Question

Some groups in society are subject to stereotypes. Even if a person in a particular group does not personally believe in a stereotype about a group they belong to, they might still be worried about whether other people are judging them based on the stereotype. Psychologists have studied the effects of stereotypes on academic (and other kinds) of performance. Many researchers have found that people in a stereotyped group tend to do worse on a task where they experience a stereotype, but their performance gets better when they are told that the stereotype does not apply. The earliest study examined black students at Stanford University doing difficult GRE-type verbal questions. Black students who were told that this task was a test of their intelligence did worse than black students who were told that the task had no racial differences in outcomes, whereas white students did equally well in either case. Similar results have been found when studying many other groups and tasks, including women taking math tests, students from Latino or low-income families doing intellectual tasks, and white students playing sports. The effect that being part of a stereotyped group can have on performance is called “stereotype threat.”

What biological factors might explain those results? In particular, how might stress have contributed?

Answer 1

Factors contributing to stereotypic threat are

Stress arousal and performance monitoring which narrows attentjon and also efforts to suprress negative emotions and thoughts.

When the person under stereotypic stress spends more cognitive resources for performance monitoring to supress the negative emotions ,the working memory gets reduced and also executive function gets reduced thus results in less performance .

Streotypic stress contributes increased stress arousal and also increases the efforts to reduce anxiety caused by the negative thoughts