 zip codes within a thirty-mile radius of Rittenhouse Square, which is in the center of downtown Philadelphia. The places at the top of my colleague’s list comprised eleven zip code locations — a little more than 2 percent of the total. These are among the whitest, wealthiest, and most educated residential areas in and around Philadelphia. Somehow my colleague knew where people like him live and are supposed to live. My colleague’s choice of neighborhoods lined up almost perfectly with the precincts Charles Murray dubs the “SuperZips.” In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Murray’s magisterial look at inequality in white America, the SuperZips play a central role in the drama of social and economic fragmentation that has unfolded in our country in the past few decades. To set the stage for his cultural and geographical portrait of American non-Hispanic whites, Murray lists four of what he calls the “Founding Virtues,” or quintessential attributes he claims that our society must possess to preserve a cohesive and distinctly “American” way of life: marriage, honesty, industriousness, and religiosity (p. 130). Murray argues that on all of these dimensions, and regardless of class, education, location, or background, Americans used to be remarkably similar in outlook, with the vast majority endorsing the basic elements of a “respectable” life to include strong families, respect for law, honesty, probity, hard work, and faith (pp. 140–41). Most people were remarkably successful in maintaining these ideals in their daily lives. A considerable degree of geographical mixing accompanied this consensus, with persons from all income levels living in close proximity and even on the same streets. According to Murray, these conditions no longer prevail (p. 100). In practice, if not always in professed ideals, the American consensus has broken down on many fronts, with American society bifurcating into distinct cultures of upper and lower