We don’t normally think of highly successful people as likely to suffer due to psychological pressure or stereotyping. But according to social psychologists, it is those most invested in their achievement who are most likely to fall prey to a kind of unconscious behavior known as stereotype threat.Discrimination in employment ; Sex discrimination against women ; Stereotype (Psychology)

Carrie Conaway

English

Research Papers in Economics

40 REGIONAL REVIEW Q1 2005
impact of afﬁrmative action on women, none have 
focused on women at the highest rungs on the career 
ladder. Thus, we still do not know whether being the 
beneﬁciary of afﬁrmative action early in their careers 
ultimately helps women to attain top leadership posi-
tions; though as noted, it does appear to have helped 
open doors to positions along the way. Afﬁrmative 
action and antidiscrimination policy, in general, may 
also have broader social beneﬁts, beyond the gains to 
the speciﬁc individuals hired, for instance by creating 
mentors and expanding networking opportunities for 
women and minorities.
The beneﬁts of afﬁrmative action in employment, 
then, are moderately positive for women and minori-
ties alike. Some individuals, however, perceive its 
costs to be large, which is what makes the policy so 
controversial and also may threaten its effectiveness. 
One concern that has been raised is that it creates de-
facto quotas. But work by Jonathan Leonard shows 
that federal contractors tend to fall short of their em-
ployment goals for women and minorities, suggesting 
that they are indeed goals and not quotas. The more 
frequently raised concern, however, is that afﬁrmative 
action encourages reverse discrimination—deliber-
ately excluding white men to provide more opportu-
nities for women and minorities. Such concerns may 
particularly arise when the economy is in a downturn 
and jobs are scarce. However, Holzer and Neumark’s 
evidence suggests that the likelihood of more produc-
tive men or whites being passed over in favor of less 
productive women or minorities is probably low. And 
the fact that women and minorities still earn less than 
men and whites, all else equal, also indicates that 
reverse discrimination is not the norm. 
Concerns about afﬁrmative action not only make 
the program politically sensitive but could actually 
cause problems for those who are supposed to ben-
eﬁt from it. They may be viewed as “afﬁrmative ac-
tion hires” rather than as equally qualiﬁed, equally 
productive employees. This, in turn, could sap their 
conﬁdence, creating a self-fulﬁlling prophecy. On 
the other hand, without afﬁrmative action, women 
and minorities are likely to have fewer opportunities 
available to them or may invest less in education and 
training because they think that it will not pay off 
down the line. Looking to the future, the challenge is 
to continue to ﬁnd ways to equitably level the “play-
ing ﬁeld” so that everyone has an equal opportunity 
to succeed. S
Francine D. Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of 
Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Econom-
ics and Director of the Institute for Labor Market 
Policies at Cornell University. Anne E. Winkler is 
Professor of Economics and Public Policy Adminis-
tration at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
psychological  
e don’t normally think of highly success-
ful people as likely to suffer due to psychological 
pressure or stereotyping. But according to social 
psychologists, it is those most invested in their 
achievement who are most likely to fall prey to a 
kind of unconscious behavior known as stereo-
type threat. This threat is pernicious because it is not due to active 
discrimination by employers, teachers, or other external evaluators; 
rather, it comes from within. It emerges in situations where people 
worry that their poor performance on some measure might be attrib-
uted not to their individual ability, but to a negative stereotype about 
a group they belong to—women, African-Americans, athletes, liber-
als, any group at all. Members of these stereotyped groups worry that 
their individual results will serve as a referendum on the abilities of 
everyone in their group, and the stress and self-doubt this brings on 
demonstrably reduces their performance—creating the very outcome 
they were striving to avoid. For example, knowing that women are 
perceived as indecisive, a successful woman leader may still act inde-
cisively, not because she actually is incapable of making a decision, 
but because the fear that others will perceive her that way slows down 
her decision-making process. 
Stereotype threat is a complex psychological phenomenon that oc-
curs only when several related factors coincide. Research evidence 
shows that for people to be affected by it, they must be high perform-
ers—people who care about doing well, rather than people who have 
dissociated themselves from striving for high achievement. They also 
must be put into a situation where their skills or abilities might be 
in question. This does not literally need to be an examination; a job 
assignment could serve the same purpose. But the task does need to 
be challenging, even frustrating, since these high achievers will not 
doubt their ability to perform well on an easy test. Studies also indicate 
that people will be more susceptible when they are invested in their 
image as a member of the stereotyped group. People whose group 
identity isn’t important to them won’t be worried about whether their 
poor performance reﬂects badly on their group. In addition, individu-
als are especially vulnerable if they believe that human intelligence 
is determined at birth (rather than being determined by situational 
W
a
effect of
stereotypes
by carrie conaway 
3
COUNTERING STEREOTYPES BY CHANGING THE RULESQ1 2005 REGIONAL REVIEW 41 
or learning experiences) and if they anticipate that they will experi-
ence discrimination in the test situation (rather than expecting to be 
treated fairly).
When these factors come together—as they often do on standard-
ized tests and job evaluations—the effect on performance can be sur-
prisingly large. The earliest research on this phenomenon, conducted 
a decade ago by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, focused on Af-
rican-Americans’ performance on verbal material. They found that, 
after adjusting for initial differences in SAT scores, black students at 
Stanford University who took a challenging verbal test answered ap-
proximately 10 percent fewer questions correctly than whites did—but 
only if they believed that the test was a measure of their ability. If they 
were told that the test measured “psychological factors involved in 
solving verbal problems,” the black-white test score difference was 
eliminated. 
Later studies have replicated Steele and Aronson’s results, often 
even without adjusting for initial differences in education or ability. 
And the effect is not unique to blacks. Studies show that women do 
worse on challenging tests of mathematical and scientiﬁc material, 
both when they are primed to think that the test demonstrates gender 
differences in math ability and when they are not primed about the 
test’s content (and thus are reacting purely on their knowledge that 
society expects women to be bad at math). The male-female gap is 
eliminated only when women are led to believe that the test is gen-
der-neutral. Even high-ability white men are susceptible. White men 
with near-perfect scores on the mathematics section of the SAT—that 
is to say, white men who were highly invested in their math perfor-
mance—performed worse on a mathematics test when they were told 
the test was designed to understand why Asians are better at math. 
And the results also extend outside academic ability. White athletes 
did worse than black athletes in a golf exercise when they thought 
their scores demonstrated “natural athletic ability” (a stereotypically 
black trait), whereas blacks did worse than whites when they thought 
it tested “sports strategic intelligence” (a stereotypically white trait).
Unfortunately, we do not know much about stereotype threat out-
side laboratory settings—for example, in actual work environments. 
And we know even less about how it might affect women on the way 
up the corporate ladder. But one set of studies, by Laura Kray and col-
leagues, does demonstrate that stereotype threat could affect women’s 
outcomes in one key skill needed by successful executives—negotia-
tion. Women and men business students in a negotiations class were 
paired (in either mixed- or same-sex pairs) and asked to negotiate over 
a price or over salary and beneﬁts. Similar to the results of previous 
stereotype threat research, when women believed that the task demon-
strated their negotiating ability—something they cared deeply about 
because of their identity as business students—their performance suf-
fered. But if they were explicitly told that the test was a learning tool 
and did not measure ability, they did just as well as men. Likewise, if 
women were told that successful negotiators were rational, assertive, 
and self-interested—implicitly linking stereotypically male traits to 
success—they performed worse than men. But interestingly, and in 
contrast to some other studies, women actually outperformed men if 
they were explicitly told that the researchers expected to see gender 
differences because men were more likely to possess the traits associ-
ated with success. In this case, the explicit reference to gender differ-
ences led the women to compensate—indeed, overcompensate—for 
the negative effect of stereotype threat.
The bad news is, stereotype threat is pervasive, and it can have a 
signiﬁcant impact on performance. The good news is, under-
standing the circumstances that trigger it can help to identify 
ways to avoid its effects. The more people believe that they are 
being evaluated on a gender- and race-neutral standard and that 
their evaluators are conﬁdent in their abilities, the less impact 
stereotype threat will have. S
“Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students, ” by Claude 
Steele, Atlantic Monthly, 1999. 
“Contending with Group Image: The Psychology of Stereotype and So-
cial Identity Threat, ” by Claude M. Steele, Steven J. Spencer, and Joshua 
Aronson, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2002.
“Battle of the Sexes: Stereotype Conﬁrmation and Reactance in Nego-
tiations, ” by Laura J. Kray, Leigh Thompson, and Adam Galinsky, Journal 
of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001.
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A psychological effect of stereotypes

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A psychological effect of stereotypes

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