research on stereotype threat suggests that

Stereotype Threat: Definition and Examples

Erin Heaning

Clinical Safety Strategist at Bristol Myers Squibb

Psychology Graduate, Princeton University

Erin Heaning, a holder of a BA (Hons) in Psychology from Princeton University, has experienced as a research assistant at the Princeton Baby Lab.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

Stereotype threat is when individuals fear they may confirm negative stereotypes about their social group. This fear can negatively affect their performance and reinforce the stereotype, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy . It can impact various domains, notably academic and professional performance.

Stereotype threat is the psychological phenomenon where an individual feels at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about a group they identify with.
Stereotype threat contributes to achievement and opportunity gaps among racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural groups, — particularly in academics and the workplace.
Interventions such as teaching about stereotype threat and growth mindset, implementing self-affirmation assignments, and highlighting positive role models have been proven to impact fighting stereotype threat positively.

The term stereotype threat was first defined by researchers Steele and Aronson as “being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group” (Steele et al., 1995).

In other words, stereotype threat refers to an individual’s fear that their actions or behaviors will support negative ideas about a group to which they belong.

For instance, if an individual is worried that performing badly on a test will confirm people’s negative beliefs about the intelligence of their race, gender, culture, ethnicity, or other forms of identity, they are experiencing stereotype threat.

The effects of stereotype threat are especially evident in the classroom, but they can also follow an individual into the workplace and throughout the rest of their lives.

Steele and Aronson’s original study of this effect looked at black and white students’ performance on an academic test, specifically, a 30-minute test made up of items from the verbal section of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).

Steele and Aronson chose this procedure in response to the racial stereotype that black students are less intelligent or less capable than white students.

Given this stereotype threat against black students’ academic abilities, the researchers hypothesized that when black students were primed with the belief that the test was diagnostic of intellectual ability, they would perform worse than white students.

Confirming their suspicions, Steele and Aronson’s findings showed that black participants underperformed white participants when the test was labeled diagnostic of intellectual ability, but they performed equally well when the test was labeled non-diagnostic (Steele et al., 1995).

By labeling the test as diagnostic of intelligence in the stereotype threat condition, the experiment effectively made black students more vulnerable to judgment about their race’s academic ability.

And so, with their mental energy being used up by doubt and fear of failure, their academic performance ironically worsens.

Stereotype Threat Examples

The original investigation of stereotype threat by Steele and Aronson in 1995 investigated the relationship between race and academic performance.

Since then, additional studies have evidenced the role of stereotype threat in negatively impacting the academic performance of black students (Osborne et al., 2001).

However, in addition to race, recall stereotype threat can result from negative stereotypes against any aspect of one’s identity, such as ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, and more.

For instance, Spencer and colleagues showed stereotype threat might also underlie gender differences in advanced math performance (Spencer et al., 1999).

Based on the cultural belief that women have weaker math abilities, the researchers in this study hypothesized that reducing stereotype threats may help to eliminate gender differences in math performance.

In support of their hypothesis, their findings showed that when a math test was described as producing gender differences, women performed worse, but when the test was described as not producing gender differences, women performed equally as well.

Apart from race and gender, stereotype threat has also been extended to studies on the academic underperformance of students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds.

In a study by Croizet and colleagues, the researchers showed that when a test was described as measuring intellectual ability, lower SES participants performed worse than higher SES participants, but this difference was eliminated when the test was labeled non-diagnostic (Croizet et al., 2021).

These findings strongly contest the cultural belief that members of lower SES backgrounds have the lesser intellectual ability . Instead, studies such as these show that societal stereotypes might, in fact, be holding people back from the academic achievement they might otherwise attain.

Be it race, gender, SES, or some other form of identity, examples of stereotype threat impacting the achievement of stigmatized groups are evident.

Theories of Stereotype Threat

As these examples show, stereotype threat is a very prevalent issue that exaggerates racial and gender disparities in performance, but what is it that causes this stereotype threat effect?

In recent adaptations of stereotype threat studies, researchers have connected stereotype threat to the idea of “belonging uncertainty,” which undermines an individual’s sense of social acceptance and identity (Walton et al., 2007).

The desire for social belonging is a basic human motivation, and members of stigmatized groups may be more uncertain of their social bonds than others.

Therefore, to establish a sense of belonging, individuals may do all they can to avoid the threat of embarrassment or failure that could come from confirming negative stereotypes about their identity.

Consistent with this idea, Inzlicht’s “stigma as ego depletion ” theory further hypothesizes that stigma drains an individual’s self-regulatory resources, impairing their performance on following tasks (Inzlicht et al., 2006).

In this research, Inzlicht discusses how members of a stigmatized group may have fewer resources to regulate their actions or behaviors when they feel they are in a threatening or discriminatory environment.

In other words, one’s cognitive abilities can be thought of as a fuel tank that starts on full, but as people face discrimination or negative stereotypes, that fuel is used up by focusing on doubt or concern over their own abilities.

As a result, stigmatized individuals spend so much mental energy worrying about their own talents, skills, or capabilities that they do not have the mental energy left to reach their full potential in following tasks.

Stereotype Threat and the Achievement Gap

Stereotype threat is especially dangerous due to the far-reaching impacts it has not only on the individual but on society as a whole.

For instance, at the individual level, stereotype threat can increase anxiety and stress as people actively attempt to disprove negative stereotypes about themselves.

Faced with negative stereotypes and fear that they will confirm them, people might become more disengaged from certain subject fields or areas of interest.

By establishing this fear that one might confirm negative stereotypes about one’s group (such as lesser intellectual ability), stereotype threat may also lead to a lack of confidence, doubt, self-defeating behavior, and a disengaged attitude.

Ironically, these resulting negative behaviors could cause a self-fulfilling prophecy for the individual who ends up living up to that negative stereotype.

People might even change their career trajectory or aspirations to avoid the threat of failure that society assigns to their identity.

For instance, a woman who is interested in math might still choose to avoid a major or career in STEM for fear she will prove lesser than her male counterparts, resulting in a lower number of women in STEM fields.

At a societal level, the combined impacts of these stereotype threats lead to a culture in which people of certain groups or identities are handicapped.

Stereotype threat can reduce academic focus and performance by creating a high cognitive load of vulnerabilities and doubt — contributing to the long-standing racial and gender gap in achievement.

For instance, standardized testing in school represents one such place where the effects of stereotype threat are especially striking.

Currently, exams such as the SAT, ACT, and GRE are crucial components of applications for higher education. And although there have been many arguments as to the unreliability of these exams and their inherent unfairness, most higher-education schools still require them in their admissions process.

Supporters of standardized tests argue these exams are meant to reflect academic ability and reasoning skills, but opponents say they probably measure access to opportunity more than academic ability.

The apparent racial and SES gaps in SAT scores are evidence of standard test opponents’ claims, as white and affluent individuals continue to outperform black, Latinx, and lower-income students.

Given society’s value of standardized tests as a diagnostic of intellectual ability, it’s no wonder that stereotype threat might be at play in exaggerating these scoring gaps.

Furthermore, since test scores impact stigmatized groups’ opportunities and social mobility, inequalities in the SAT score distribution reflect and reinforce racial inequalities across generations (Reeves & Halikias, 2017).

As a result, the effects of stereotype threat today continue to contribute to the future of this long-standing achievement gap.

Beyond school, the effects of stereotype threat can also follow people into the workplace. Earlier, this paper discussed how entire career trajectories might be changed given the self-doubt caused by stereotype threat.

Stereotype threat can prevent people from applying for jobs, asking for promotions, or performing confidently within an organization. Additionally, workers who face negative stereotypes surrounding their performance or intellectual ability may exhibit greater anxiety, reduced effort, and less creativity on the job.

In addition to decreasing workplace performance or productivity, stereotype threat also reduces the representation of stigmatized groups in corporations.

For instance, as stereotype threats follow people from academics into the workplace, there can be downstream impacts such as an inequality in the number of women in leadership positions and lower representation of ethnic minorities in CEO positions.

Therefore, the achievement gap exists not only in academics. Instead, it follows individuals into their careers and the rest of their lives.

How to Fight Stereotype Threat

Given the far-reaching impacts of stereotype threat, there has been much research on how to reduce its effects and help stigmatized populations succeed without fear of discrimination.

Some interventions have shown that simply teaching people about stereotype threat reduces its effect.

In one study on women’s math performance, no significant difference in scores was found between men and women in the condition in which stereotype threat was explained (Johns et al., 2005).

This could be due to the idea that teaching people about stereotype threat allows individuals to attribute anxiety and stress to external stereotypes rather than their internalized doubt.

Additionally, educating students on a growth mindset (or the idea that intelligence is a learned and not a fixed trait) can reduce stereotype threat.

In one study on this intervention, black students who were encouraged to view intelligence as a malleable trait reported greater enjoyment and engagement in academics and obtained higher grade point averages than control groups (Aronson et al., 2002).

By teaching intelligence as a trait that can be changed through one’s own effort and attention, a growth mindset makes students’ performances less vulnerable to stereotype threat, helping them maintain engagement with academics without doubting their abilities.

Drawing on this growth-mindset theory, self-affirmation interventions have also been proven to help fight the effects of stereotype threat. Self-affirmation refers to recognizing and asserting the value of oneself and their abilities.

In one study of this technique by Cohen and colleagues, black students were assigned a brief, in-class writing assignment reaffirming their personal adequacy.

As a result of this assignment, students’ grades significantly improved, reducing the racial achievement gap by forty percent (Cohen et al. 2006). By helping students acknowledge their own abilities and talents, self-affirmation assignments such as these can work wonders in building students’ confidence and overcoming internalized stereotypes.

Finally, role models can play a valuable role in reducing stereotype threat.

One study on role models showed that when college women first read about women who had succeeded in architecture, law, medicine, and invention, they performed significantly better on a difficult mathematics test (McIntyre et al., 2003).

The importance of this study is that it shows that representation doesn’t have to mean physical exposure to counter-stereotypical role models. Instead, increasing representation and fighting negative stereotypes in television, movies, or literature can also change public perception of stigmatized groups.

Furthermore, exposure to these counter-stereotypical role models at an early age can influence aspirations, career choices, and confidence in children, which can be carried through adulthood.

By implementing these measures, academic institutions and workplaces can make an effort to fight the threat of stereotypes and build a fairer and less discriminatory society moving forward.

Learning Check

Which of the following is the best example of stereotype threat?

A female student feels nervous about a math test due to the stereotype that women are not as good at math as men.
An elderly person deciding not to participate in physical activity out of fear of injury.
A football player spends extra time practicing to improve his skills.
Asian students pushing themselves to excel in math to align with the stereotype that Asians are good at math.
A person choosing not to attend a social gathering because they are introverted and prefer smaller social settings.

Answer : The best example of stereotype threat is 1) A female student feeling nervous about a math test due to the stereotype that women are not as good at math as men. This situation involves fear of confirming a negative stereotype about her social group, which is characteristic of stereotype threat.

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing the Effects of Stereotype Threat on African American College Students by Shaping Theories of Intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38 , 113-125.

Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Apfel, N. & Master, A. (2006). Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention. Science, 313 , 1307-1310.

Croizet, J. C., & Claire, T. (1998). Extending the concept of stereotype threat to social class: The intellectual underperformance of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24 (6), 588-594.

Inzlicht, M., McKay, L., & Aronson, J. (2006). Stigma as ego depletion: How being the target of prejudice affects self-control. Psychological Science, 17 (3), 262-269.

Johns, M., Schmader, T., & Martens, A. (2005). Knowing is half the battle: Teaching stereotype threat as a means of improving women’s math performance. Psychological science, 16 (3), 175-179.

McIntyre, R. B., Paulson, R., & Lord, C. (2003). Alleviating women’s mathematics stereotype threat through salience of group achievements. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39 , 83-90.

Reeves, R. V., & Halikias, D. (2017, August 15). Race gaps in SAT scores highlight inequality and hinder upward mobility. Brookings. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-highlight-inequality-and-hinder-upward-mobility/

Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of experimental social psychology, 35 (1), 4-28.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and social psychology , 69 (5), 797.

Osborne, J. W. (2001). Testing stereotype threat: Does anxiety explain race and sex differences in achievement?. Contemporary educational psychology, 26 (3), 291-310.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and social psychology, 92 (1), 82.

Further Information

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69 (5), 797.

Aronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35 (1), 29-46.

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Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators

Affiliation.

1 Department of Psychology, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom.
PMID: 26752551
PMCID: PMC4713435
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0146487

This systematic literature review appraises critically the mediating variables of stereotype threat. A bibliographic search was conducted across electronic databases between 1995 and 2015. The search identified 45 experiments from 38 articles and 17 unique proposed mediators that were categorized into affective/subjective (n = 6), cognitive (n = 7) and motivational mechanisms (n = 4). Empirical support was accrued for mediators such as anxiety, negative thinking, and mind-wandering, which are suggested to co-opt working memory resources under stereotype threat. Other research points to the assertion that stereotype threatened individuals may be motivated to disconfirm negative stereotypes, which can have a paradoxical effect of hampering performance. However, stereotype threat appears to affect diverse social groups in different ways, with no one mediator providing unequivocal empirical support. Underpinned by the multi-threat framework, the discussion postulates that different forms of stereotype threat may be mediated by distinct mechanisms.

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Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Fig 1. Process of article inclusion (following PRISMA).

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REVIEW article

Addressing stereotype threat is critical to diversity and inclusion in organizational psychology.

$\r\nBettina J. Casad*$

Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

Recently researchers have debated the relevance of stereotype threat to the workplace. Critics have argued that stereotype threat is not relevant in high stakes testing such as in personnel selection. We and others argue that stereotype threat is highly relevant in personnel selection, but our review focused on underexplored areas including effects of stereotype threat beyond test performance and the application of brief, low-cost interventions in the workplace. Relevant to the workplace, stereotype threat can reduce domain identification, job engagement, career aspirations, and receptivity to feedback. Stereotype threat has consequences in other relevant domains including leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiations, and competitiveness. Several institutional and individual level intervention strategies that have been field-tested and are easy to implement show promise for practitioners including: addressing environmental cues, valuing diversity, wise feedback, organizational mindsets, reattribution training, reframing the task, values-affirmation, utility-value, belonging, communal goal affordances, interdependent worldviews, and teaching about stereotype threat. This review integrates criticisms and evidence into one accessible source for practitioners and provides recommendations for implementing effective, low-cost interventions in the workplace.

“Is stereotype threat a useful construct for organizational psychology research and practice?” This is the title of a focal article in a recent volume of Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice ( Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ). The mere publication of such a paper suggests a debate in the field of industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology on the extent to which research on stereotype threat is applicable to the workplace. Stereotype threat is the fear or anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s social group (e.g., women are bad at math). Members of stereotyped groups (e.g., women, racial minorities) can experience stereotype threat in evaluative situations, which often leads to underperformance ( Steele and Aronson, 1995 ). The paper generated 16 commentaries from researchers and practitioners in I/O psychology and related fields, arguing both for and against the relevance of stereotype threat to I/O psychology.

Critics of stereotype threat research have four primary arguments: (1) mixed effects in operational high stakes testing environments ( Cullen et al., 2004 ; Stricker and Ward, 2004 ; Sackett and Ryan, 2012 ); (2) necessary boundary conditions ( Sackett, 2003 ; Sackett and Ryan, 2012 ; Ryan and Sackett, 2013 ); (3) lack of field studies ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ; Kenny and Briner, 2014 ; Streets and Major, 2014 ); and (4) impracticality of implementing workplace interventions ( Streets and Major, 2014 ). Several publications have addressed the widely discussed arguments on high stakes testing ( Cullen et al., 2004 ; Aronson and Dee, 2012 ; Sackett and Ryan, 2012 ; Walton et al., 2015a ) and the boundary conditions of stereotype threat ( Sackett, 2003 ; Sackett and Ryan, 2012 ; Ryan and Sackett, 2013 ). Throughout our review we provide evidence to counter the third and fourth criticisms on the lack of field studies and impracticality of workplace interventions.

This review contributes to the growing attempt to apply research in the stereotype threat domain to the workplace ( Aronson and Dee, 2012 ; Kang and Inzlicht, 2014 ; Walton et al., 2015a ). We review the literature on the effects of stereotype threat beyond performance in an attempt to bring awareness to an area of stereotype threat research that may be underappreciated by practitioners due to its initial appearance as irrelevant ( Kang and Inzlicht, 2014 ; Spencer et al., 2015 ). Highly relevant to I/O researchers and practitioners, stereotype threat can affect domain identification, job engagement, career aspirations, and openness to feedback. Another area that needs greater dissemination is the effects of stereotype threat in domains other than selection and high stakes testing, such as leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiations, and competitiveness. The content and organization of our review on the antecedents and consequences of stereotype threat in the workplace is similar to previous work (see Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ). We complete the review by describing several institutional and individual level interventions that are brief, easily implementable, have been field tested, and are low-cost (summarized in Table 1 ). We provide recommendations for practitioners to consider how to implement the interventions in the workplace.

TABLE 1. Summary of stereotype threat interventions adaptable to the workplace.

Effects of Stereotype Threat Beyond Performance

When research on stereotype threat was first published, the focus was on academic test performance for women and racial minorities ( Steele and Aronson, 1995 ). However, since this time research has expounded, cataloging numerous psychological, and behavioral outcomes that are affected by experiencing stereotype threat ( Schmader et al., 2008 ; Inzlicht et al., 2012 ). Research on stereotype threat spillover has documented pernicious effects of stereotype threat beyond performance ( Inzlicht and Kang, 2010 ; Inzlicht et al., 2011 ). Research on stereotype threat in an I/O context similarly has focused on performance as the key outcome (e.g., Sackett et al., 2001 ; Sackett and Ryan, 2012 ). It seems that because the effects of stereotype threat in high-stakes testing has been controversial ( Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ), the overemphasis on performance may have undermined I/O psychology’s research focused on other outcomes ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kang and Inzlicht, 2014 ). Indeed, research demonstrates that stereotype threat spillover effects are likely underestimated and may account for some of the null findings of stereotype threat on performance in field studies ( Inzlicht and Kang, 2010 ; Inzlicht et al., 2011 ; Kang and Inzlicht, 2014 ). In this section, we first describe the psychological processes responsible for stereotype threat spillover effects. We then review research showing that stereotype threat negatively impacts outcomes beyond performance (see Spencer et al., 2015 ). These negative outcomes are critical for I/O practitioners to consider when evaluating the usefulness of stereotype threat in the workplace. Although there are many outcomes affected by stereotype threat including intrapersonal, interpersonal, and employer–employee outcomes ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ), we focus on four outcomes that are linked to other downstream effects relevant to the workplace: openness to feedback ( Roberson et al., 2003 ), domain identification ( Crocker et al., 1998 ), job engagement ( Harter et al., 2002 ), and reduced career aspirations ( Davies et al., 2005 ).

Stereotype Threat Processes

After many studies established the effects of stereotype threats on various outcomes for several minority groups, research turned to understanding the mechanisms driving these effects ( Schmader et al., 2008 ; Inzlicht et al., 2014 ). Experiencing stereotype threat can lead to a cascade of processes that include attentional, physiological, cognitive, affective, and motivational mechanisms (see Casad and Merritt, 2014 ). When a stigmatized person becomes aware that their stigmatized status may be relevant in a particular context, they may become vigilant and increase attention for environmental cues relevant to potential prejudice and discrimination.

In addition to increased vigilance or attention, stereotype threat causes heightened physiological arousal such as heighted blood pressure and vasoconstriction ( Blascovich et al., 2001 ; Croizet et al., 2004 ; Murphy et al., 2007 ; Vick et al., 2008 ). However, physiological arousal alone does not necessarily lead to negative outcomes, but rather the appraisal of a stimulus as threatening or challenging elicits a response ( Blascovich et al., 2004a , b ; Schmader et al., 2008 ; Inzlicht et al., 2012 ).

Research on stereotype threat processes has identified cognitive and affective factors, particularly cognitive, and affective appraisals, as determinants of outcomes ( Major et al., 2002 ; Major and O’Brien, 2005 ). Cognitive appraisals can heighten awareness of a relevant stereotype, thus reinforcing the arousal of threat ( Inzlicht et al., 2006a ). These cognitions include the extent to which a stressor is self-relevant, dangerous, and creates uncertainty. The negative cognitions initiate physiological arousal, such as elevated cortisol, increased adrenaline, increased blood pressure, and other cardiovascular responses such as increased vasoconstriction ( Chen and Matthews, 2003 ; Blascovich et al., 2004a ; Vick et al., 2008 ). Relatedly, affective appraisals can heighten awareness of a relevant stereotype, thus reinforcing the arousal of threat ( Inzlicht et al., 2006a ). These emotions include feeling overwhelmed, nervous, anxious, worried, and fearful, which initiate physiological arousal like cognitive appraisals ( Chen and Matthews, 2003 ; Blascovich et al., 2004a ).

A final mechanism that explains why stereotype threat can negatively affect performance and spill over into other domains is executive functions. Executive functions are required to self-regulate one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors under stress ( Muraven et al., 1998 ; Muraven and Baumeister, 2000 ). This self-regulation requires not only motivation, but also ego-strength, which comes in limited supplies ( Muraven et al., 1998 ; Muraven and Baumeister, 2000 ). When a task requires a controlled response, willful action can quickly deplete ego-strength, or it can divert motivation and attention to other actions ( Inzlicht et al., 2014 ). Research has shown that women under stereotype threat were quicker to fail at a self-regulation task (squeezing a hand grip—a task irrelevant to math-based stereotype threat) than women not under threat ( Inzlicht et al., 2006b ). Other research shows that participants under threat give up on complex tasks more quickly than participants not under threat (Inzlicht and Hickman, 2005, Unpublished Manuscript). In order to overcome stereotype threat, people have to exert self-control, often having to work harder to maintain performance in the face of threat ( Inzlicht and Kang, 2010 ). Exerting self-control may prevent negative performance at the moment, possibly accounting for null effects of stereotype threat on performance in workplace settings; however, exerting self-control comes at a cost. The stress of working against stereotype threat can spill over into other seemingly unrelated domains such as health (diet, exercise, and alcohol/drug abuse), decision-making, and aggression ( Inzlicht and Kang, 2010 ; Inzlicht et al., 2011 ). Next, we describe four negative consequences of stereotype threat beyond performance.

Reduced Openness to Feedback

Stereotype threat has been shown to hinder affected employees’ openness to and utilization of critical feedback ( Roberson et al., 2003 ). Feedback is vital for an organization’s workforce to adapt and grow, and when employees from stigmatized groups are not able to utilize feedback as effectively as non-stigmatized workers, their chances for advancement and success will be hindered ( Crocker et al., 1991 ).

Employees faced with stereotype threat often find it easy to assume that their coworkers or superiors are biased against them due to their group membership ( Walton et al., 2015a ). This can often occur when a non-minority manager presents negative, though constructive, feedback to a minority subordinate. If the employee is vulnerable to stereotype threat, such as being a numeric minority in the workgroup, they are more likely to interpret negative feedback as internally attributed, such that it speaks to their inherent ability ( Kiefer and Shih, 2006 ). This misattribution increases the vulnerability of self-esteem, so these employees may then be more likely to interpret that negative feedback as biased and discount it ( Roberson et al., 2003 ). Discounting valuable feedback robs the employee of a valuable learning experience and the opportunity to improve their standing or performance ( Roberson et al., 2003 ). A non-minority employee does not undergo this process when interpreting feedback, so they can more easily perceive the feedback as legitimate and utilize it effectively.

The tendency to discount critical feedback has been documented in several studies. Cohen et al. (1999) found that African American students were less likely to adjust written essays that following feedback given by white professors if they were led to believe that white students received less negative feedback. Cohen and Steele (2002) found a similar effect with female science students when giving presentations before and after negative feedback. It is likely that this pattern is due to minority members’ desire to protect their self-esteem from negative information regarding personal performance. Because subtle forms of prejudice are pervasive, it is highly likely for stereotyped individuals to assume that feedback in interracial or mixed gender context might be biased. Therefore, discounting negative feedback to protect one’s self-esteem may be adaptive, reasonable, and justified. Failing to discount biased feedback could potentially reinforce negative stereotypes about belonging and ability ( Crocker and Major, 1989 ; Cohen et al., 1999 ; Walton et al., 2015a ).

Apart from discounting feedback from supervisors, stereotype threat may influence how minority employees seek out feedback concerning their performance. Research has shown that direct feedback, or explicit and outright feedback, is much more effective in terms of improving performance. Conversely, indirect feedback, or monitoring one’s environment for cues about ones performance, is much more ambiguous and therefore less useful ( Ashford and Tsui, 1991 ). An important distinction, however, is that direct feedback can often be perceived as emotionally threatening as it reflects a more true representation of performance. Indirect feedback is much less threatening because the recipient is not confronted about their performance outright ( Ashford and Northcraft, 1992 ). In order to protect social standing and avoid public scrutiny, minority employees may actively avoid direct feedback ( Roberson et al., 2003 ).

Reduced Domain Identification

Chronic exposure to threat may lead stigmatized individuals to disidentify from the domain in which they are negatively stereotyped ( Steele and Aronson, 1995 ). Disidentification serves as a coping mechanism to chronic threat where individuals selectively disengage their self-esteem from intellectual tasks or domains ( Steele, 1992 , 1997 ; Crocker et al., 1998 ). That is, by redefining their self-concept to not include achievement in that domain as a basis for self-evaluation, individuals protect their self-esteem so that poor performance in that domain is no longer relevant to their self-evaluation. However, disidentification is a maladaptive response, and it is a contributing factor to reduced career and performance goals ( Major and Schmader, 1998 ) and workplace turnover ( Crocker et al., 1998 ; Harter et al., 2002 ).

Another area of concern is that stereotype threat interferes with minorities’ ability to integrate personal identities with professional identities. When employees view their personal identity (e.g., woman, African American) as incompatible with their professional identity (e.g., lawyer) because of stereotype threat in the workplace, negative mental health consequences are likely ( Settles et al., 2002 ; Settles, 2004 ). Female lawyers, accountants, and managers who experienced stereotype threat reported separating their identity as a woman from their professional identity ( von Hippel et al., 2010 , 2011a , 2015 ). Other research shows that women scientists report having to switch back and forth between their identity as a woman and identity as a scientist in order to fit into male-dominated environments ( Settles, 2004 ). Adverse consequences of this lack of identity integration include negative job attitudes ( von Hippel et al., 2011a ), more negative work-related mental health ( von Hippel et al., 2015 ) greater depression ( Settles, 2004 ), lower life satisfaction ( Settles, 2004 ), and reduced likelihood of recommending fellow women to the field (e.g., finance; von Hippel et al., 2015 ).

Reduced Engagement

Another non-performance consequence of stereotype threat is the tendency for stereotyped individuals to disengage from their work tasks and the feedback that follows. Employees under threat may disengage in order to distance their self-esteem from the potential consequences of their work performance ( Major and Schmader, 1998 ). If a particular stereotype indicates that the individual will perform poorly, that individual is more likely to reduce their attachment to their performance for fear of potentially proving that stereotype correct. This process leads to feelings of powerlessness ( Major et al., 1998 ). Stigmatized individuals therefore reduce the amount of care and concern they put toward a work outcome in order to avoid the negative consequences of their anticipated poor performance. Individuals who identify highly with their domain are most susceptible to disengagement, since success in that domain is more central to them, making negative feedback much more damaging.

Disengagement is closely related to disidentification in that repeated disengagements often contribute to the individual reducing their identification with a certain domain. Disengagement is typically a state-level phenomenon that occurs in response to specific situations, such as analyzing scientific data, whereas disidentification is typically a chronic state that affects the individual’s overall identity attachment to the domain, such as being a scientist. If the individual regularly disengages from relevant tasks in order to shield his or her self-esteem, a reduction of identification to the domain could result. This cycle is problematic, as it indicates disengagement can ultimately result in higher turnover due to a lack of domain identification ( Crocker et al., 1998 ; Harter et al., 2002 ).

Disengagement has been shown to negatively impact task performance and motivation, such that individuals will give up more easily on a stereotype-relevant task while under threat ( Crocker and Major, 1989 ; Steele, 1992 ; Major and Schmader, 1998 ). Research indicates it is not the task itself that is threatening, but rather the anticipated feedback that follows ( Ashford and Tsui, 1991 ). If employees under threat are highly engaged in their work, and they receive negative feedback that aligns with a relevant group stereotype, it could be much more damaging to their self-esteem than it would be for non-threatened employees ( Major and Schmader, 1998 ).

Disengagement results from discounting and devaluing. Discounting occurs when the employee dismisses feedback as an invalid representation of one’s potential due to external inadequacies, such as skepticism toward an intelligence test. Devaluing occurs when the employee dismisses the importance of the feedback, often taking the position that the feedback does not matter to them or their career path. When stereotyped individuals engage in discounting and devaluing, negative feedback is less likely to affect self-esteem because the feedback has been deemed irrelevant or flawed ( Major and Schmader, 1998 ).

Interestingly, there has been a small body of research investigating the potential adaptiveness of disengagement. For example, Nussbaum and Steele (2007) observed that temporarily disengaging from harmful feedback can actually foster persistence, as it deflects damage to the self-esteem which would otherwise create a sense of lack of belonging. While it is possible that situational disengagement could be beneficial in particular contexts, it cannot be harnessed and applied to particular contents of the individual’s choosing – it is evoked whenever the individual feels threatened. Additionally, disengagement, regardless of its capacity to protect self-esteem, results in the rejection of valuable feedback that could otherwise be used toward refining work-relevant skills. Finally, chronic disengagement has been shown to lead to disidentification, or no longer perceiving one’s workplace identity as central to self-identity ( Crocker et al., 1998 ), which in turn is associated with increased turnover ( Harter et al., 2002 ). It is therefore critical that disengagement is curtailed, and reducing stereotype threat is necessary to do so.

Reduced or Changed Career Aspirations

Another consequence of chronic experiences with stereotype threat is reduced or altered career aspirations. When people feel threat in a domain, they often feel they have fewer opportunities for success in the domain ( Steele, 1997 ). For example, Davies et al. (2005) found that women were less interested in taking on leadership roles after viewing gender stereotypic television commercials. Similarly, when leadership roles are described using masculine traits, women report less interest in entrepreneurship than men ( Gupta et al., 2008 ). Reduced career aspirations in response to threat, particularly for women in leadership, entrepreneurship, and science may exacerbate the gender gap in these fields ( Murphy et al., 2007 ; Koenig et al., 2011 ).

Consequences of Stereotype Threat for Organizations

As previously outlined, stereotype threat leads to a cascade of mechanisms that can lead to poor performance in a stereotyped domain, or spillover into unrelated domains such as health. In the previous section we described research documenting how stereotype threat can result in reduced openness to feedback from employers, reduced domain identification, reduced job engagement, and reduced or altered career aspirations. All four of these consequences are linked to changes in behaviors that have consequences for the workplace. Experiencing stereotype threat has shown to impair leadership performance and aspirations, negotiation skills, entrepreneurial interests, and skills, and desire to work in competitive environments and competiveness skills ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ). The following section describes predominantly lab-based research that shows the negative effects of stereotype threat on these four important workplace behaviors.

Encountering stereotype threat has been shown to limit one’s willingness to embrace challenges and work through uncertainty because any resulting failure could be interpreted as evidence supporting the stereotype ( Steele, 1997 ). Experiencing stereotype threat leads individuals to avoid domains in which they are stereotyped as not belonging, such as women in leadership. Leaders are commonly assumed to be white males ( Koenig et al., 2011 ), therefore women and racial minorities seeking leadership positions must directly challenge that stereotype. Empirical evidence has supported the idea that when individuals face stereotype threat, they are less likely to pursue leadership roles, particularly when they are the only member of their group among their peers ( Hoyt et al., 2010 ). It is assumed that the threatening environment activates a heightened aversion to risk, which when coupled with greater uncertainty regarding their success, may cause them to forgo challenges such as striving for leadership roles.

Aligning with this theory, Davies et al. (2005) instructed women to choose to hold either a leadership or non-leadership position following the presentation of either a stereotype-activating commercial or a neutral commercial. Results indicated that women who viewed the stereotype-relevant commercial were more likely to elect to hold the non-leadership position, whereas those who viewed the neutral commercial were more evenly distributed between the two roles. This indicates that the knowledge and activation of stereotypes of women’s roles as subordinate or supportive in nature rather than leadership roles will diminish women’s desire to lead due to the fear of confirming the stereotype. This phenomenon is even more dangerous because it can activate a self-perpetuating cycle – stereotyped individuals avoid leadership roles due the stereotype that leaders should be white males, which then discourages those individuals to establish a prominent leadership presence. When no female or minority leaders are present, no information counter to the stereotype is available and the stereotype persists.

It is important to note that individual differences can diminish the effects of stereotype threat on leadership aspirations. For example, for women who are already high in leadership self-efficacy, the presence of stereotypes can actually motivate them to pursue leadership positions and increase their identity as a leader ( Hoyt, 2005 ). Research has shown that identity safety can mitigate the effects of stereotype threat ( Markus et al., 2000 ), meaning security with one’s identity can increase a feeling of belonging in that particular domain. Stereotyped individuals can therefore view the stereotype as a challenge rather than a threat and feel less uncertainty regarding future success. One issue, however, is that establishing leadership self-efficacy often requires past performances that were successful ( Bandura, 1977 ), which means that in order for leadership self-efficacy to be high enough for stereotyped individuals to challenge stereotypes, it may be necessary for them to have proven their capability as a leader at an earlier time.

Entrepreneurship

Paralleling the reduced aspiration to participate in leadership roles, the presence of stereotype threat can also inhibit individuals from pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. Many traits that are important for leaders are also important for entrepreneurial success (e.g., assertiveness, risk-taking), thus similar hesitations can result. Although it appears that the number of female entrepreneurs is growing in industries such as retail and personal service ( Anna et al., 2000 ), this is presumably because those industries still center on female-oriented traits such as nurturance, sensitivity, and fashion-sense. Even with this increase, however, the number of male entrepreneurs still outnumbers that of female entrepreneurs 2 to 1 ( Acs et al., 2005 ).

When stereotype threat is due to contextual or situational cues, individuals can strive to eliminate the threat by distancing themselves from that situation or context. Because masculine stereotypes are important for entrepreneurial success, women may negatively evaluate their capability for success and therefore distance themselves from any entrepreneurial endeavor. Although some research has shown that proactive personalities can buffer the effect of stereotype threat on women’s entrepreneurial intentions ( Gupta and Bhawe, 2007 ), activating stereotypes of entrepreneurship and masculinity discourages women from taking such risks.

Negotiations

Many of the stereotypic masculine traits mentioned previously can impact aspects of the workplace other than career aspirations and risk-taking. Because strong negotiators are stereotyped to have masculine qualities, women may alter their negotiation strategies. Much of this research is similar to other areas, namely that activating gender stereotypes can cause women to underperform during negotiations compared to when stereotypes are not activated ( Kray et al., 2002 ). Stereotype threat also leads to less willingness to initiate a discussion that is negotiative in nature Small et al. (2007) .

The dynamic nature of negotiations makes it challenging for researchers to determine whether gender differences in negotiation performance are due to the suppressed performance of women under threat, or the situational control experienced by male opponents ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ). Although research suggests the mere competitive nature of the negotiation process is what deters women from pursuing maximum benefits ( Gneezy et al., 2003 ; Niederle and Vesterlund, 2010 ), several studies show women’s negotiation performance improves when stereotypes are made explicit ( Kray et al., 2001 , 2004 ). This phenomenon is due to stereotype reactance, or the tendency to react counter to a stereotype when overt attention is drawn to its unfairness. However, if a stereotype is presented implicitly, women’s performance may still be negatively impacted ( Kray et al., 2001 ).

The negative effects of stereotype threat on negotiations does not necessarily stop at the bargaining table. Research has shown that women who behave in ways counter to gender stereotypes may be faced with social backlash ( von Hippel et al., 2011b ), especially if interactions with the negotiator are expected to recur. This suggests that even if women are able to overcome stereotype threat and negotiate effectively in a particular situation, the chronic experience of stereotype threat can potential impact women throughout their careers.

Competitiveness

As previously mentioned, one reason women may be less effective in leadership, entrepreneur intentions, and negotiations is a dislike of competitiveness. Competitive environments can be threatening to women due to the stereotype that women cannot fend for themselves when competing with men, and that they are better suited for supportive roles. Gneezy et al. (2003) conducted an experiment where participants were instructed to complete a computerized maze to earn compensation. Participants were either compensated for every maze completed regardless of performance or only if they solved the most puzzles in a set amount of time. Results indicated that men’s and women’s performances did not differ in the non-competitive condition, but women’s performance was significantly lower in the competitive condition. In the competitive condition, women elected not to dedicate effort to compete due to a preconceived expectation of losing. This parallels the idea that women may not feel capable of performing well in competitive environments, and therefore do not fully engage themselves, which can protect their self-esteem following expected loss ( Gneezy et al., 2003 ).

People who lack a competitive nature may experience difficulties in the competitive world of work. Stereotypes that give men a competitive edge (e.g., men play sports while women cheer them on) can carry over into a wide array of workplace contexts, potentially leaving women feeling unprepared, or incapable of competing. Although some research shows that women are capable of competitiveness on tasks in which women are more knowledgeable ( Günther et al., 2010 ), this stereotypical gender difference still gives a normative advantage to males across most situations. In a workplace, whether it be for a position, client, project, or ethical dilemma, having the ability and motivation to compete with others may determine success or failure. Understanding this phenomenon and equipping women with strategies to be competitive in the workplace is of vital importance.

Stereotype Threat Interventions in the Workplace

Broadly speaking, stereotype threat research is typically divided into three subdivisions – whether stereotype threat is present in a given domain, whether its presumable effects can be prevented or reduced, and the underlying mechanisms of the effects. All three types of research are necessary – there is no use preventing it if its effects are nonexistent, but no change will ever occur if we do not first understand why it is happening and then develop strategies to overcome it. Research has come a long way in developing intervention strategies, and there now exists a wide variety of interventions that organizations can implement in order to reduce stereotype threat and its effects on employees.

One issue concerning these interventions raised by researchers and organizational leaders is that many of the strategies, while sound in theory and laboratory testing, are not always applicable or practical in real-world practice, and therefore are not helpful to organizations ( Streets and Major, 2014 ). For example, one well-known intervention strategy within the stereotype threat literature is to increase minority representation within the organization ( Purdie-Vaughns et al., 2008 ; Spencer et al., 2015 ). Doing so has been shown to not only increase the value placed on diversity, but has also aided in the development of role models—a strong antecedent for the success of stereotyped individuals ( Marx and Roman, 2002 ). While this practice is undoubtedly effective, reorganizing personnel or modifying hiring practices requires major organizational change and expense. This intervention may not be attainable, particularly for smaller companies with fewer resources and opportunities to hire new personnel.

It seems the main argument against implementing stereotype threat interventions in the workplace is cost and potential disruption to the work environment. In the next section we describe intervention strategies that are no or low cost that can be integrated into existing training programs. Ultimately the organization has to weigh the costs and benefits of implementing workplace interventions. However, continuing to ignore diversity issues in the workplace and having employees who experience stereotype threat may negatively impact organizations’ bottom line in unanticipated ways (e.g., higher turnover, burnout, lawsuits).

Stereotype threat is triggered by subjective interpretation of situational contexts, which makes perceptions malleable through interventions. Interventions target institutional, structural level features of the organization and also individual level factors related to subjective construals of environments ( Cohen et al., 2012 ). Effective interventions range from brief, low-cost interventions such as changing physical workplace environments to long-term, high-cost changes such as diversifying the workforce. In this section we describe a range of stereotype threat reducing interventions that have been tested in laboratory and field settings, which are summarized in Table 1 .

Institutional and Structural Level Interventions

Addressing environmental cues.

Research has documented several environmental cues that can trigger stereotype threat, thus employers can be proactive in minimizing the presence of these cues in the workplace. Regarding the physical workplace environment, décor can signal to employees, and prospective recruits, whether they are welcomed in the organization. For example, halls decorated with photos of senior management and executives that represent Caucasian males may trigger doubt that women and minorities can advance in the organization. Other seemingly benign objects, such as the choice of magazines in a reception area, can affect the perception of the organization’s diversity values ( Cohen and Garcia, 2008 ). Do the magazines reflect a diversity of tastes and are they targeted to diverse audiences? Décor that communicates a masculine culture, such as references to geeky pop culture, may signal to women and those who do not identify with these cues that they do not belong ( Cheryan et al., 2009 ).

Research has shown that perceptions of environments are not limited to physical workspace. Websites, employment offer letters, and virtual environments have all been shown to evoke similar appraisals of belonging, potential threat, and person-organization fit to that of physical environmental cues ( Ng and Burke, 2005 ; Braddy et al., 2006 ; Cheryan et al., 2011 ). The design and content of websites, language used in various materials, and presence of stereotypes in virtual settings all have the potential to signal to diverse applicants and employees that they do not belong ( Walker et al., 2012 ). If organizations portray a particular culture through virtual or nontraditional avenues, and that culture could be considered threatening to women, such as one that values taking risks or that is highly competitive, the favorability of the organization from a woman’s perspective could be negatively affected. Conversely, if an organization is able to communicate an appreciation and acceptance of diversity, such as including a demographic variety in their testimonials, images, and recruiters, women’s and racial minorities’ perceptions of the organization could be bolstered ( Braddy et al., 2006 ).

Organizational research has also shown that a stereotype-affirming environment leads members of stereotyped groups to question their belonging to that workgroup ( Elsbach, 2003 ). Women in technology perceived greater threat when working in environments that they felt were masculine in nature. When in environments that are subtly (or not so subtly) favorable for men, it may induce women to feel that they are infiltrating a “boy’s club,” and that they must accept the existing social norms. Physical markers within an environment include things such as masculine wall colors, breakroom paraphernalia such as calendars or refrigerator magnets, or a norm of vulgar language. Making the physical environment, particularly common areas such as the breakroom and lobby, more gender neutral will help to dispel the feeling that the organization favors one gender group over the other.

In sum, employers should scrutinize physical and virtual workplace environments and messages to ensure that these cues are communicating the intended message that all employees are valued and belong.

Valuing Diversity Among Employees

A more pervasive environmental cue is lack of racial, ethnic, age, and gender diversity among employees. Being a numeric minority in an evaluative context such as the workplace is sufficient to trigger stereotype threat ( Inzlicht and Ben-Zeev, 2000 ; Murphy et al., 2007 ). For example, women college students viewed one of two videos depicting a science conference. Those viewing the video in which women were underrepresented 3:1 were less interested in attending the conference, anticipated feeling a lack of belonging at the conference, and showed a cardiovascular threat response to watching the video compared to women who watched a gender balanced video ( Murphy et al., 2007 ).

Research on solo status documents the negative effects of being the only or one of few members of a racial or gender group in the workplace ( Saenz and Lord, 1989 ; Sekaquaptewa and Thompson, 2003 ). Numeric minorities can feel pressure to positively represent their group and engage in counter-stereotypic behavior ( Saenz and Lord, 1989 ; Sekaquaptewa and Thompson, 2003 ); however, members of majority groups often attribute minority group members’ behaviors as confirming a negative group stereotype ( Sekaquaptewa and Thompson, 2003 ). A non-diverse workforce can elicit mistrust and less commitment from minority employees ( Roberson et al., 2003 ; Purdie-Vaughns et al., 2008 ).

Another reason a non-diverse workforce is problematic is there are fewer ingroup members to serve as role models for members of minority groups. Having a same-race or same-gender role model is beneficial for employees’ achievement and motivation in the domain ( Dasgupta and Asgari, 2004 ; McIntyre et al., 2011 ). If ingroup role models are not available, merely presenting members of underrepresented groups with stories of successful minority role models is effective in reducing stereotype threat ( von Hippel et al., 2010 ).

Although diversifying an organization’s workforce is the ideal solution, this may not be feasible in the short-term, particularly for smaller organizations. A possible remedy for lack of a diverse workforce is the organization’s diversity philosophy or mission. Although the organization may not have a very diverse body of employees, this does not prevent the organization from communicating its value of diversity to current and prospective employees. Research has investigated three types of diversity philosophies and their effects on minority and majority group’s perceptions of the organization, including color-blind, multicultural, and all-inclusive multicultural ( Plaut et al., 2009 ). Although a color-blind policy indicating race does not affect performance or evaluations and employees are valued for their work ethic seems positive, this widely endorsed policy is viewed as exclusionary by minorities ( Plaut et al., 2009 ). Often a color-blind approach results in valuing a majority perspective by ignoring important group differences and overemphasizing similarities ( Ryan et al., 2007 ), which can in turn trigger stereotype threat ( Plaut et al., 2009 ). In contrast, a multicultural philosophy values differences and recognizes that diversity has positive effects in organizations ( Ely and Thomas, 2001 ). Minority groups report feeling more welcome when organizations have multicultural policies ( Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ); however, majority groups have reported feeling excluded ( Thomas, 2008 ). More recent research suggests an all-inclusive multicultural approach is most effective. This approach recognizes and values contributions from all groups, majority and minority, and all employees report feeling included with this philosophy ( Plaut et al., 2011 ).

Organizational behaviors that communicate the adoption of a multicultural philosophy are often based on awareness and sensitivity. For example, the creation of a specific position responsible for managing diversity issues can better equip the organization to address diversity-related concerns. Diverse employees who are potential candidates for promotion could be identified and targeted in the promotion process. Turnover rates for diverse employees could be specifically analyzed and interpreted. Organizations can implement training with all employee ranks that stresses the value of a diverse workforce ( Blanchard, 1989 ; Konrad and Linnehan, 1995 ). There are numerous strategies that organizations can undertake. Research has shown that the adoption of multicultural practices such as these leads to attracting and retaining highly qualified diverse applicants ( Ng and Burke, 2005 ; Brenner et al., 2010 ), the subsequent hiring of more qualified diverse applicants ( Holzer and Neumark, 2000 ), and greater organizational commitment among diverse employees ( Hopkins et al., 2001 ). Conversely, if applicants perceive the organization is not welcoming of racial and ethnic diversity, they may be less likely to pursue employment with that organization ( Purdie-Vaughns et al., 2008 ).

Wise Feedback and Organizational Mindset

As discussed previously, a negative consequence of stereotype threat is discounting feedback ( Roberson et al., 2003 ), which hinders employee’s professional development and performance in the organization. Members of minority groups are particularly likely to mistrust feedback when it is in interracial or intergender contexts ( Cohen et al., 1999 ; Cohen and Steele, 2002 ). A negative consequence for those giving critical feedback is the feedback withholding bias ( Harber, 1998 ). Because giving and receiving critical feedback is important for individuals’ and organizations’ performance, employers should be trained in how to give “wise feedback” ( Yeager et al., 2013 ). Wise feedback has the goal of clarity, to remove ambiguity regarding the motive for the feedback so that members of minority groups do not attribute negative feedback to racial or gender bias. In this approach, the supervisor communicates to the employee that he or she has high standards for the employee’s performance but that he or she believes the employee can live up to those standards. When framed in this manner, the purpose of the feedback is to help the employee meet the high standards. Field studies show that minority students given wise feedback showed more motivation to improve ( Cohen et al., 1999 ) and were more likely to resubmit their graded work after receiving feedback ( Yeager et al., 2013 ).

The role of communicating high standards in wise feedback is also reflective of organization mindsets. Research on entity and incremental views of intelligence ( Dweck, 2006 ) has documented that how educators and employers, communicate their beliefs about intelligence and performance affects students’ and potential employees’ motivation and performance ( Murphy and Dweck, 2010 ). An entity or fixed mindset reflects beliefs that intelligence is something humans are born with and that the capacity to increase intelligence occurs within innate boundaries. This mindset promotes viewing mistakes and challenges as evidence of low intelligence. In contrast, an incremental or malleable view of intelligence suggests that intelligence is a result of learning and hard work and that anyone can increase their intelligence. In this mindset, mistakes are viewed as an important part of the learning process. Research with adolescents ( Paunesku et al., 2015 ), girls ( Good et al., 2003 ), and racial minorities ( Aronson et al., 2002 ) struggling with math shows that incremental mindsets predict learning and achievement. Recent work has documented that organizations perceived to have fixed mindsets elicited more stereotype threat among women ( Emerson and Murphy, 2015 ). Organizations perceived to have a growth (incremental) mindset did not elicit threat and women reported greater trust and commitment to the organization and had higher performance ( Emerson and Murphy, 2015 ).

In sum, supervisors should be trained in giving wise feedback. Organizations should communicate to current and prospective employees the value placed on motivation, hard work, and effort. New hires are selected in part for their competencies, thus emphasis on effort will keep employees motivated to perform well and may reduce or eliminate stereotype threat ( Murphy and Dweck, 2010 ; Emerson and Murphy, 2015 ).

Individual and Psychological Focused Interventions

Reattribution training.

One way that employers can empower employees to avoid experiencing stereotype threat is through reattribution training, or attribution retraining ( Walton and Cohen, 2007 ). When facing challenges common in the workplace, employees who attribute hardships to temporary, external factors are more likely to excel in the face of failure than employees who attribute setbacks to internal factors such as ability ( Weiner, 1985 ). Research has shown that providing alternative explanations for the perceived difficulty of a task can allow individuals the opportunity to attribute that difficultly to something other than their stereotyped group membership ( Wilson et al., 2002 ). Providing alternative explanations may help to alleviate some of the anxiety caused by stereotype threat because it buffers self-esteem from negative self-evaluation.

Research shows that reattribution training can be effective when inadequate instructions or guidelines are offered ( Menec et al., 1994 ), employees lack practice or experience on a given task ( Brown and Josephs, 1999 ), and the work needs to be carried out in an irregular context ( Stone et al., 1999 ). These alternative explanations for poorer performance reflect external and less controllable circumstances, thus group membership is no longer the only plausible explanation for shortcomings in performance. The individual can now partially attribute performance to factors not associated with self-esteem.

To illustrate this technique, consider the following scenario. During the onboarding process, employers can share stories with new employees about others’ experiences when first joining company. For example, highlighting cases where individuals first felt like an outsider, but then developed a sense of community after joining an organization-related club. When a new trainee experiences difficulty learning a new job skill, the trainer can emphasize that other new employees experienced initial trouble but mastered the skill after practice, which will diffuse the negativity of the setback. However, attribution retraining is only successful when the employee is provided with the opportunity to grow and learn from their mistakes ( Menec et al., 1994 ). Employers who wish to implement this intervention should consider the training opportunities available to new and current employees and expand resources as necessary to support development opportunities.

Attribution retraining must not be confused with simply providing plausible excuses for employees or lying to employees about why they may have failed. Additionally, attribution retraining should not give employees a guilt-free outlet for regular underperformance. Rather, the goal of attribution retraining should be to remind employees of any existing difficult circumstances which may be stalling performance, not create them ( Roberson and Kulik, 2007 ). Therefore, managers ought to utilize this strategy only when the following criteria are met: (1) when a stereotyped employee is presumably struggling due to stereotype threat; (2) when actual difficult circumstances may be preventing employees from succeeding; and (3) when underperformance is understandable and not crucial to typical job performance. Meeting these criteria will insure that attribution retraining is targeted at combating stereotype threat among truly capable employees. Although attribution retraining will not target the source of stereotype threat, it may provide additional resources to employees who are having trouble coping with it.

Reframing the Task

One way in which stereotype threat can be actively removed from an evaluative performance situation is by simply reframing the task—that is, by using a description that does not evoke negative stereotypes about a social group. Although diagnostic exams and workplace evaluations activate stereotype threat implicitly, explicitly describing an exam or evaluation as non-diagnostic (for example, of intelligence) is enough to eliminate the effects of stereotype threat ( Steele and Aronson, 1995 ). However, this method does not seem practical in diagnostic exams, such as standardized tests, that are meant to measure an individual’s academic performance. Research has also found that stereotype threat can be eliminated by explicitly stating that exams show no difference in performance based on stereotypes. For example, describing a math exam as gender-fair can be enough to dramatically increase women’s math performance ( Spencer et al., 1999 ; Quinn and Spencer, 2001 ). This method is quite practical because simply stating the gender and cultural fairness of an exam before it is administered can easily reduce stereotype threat effects. In a workplace setting, describing evaluations as objective or fair may alleviate stereotype threat ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ). That is, if an evaluation is conducted by more than one supervisor and focuses on behaviors and quantitative metrics of performance, evaluations may be less biased and may not evoke threat ( Austin and Villanova, 1992 ; Bommer et al., 1995 ). Employers should evaluate testing or evaluation procedures to make sure the fairness of the metric is communicated to employees.

Values-Affirmation

An intervention that can reduce stereotype threat and improve performance is values-affirmation ( Sherman and Cohen, 2006 ; Sherman and Hartson, 2011 ). The intervention is based on self-affirmation theory, which states that affirming an aspect of the self that is valued and unrelated to a particular threat can buffer self-esteem and alleviate the threat ( Sherman and Cohen, 2006 ). Value-affirmation interventions have been implemented in school settings, typically having students write for 15–20 min about things that they value and why, often including this as a regular writing assignment throughout the academic term. This helps to put students’ troubles in the broader context of their values and sources of support. This brief, low-cost intervention has shown to improve minority students’ GPA even 3 years later ( Cohen et al., 2009 ; Sherman et al., 2013 ). It also has reduced stereotype threat and increased sense of belonging among minorities ( Cohen et al., 2009 ; Sherman et al., 2013 ) and women in the sciences ( Walton et al., 2015a ). Research suggests the key mechanism for values-affirmation interventions is to have participants write about social belonging ( Shnabel et al., 2013 ).

Recent research has applied values-affirmation interventions in the workplace and found improved performance and retention ( Cable et al., 2013 ). Cable et al. (2013) encouraged employees of a large international organization to express their “best selves,” in that they encouraged their employees not to censor or withhold their input or perspectives. This communicated to the employees that all inputs were valued and important, and resulted in decreased experiences of stereotype threat among employees. Wiesenfeld et al. (1999) simulated an organizational layoff, in which a confederate was unfairly excused from further participation in the experiment. Results indicated that witnessing the unfair treatment, which is theorized to threaten self-integrity, inhibited performance on a subsequent task. Conversely, when the layoff was perceived as fair, participants were less likely to report self-consciousness as opposed to the unfair condition. In other words, when affected employees perceive a threat to their self-esteem, they alter how they evaluate themselves and exhibit performance detriments.

Organizations can implement brief values-affirmation interventions by providing employees with opportunities to express their values and things important in their non-work life that may boost their sense of belonging to the organization. For example, opening a business meeting by asking for announcements about recent life events such as birthdays, births, weddings, graduations, and other such positive activities highlights that organizations care about the whole person and reminds employees of the broader spectrum of their values besides their contribution to the workplace (see Lepper and Woolverton, 2002 ). Sharing such personal stories will likely improve interpersonal relationships among employees and with supervisors, thus improving sense of belonging to the organization ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ).

Utility-Value Interventions

Harackiewicz et al. (2015) find one reason for underachievement in academic environments is that students may not value their coursework or feel engaged in the learning process ( Harackiewicz et al., 2015 ). Utility-value interventions aim to increase value and engagement in coursework and can combat the tendency to discount and devalue academics among students who experience stereotype threat. To be effective, such interventions must help participants value the task and believe that they can succeed at the task. Finding utility-value in the task means that individuals see the importance and usefulness of the task to accomplish their goals, both in the immediate situations and in their lives.

Harackiewicz et al. (2015) conducted an academic intervention to increase utility-value in science students by having them complete a short writing assignment in which they explained how the material they were learning (math or science) was relevant to their lives and career goals. The intervention increased perceptions of utility-value and interest, especially for students who were low in expected or actual classroom performance. Views of utility-value mediated the relationship between interests in the domain and academic performance in the domain. This intervention has been effectively implemented with first generation college students, women in biology, and racial minority students, resulting in higher end-of-semester grades. Other research finds that perception of utility-values in coursework is positively correlated with hard work, interest, and performance ( Harackiewicz et al., 2008 ; Hulleman et al., 2008 ).

To our knowledge, utility-value interventions have not been implemented in the workplace. However, like values-affirmation interventions, many field studies are first conducted in education settings and later applied to organizational settings. A utility-value intervention would be useful for organizations when employees show lower motivation or interest in their work, particularly if they are performing poorly in a challenging domain like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). For example, when learning a difficult task employees can be asked to think about how the new learning will help them accomplish their work goals, but also how it is relevant to life outside of work. However, it is important that utility-value interventions are employee-generated. That is, having supervisors tell employees that a new task is valuable is not effective and may backfire, leading to lower employee performance on the task and less interest (see Canning and Harackiewicz, 2015 ). A combination of direct communication about the task utility and allowing employees to self-generate the value and utility of the task is most effective. For employees lower in confidence in the task, it is more effective to apply the utility and value of the task to everyday life situations rather than to the work domain ( Canning and Harackiewicz, 2015 ).

Belonging Interventions

When women and racial minorities are underrepresented in the workplace, they may experience belonging uncertainty ( Walton and Cohen, 2007 ). When facing challenges and setbacks, members of underrepresented groups can interpret struggles as a sign that “people like me don’t belong here” ( Walton and Cohen, 2007 ) and may feel that they alone are experiencing struggles. Belonging interventions share stories with underrepresented groups to dispel the belief that they alone feel isolated or that their difficulties are unique to their gender or racial group ( Walton et al., 2015b ). In academic field settings, college freshmen were given information that most college freshmen struggle with their sense of belonging in the beginning of college but that this uncertainly subsides and they develop a sense of belonging. Further, students were told that feeling a lack of belonging is experienced by all college students’ regardless of their race or gender. Compared to a control group, students who received the belonging intervention had higher GPAs throughout the entire duration of their college years ( Walton and Cohen, 2011 ). Like reattribution training, the belonging intervention shaped the way college students interpreted their college experiences.

A naturalistic study conducted with science faculty members at a large university found evidence for belonging uncertainty ( Holleran et al., 2011 ). Interactions among male and female faculty members were monitored for content and participants were asked to rate the competencies of those with whom they interacted. Results indicated that men were much less likely to engage in conversation regarding research with women compared to men, and when such conversations were carried out, women were generally regarded as less competent. No such competence contrasts were present for men. This imbalanced treatment appeared to evoke disengagement among women, such that inequity in socialization prompted a feeling of not belonging to the rest of the workgroup. This mirrors much of the belongingness literature regarding stereotype threat, in that performance and engagement tend to suffer for individuals who are not viewed as belonging to the group ( Holleran et al., 2011 ).

Communal Goal Affordances and Interdependence

Two additional areas related to stereotype threat are closely tied to sense of belonging in university or the workplace and personal values. Research on communal goal affordances finds that women may be underrepresented in many male-dominated fields (e.g., STEM) because they do not believe these careers can meet their goals of nurturing and helping others ( Diekman et al., 2010 ). A distinct but related concept is valuing interdependence, that underrepresented students, and by extension employees, may not see Western organizational values of independence as congruent with their values of cultural interdependence ( Stephens et al., 2012b ). This section reviews research and interventions on communal goal affordances, and then interdependence and cultural mismatch.

Current research suggests that women and racial minorities may experience stereotype threat in male- and majority race-dominated domains and avoid STEM disciplines because they do not see their personal life goals and cultural values as congruent with the expected quality of life of a STEM student, scientist, or engineer ( Diekman et al., 2010 ; Smith et al., 2014 , 2015 ; Thoman et al., 2015 ). Many women and racial minorities have communal goals, or an orientation to nurture others, and are more likely to endorse communal goals then men and Caucasians ( Diekman et al., 2010 ; Smith et al., 2014 ; Thoman et al., 2015 ). Societal stereotypes of STEM disciplines suggest that scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are typically male, work in isolation in a laboratory, value competitiveness, and have little time for family ( Barbercheck, 2001 ). Stereotypes of scientists make STEM unappealing fields of study or work for many women ( Cheryan et al., 2009 ; Cheryan, 2012 ) and racial minorities, particularly those with communal goals ( Diekman et al., 2010 ; Smith et al., 2014 ; Thoman et al., 2015 ).

One line of research examined stereotype threat through the lens of communal goals and utility-values (discussed in the previous section). Smith et al. (2015) found experiences of stereotype threat were negatively related to college women’s science identity, but this relationship was mediated by (lower) perceptions of the communal utility-value of science. Particularly among women in male-dominated majors (e.g., physics) compared to female-dominated STEM majors (e.g., biology), perceiving a career in science as less useful in reaching one’s goals to help others was related to greater experiences of stereotype threat and lower science identity ( Smith et al., 2015 ).

An intervention with science students combined a utility-value intervention with a communal goal intervention ( Brown et al., 2015 ). The culture of science emphasizes agentic values, which can deter women and minorities from pursuing STEM education and careers. Brown et al. (2015) found an intervention emphasizing the communal utility-value of science education, particularly addressing the desire to help others, increased students’ motivation to succeed in science.

The communal goals literature has implications for organizations in STEM fields that want to recruit a diverse workforce and support them in the workplace. It is important for organizations to communicate valuing communal goals and providing employees with opportunities to conduct work that will help the community. As with diversity policies, this can be accomplish through websites, brochures, and job descriptions. Many companies already have such opportunities in place, and contribute to local communities as part of public relations efforts. Employers should know that women, particularity in male-dominated occupations, may perceive greater fit with the organization, and therefore greater job satisfaction and performance ( Spanjol et al., 2014 ; Svyantek et al., 2015 ), if they having the opportunities to reach their communal goals.

A related value that can be undermined in academic and workplace settings, and decrease sense of belonging in organizations is interdependence. Research finds that low-income, first generation college students, and racial minorities are more likely to take an interdependent worldview, compared to an independent worldview, than middle class majorities ( Stephens et al., 2012a ). Consistent with US culture’s emphasis on independence and agency ( Markus and Kitayama, 2003 ), institutions of higher education promote an independent worldview ( Stephens et al., 2012a ). Underrepresented students may perceive a cultural mismatch and lack of fit with US universities, which predicts lower sense of belonging and academic performance ( Stephens et al., 2012a ).

To address this cultural mismatch in higher education, Stephens et al. (2012a) implemented a brief intervention to reframe universities’ values as fostering interdependence and tested the effects on first generation college students’ performance. During orientation, new students were randomly assigned a welcome letter from the University president that described the university’s promotion of independent or interdependent learning norms. First generation college students who received the interdependent letter had higher performance on an academic task. Further, the type of letter received affected first generation college students’ perceptions of task difficulty, linking a cultural mismatch to greater perceived difficulty and a cultural match to less difficulty. For first generation college students, those who received an interdependent letter and perceived the academic task as less difficult had better performance compared to first generation students receiving an independence letter ( Stephens et al., 2012a ).

The possible cultural mismatch for low-income and racial minority employees should be a concern for organizations. Organizations that promote an individualistic worldview may similarly undermine employees’ interdependence values and inadvertently alienate a segment of the workforce. The Stephens et al. (2012a) intervention could be adapted to the workplace by communicating the organizations’ value of interdependence through websites and new hire letters.

In sum, organizations can decrease underrepresented employees’ experiences of stereotype threat and increase sense of belonging by being aware of employees’ communal and interdependence goals and values. As previously stated, an all-inclusive multicultural approach is most effective for employees from all backgrounds ( Plaut et al., 2011 ). When adopting diversity missions, philosophies, and policies, organizations can express their value of contributions from all groups, majority and minority, by including statements on how working in the organization can meet communal goals and the value placed on interdependent work.

Discussing Stereotype Threat

A final intervention to reduce stereotype threat in the workplace is to simply talk about it. Johns et al. (2005) explicitly told students about stereotype threat and feelings of anxiety. The researchers stated, “It’s important to keep in mind that if you are feeling anxious while taking this test, this anxiety could be the result of these negative stereotypes that are widely known in society and have nothing to do with your actual ability to do well on the tes” ( Johns et al., 2005 , p. 176). As a result of these instructions, women did not underperform on a math test in the stereotype threat condition. Another study found that instructing participants under stereotype threat that their anxiety may actually enhance their test performance eliminated the effect of threat ( Johns et al., 2008 ). These studies suggest that providing people with external attributions for experiencing anxiety during evaluative performance situations may help them regulate the anxiety and reduce or eliminate stereotype threat.

Directly confronting stereotype threat can create stereotype reactance in which individuals are motivated to disprove the stereotype ( Kray et al., 2001 ; Kray and Shirako, 2012 ). Kray et al. (2001 , 2004 ) demonstrated that discussing stereotype threat created stereotype reactance and women performed better in negotiations ( Kray et al., 2001 , 2004 ) and in entrepreneurship domains ( Gupta et al., 2008 ). Kray and Shirako (2012) suggest that organizational leaders can help reduce stereotype threat by actively managing the messages employees hear regarding what traits are necessary to perform well on tasks and ensuring that stereotypes are not activated or endorsed in the workplace.

A Note of Caution

Researchers note that for interventions to be effective, an indirect approach should be taken ( Robinson, 2010 ; Cohen et al., 2012 ). The interventions should not be advertised as a means to improve performance or well-being, as this may dampen their effects or backfire ( Sherman et al., 2009 ). For example, employees should not be labeled as “in need” of a stereotype threat intervention, which is associated with negative consequences ( Schneider et al., 1996 ). In the workplace, minorities who are perceived to have been hired or promoted because of affirmative action are stigmatized ( Leslie et al., 2014 ), likewise minorities who believe they were beneficiaries of affirmative action are less satisfied and may have lower job performance ( Leslie et al., 2014 ). Instead, interventions should be subtle, include all employees, not just minorities, and be embedded in existing workplace activities (e.g., onboarding, training, department meetings; Cohen et al., 2012 ).

Interventions should be focused on addressing the psychological needs and motivational processes on which they are based ( Cohen et al., 2012 ). Interventions developed based on anecdotal evidence or intuition may backfire and create more threat (e.g., Dweck, 1999 ; Schneider et al., 1996 ). Timing of the interventions is also a factor to consider. Research is still underway to address how timing affects intervention effectiveness ( Cohen et al., 2012 ). Interventions that focus on early stages (e.g., onboarding) serve a prevention function to intervene before the onset of stereotype threat, for example when employees are still developing their initial perceptions of the workplace. Interventions may be implemented after a problem has already been identified and can disrupt the downward spiral, for example after a merger or during a mid-quarter progress meeting ( Cohen et al., 2012 ). It is important to note that stereotype threat interventions alone may not boost employee performance, but instead may prevent decrements in performance. Effective interventions must be coupled with opportunities for growth and resources to provide proper training for employees. That is, the interventions will not provide employees with the necessary abilities to perform well, they merely help employees reconstrue the workplace environment in ways that allow their highest potential to surface.

Finally, not all well-developed diversity policies will have the intended positive effects on diversifying the workforce and helping minority employees feel welcome. Lab based research finds that organizations with diversity policies may be seen as fair when there is objective evidence of bias ( Brady et al., 2015 ). That is, the mere presence of a diversity policy may lead people to believe that an organization’s actual practices are fair and undermine employee’s claims of discrimination ( Dover et al., 2014 ). Further, organizations that have received diversity award may be perceived as fair despite evidence of unfair practices ( Kaiser et al., 2013 ). Organizations that are serious about implementing effective diversity policies and practices should appoint a diversity and inclusion officer with expertise in diversity science ( Plaut, 2010 ). We, and others, argue that knowledge of employment and discrimination law is not sufficient. An expert in diversity science, and the psychology behind diversity policies and practices, is needed to fully utilize effective policies and practices to achieve diversity and inclusion in organizations ( Plaut, 2010 ).

Summary, Limitations, and Future Directions

In this review we have argued the recent question of scholarly debate ( Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ), “Is stereotype threat a useful construct for organizational psychology research and practice?” reflects a research-practice gap in I/O psychology. We and others ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ) argue that stereotype threat research is highly relevant to the field of I/O psychology and should be at the forefront of research on diversity and inclusion. Throughout the review we described several field studies both within education and workplace environments. However, we recognize a dearth of studies in workplaces and this gap needs to be addressed in future research ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kalokerinos et al., 2014 ).

This review provided evidence that stereotype threat affects women and racial minorities in important ways besides performance including affecting domain identification, job engagement, career aspiration, and openness to feedback. Stereotype threat is also relevant in domains beyond personnel selection including leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiations, and competitiveness. It is important to note that our review focused primarily on cognitive stereotypes and workplace behaviors beyond performance ( Spencer et al., 2015 ). Recent research suggests that non-cognitive stereotypes have been largely ignored in the organizational stereotype threat literature ( Dhanani and Wolcott, 2014 ). For example, the stereotype of African Americans as aggressive may affect African Americans’ workplace behaviors (e.g., withholding information or being less assertive) because of stereotype threat. This reflects a cognitive bias in the stereotype threat literature and future research should explore the role of non-cognitive stereotypes in stereotype threat in the workplace.

In this review we focused primarily on workplace behaviors other than performance, which resulted in excluding research on age-based stereotype threat and job performance ( von Hippel et al., 2013 ; Cox, 2014 ; Kulik, 2014 ). von Hippel et al. (2013) found that older employees who experienced age-based stereotype threat reported more negative job attitudes and poorer work mental health. Negative job attitudes predicted greater intentions to resign or retire. The most common stereotypes associated with older adults are primarily cognitive or physical such as having poor memory, slower processing, reduced executive functions, and less physical speed and strength ( Cuddy et al., 2005 ). To our knowledge, research has not examined the effects of age-based stereotype threat on non-performance outcomes such as leadership, entrepreneurship, negotiations, and competitiveness, thus literature on age-based stereotype threat was omitted. As Cox (2014) and Kulik (2014) argue, age-based stereotype threat is an understudied area and is critical for the future of organizational psychology as the workforce ages and generations intermix in the workplace. Finally, there are other types of stigmas relevant to workplace stereotype threat that were not discussed include obese employees ( Carlson and Seacat, 2014 ) and employees with non-traditional work histories ( Melloy and Liu, 2014 )

We concluded the review with examples from field-tested interventions that implementing brief, low-cost workplace interventions to reduce stereotype threat is feasible. Many of the psychological processes underlying threat can be addressed in onboarding and training programs. For example, onboarding programs can implement reattribution training and belongingness interventions and a few examples were provided. Good practices in new hire training and onboarding often already reflect some of these principles ( Klein and Polin, 2012 ).

Where Do We Go From Here?

Although the evidence suggests that stereotype threat is highly likely to occur in workplace settings, more evidence is needed to document its occurrence (see Hall et al., 2015 ; von Hippel et al., 2015 ). In addition, some research questions remain unanswered regarding whether boundary conditions found in the lab apply in the field. As previously stated, stereotype threat does not affect all minority groups equally ( Schmader et al., 2008 ; Logel et al., 2012 ) as there are many moderating variables reflecting aspects of the situation and the person. Some of the features of the situation, such as task difficulty and task diagnosticity, or the person such as high domain identification, may not be present in non-lab settings such as the workplace ( Sackett and Ryan, 2012 ). Thus it is not clear that group identity must be high in evaluative situations with important consequences. Research needs to determine what impact the presence of absence of these variables has on stereotype threat effects in the workplace. In addition, the overemphasis on performance needs to be remedied by focusing on other outcomes important in the workplace ( Kray and Shirako, 2012 ; Kang and Inzlicht, 2014 ; Spencer et al., 2015 ).

Two additional areas for future research that seem to be understudied concern clarifying the construct of stereotype threat ( Shapiro and Neuberg, 2007 ; Voyles et al., 2014 ; Finkelstein et al., 2015 ) and conceptualizing measurement ( Xavier et al., 2014 ). First, Voyles et al. (2014) argue that a similar body of literature on metastereotypes has been ignored in the stereotype literature and the stereotype threat literature includes some construct overlap with metastereotypes. Metastereotypes are people’s beliefs about what stereotypes others hold about them ( Voyles et al., 2014 ). Therefore, metastereotypes must precede stereotype threat because stereotyped groups must believe that the perceiver holds a negative stereotype about their social group. Conceptualized this way, metastereotypes are relevant at the stereotype activation phase and stereotype threat is the reaction to the metastereotype. Future research should continue to clarify these concepts and examine the specific processes through which they operate.

Related to metastereotypes is a concern regarding how we measure self-reported experiences of stereotype threat ( Xavier et al., 2014 ). Some of the most widely used measures seem to be measuring metastereotypes (“Some of my colleagues feel I’m not as committed because of my gender”; von Hippel et al., 2013 ) rather than fear about being judged with a stereotype (“I worry that if I perform poorly on this test, others will attribute my poor performance to my race”; Marx and Goff, 2005 ; Xavier et al., 2014 ). Further, Shapiro and Neuberg (2007) , Shapiro (2012) , Shapiro et al. (2013) have noted both construct confusion and measurement concerns in their multi-threat framework. Shapiro’s work demonstrates there are multiple forms of stereotype threat, for example threats to the self and threats to one’s group. The form of stereotype threat affects how it is measured ( Shapiro, 2012 ) and what interventions are most appropriate ( Shapiro et al., 2013 ).

In conclusion, research on stereotype threat is highly relevant to I/O psychology and ripe for future discoveries. What we have learned from lab and field studies is valuable for improving diversity and inclusion in organizations. Future research should continue examining the basic mechanisms and boundary conditions of stereotype threat and testing the effectiveness of interventions for the workplace.

Author Contributions

BC conceptualized the argument and organization of the review. Each author equally contributed to the content of the review.

The work contributing to this manuscript was supported by grants to the first author from the National Science Foundation (0734124) and the National Institutes of Health (R01GM094536). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

An earlier and abbreviated version of this work was presented at the 30th annual convention of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Philadelphia, PA, USA. The authors would like to thank Abdiel J. Flores, Breanna R. Wexler, Zachary W. Petzel, and Mindy Siebert for their feedback on an earlier draft, and the reviewers for their valuable insights.

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Keywords : stereotype threat, interventions, diversity, inclusion, workplace

Citation: Casad BJ and Bryant WJ (2016) Addressing Stereotype Threat is Critical to Diversity and Inclusion in Organizational Psychology. Front. Psychol. 7:8. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00008

Received: 02 October 2015; Accepted: 05 January 2016; Published: 20 January 2016.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2016 Casad and Bryant. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Bettina J. Casad, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Psychology

Volume 67, 2016, review article, stereotype threat.

Steven J. Spencer 1 , Christine Logel 2 , and Paul G. Davies 3
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1; email: [email protected] 2 Renison University College, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1; email: [email protected] 3 Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, V1V 1V7; email: [email protected]
Vol. 67:415-437 (Volume publication date January 2016) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-073115-103235
First published as a Review in Advance on September 10, 2015
© Annual Reviews

When members of a stigmatized group find themselves in a situation where negative stereotypes provide a possible framework for interpreting their behavior, the risk of being judged in light of those stereotypes can elicit a disruptive state that undermines performance and aspirations in that domain. This situational predicament, termed stereotype threat, continues to be an intensely debated and researched topic in educational, social, and organizational psychology. In this review, we explore the various sources of stereotype threat, the mechanisms underlying stereotype-threat effects (both mediators and moderators), and the consequences of this situational predicament, as well as the means through which society and stigmatized individuals can overcome the insidious effects of stereotype threat. Ultimately, we hope this review alleviates some of the confusion surrounding stereotype threat while also sparking further research and debate.

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Article Type: Review Article

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Strategies and resources about stereotype threat.

Teaching Resources
Inclusive and Anti-Racist Teaching
Inclusive Teaching

What is a stereotype threat?

A type of social identity threat that occurs when one fears being judged in terms of a group-based stereotype

What are the effects of stereotype threat?

Research suggests that when a student is in a performance situation with the potential to confirm negative stereotypes about the student’s identity, possible outcomes include:

Increased stress
Reduction in working memory, lessening capacity to focus on the task (Schmader & Johns, 2003)
Impaired performance and/or reduced sense of belonging in the field (Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2012; Steele & Aronson, 1995)

However, stereotype threat is also complex, with studies pointing to a differential impact on students (Nguyen & Ryan, 2008; Owens & Lynch, 2012).

How can stereotype threat be mitigated in the classroom?

Examine how you give feedback to students: To mitigate stereotype threat, critical feedback on assignments should emphasize: (1) reflection of a teacher’s high standards, (2) students’ potential to reach them, and (3) substantive feedback to improve. For example, a framing comment like the following can be adapted: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” (Steele, 2011; Yaeger et al., 2014).
Frame the purpose of assessments effectively: Emphasize that tests and assignments are a diagnostic of students’ current skill levels, which can be improved with practice, instead of a measure of permanent ability (Aronson, 2002).
Use reflective writing to normalize struggles. In one study, college students wrote letters to middle-school “pen pals” about how they overcame struggles to find success and later made taped speeches. One year later, participants in the intervention had more malleable beliefs about intelligence, enjoyment of academics, and higher GPAs, compared to control. (There were positive gains for all students but statistically significant gains only for African-American students.) (Aronson, Fried & Good, 2001)
Recognize the diversity of contributors to/members of the field. One study indicated that showing female STEM students images of female engineers and mathematicians significantly improved their attitudes, identification, self-efficacy, and career interest in STEM (Dasgupta, 2011), while another suggests that advanced peer mentors can positively influence women's self-concept in math (Stout, Dasgupta, Hunsinger, & McManus, 2011). (See also Walton & Cohen, 2011.)
Move course assessments away from timed, high-stakes tests. A study of over a half million students in U.S. STEM courses found that gender under-performance — i.e., women performing more poorly than would be predicted from their prior GPAs — was related to courses that "typically employ timed, high-stakes, and often multiple choice exams" (Matz et al., 2011). Courses with design- or writing-based assignments, as well as low-stakes quizzes, tended to have more equitable outcomes.

What are other resources to explore the phenomenon?

Killpack & Melón (2016). Toward Inclusive STEM Classrooms: What Personal Role Do Faculty Play? : This article offers a definition of stereotype threat and three strategies that instructors can use to mitigate it. Although written in a STEM education journal, the strategies are broadly applicable to other disciplines (e.g., if the collection of demographic information is needed during a survey or assessment, place those questions at the end).

Aronson, J. (2002). Stereotype threat: Contending and coping with unnerving expectations. In J. Aronson, Ed. I mproving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education (pp. 279-301). New York: Academic Press.

Aronson, J., Fried, C.B., & Good, C. (2001). Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 38(2): 113-125.

Dasgupta, N. (2011). Ingroup experts and peers as social vaccines who inoculate the self-concept: The stereotype inoculation model. Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory , 22:4: 231-246.

Good, C., Rattan, A., & Dweck, C.S. (2012). Why do women opt out? Sense of belonging and women’s representation in mathematics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 102(4): 700–717.

Matz, R.L., Koester, B.P., Fiorini, S., Grom, G., Shepard, L., Stangor, C.G., Weiner, B., & McKay, T. (2011). Patterns of gendered performance differences in large introductory courses at five research universities. AERA Open, 3 (4): 1-12.

Murphy, M.C., Steele, C.M., & Gross, J.J. (2007). Signaling threat: How situational cures affect women in math, science, and engineering settings. Psychological Science , 18(10): 879-885.

Nguyen, H.D., & Ryan, A.M. (2008). Does stereotype threat affect test performance of minorities and women? A meta-analysis of experimental evidence. Journal of Applied Psychology , 93(6): 1314-1334.

Owens, J., & Lynch, S.M. (2012). Black and Hispanic immigrants’ resilience against negative-ability racial stereotypes at selective colleges and universities in the United States. Sociology of Education , 85(4): 303-325.

Schmader, T., & Johns, M. (2003). Converging evidence that stereotype threat reduces working memory capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 85, 440-452.

Steele, C.M. (2011). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do . New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Steele, C.M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 69(5): 797-811.

Stout, J.G., Dasgupta, N., Hunsinger, M., & McManus, M.A. (2010). STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women's self-concept in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100 (2): 255-270.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science , 331, 1447-1451.

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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Psychology, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom

Charlotte R. Pennington,
Derek Heim,
Andrew R. Levy,
Derek T. Larkin

Published: January 11, 2016
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487
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This systematic literature review appraises critically the mediating variables of stereotype threat. A bibliographic search was conducted across electronic databases between 1995 and 2015. The search identified 45 experiments from 38 articles and 17 unique proposed mediators that were categorized into affective/subjective ( n = 6), cognitive ( n = 7) and motivational mechanisms ( n = 4). Empirical support was accrued for mediators such as anxiety, negative thinking, and mind-wandering, which are suggested to co-opt working memory resources under stereotype threat. Other research points to the assertion that stereotype threatened individuals may be motivated to disconfirm negative stereotypes, which can have a paradoxical effect of hampering performance. However, stereotype threat appears to affect diverse social groups in different ways, with no one mediator providing unequivocal empirical support. Underpinned by the multi-threat framework, the discussion postulates that different forms of stereotype threat may be mediated by distinct mechanisms.

Citation: Pennington CR, Heim D, Levy AR, Larkin DT (2016) Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0146487. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487

Editor: Marina A. Pavlova, University of Tuebingen Medical School, GERMANY

Received: June 23, 2015; Accepted: December 17, 2015; Published: January 11, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 Pennington et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The authors acknowledge support toward open access publishing by the Graduate School and the Department of Psychology at Edge Hill University. The funders had no role in the systematic review, data collection or analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The present review examines the mediators of stereotype threat that have been proposed over the past two decades. It appraises critically the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat as a function of the type of threat primed, the population studied, and the measures utilized to examine mediation and performance outcomes. Here, we propose that one reason that has precluded studies from finding firm evidence of mediation is the appreciation of distinct forms of stereotype threat.

Stereotype Threat: An Overview

Over the past two decades, stereotype threat has become one of the most widely researched topics in social psychology [ 1 , 2 ]. Reaching its 20 th anniversary, Steele and Aronson’s [ 3 ] original article has gathered approximately 5,000 citations and has been referred to as a 'modern classic' [ 4 , 5 , 6 ]. In stark contrast to theories of genetic intelligence [ 7 , 8 ] (and see [ 9 ] for debate), the theory of stereotype threat posits that stigmatized group members may underperform on diagnostic tests of ability through concerns about confirming a negative societal stereotype as self-characteristic [ 3 ]. Steele and Aronson [ 3 ] demonstrated that African American participants underperformed on a verbal reasoning test when it was presented as a diagnostic indicator of intellectual ability. Conversely, when the same test was presented as non-diagnostic of ability, they performed equivalently to their Caucasian peers. This seminal research indicates that the mere salience of negative societal stereotypes, which may magnify over time, can impede performance. The theory of stereotype threat therefore offers a situational explanation for the ongoing and intractable debate regarding the source of group differences in academic aptitude [ 1 ].

Stereotype threat has been used primarily to explain gaps in intellectual and quantitative test scores between African and European Americans [ 3 , 10 ] and women and men respectively [ 11 ]. However, it is important to acknowledge that many factors shape academic performance, and stereotype threat is unlikely to be the sole explanation for academic achievement gaps [ 12 ]. This is supported by research which has shown “pure” stereotype threat effects on a task in which a gender-achievement gap has not been previously documented [ 13 ], thus suggesting that performance decrements can be elicited simply by reference to a negative stereotype. Furthermore, stereotype threat effects may not be limited to social groups who routinely face stigmatizing attitudes. Rather, it can befall anyone who is a member of a group to which a negative stereotype applies [ 3 ]. For example, research indicates that Caucasian men, a group that have a relatively positive social status, underperform when they believe that their mathematical performance will be compared to that of Asian men [ 14 ]. White men also appear to perform worse than black men when motor tasks are related to 'natural athletic ability' [ 15 , 16 ]. From a theoretical standpoint, stereotype threat exposes how group stereotypes may shape the behavior of individuals in a way that endangers their performance and further reinforces the stereotype [ 10 ].

Over 300 experiments have illustrated the deleterious and extensive effects that stereotype threat can inflict on many different populations [ 17 ]. The possibility of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group is found to contribute to underperformance on a range of diverse tasks including intelligence [ 3 , 13 ], memory [ 18 , 19 ], mental rotation [ 20 – 23 ], and math tests [ 11 , 24 , 25 ], golf putting [ 26 ], driving [ 27 , 28 ] and childcare skills [ 29 ]. Given the generality of these findings, researchers have turned their efforts to elucidating the underlying mechanisms of this situational phenomenon.

Susceptibility to Stereotype Threat

Research has identified numerous moderators that make tasks more likely to elicit stereotype threat, and individuals more prone to experience it [ 30 , 31 ]. From a methodological perspective, stereotype threat effects tend to emerge on tasks of high difficulty and demand [ 32 , 33 ], however, the extent to which a task is perceived as demanding may be moderated by individual differences in working memory [ 34 ]. Additionally, stereotype threat may be more likely to occur when individuals are conscious of the stigma ascribed to their social group [ 32 , 35 ], believe the stereotypes about their group to be true [ 36 , 37 ], for those with low self-esteem [ 38 ], and an internal locus of control [ 39 ]. Research also indicates that individuals are more susceptible to stereotype threat when they identify strongly with their social group [ 40 , 41 , 42 ] and value the domain [ 10 , 13 , 15 , 33 , 43 ]. However, other research suggests that domain identification is not a prerequisite of stereotype threat effects [ 44 ] and may act as a strategy to overcome harmful academic consequences [ 45 , 46 ].

Mediators of Stereotype Threat

There has also been an exPLOSion of research into the psychological mediators of stereotype threat (c.f. [ 2 , 47 ] for reviews). In their comprehensive review, Schmader et al. [ 2 ] proposed an integrated process model, suggesting that stereotype threat heightens physiological stress responses and influences monitoring and suppression processes to deplete working memory efficiency. This provides an important contribution to the literature, signaling that multiple affective, cognitive and motivational processes may underpin the effects of stereotype threat on performance. However, the extent to which each of these variables has garnered empirical support remains unclear. Furthermore, prior research has overlooked the existence of distinct stereotype threats in the elucidation of mediating variables. Through the lens of the multi-threat framework [ 31 ], the current review distinguishes between different stereotype threat primes, which target either the self or the social group to assess the evidence base with regards to the existence of multiple stereotype threats that may be accounted for by distinct mechanisms.

A Multi-threat Approach to Mediation

Stereotype threat is typically viewed as a form of social identity threat: A situational predicament occurring when individuals perceive their social group to be devalued by others [ 48 , 49 , 50 ]. However, this notion overlooks how individuals may self-stigmatize and evaluate themselves [ 51 , 52 , 53 ] and the conflict people may experience between their personal and social identities [ 54 ]. More recently, researchers have distinguished between the role of the self and the social group in performance-evaluative situations [ 31 ]. The multi-threat framework [ 31 ] identifies six qualitatively distinct stereotype threats that manifest through the intersection of two dimensions: The target of the threat (i.e., is the stereotype applicable to one’s personal or social identity?) and the source of threat (i.e., who will judge performance; the in-group or the out-group?). Focusing on the target of the stereotype, individuals who experience a group-as-target threat may perceive that underperformance will confirm a negative societal stereotype regarding the abilities of their social group. Conversely, individuals who experience a self-as-target threat may perceive that stereotype-consistent performance will be viewed as self-characteristic [ 31 , 55 ]. Individuals may therefore experience either a self or group-based threat dependent on situational cues in the environment that heighten the contingency of a stereotyped identity [ 2 ].

Researchers also theorize that members of diverse stigmatized groups may experience different forms of stereotype threat [ 31 , 56 ], and that these distinct experiences may be mediated by somewhat different processes [ 31 , 57 ]. Indeed, there is some indirect empirical evidence to suggest that this may be the case. For example, Pavlova and colleagues [ 13 ] found that an implicit stereotype threat prime hampered women’s performance on a social cognition task. Conversely, men’s performance suffered when they were primed with an explicit gender-related stereotype. Moreover, Stone and McWhinnie [ 58 ] suggest that subtle stereotype threat cues (i.e., the gender of the experimenter) may evoke a tendency to actively monitor performance and avoid mistakes, whereas blatant stereotype threat cues (i.e., stereotype prime) create distractions that deplete working memory resources. Whilst different stereotype threat cues may simultaneously exert negative effects on performance, it is plausible that they are induced by independent mechanisms [ 58 ]. Nonetheless, insufficient evidence has prevented the multi-threat framework [ 31 ] to be evaluated empirically to date. It therefore remains to be assessed whether the same mechanisms are responsible for the effects of distinct stereotype threats on different populations and performance measures.

The current article offers the first systematic literature review aiming to: 1), identify and examine critically the proposed mediators of stereotype threat; 2), explore whether the effects of self-as-target or group-as-target stereotype threat on performance are the result of qualitatively distinct mediating mechanisms; and 3), evaluate whether different mediators govern different stereotyped populations.

Literature Search

A bibliographic search of electronic databases, such as PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Web of Knowledge, PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar was conducted between the cut-off dates of 1995 (the publication year of Steele & Aronson’s seminal article) and December 2015. A search string was developed by specifying the main terms of the phenomenon under investigation. Here, the combined key words of stereotype and threat were utilized as overarching search parameters and directly paired with either one of the following terms; mediator , mediating , mediate(s) , predictor , predicts , relationship or mechanism(s) . Additional references were retrieved by reviewing the reference lists of relevant journal articles. To control for potential publication bias [ 59 , 60 , 61 ], the lead author also enquired about any ‘in press’ articles by sending out a call for papers through the European Association for Social Psychology. The second author conducted a comparable search using the same criteria to ensure that no studies were overlooked in the original search. Identification of relevant articles and data extraction were conducted in line with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Statement (PRISMA; See S1 Table ) [ 62 ]. A literature search was conducted separately in each database and the records were exported to citation software, after which duplicates were removed. Relevant articles were screened by examining the title and abstract in line with the eligibility criteria. The remaining articles were assessed for eligibility by performing a full text review [ 63 , 64 ].

Eligibility Criteria.

Studies were selected based on the following criteria: 1), researchers utilized a stereotype threat manipulation; 2), a direct mediation analysis was conducted between stereotype threat and performance; 3), researchers found evidence of moderated-mediation, and 4), the full text was available in English. Articles were excluded on the following basis: 1), performance was not the dependent variable, 2), investigations of “stereotype lift”; 3), doctorate, dissertation and review articles (to avoid duplication of included articles); and 4), moderating variables. Articles that did not find any significant results in relation to stereotype threat effects were also excluded in order to capture reliable evidence of mediation [ 65 ]. See Table 1 for details of excluded articles.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.t001

Distinguishing Different Stereotype Threats.

The current review distinguished between different experiences of stereotype threat by examining each stereotype threat manipulation. Self-as-target threats were categorized on the basis that participants focused on the test as a measure of personal ability whereas group-as-target threats were classified on the basis that participants perceived performance to be diagnostic of their group’s ability [ 31 ].

A total of 45 studies in 38 articles were qualitatively synthesized, uncovering a total of 17 distinct proposed mediators. See Fig 1 for process of article inclusion (full details of article exclusion can be viewed in S1 Supporting Information ). These mediators were categorized into affective/subjective ( n = 6), cognitive ( n = 7) or motivational mechanisms ( n = 4). Effect sizes for mediational findings are described typically through informal descriptors, such as complete , perfect , or partial [ 66 ]. With this in mind, the current findings are reported in terms of complete or partial mediation. Complete mediation indicates that the relationship between stereotype threat ( X ) and performance ( Y ) completely disappears when a mediator ( M ) is added as a predictor variable [ 66 ]. Partial mediation refers to instances in which a significant direct effect remains between stereotype threat and performance when controlling for the mediator, suggesting that additional variables may further explain this relationship [ 67 ]. Instances of moderated mediation are also reported, which occurs when the strength of mediation is contingent on the level of a moderating variable [ 68 ]. The majority of included research utilized a group-as-target prime ( n = 36, 80%) compared to a self-as-target prime ( n = 6; 13.33%). Three studies (6.66%) were uncategorized as they employed subtle stereotype threat primes, for example, manipulating the group composition of the testing environment.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.g001

Affective/Subjective Mechanisms

Researchers have conceptualized stereotype threat frequently as a fear, apprehension or anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group [ 3 , 69 , 70 ]. Accordingly, many affective and subjective variables such as anxiety, individuation tendencies, evaluation apprehension, performance expectations, explicit stereotype endorsement and self-efficacy have been proposed to account for the stereotype threat-performance relationship.

Steele and Aronson’s [ 3 ] original study did not find self-reported anxiety to be a significant mediator of the effects of a self-relevant stereotype on African American’s intellectual performance. Extending this work, Spencer et al. (Experiment 3, [ 11 ]) found that anxiety was not predictive of the effects that a negative group stereotype had on women’s mathematical achievement, with further research confirming this [ 14 , 44 , 71 ]. Additional studies have indicated that self-reported anxiety does not influence the impact of self-as-target stereotype elicitation on African American’s cognitive ability [ 72 ], white students’ athletic skills [ 15 ], and group-as-target stereotype threat on older adults’ memory recall [ 18 , 32 ].

Research also suggests that anxiety may account for one of multiple mediators in the stereotype threat-performance relationship. In a field study, Chung and colleagues [ 73 ] found that self-reported state anxiety and specific self-efficacy sequentially mediated the influence of stereotype threat on African American’s promotional exam performance. This finding is supported by Mrazek et al. [ 74 ] who found that anxiety and mind-wandering sequentially mediated the effects of stereotype threat on women’s mathematical ability. Laurin [ 75 ] also found that self-reported somatic anxiety partially mediated the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s motor performance. Nevertheless, it is viable to question whether this finding is comparable to other studies as stereotype threat had a facilitating effect on performance.

The mixed results regarding anxiety as a potential mediator of performance outcomes may be indicative of various boundary conditions that enhance stereotype threat susceptibility. Consistent with this claim, Gerstenberg, Imhoff and Schmitt (Experiment 3 [ 76 ]) found that women who reported a fragile math self-concept solved fewer math problems under group-as-target stereotype threat and this susceptibility was mediated by increased anxiety. This moderated-mediation suggests that women with a low academic self-concept may be more vulnerable to stereotype threat, with anxiety underpinning its effect on mathematical performance.

Given that anxiety may be relatively difficult to detect via self-report measures [ 3 , 29 ], researchers have utilized indirect measures. For instance, Bosson et al. [ 29 ] found that physiological anxiety mediated the effects of stereotype threat on homosexual males’ performance on an interpersonal task. Nevertheless, this effect has not been replicated for the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on older adults’ memory recall [ 32 ] and self-as-target threat on children’s writing ability [ 77 ].

Individuation tendencies.

Steele and Aronson [ 3 ] proposed that stereotype threat might occur when individuals perceive a negative societal stereotype to be a true representation of personal ability. Based on this, Keller and Sekaquaptewa [ 78 ] examined whether gender-related threats (i.e., group-as-target threat) influenced women to individuate their personal identity (the self) from their social identity (female). Results revealed that participants underperformed on a spatial ability test when they perceived that they were a single in-group representative (female) in a group of males. Moreover, stereotype threat was partially mediated by ‘individuation tendencies’ in that gender-based threats influenced women to disassociate their self from the group to lessen the applicability of the stereotype. The authors suggest that this increased level of self-focused attention under solo status conditions is likely related to increased levels of anxiety.

Evaluation apprehension.

Steele and Aronson [ 3 ] also suggested that individuals might apprehend that they will confirm a negative stereotype in the eyes of out-group members. Despite this, Mayer and Hanges [ 72 ] found that evaluation apprehension did not mediate the effects of a self-as-target stereotype threat on African American’s cognitive ability. Additional studies also indicate that evaluation apprehension does not mediate the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance [ 11 , 79 ].

Performance expectations.

Under stereotype threat, individuals may evaluate the subjective likelihood of success depending on their personal resources. As these personal resources are typically anchored to group-level expectations, in-group threatening information (i.e., women are poor at math) may reduce personal expectancies to achieve and diminish performance [ 80 ]. Testing this prediction, Cadinu et al. (Experiment 1 [ 80 ]) found that women solved fewer math problems when they were primed with a negative group-based stereotype relative to those who received a positive or no stereotype. Furthermore, performance expectancies partially mediated the effect of group-as-target threat on math performance, revealing that negative information was associated with lower expectancies. A second experiment indicated further that performance expectancies partially mediated the effects of group-as-target threat on Black participants’ verbal ability. Research by Rosenthal, Crisp and Mein-Woei (Experiment 2 [ 81 ]) also found that performance expectancies partially mediated the effects of self-based stereotypes on women’s mathematical performance. However, rather than decreasing performance expectancies, women under stereotype threat reported higher predictions for performance relative to a control condition.

Research has extended this work to examine the role of performance expectancies in diverse stigmatized populations. For example, Hess et al. [ 32 ] found evidence of moderated-mediation for the effects of a group-as-target stereotype threat on older adults’ memory recall. Here, the degree to which performance expectancies mediated stereotype threat effects was moderated by participants’ education. That is, elderly individuals with higher levels of education showed greater susceptibility to stereotype threat. These findings add weight to the assertion that lowered performance expectations may account for the effects of stereotype threat on performance, especially among individuals who identify strongly with the ability domain. Conversely, Appel et al. [ 43 ] found that performance expectancies do not mediate the effects of group-based stereotype threat among highly identified women in the domains of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Further research suggests that stereotype threat can be activated through subtle cues in the environment rather than explicit stereotype activation [ 58 , 82 ]. It is therefore plausible that expectancies regarding performance may be further undermined when stigmatized in-group members are required to perform a stereotype-relevant task in front of out-group members. Advancing this suggestion, Sekaquaptewa and Thompson [ 82 ] examined the interactive effects of solo status and stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance. Results revealed that women underperformed when they completed a quantitative examination in the presence of men (solo status) and under stereotype threat. However, whilst performance expectancies partially mediated the relationship between group composition and mathematical ability, they did not mediate the effects of stereotype threat on performance.

Explicit stereotype endorsement.

Research has examined whether targeted individuals’ personal endorsement of negative stereotypes is associated with underperformance. For example, Leyens and colleagues [ 83 ] found that men underperformed on an affective task when they were told that they were not as apt as women in processing affective information. Against predictions, however, stereotype endorsement was not found to be a significant intermediary between stereotype threat and performance. Other studies also indicate that stereotype endorsement is not an underlying mechanism of the effects of self-as-target [ 3 ] and group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical aptitude [ 11 , 84 ].

Self-efficacy.

Research suggests that self-efficacy can have a significant impact on an individual’s motivation and performance [ 85 , 86 , 87 ], and may be influenced by environmental cues [ 88 ]. Accordingly, it has been proposed that the situational salience of a negative stereotype may reduce an individual’s self-efficacy. As mentioned, Chung et al. [ 73 ] found that state anxiety and specific self-efficacy accounted for deficits in African American’s performance on a job promotion exam. However, additional studies indicate that self-efficacy does not mediate the effects of self-as-target threat on African American’s cognitive ability [ 72 ] and group-as-target threat on women’s mathematical performance [ 11 ].

Cognitive Mechanisms

Much research has proposed that affective and subjective variables underpin the harmful effects that stereotype threat exerts on performance [ 89 ]. However, other research posits that stereotype threat may influence performance detriments through its demands on cognitive processes [ 2 , 89 , 90 ]. Specifically, researchers have examined whether stereotype threat is mediated by; working memory, cognitive load, thought suppression, mind-wandering, negative thinking, cognitive appraisals and implicit stereotype endorsement.

Working memory.

Schmader and Johns [ 89 ] proposed that performance-evaluative situations might reduce working memory capacity as stereotype-related thoughts consume cognitive resources. In three studies, they examined whether working memory accounted for the influence of a group-as-target threat on women’s and Latino American’s mathematical ability. Findings indicated that both female and Latino American participants solved fewer mathematical problems compared to participants in a non-threat control condition. Furthermore, reduced working memory capacity, measured via an operation span task [ 91 ], mediated the deleterious effects of stereotype threat on math performance. Supporting this, Rydell et al. (Experiment 3 [ 92 ]) found that working memory mediated the effects of a group-relevant stereotype on women’s mathematical performance when they perceived their performance to be evaluated in line with their gender identity. Here results also showed that these performance decrements were eliminated when women were concurrently primed with a positive and negative social identity (Experiment 2).

Further research has also examined how stereotype threat may simultaneously operate through cognitive and emotional processes. Across four experiments, Johns et al. [ 90 ] found that stereotype threat was accountable for deficits in women’s verbal, intellectual and mathematical ability. Moreover, emotion regulation − characterized as response-focused coping − mediated the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on performance by depleting executive resources.

Nonetheless, executive functioning is made up of more cognitive processes than the construct of working memory [ 93 ]. Acknowledging this, Rydell et al. [ 93 ] predicted that updating (i.e., the ability to maintain and update information in the face of interference) would mediate stereotype threat effects. They further hypothesized that inhibition (i.e., the ability to inhibit a dominant response) and shifting (i.e., people’s ability to switch between tasks) should not underpin this effect. Results indicated that women who experienced an explicit group-as-target threat displayed reduced mathematical performance compared to a control condition. Consistent with predictions, only updating mediated the stereotype threat-performance relationship. These results suggest that the verbal ruminations associated with a negative stereotype may interfere with women’s ability to maintain and update the calculations needed to solve difficult math problems.

The extent to which updating accounts for stereotype threat effects in diverse populations, however, is less straightforward. For example, Hess et al. [ 32 ] found that working memory, measured by a computational span task, did not predict the relationship between group-based stereotype threat and older participants’ memory performance.

Cognitive load.

There is ample evidence to suggest that stereotype threat depletes performance by placing higher demands on mental resources [ 89 , 93 ]. These demands may exert additional peripheral activity (i.e., emotional regulation) that can further interfere with task performance [ 90 ]. In order to provide additional support for this notion, Croizet et al. [ 94 ] examined whether increased mental load, measured by participants’ heart rate, mediated the effects of stereotype threat on Psychology majors’ cognitive ability. Here, Psychology majors were primed that they had lower intelligence compared to Science majors. Results indicated that this group-as-target stereotype threat undermined Psychology majors’ cognitive ability by triggering a psychophysiological mental load. Moreover, this increased mental load mediated the effects of stereotype threat on cognitive performance.

Thought suppression.

Research suggests that individuals who experience stereotype threat may be aware that their performance will be evaluated in terms of a negative stereotype and, resultantly, engage in efforts to disprove it [ 3 , 94 , 95 ]. This combination of awareness and avoidance may lead to attempts to suppress negative thoughts that consequently tax the cognitive resources needed to perform effectively. In four experiments, Logel et al. (Experiment 2 [ 95 ]) examined whether stereotype threat influences stereotypical thought suppression by counterbalancing whether participants completed a stereotype-relevant lexical decision task before or after a mathematical test. Results indicated that women underperformed on the test in comparison to men. Interestingly, women tended to suppress stereotypical words when the lexical decision task was administered before the math test, but showed post-suppression rebound of stereotype-relevant words when this task was completed afterwards. Mediational analyses revealed that only pre-test thought suppression partially mediated the effects of stereotype threat on performance.

Mind-wandering.

Previous research suggests that the anticipation of a stereotype-laden test may produce a greater proportion of task-related thoughts and worries [ 93 , 95 ]. Less research has examined the role of thoughts unrelated to the task in hand as a potential mediator of stereotype threat effects. Directly testing this notion, Mrazek et al. (Experiment 2 [ 74 ]) found that a group-as-target stereotype threat hampered women’s mathematical performance in comparison to a control condition. Furthermore, although self-report measures of mind-wandering resulted in null findings, indirect measures revealed that women under stereotype threat showed a marked decrease in attention. Mediation analyses indicated further that stereotype threat heightened anxiety which, in turn, increased mind-wandering and contributed to the observed impairments in math performance. Despite these findings, other studies have found no indication that task irrelevant thoughts mediate the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance [ 24 ] and African American participants’ cognitive ability [ 72 ].

Negative thinking.

Schmader and Johns’ [ 89 ] research suggests that the performance deficits observed under stereotype threat may be influenced by intrusive thoughts. Further research [ 74 ] has included post-experimental measures of cognitive interference to assess the activation of distracting thoughts under stereotype threat. However, the content of these measures are predetermined by the experimenter and do not allow participants to report spontaneously on their experiences under stereotype threat. Overcoming these issues, Cadinu and colleagues [ 96 ] asked women to list their current thoughts whilst taking a difficult math test under conditions of stereotype threat. Results revealed that female participants underperformed when they perceived a mathematical test to be diagnostic of gender differences. Moreover, participants in the stereotype threat condition listed more negative thoughts relative to those in the control condition, with intrusive thoughts mediating the relationship between stereotype threat and poor math performance. It seems therefore that negative performance-related thoughts may consume working memory resources to impede performance.

Cognitive appraisal.

Other research suggests that individuals may engage in coping strategies to offset the performance implications of a negative stereotype. One indicator of coping is cognitive appraisal, whereby individuals evaluate the significance of a situation as well as their ability to control it [ 97 ]. Here, individuals may exert more effort on a task when the situational presents as a challenge, but may disengage from the task if they evaluate the situation as a threat [ 98 , 99 ]. Taking this into consideration, Berjot, Roland-Levy and Girault-Lidvan [ 100 ] proposed that targeted members might be more likely to perceive a negative stereotype as a threat to their group identity rather than as a challenge to disprove it. They found that North African secondary school students underperformed on a visuospatial task when they perceived French students to possess superior perceptual-motor skills. Contrary to predictions, threat appraisal did not mediate the relation between stereotype threat and performance. Rather, perceiving the situation as a challenge significantly mediated the stereotype threat-performance relationship. Specifically, participants who appraised stereotype threat as a challenge performed better than those who did not. These results therefore suggest that individuals may strive to confront, rather than avoid, intellectual challenges and modify the stereotype held by members of a relevant out-group in a favorable direction [ 101 ].

Implicit stereotype endorsement.

Situational cues that present as a threat may increase the activation of automatic associations between a stereotyped concept (i.e., female), negative attributes (i.e., bad), and the performance domain (i.e., math; [ 102 ]). Implicit measures may be able to detect recently formed automatic associations between concepts and stereotypical attributes that are not yet available to explicitly self-report [ 103 ]. In a study of 240 six-year old children, Galdi et al. [ 103 ] examined whether implicit stereotype threat endorsement accounted for the effects of stereotype threat on girls’ mathematical performance. Consistent with the notion that automatic associations can precede conscious beliefs, results indicated that girls acquire implicit math-gender stereotypes before they emerge at an explicit level. Specifically, girls showed stereotype-consistent automatic associations between the terms ‘boy-mathematics’ and ‘girl-language’, which mediated stereotype threat effects.

Motivational Mechanisms

Most of the initial work on the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat has focused on affective and cognitive processes. More recently, research has begun to examine whether individuals may be motivated to disconfirm a negative stereotype, with this having a paradoxical effect of harming performance [ 104 , 105 , 106 ]. To this end, research has elucidated the potential role of effort, self-handicapping, dejection, vigilance, and achievement goals.

Effort/motivation.

Underpinned by the “mere effort model” [ 104 ], Jamieson and Harkins [ 105 ] examined whether motivation plays a proximal role in the effect of stereotype threat on women’s math performance. Here they predicted that stereotype threat would lead participants to use a conventional problem solving approach (i.e., use known equations to compute an answer), which would facilitate performance on ‘solve’ problems, but hamper performance on ‘comparison’ problems. Results supported this hypothesis, indicating that stereotype threat debilitated performance on comparison problems as participants employed the dominant, but incorrect, solution approach. Furthermore, this incorrect solving approach mediated the effect of stereotype threat on comparison problem performance. This suggests that stereotype threat motivates participants to perform well, which increases activation of a dominant response to the task. However, as this dominant approach does not always guarantee success, the work indicates that different problem solving strategies may determine whether a person underperforms on a given task [ 105 , 107 ].

Stereotype threat may have differential effects on effort dependent on the prime utilized [ 27 ]. For example, Skorich et al. [ 27 ] examined whether effort mediated the effects of implicit and explicit stereotypes on provisional drivers’ performance on a hazard perception test. Participants in the implicit prime condition ticked their driving status (provisional, licensed) on a questionnaire, whereas participants in the explicit prime condition were provided with stereotypes relating to the driving ability of provisional licensees. Results revealed that participants detected more hazards when they were primed with an explicit stereotype relative to an implicit stereotype. Mediational analyses showed that whilst increased effort mediated the effects of an implicit stereotype on performance, decreased effort mediated the effects of an explicit stereotype prime. Research also indicates that reduced effort mediates the effects of an explicit stereotype on older adults’ memory recall [ 18 ]. Taken together, these results suggest that implicit stereotype primes may lead to increased effort as participants aim to disprove the stereotype, whereas explicit stereotype threat primes may lead to decreased effort as participants self-handicap [ 27 ]. Nevertheless, other studies utilizing self-reported measures of effort have resulted in non-significant findings (Experiment 1 & 2 [ 14 ]; Experiment 4 [ 44 ]; Experiment 2 [ 77 ]; Experiment 2, 4 & 5, [ 108 ]).

Self-handicapping.

Individuals may engage in self-handicapping strategies to proactively reduce the applicability of a negative stereotype to their performance. Here, people attempt to influence attributions for performance by erecting barriers to their success. Investigating this notion, Stone [ 15 ] examined whether self-handicapping mediated the effects of stereotype threat on white athletes’ sporting performance. Self-handicapping was measured by the total amount of stereotype-relevant words completed on a word-fragment task. Results indicated that white athletes practiced less when they perceived their ability on a golf-putting task to be diagnostic of personal ability, thereby confirming a negative stereotype relating to ‘poor white athleticism’. Moreover, these athletes were more likely to complete the term ‘awkward’ on a word fragment completion test compared to the control condition. Mediation analyses revealed that the greater accessibility of the term ‘awkward’ partially mediated the effects of stereotype threat on psychological disengagement and performance. The authors suggest that stereotype threat increased the accessibility of thoughts related to poor athleticism to inhibit athletes' practice efforts. However, a limitation of this research is that analyses were based on single-item measures (i.e., the completion of the word ‘awkward’) rather than total of completed words on the word-fragment test.

Keller [ 109 ] also tested the hypothesis that the salience of a negative stereotype is related to self-handicapping tendencies. Results showed that women who were primed with a group-as-target stereotype underperformed on a mathematical test relative to their control group counterparts. Furthermore, they expressed stronger tendencies to search for external explanations for their weak performance with this mediating the effects of stereotype threat on performance. Despite these preliminary findings, Keller and Dauenheimer [ 44 ] were unable to provide support for the notion that self-reported self-handicapping is a significant intermediary between stereotype threat and women’s mathematical underperformance.

Research on performance expectations suggests that stereotype threat effects may be mediated by goals set by the participants. Extending this work, Keller and Dauenheimer [ 44 ] hypothesized that female participants may make more errors on a mathematical test due to an overly motivated approach strategy. Results indicated that women underperformed when a math test was framed as diagnostic of gender differences (a group-as-target threat). Furthermore, their experiences of dejection were found to mediate the relation between stereotype threat and performance. The authors suggest that individuals may be motivated to disconfirm the negative stereotype and thus engage in a promotion focus of self-regulation. However, feelings of failure may elicit an emotional response that resultantly determines underperformance.

In contrast to Keller and Dauenheimer [ 44 ], Seibt and Förster (Experiment 5; [ 108 ]) proposed that under stereotype threat, targeted individuals engage in avoidance and vigilance strategies. They predicted that positive stereotypes should induce a promotion focus, leading to explorative and creative processing, whereas negative stereotypes should induce a prevention focus state of vigilance, with participants avoiding errors. Across five experiments, male and female participants were primed with a group-as-target stereotype suggesting that women have better verbal abilities than men. However, rather than showing a stereotype threat effect, results indicated a speed-accuracy trade off with male participants completing an analytical task slower but more accurately than their counterparts in a non-threat control condition. Furthermore, this prevention focus of vigilance was found to partially mediate the effects of stereotype threat on men’s analytical abilities (Experiment 5). The authors conclude that the salience of a negative group stereotype elicits a vigilant, risk-averse processing style that diminishes creativity and speed while bolstering analytic thinking and accuracy.

Achievement goals.

Achievement goals theory [ 110 ] posits that participants will evaluate their role in a particular achievement context and endorse either performance-focused or performance-avoidance goals. In situations where the chances of success are low, individuals engage in performance-avoidance goals, corresponding to a desire to avoid confirming a negative stereotype. Accordingly, Chalabaev et al. [ 111 ] examined whether performance avoidance goals mediated the effects of stereotype threat on women’s sporting performance. Here, the impact of two self-as-target stereotypes (i.e., poor athletic and soccer ability) on performance were assessed relative to a control condition. Results indicated that women in the athletic ability condition performed more poorly on a dribbling task, but not in the soccer ability condition. Furthermore, although these participants endorsed a performance-avoidance goal, this did not mediate the relationship between stereotype threat and soccer performance.

Highlighting the possible interplay between affective, cognitive and motivation mechanisms, Brodish and Devine [ 112 ] proffered a multi-mediator model, proposing that anxiety and performance-avoidance goals may mediate the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance. Achievement goals were measured by whether participants endorsed performance-avoidant (the desire to avoid performing poorly) or approach goals (trying to outperform others). Results indicated that women under stereotype threat solved fewer mathematical problems relative to those in a control condition. Mediation analyses revealed that performance avoidance goals and anxiety sequentially mediated women’s mathematical performance. That is, stereotype threatened women were motivated to avoid failure, which in turn heightened anxiety and influenced underperformance. Table 2 summarizes the articles reviewed and details their key findings and respective methodologies. See S2 Table for overview of significant mediational findings.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.t002

The current review evaluated empirical support for the mediators of stereotype threat. Capitalizing on the multi-threat framework [ 31 ], we distinguished between self-relevant and group-relevant stereotype threats to examine the extent to which these are mediated by qualitatively distinct mechanisms and imperil diverse stigmatized populations. On the whole, the results of the current review indicate that experiences of stereotype threat may increase individuals’ feelings of anxiety, negative thinking and mind-wandering which deplete the working memory resources required for successful task execution. Research documents further that individuals may be motivated to disconfirm the negative stereotype and engage in efforts to suppress stereotypical thoughts that are inconsistent with task goals. However, many of the mediators tested have resulted in varying degrees of empirical support. Below we suggest that stereotype threat may operate in distinct ways dependent on the population under study, the primes utilized, and the instruments used to measure mediation and performance.

Previous research has largely conceptualized stereotype threat as a singular construct, experienced similarly by individuals and groups across situations [ 31 , 55 ]. Consequently, research has overlooked the possibility of multiple forms of stereotype threats that may be implicated through concerns to an individual’s personal or social identity [ 31 ]. This is highlighted in the present review, as the majority of stereotype threat studies employed a group-as-target prime. Here stereotype threat is typically instantiated to highlight that stereotype-consistent performance may confirm, or reinforce, a negative societal stereotype as being a true representation of one’s social group [ 48 ]. This has led to a relative neglect of situations in which individuals may anticipate that their performance may be indicative of personal ability [ 31 , 55 ].

Similar processes such as arousal, deficits in working memory, and motivation may be triggered by self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threats. However, it is important to note that the experiences of these stereotype threats may be fundamentally distinct [ 31 ]. That is, deficits in working memory under self-as-target stereotype threat may be evoked by negative thoughts relating to the self (i.e., ruining one’s opportunities, letting oneself down). Conversely, group-based intrusive thoughts may mediate the effects of group-as-target threat on performance as individuals view their performance in line with their social group (i.e., confirming a societal stereotype, letting the group down) [ 31 ]. Moreover, research suggests that when a group-based stereotype threat is primed, individuals dissociate their sense of self from the negatively stereotyped domain [ 78 ]. Yet, this may be more unlikely when an individual experiences self-as-target stereotype threat as their personal ability is explicitly tied to a negative stereotype that governs their ingroup. As such, the activation of a group-based stereotype may set in motion mechanisms that reflect a protective orientation of self-regulation, whereas self-relevant knowledge may heighten self-consciousness. To date, however, research has not explicitly distinguished between self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threat in the elucidation of mediating variables. Future research would therefore benefit from a systematic investigation of how different stereotype threats may hamper performance in qualitatively distinguishable ways. One way to investigate the hypotheses set out here would be to allow participants to spontaneously report their experiences under self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threat, and to examine differences in the content of participants’ thoughts as a function of these different primes.

In a similar vein, different mechanisms may mediate the effects of blatant and subtle stereotype threat effects on performance [ 27 , 58 , 111 ]. Blatant threat manipulations explicitly inform participants of a negative stereotype related to performance (e.g., [ 3 , 11 ]), whereas placing stigmatized group members in a situation in which they have minority status may evoke more subtle stereotype threat [ 78 , 82 ]. Providing evidence consistent with this notion, Sekaquaptewa and Thompson [ 82 ] found that performance expectancies partially mediated the effects of solo status, but not stereotype threat on performance. These results suggest that women may make comparative judgments about their expected performance when they are required to undertake an exam in the presence of out-group members, yet may not consciously recognize how a negative stereotype can directly impair performance. Further research suggests that working memory may mediate the effects of subtle stereotype threat cues on performance as individuals attend to situational cues that heighten the salience of a discredited identity [ 88 , 94 ]. Alternatively, motivation may mediate the effects of blatant stereotype threat as individuals strive to disprove the negative stereotype [ 27 , 44 , 58 , 108 ]. Although stereotype threat effects appear to be robust [ 30 ], it is plausible that these distinct manipulations diverge in the nature, the focus, and the intensity of threat they produce and may therefore be mediated by different mechanisms [ 31 ].

It is also conceivable that different groups are more susceptible to certain types of stereotype threat [ 13 , 31 , 56 ]. For example, research indicates that women’s performance on a social cognition task was influenced to a greater extent by implicit gender-related stereotypes, whereas men were more vulnerable to explicit stereotype threat [ 13 ]. Further research suggests that populations who tend to have low group identification (e.g., those with a mental illness or obesity) are more susceptible to self-as-target threats. Conversely, populations with high group identification, such as individuals of a certain ethnicity, gender or religion are more likely to experience group-as-target threats [ 56 ]. Whilst this highlights the role of moderating variables that heighten individuals’ susceptibility to stereotype threat, it also suggests that individuals may experience stereotype threat in different ways, dependent on their stigmatized identity. This may explain why some variables (e.g., anxiety, self-handicapping) that have been found to mediate the effects of stereotype threat on some groups have not emerged in other populations.

Finally, it is conceivable that diverse mediators account for the effects of stereotype threat on different performance outcomes. For example, although working memory is implicated in tasks that typically require controlled processing, it is not required for tasks that rely more on automatic processes [ 24 , 58 , 93 ]. In line with this notion, Beilock et al. [ 24 ] found that experts’ golf putting skills were harmed under stereotype threat when attention was allocated to automatic processes that operate usually outside of working memory. This suggests that well-learned skills may be hampered by attempts to bring performance back under step-by-step control. Conversely, skills such as difficult math problem solving appear to involve heavy processing demands and may be harmed when working memory is consumed by a negative stereotype. As such, distinct mechanisms may underpin different threat-related performance outcomes.

Limitations of Stereotype Threat Research

We now outline methodological issues in current stereotype threat literature with a view to inform the design of future research. First, researchers have predominantly utilized self-report measures in their efforts to uncover the mediating variables of stereotype threat. However, it has long been argued that individuals have limited access to higher order mental processes [ 113 , 114 ], such as those involved in the evaluation and initiation of behavior [ 115 , 116 ]. Resultantly, participants under stereotype threat may be unable to observe and explicitly report the operations of their own mind [ 29 , 114 , 117 , 118 , 119 ]. Consistent with this assertion, Bosson et al. [ 29 ] found that although stereotype threat heightened individuals’ physiological anxiety, the same individuals did not report an awareness of increased anxiety on self-report measures. Participants may thus be mindful of the impression they make on others and engage in self-presentational behaviors in an effort to appear invulnerable to negative stereotypes [ 29 ]. This is supported by research suggesting that stereotype threatened participants tend not to explicitly endorse stereotypes [ 29 , 37 , 83 , 84 ] and are more likely to claim impediments to justify poor performance [ 3 , 14 , 109 ]. Moreover, it is possible that stereotype threat processes are non-conscious [ 119 ] with research indicating that implicit–but not explicit–stereotype endorsement mediates stereotype threat effects [ 103 ]. This suggests that non-conscious processing of stereotype-relevant information may influence the decrements observed in individuals’ performance under stereotype threat. Furthermore, this research underscores the greater sensitivity of indirect measures for examining the mediators of stereotype threat. From this perspective, future research may benefit from the use of physiological measures, such as heart rate, cortisol and skin conductance to examine anxiety (c.f., [ 94 , 120 , 121 ]), the IAT to measure implicit stereotype endorsement [ 103 ] and the sustained response to attention task to measure mind-wandering [ 74 ].

In the investigation of stereotype threat, self-report measures may be particularly susceptible to order effects. For example, Brodish and Devine [ 112 ] found that women reported higher levels of anxiety when they completed a questionnaire before a mathematical test compared to afterwards. This suggests that pre-test anxiety ratings may have reflected participants’ uneasiness towards the upcoming evaluative test, with this apprehension diminishing once the test was completed. Research by Logel and colleagues [ 95 ] provides support for this notion, indicating that women who completed a lexical decision task after a math test were quicker to respond to stereotype-relevant words compared to women who subsequently completed the task. These results exhibit the variability in individuals’ emotions under stereotype threat and suggest that they may be unable to retrospectively report on their feelings once the threat has passed. This emphasizes the importance of counterbalancing test instruments in the investigation of stereotype threat, purporting that the order in which test materials are administered may influence mediational findings.

This review highlights that, in some studies, individuals assigned to a control condition may have also experienced stereotype threat, thus potentially preventing reliable evidence of mediation. For instance, Chalabaev et al. [ 111 ] primed stereotype threat by presenting a soccer ability test as a diagnostic indicator of personal factors related to athletic ability. Nevertheless, participants in the control condition received information that the aim of the test was to examine psychological factors in athletic ability. Consequently, these participants may have also been apprehensive about their performance being evaluated, and this may have precluded evidence that achievement goals mediate the stereotype threat-performance relationship. Furthermore, research has manipulated the salience of stereotype threat by stating that gender differences in math performance are equal [ 82 ]. However, other research has utilized this prime within control conditions (e.g., [ 94 , 105 , 119 ]), underpinned by the rationale that describing a test as ‘fair’ or non-diagnostic of ability eliminates stereotype threat [ 122 ]. It is therefore possible that, in some instances, researchers have inadvertently induced stereotype threat. This outlines the importance of employing a control condition in which individuals are not made aware of any negative stereotypes, and are told that the test is non-diagnostic of ability, in order to detect possible mediators.

Two decades of research have demonstrated the harmful effects that stereotype threat can exert on a wide range of populations in a broad array of performance domains. However, findings with regards to the mediators that underpin these effects are equivocal. This may be a consequence of the heterogeneity of primes used to instantiate stereotype threat and the methods used to measure mediation and performance. To this end, future work is likely to benefit from the following directions: First, account for the existence of multiple stereotype threats; Second, recognize that the experiences of stereotype threat may differ between stigmatized groups, and that no one mediator may provide generalized empirical support across diverse populations; Third, utilize indirect measures, in addition to self-report measures, to examine reliably mediating variables and to examine further the convergence of these two methods; Fourth, counterbalance test instruments to control for order effects; and finally, ensure that participants in a control condition do not inadvertently encounter stereotype threat by stating explicitly that the task is non-diagnostic of ability.

Supporting Information

S1 supporting information. list of excluded studies and rationale for exclusion..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.s001

S1 Table. PRISMA Checklist.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.s002

S2 Table. Summary of affective, cognitive and motivational mechanisms that have been found to mediate stereotype threat effects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.s003

Author Contributions

Analyzed the data: CRP DH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: CRP DH ARL DTL. Wrote the paper: CRP. Developed the review design and protocol: CRP DH AL DL. Reviewed the manuscript: DH AL DL. Cross-checked articles in systematic review: CRP DH.

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8 Stereotype Threat and Ten Things We Can Do to Remove the Threat in the Air

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The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of the literature related to stereotype threat in an effort to provide faculty members and instructional developers with a better understanding of what the phenomenon is and what can be done about it in college classroom settings. To this end, we reviewed several of the major studies published on the subject between 1995 and 2005 and compiled a list of strategies that reflected both the major empirical findings on stereotype threat and our own research and experiences with faculty and students in college settings. Given the enormity of the subject, we focused heavily on the features of stereotype threat that relate specifically to race but acknowledged that the complexity of the subject required attention to other aspects of identity that may function to lessen, or in some cases increase, the intensity of stereotype threat. The overall findings suggested that there are several ways in which faculty and instructional developers can help to create learning environments that serve to mitigate the impact of stereotype threat, and that more work needs to be done to examine the ways in which faculty and instructional developers can strive to create environments that improve the quality of students’ perceptions and academic performances .

Research has shown that for some populations of high-achieving students, taking a difficult exam can produce feelings of anxiety that are rooted in a fear of confirming a negative stereotype about an affiliated group, and that these feelings can result in deficits in performance (Marx & Roman, 2002; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999; Steele & Aronson, 1995). This phenomenon labeled stereotype threat is generally activated when three situational conditions are present: 1) students must be explicitly or implicitly exposed to a negative stereotype about a group with which they can be associated, 2) the testing or learning conditions must pose a challenge to the students, and 3) the testing or learning domain must be of some importance to the students (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Stereotype threat is strongest among the highest achieving students because academic performance is an integral part of their collective identities. In fact, low-achieving students, who do not perceive the academic domain to be an important indicator of their personal success, are less susceptible to this threat (Major, Spencer, Schmader, Wolfe, & Crocker, 1998).

Empirical research on stereotype threat demonstrates its impact on the performance of a wide range of student populations, including women (Desert, Gonçalves, & Leyens, 2005; Quinn & Spencer, 2001; Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999; Spencer et al., 1999), Latinos (Aronson, Quinn, & Spencer, 1998; Aronson & Salinas, 1997; Gonzales, Blanton, & Williams, 2002), Asians (Shih et al., 1999), gay white males (Bosson, Haymovitz, & Pinel, 2004), and even white male students who do not traditionally suffer from negative stereotypes in academic domains (Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000). In this chapter, we center our discussion on the impact of stereotype threat as it relates to black students in academic settings. Specifically, we provide an overview of the literature related to stereotype threat in an effort to provide faculty members and instructional developers with a better understanding of what this phenomenon is and what can be done about it.

Stereotype Threat: What Is It?

According to Steele and Aronson (1995), the educational experiences of black students are uniquely affected by the sociopsychological threats that arise when they are engaging in academic activities for which a negative stereotype about their group may apply. This predicament threatens students with the possibility that they may be judged or treated stereotypically and that their academic performance may confirm the stereotype. Taylor and Antony (2000) describe this as the social and psychological sense of peril that negative racial stereotypes may be unfairly applied to black students solely on the basis of their skin color. This threat of being racially stereotyped produces a climate of intimidation that can hamper academic performance (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Black students may also disidentify with academic goals because of the anxiety that is produced by widely held stereotypes that they are intellectually inferior (Steele, 1997).

The Impact of Stereotype Threat Related to Race

Good, Aronson, and Inzlicht (2003) argue that “being evaluated in a stereotyped domain is sufficient to trigger the trademark responses associated with stereotype threat such as a lack of enjoyment of the educational process, increased anxiety and stress, and ultimately, underperformance” (p. 647). These “trademark responses” can contribute to students’ underperformance when their academic profiles might suggest otherwise. For example, Steele (1997) argues that when gifted black students sit down to take a difficult exam, “the extra apprehension they feel in comparison with whites is less about their own ability than it is about having to perform on a test and in a situation that may be primed to treat them stereotypically” (p. 52). This conclusion suggests that talented black students who perceive their learning environment to be racialized may not perform up to their ability (Carter & Tuitt, 2006). This underperformance appears to be rooted less in black students’ self-doubt than in their social mistrust of the learning environment (Steele, 1999).

While stereotype threat is commonly known for the detrimental impact it has on standardized test scores, research also indicates that individuals may suffer negative performance outcomes such as less engagement with academics because of the burden black students may experience when confronted with “the prospect of confirming cultural stereotypes impugning their intellectual and academic abilities” (Good et al., 2003, p. 647). According to Osborne (2001), there is empirical support for the assertion that black students do in fact have increased anxiety or arousal that can inhibit participation when performing in academic arenas. He argues that the racial performance gaps may be explained through “the cognitive effects of increasing anxiety, which include decreasing cognitive capacity, reticence to respond, attention deficits, and distracting thoughts” (p. 293). This evidence suggests that for some black students the “threat in the air” existing in predominantly white classrooms may not simply be a figment of their imagination (Tuitt, 2003).

Removing the Threat in the Air

Although a significant amount has been written about the impact of stereotype threat and what can be done about it, this information is not widely disseminated among those who work within the field of higher education and faculty/teaching assistant development. The identification of pedagogical interventions and learning strategies that potentially reduce the impact of stereotype threat is vitally important if we are to create teaching and learning environments in which all students have a chance to reach their potential.

Creating Identity-Safe Learning Environments

According to Davies, Spencer, and Steele (2005), attempting to eliminate all potentially threatening cues from the learning environment would be a futile exercise, but it may be possible to create environments that effectively reduce the risk of experiencing stereotype threat. In addition, Taylor and Antony (2000) suggest that students’ academic performance can be improved through instructional strategies that reduce stereotype threat and assure students that they will not be cast in the shadow of negative stereotypes. Essentially, professors have the responsibility of creating identity-safe environments where their students’ sense of the institution is not a barrier to their academic success (Davies et al., 2005). According to Davies et al., identity-safe environments challenge the validity, relevance, or acceptance of negative stereotypes linked to stigmatized social identities. These identity-safe environments would remove the threat in the air, allowing stigmatized individuals to enter previously threatening situations without the risk of confirming a negative stereotype targeting their social identity (Markus, Steele, & Steele, 2002; Steele, 2004).

Ten Strategies for Removing the Threat in the Air

Create optimistic and personalized teacher-student relationships.

2. Affirm students’ sense of belonging.

3. Build students’ self-efficacy.

4. Create authentic opportunities for students to affirm their individuality.

5. Hold students to high standards.

6. Teach students about the nature of intelligence and stereotype threat.

7. Value multiple perspectives.

8. Create cooperative learning environments.

9. Provide role models.

10. Address test taking anxiety.

Several researchers note that explicitly telling students that an exam is racially fair, reporting to students specific aspects of their performance that indicate their capacity to perform at high levels (Spencer et al., 1999; Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, & Darley, 1999), and exposing students to stereotype-disconfirming evidence (e.g., a mathematics professor of Latino or African descent) all function to mitigate the effects of stereotype threat. In addition, Steele and Aronson (1995) found that decreasing the diagnosticity of an exam by telling students that a given test is not an indicator of their intellectual ability minimizes the impact of stereotype threat.

Affirm students’ sense of belonging.

Build students’ self-efficacy.

Create authentic opportunities for students to affirm their individuality.

Hold students to high standards.

Teach students about the nature of intelligence and stereotype threat.

Value multiple perspectives.

Create cooperative learning environments.

Provide role models.

Address test taking anxiety.

The results of the various studies cited in this chapter have major implications for faculty and for those who do the work of instructional development. It is clear that instructors can create learning environments that produce differential outcomes for students based on their status and sociopsychological location in the classroom. In this regard, it is crucial that educational institutions be capable of developing professors who are cognizant of stereotype threat and the impact it can have on the learning environment. Moreover, institutions need to hold instructors accountable for the role they play in creating identity-threatening learning environments. Assessment and evaluation of instructors at the institutional level is vital. Finally, more attention needs to be paid to how we prepare doctoral candidates for postsecondary teaching. Graduate programs should ensure that there are a variety of opportunities for aspiring professors to hone their teaching skills prior to arriving in their first college classroom as an instructor (Carter & Tuitt, 2006). Graduate programs responsible for preparing the next generation of college professors must ensure that future instructors have the pedagogical knowledge and skills needed to create classrooms where all students, regardless of their background, have the opportunity to achieve at the highest levels—free from the threat of being stereotyped.

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July 8, 2020

Stereotypes Harm Black Lives and Livelihoods, but Research Suggests Ways to Improve Things

Management researcher Modupe Akinola explains on how stereotypes hurt Black Americans and what we can do to counter them

By Katy Milkman & Kassie Brabaw

research on stereotype threat suggests that

Modupe Akinola speaks on stage at the New York Times 2015 DealBook Conference at the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 3, 2015, in New York City.

Neilson Barnard Getty Images

The Black Lives Matter protests shaking the world have thankfully brought renewed attention not just to police brutality but to the broader role of racism in our society. Research suggests some roots of racism lie in the stereotypes we hold about different groups. And those stereotypes can affect everything from the way police diagnose danger to who gets interviewed for jobs to which students get attention from professors. Negative stereotypes harm Black Americans at every turn. To reduce their pernicious effects, it’s important to first understand how stereotypes work and just how pervasive they are.

Modupe Akinola , an associate professor at Columbia Business School, studies racial bias, workforce diversity and stress. Recently, Katy Milkman , a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, got to chat with Akinola about how stereotypes are formed, how they affect consequential decisions and how we can combat negative stereotypes .

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows. ]

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Let’s start at the beginning. What is a stereotype?

A stereotype is a snap judgment we make about a person or about a thing that can influence our decision-making. Every day we get millions and millions of bits of information in our head that associate good and bad with certain people or groups or things. And anytime we then see those people, groups or things, that association comes immediately to our mind.

Why do you think we do this?

We’re processing so much information all the time; we need these mental shortcuts to allow us to navigate the world. If not, we wouldn’t be able to function, quite frankly. We have to make quick judgments to make life easier and to simplify. But any type of shortcut can have its pros and cons.

Could you talk about some of the research connecting stereotyping with racism?

One of my favorite sets of studies examines stereotyping as it relates to policing. I grew up in New York City. And we heard a lot about Amadou Diallo, who was an unarmed Black man who was shot by police, because they thought he was carrying a gun—when in actuality, he raised his hand, and he had a wallet.

Joshua Correll, [now at the University of Colorado Boulder], and his colleagues wanted to look at whether the stereotypes associating Black people with danger could play a role in how a mistake like that could be made. The news we see regularly shows crime rates being higher for certain populations, mostly minority populations,. And so this creates an automatic stereotype that a Black man would be more linked to danger than a white man, because you don’t see those same associations for white people.

Correll came up with a computerized shooter bias exercise that showed pictures of targets, Black and white men, carrying objects, either weapons or regular objects like a Coke can or a wallet. When you saw a person and the object, you had to click on whether or not to shoot. He found that civilians were more likely to shoot unarmed Black men, relative to unarmed white men and even armed white men, which was attributed to the stereotypes associating Black people with danger.

I found that study fascinating, because it showed just how powerful these associations can be. I did some follow-up research, because I wanted to see if stress affects that decision-making process. I stressed out police officers and had them engage in the shooting exercise.

The interesting thing is: I saw that under stress, officers were more accurate. They were able to discern whether to shoot an armed Black man and did that better in terms of not shooting unarmed Black men. However, they were less likely to shoot armed white men, which I think demonstrates the power of stereotypes, because there isn’t a stereotype of white and danger.

Stereotypes work in two ways: they can harm some groups, and they can protect others.

Are there any other studies about stereotyping that you think people might find illuminating?

My favorite are audit studies, where you observe real-world behavior. There have been audit studies where people go to car dealerships to see if people are treated differently and about who gets mortgages and things like that.

One audit study was testing ads in the newspaper, which were advertising entry-level positions. [The researchers] sent candidate résumés to these job ads, which were identical, and changed the names on the résumés to signal race. “Lakisha” and “Jamal” were Black-sounding names that were tested and pretested to ensure they would signal race versus a name like “Catherine,” which would be a more white-sounding name. They waited to see who called back for which candidates. The Lakishas and Jamals received fewer callbacks for an interview than the white-sounding names.

Again, this behavior is attributed to stereotypes. We make presumptions and snap judgments about who might be more qualified for a job, who might do well in a job, even in the context of identical information.

Would you be willing to describe a little bit of the work we’ve done together on the role of stereotyping in academia?

Certainly. We—you, I and Dolly Chugh [of the Stern School of Business at New York University]—wanted to see if racial or gender stereotypes impact the pathway to academia. As you’re applying or thinking about getting a Ph.D., often you’ll reach out to a professor and ask, “Are you taking graduate students?” or “Can I learn more about your research?” We get these e-mails, all the time, asking for time on our schedule. And we wanted to see if professors would differentially respond to these requests, depending on the race and gender of the requester.

We sent e-mails to around 6,500 professors across the country, at both private and public universities. We sent these e-mails that were identical, except we varied the race and gender of the name of the applicant.

These e-mails said, “Dear professor so-and-so, I’ll be on campus on XYZ day, on a Monday or Tuesday, and was wondering if I could take some time to learn about your research.” The names on these e-mails were Chinese names, Indian names, African-American-, Latino- and white-sounding names. We pretested all these names to ensure that they did signal the race and gender we thought they would.

We expected to see more stereotyping or discrimination (i.e., fewer responses) to nonwhite males when asked to meet next week versus today. Why? Today everyone’s pretty busy, and so there’s no time for the stereotypes or snap judgments to come into your mind about who might be a more qualified student, who you might want to respond to and meet with.

However, in a meeting request for next week, you might go through more scrutiny about whether the candidate is worthy of your time. We thought that’s when stereotypes would set in. Maybe for some categories, it’s “Do they have English-language proficiency?” For other categories, given the lack of minorities in academia in general, there might be the question of “Can they cut it?”

As we predicted, we did find fewer responses for all of the other categories, relative to the responses to white males, for a meeting request for next week. The question then was whether we’d see this when we matched the race and the gender of the professor with the race and the gender of the student. We still found that requests for next week, regardless of the race of the professor, are lower for candidates other than white males.

As an African-American professor, in the early days of my teaching, I’d often find myself setting up to teach a class, and somebody, usually a prospective student, would come in and say, “I’d like to sit in and learn more about this class. Where’s the professor?” They would say that to me as I was setting up, looking like the professor—on the computer, getting everything ready. That, for me, was a perfect example of how stereotypes can play a role.

The stereotype of what a professor looks like—an older white man with gray hair—is one of the factors that might make somebody come in, see a person at the podium preparing for work and wearing a suit, and ask who the professor is. I love those moments, in some ways, because one of the ways in which you change people’s stereotypes is by having counter-stereotypical exemplars.

Let’s talk more about that. How can we combat stereotypes or try to reduce the harm they cause?

I think one of the ways we can reduce the harm of stereotypes is just being aware. Sometimes you’ll be walking down the street, and you’ll make a snap judgment and not even realize it. But I think one of the critical aspects is noticing, “Oh wow, that came up for me. That’s interesting,” and thinking, “Where did that come from?” We can change our behavior when we’re more aware that our behavior is being influenced by stereotypes.

The other way is by being exposed to counter-stereotypical exemplars. As an African-American, female professor, a student’s mere exposure to me means that the next time they go into a classroom with an African-American woman setting up, or someone else who might defy the stereotype of what a professor looks like, they won’t automatically say, “Where’s the professor?”

I often tell my students they have a beautiful opportunity to be the walking, breathing and living counter-stereotypical exemplars in their work environments. I ask them to think about the stereotypes that exist about them, the stereotypes that exist about people around them, the stereotypes that exist about people on their teams— and to realize that, every day, they have the opportunity to defy those stereotypes.

Katy Milkman is a behavioral scientist and James G. Dinan Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School . She is co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative .

Kassie Brabaw is a journalist writing about health, relationships and astronomy. Find her work at Health, SELF.com, Women’s Health, VICE.com and Space.com.

Advances in stereotype threat research on African Americans: continuing challenges to the validity of its role in the achievement gap

Published: 05 December 2017
Volume 21 , pages 111–137, ( 2018 )

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Arthur L. Whaley 1

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Over the past two decades, there have been significant advances in stereotype threat research on African Americans. The current article reviews general issues of internal validity and external validity (or generalizability) beyond college laboratories in stereotype threat studies, and as they are revealed specifically in the context of advances in research on African Americans. Research suggests an internally valid operational definition of stereotype threat relevant to the African American students’ experience is the expectation of, and reactions to, interviewer or teacher bias. The external validity of laboratory research on stereotype threat is very limited. Effect sizes and variance explained in multivariate models in most survey and field studies of stereotype threat variables are very small. Advances in stereotype threat research emphasize the relatively greater importance of school racial climate and faculty diversity in efforts to reduce the achievement gap. Interventions to improve the educational experiences of African American students should address situational factors of school racial climate, faculty diversity, and cultural competence training for non-African American instructors and interviewers.

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Stereotype Threat in High School Classrooms: How It Links to Teacher Mindset Climate, Mathematics Anxiety, and Achievement

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Whaley, A.L. Advances in stereotype threat research on African Americans: continuing challenges to the validity of its role in the achievement gap. Soc Psychol Educ 21 , 111–137 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-017-9415-9

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An Integrated Process Model of Stereotype Threat Effects on Performance

Toni schmader.

University of Arizona

Michael Johns

University of Wyoming

Chad Forbes

Research showing that activation of negative stereotypes can impair the performance of stigmatized individuals on a wide variety of tasks has proliferated. However, a complete understanding of the processes underlying these stereotype threat effects on behavior is still lacking. The authors examine stereotype threat in the context of research on stress arousal, vigilance, working memory, and self-regulation to develop a process model of how negative stereotypes impair performance on cognitive and social tasks that require controlled processing, as well as sensorimotor tasks that require automatic processing. The authors argue that stereotype threat disrupts performance via 3 distinct, yet interrelated, mechanisms: (a) a physiological stress response that directly impairs prefrontal processing, (b) a tendency to actively monitor performance, and (c) efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions in the service of self-regulation. These mechanisms combine to consume executive resources needed to perform well on cognitive and social tasks. The active monitoring mechanism disrupts performance on sensorimotor tasks directly. Empirical evidence for these assertions is reviewed, and implications for interventions designed to alleviate stereotype threat are discussed.

Stereotype threat has become one of the most widely studied topics of the past decade in social psychology. In 2003, Steele and Aronson's (1995) seminal article on the subject was named a modern classic ( Devine & Brodish, 2003 ; Fiske, 2003 ). Although a large body of work now testifies to the reliability and generalizability of stereotype threat effects on performance, lingering questions remain about precisely what processes underlie these effects. Researchers have found evidence for variables such as anxiety ( S. J. Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999 ), stereotype activation ( Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002 ), self-doubt ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ), working memory ( Schmader & Johns, 2003 ), and arousal ( Ben-Zeev, Fein, & Inzlicht, 2005 ). Unfortunately, limitations of experimental research necessitate that only one or two process variables can be explored in any single study. Although these studies have advanced a basic understanding of the putative mechanisms of stereotype threat, one unintended consequence of this systematic dismantling of process is an unrealistic expectation that there is a single mediator of stereotype threat effects on performance. Complex behavior, however, is likely to result from an interrelated sequence of processes. In the present article, we describe an integrated process model in which motivational, affective, physiological, and cognitive processes interact to impair performance in a stereotype-relevant context.

A Primer on Stereotype Threat

In 1995, Steele and Aronson published research testing a provocative explanation for the long-standing finding that African Americans tend to underperform on standardized tests ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ). They reasoned that knowledge of the prevalent cultural stereotype asserting the intellectual inferiority of African Americans could interfere with Black students' performance on intellectual tests through fear of confirming that stereotype. In support of this hypothesis, their experiments revealed that African American college students performed worse than their White peers on standardized test questions when this task was described to them as being diagnostic of their verbal ability but that their performance was equivalent to that of their White peers when the same questions were simply framed as an exercise in problem solving (and after accounting for prior SAT scores). Part of the popular, practical, and scientific appeal of stereotype threat as an explanation for group differences in test scores is that it can be created in the performance situation itself. The threat is “in the air,” as Steele (1997) argued, and by implication, once the air is cleared, group differences should be diminished.

Since the publication of that seminal research, stereotype threat effects have been extended to account for a wide variety of performance decrements observed among those who are targeted by negative stereotypes. When a task is described as diagnostic of intelligence, Latinos and particularly Latinas perform more poorly than do Whites ( Gonzales, Blanton, & Williams, 2002 ), children with low socioeconomic status perform more poorly than do those with high socioeconomic status ( Croizet & Claire, 1998 ), and psychology students perform more poorly than do science students (Croizet, Després, Gauzins, Huguet, & Leyens, 2003). Even groups who typically enjoy advantaged social status can be made to experience stereotype threat. Specifically, White men perform more poorly on a math test when they are told that their performance will be compared with that of Asian men ( Aronson et al., 1999 ), and Whites perform more poorly than Blacks on a motor task when it is described to them as measuring their natural athletic ability ( Stone, 2002 ; Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, & Darley, 1999 ). In addition, Whites also show stereotype threat effects on tasks where they might fear confirming the stereotype that Whites are racist ( Frantz, Cuddy, Burnett, Ray, & Hart, 2004 ).

Performance decrements have been observed in response to both explicit manipulations that call attention to one's stigmatized status in a domain (e.g., S. J. Spencer et al., 1999 ) and more subtle manipulations in which the researcher's expectations for poor performance are less likely to be consciously primed (e.g., Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000 ; J. L. Smith & White, 2002 ; Stone & McWhinnie, in press ). Furthermore, recent evidence confirms that such manipulations increase one's motivation to try to disconfirm the negative stereotype, at least for those who are highly identified with the domain ( Forbes, Schmader, & Allen, 2007 ; Jamieson & Harkins, 2007 ). Some have suggested that stereotype threat has little impact outside of the laboratory ( Cullen, Hardison, & Sackett, 2004 ; Stricker & Ward, 2004 ). However, in a recent reanalysis of a field experiment by Stricker and Ward (2004) , Danaher and Crandall (in press) revealed that marking one's gender after (as compared with before) an advanced placement calculus test led to a 33% reduction in the gender gap in performance. Taken together, this research suggests that activating negative stereotypes about a social identity one possesses motivates individuals to try to combat that stereotype but that this creates some sort of extra situational burden that interferes with the ability to perform as well at a task as might otherwise be possible. In the present article, we unpack the sequence of processes that are likely to account for this pattern of interference.

An Integrated Process Model of Stereotype Threat

In our view, stereotype threat is triggered by situations that pose a significant threat to self-integrity, the sense of oneself as a coherent and valued entity that is adaptable to the environment ( Steele, 1988 ). This self-integrity threat stems from a state of cognitive imbalance in which one's concept of self and expectation for success conflict with primed social stereotypes suggesting poor performance. This state of imbalance acts as an acute stressor that sets in motion physiological manifestations of stress, cognitive monitoring and interpretative processes, affective responses, and efforts to cope with these aversive experiences (see also Major & O'Brien, 2005 ). The general outline of the proposed model is presented in Figure 1 . In short, we assert that the threat to self-integrity stereotype threat elicits during or in anticipation of a performance cues a sequence of processes that can disrupt optimal performance on a variety of tasks. Developing an integrated mediational model of stereotype threat requires consideration of both the nature of the predictor (i.e., how do situations trigger stereotype threat?) and the outcome (i.e., what kind of performance is impaired?). Thus, we first outline the psychological process that we believe underlies the experience of stereotype threat and how situational cues and person characteristics combine to trigger that experience. We then consider how stereotype threat undermines performance on cognitive and social tasks that necessitate controlled processing . We identify working memory as the domain-general executive resource associated with efficient performance on a wide range of cognitive and social tasks that necessitate coordinated information processing while inhibiting interference from distracting information (Path a in Figure 1 ).

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An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance.

Having identified working memory as a core cognitive faculty that is implicated in cognitive and social stereotype threat effects, we then consider the discrete processes likely to be engaged in threatening situations that would rely on and disrupt this cognitive resource. These processes include an increased physiological stress response (Path b in Figure 1 ) paired with increased monitoring of cues (Path d in Figure 1 ) to disambiguate what that situation implies about the self and/or one's group. We assert that this increased monitoring, paired with increased physiological arousal and a primed state of cognitive imbalance created by stereotype threat, can lead people to appraise their experience in a biased manner that produces negative thoughts and feelings (Paths f, g , and h in Figure 1 ). However, because targets of stereotype threat are motivated to avoid stereotype confirmation by performing well, they engage in active efforts to suppress stereotypic and anxious thoughts that are inconsistent with their task goals (Path i in Figure 1 ).

Within this set of processes, there are three primary reasons why task performance could be impaired. These include (a) a direct physiological impairment of prefrontal processing caused by activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (Path c in Figure 1 ), (b) increased vigilance toward endogenous or exogenous cues to assess the self within the situation (Path e in Figure 1 ), and (c) active efforts to suppress or push out of mind stereotypic thoughts and anxious feelings (Path j in Figure 1 ). An understanding of this interrelated set of mechanisms requires a review of literatures on working memory, stress and cognition, and self-regulatory processes that might be involved in a target's active attempt to understand and cope with the threat of confirming a negative stereotype.

After describing the specific components of the model, we consider research showing the effect of stereotype threat on tasks where performance does not rely on controlled processing but benefits from the use of automatic processes to guide behaviors outside of executive attention. Research suggests that working memory impairments cannot easily account for the effect of stereotype threat on such tasks (e.g., Beilock, Jellison, Rydell, McConnell, & Carr, 2006 ). However, because performance on automated tasks suffers to the degree executive resources are used to monitor and control one's behavior—a process also implicated in performance on cognitive and social tasks—we believe the model can be applied to explain these findings. We conclude our description by considering how the model can account for these effects (Path m in Figure 1 ).

Conceptualizing the Nature of Stereotype Threat

To understand the mechanisms that underlie performance impairments, we first consider the process by which situational cues trigger stereotype threat. In our view, all situations of stereotype threat involve activation of three core concepts: the concept of one's ingroup, the concept of the ability domain in question, and the self-concept. However, it is not merely the activation of these three concepts but the activated propositional relation ( Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006 ) between them that we believe underlies the experience of stereotype threat. A positive unit relation means that the two concepts are defined in that context with respect to one another (My group has this ability; I am like my group; I have this ability). In contrast, a negative link primed between any of these two concepts would indicate that, in that context, one concept is defined in opposition to another (My group does not have this ability; I am not like my group; I do not have this ability). Drawing on balance theory ( Heider, 1958 ) and similar to the framework posed by Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) , we conceive of stereotype threat as stemming from a situationally induced state of imbalance between these implied propositional links that the individual is motivated to, and struggles to, resolve (My group does not have this ability, I am like my group, but I think I have this ability). Figure 2 depicts the imbalance among these three components that is created in situations of stereotype threat by the presence of situational primes and/or individual-differences variables found to increase threat susceptibility.

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Stereotype threat as a cognitive imbalance triggered by person and/or situation factors.

The imbalance created by stereotype threat stems from the simultaneous activation of three implied links: First, cues in the environment signal a negative propositional relation between one's concept of the ingroup and ability in a given domain such that the group is defined as deficient in that context. In prior research, such cues have involved manipulations of the diagnosticity of a test, ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ), explicit statements that one's ingroup would do poorly in the domain ( S. J. Spencer et al., 1999 ), or stereotypic group portrayals ( Davies et al., 2002 ). The negative stereotypes activated by such manipulations are a manifestation of the primed negative link between the group and the domain. Furthermore, individual differences in stereotype endorsement ( Schmader, Johns, & Barquissau, 2004 ) or stigma consciousness ( Brown & Pinel, 2003 ) might increase susceptibility to stereotype threat because the negative link between group and domain is either stronger (as in the case of stereotype endorsement) or more likely to be activated in the face of ambiguous cues (as in the case of stigma consciousness).

Second, cues in the environment make salient one's membership in the stigmatized group by activating a positive link between one's concept of self and one's concept of the group such that the self is defined in terms of group membership in that context. Past studies provide evidence for this association by showing that manipulations of group salience such as solo status ( Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000 ), group priming ( Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999 ), and group representativeness ( Schmader, 2002 ) produce stereotype threat effects. Work by Marx, Stapel, and Muller (2005) confirmed that situations of stereotype threat activate the collective self, which is a manifestation of a positive link between the concepts of self and group. Similarly, individuals high in group identification are predisposed to activate this link even in otherwise ambiguous circumstances, increasing their susceptibility to stereotype threat ( Schmader, 2002 ).

The third link that contributes to the imbalance is a positive propositional relation primed between self and domain such that the self-concept is associated with doing well in that context because of either an expectation of success or a strong motivation to excel. Indeed, the original theory states that the high-achieving vanguard of a stigmatized group will be most affected by stereotype threat, suggesting that personal investment in the domain is a necessary precondition ( Steele, 1997 ). Moreover, studies have shown that individuals experience stereotype threat to the degree that doing well in the domain is personally important to them ( Aronson et al., 1999 ; Stone et al., 1999 ). Situationally, this personal investment in the domain is accomplished in studies by providing cues to ego involvement such as reminding participants that the task, though challenging, should be within their abilities or by selecting participants with a history of success in the domain ( Schmader & Johns, 2003 ; S. J. Spencer et al., 1999 ; Steele & Aronson, 1995 ). Such procedural elements help to increase experimental realism and garner participant involvement, but it is worth emphasizing that this is likely to be an important ingredient of stereotype threat.

Nosek et al. (2002) described a similar state of stable intrapersonal associations that lead women to implicitly disassociate their sense of self from the math domain. In the present model, we expand upon these ideas to understand stereotype threat as the discrete experience of imbalance activated in a given performance situation. The implication is that each of the associations described above must be activated to produce clear signs of stereotype threat. In contrast, much of the literature to date has assumed that stereotype threat can be elicited through many separate pathways (e.g., by priming the group or by changing the task frame). Although further research is needed to bolster our conceptualization, available evidence generally supports the idea that each linkage must be activated to experience stereotype threat.

Most of the studies that have relied on group salience to manipulate threat also have described the central task that participants complete as a stereotype-relevant task (e.g., Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000 ; Schmader, 2002 ; Schmader & Johns, 2003 ; Shih et al., 1999 ). Interestingly, one study that paired race salience with a nondiagnostic test description showed only a marginal effect ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ). Similarly, manipulations that on the surface seem designed to activate only one of the concepts in this triad can also activate other components in the model (e.g., Marx et al., 2005 ). We also have some preliminary evidence suggesting that self-relevance may be a necessary feature of stereotype threat ( Schmader, Zhang, & Johns, 2007 ). We were able to reduce stereotype threat and elevate math performance among a sample of math-identified women simply by giving them a false name (either female or male) and literally detaching their personal identity from a typically stereotype threatening situation. This finding compliments work by Wheeler, Jarvis, and Petty (2001) , who showed that individuals perform consistently with an outgroup stereotype only when the outgroup is temporarily incorporated into their own working self-concept. Thus, even if one is not chronically identified with a negatively stereotyped group, manipulations can temporarily prime a sense that the group defines the self, inducing the cognitive imbalance that underlies stereotype threat.

We can also understand different forms of stereotype threat (e.g., a threat to either one's self or group concept; Shapiro & Neuberg, 2007 ) in terms of where the imbalance is most pronounced. For those concerned about the implication of the stereotype for personal identity, the greatest tension might emanate from a strong link between self and domain (i.e., I really want to do well, but the activated set of cognitions primes a negative link). In contrast, those who are more concerned about confirming the stereotype for one's social identity might feel the greatest cognitive tension as a result of a strong association between group and domain (i.e., I really want my group to do well, but the activated set of cognitions primes a negative link).

Furthermore, Shapiro and Neuberg's (2007) predictions that different variables will make individuals more or less susceptible to threat in public or private settings can also be understood within this balance framework. For example, the person susceptible to public forms of group-concept stereotype threat might activate the negative link between group and domain only when he or she believes his or her group membership and performance will be publicly known. A variable such as stigma consciousness makes this link more accessible for these individuals even in ambiguously threatening situations. In contrast, the person susceptible to private forms of group concept threat will have the group-domain link activated even in situations that are private and to the degree that he or she personally endorses the stereotype. Thus, the balance framework represents a more general meta-model that describes how external information interacts with intraindividual cognition to produce the specific forms of threat identified by Shapiro and Neuberg.

Perhaps the most critical aspect of our model is the assumption that a primed state of imbalance creates a state of tension that the individual is motivated to resolve. Thus, as with other models of cognitive inconsistency, this experience of cognitive imbalance should have downstream consequences for arousal, thought emotion, and self-regulation as the individual seeks resolution to that imbalanced state ( Carver & Scheier, 1998 ; Crandall, Silvia, N'Gbala, Tsang, & Dawson, 2007 ; Festinger, 1957 ; Higgins, 1987 : Swann & Reid, 1981 ). The integrated process model that we articulate specifies these downstream effects and articulates the implications that these processes can have for performance.

Working Memory as a Proximal Mediator of Stereotype Threat Effects in Cognitive and Social Performance Situations

A review of the literature on stereotype threat and related phenomena reveals three broad categories of stereotype threat outcomes. Most research has focused on how stereotype threat impairs performance on cognitive tasks such as verbal tests ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ), complex mathematical tasks ( Quinn & Spencer, 2001 ), tests of memory ( Hess, Auman, & Colcombe, 2003 ), and mental rotation ( Wraga, Duncan, Jacobs, Helt, & Church, 2006 ). However, additional studies that can be characterized in terms of stereotype threat have involved tasks that are inherently social ( Bosson, Haymovitz, & Pinel, 2004 ; Richeson & Shelton, 2003 ), such as maintaining a fluid interaction with someone in the face of negative stereotypes suggesting malicious intentions in that interaction. The third category of outcomes includes sensorimotor skills or other tasks that entail fluid movement or automated behavioral processes (e.g., Beilock et al., 2006 ; Stone et al., 1999 ). The primary focus of our model is on the first two types of performance situations (high-order cognitive tasks and intergroup interactions). Because the processes underlying performance decrements on sensorimotor tasks are governed by a specific component of the model—performance monitoring ( Beilock et al., 2006 )—we discuss these types of performance situations after we have described this component in detail.

To identify the processes that underlie stereotype threat effects, we start by focusing on what mechanism is common among the complex cognitive and social tasks that stereotype threat affects. Although these tasks seem quite different, they share one important element in common: They all require a certain degree of controlled attention, effortful processing, and active self-regulation. For example, stereotype threat produces gender differences in math performance only on a difficult math test ( S. J. Spencer et al., 1999 ) and specifically on complex word problems that require the formation of strategies to extract the relevant information to solve the problem ( Quinn & Spencer, 2001 ). In fact, if tasks are easy or well learned, the motivation to disconfirm the stereotype leads to better performance ( O'Brien & Crandall, 2003 ). Similarly, in social contexts, cognitive depletion effects are only observed by White Americans speaking in front of a Black American if they are in a position of having to consciously think about the wording they use to communicate their opinion ( Richeson & Trawalter, 2005 ).

This pattern of evidence suggests that stereotype threat degrades the ability to regulate attention during complex tasks where it is necessary to coordinate information processing online and inhibit thoughts, feelings, and behaviors counterproductive to one's current goals. Cognitive psychologists describe the mechanism that is responsible for this sort of efficient regulation as executive functioning or working memory (e.g., Engle, 2002 ). We next define working memory to provide the conceptual foundation for examining how stereotype threat impairs performance on cognitive and social tasks.

Working Memory Defined

Contemporary models of working memory all posit that a central executive processor coordinates cognitive and behavioral protocols in the service of task completion ( Feldman-Barrett, Tugade, & Engle, 2004 ; Miyake & Shah, 1999 ). Although these models tend to differ with respect to the interrelationship between information storage and executive control ( Conway, Jarrold, Kane, Miyake, & Towse, 2007 ), there is consensus that working memory is situated in the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for controlling attention and deploying inhibitory processes ( Gray, Chabris, & Braver, 2003 ; Kane & Engle, 2002 ). Most models also endorse the basic idea that the central executive processor is of limited capacity and therefore is sensitive to variations in information-processing demands ( Conway et al., 2007 ).

Our perspective on working memory is based on the work of Engle, Kane and colleagues. These researchers have developed dual-processing measures of working memory that predict performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks, ranging from Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices ( Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999 ) to Stroop color naming ( Kane & Engle, 2003 ). They proposed that working memory represents executive attention—the general but limited ability to keep task-relevant information and goal representations accessible in the face of interference from task-irrelevant information and competing responses ( Engle, 2002 ; Kane, Conway, Hambrick, & Engle, 2007 ). Thus, we use the term working memory to represent a limited-capacity executive process that coordinates cognition and controls behavior to achieve performance goals in the presence of exogenous or endogenous information that competes for attention.

It should be noted that although different researchers have used either working memory or executive function terminology to describe the process of interest to us here, these two terms largely refer to the same domain-general ability to control the focus of one's attention and regulate behavior. We adopt the term working memory to maintain consistency with the work of Engle, Kane, and colleagues, although we consider this usage compatible with the terms executive function and executive control . It should also be noted that although working memory measures all involve the storage of information in short-term memory, current definitions of working memory are not equated with short-term memory. In fact, the amount of information that can be stored in short-term memory is unrelated to performance on measures of fluid cognition ( Engle et al., 1999 ; Kane et al., 2004 ). It is this finding that working memory predicts high-order cognitive ability, while short-term memory does not, that has largely contributed to the development of the executive-based conceptualizations of working memory that is the focus of our model.

Evidence That Stereotype Threat Taxes Working Memory

Although research has often treated working memory as an individual-differences variable, when conceptualized as a state variable, working memory becomes a prime candidate for mediating stereotype threat effects in performance situations requiring controlled processing. Not only has research directly implicated this mechanism in performance on the same standardized tests that are the focus of the achievement gap between racial or gender groups ( Conway, Cowan, Bunting, Therriault, & Minkoff, 2002 ; Engle et al., 1999 ; Süβ, Oberauer, Wittmann, Wilhelm, & Schulze, 2002 ; Unsworth & Engle, 2005 ), it is also clear that working memory captures variation in general executive processes critical for coping with acute stressors. For example, high working memory predicts the ability to maintain the accessibility of task goals ( Kane & Engle, 2003 ) as well as the ability to control attention ( Kane et al., 2007 ) and minimize the influence of intrusive thoughts while completing resource-demanding tasks ( Rosen & Engle, 1998 ). These findings suggest that working memory is critical for efficient thought regulation in situations that place heavy demands on attention. Thus, it is reasonable to predict that stereotype threat temporarily degrades working memory efficiency in a manner that could account for the diversity of performance impairments found in the literature. There are now several pieces of evidence to support this assertion.

First, our own work has directly tested the hypothesis that reduced test performance under stereotype threat is attributable to decreased working memory ( Schmader & Johns, 2003 ). In our initial studies, college students completed the operation span task to measure their working memory ( Turner & Engle, 1989 ). In a typical trial of the task, participants are presented with a mathematical equation—for example, (2 × 3) − 5 = 1—and must decide whether the answer given is correct or incorrect. They are then given a word to remember for recall at a later point. These trials are grouped into sets such that participants might be presented with a set of five equation and word pairings before being cued to recall the five words. Participants' ability to correctly recall all of the words in each set provides an index of working memory in that it reflects the ease with which they can process the equations while simultaneously holding the words in their mind.

In our first experiment, male and female college students completed the operation span task, which was either described to them as a reliable measure of working memory (control) or as a reliable measure of quantitative capacity and highly related to math ability (stereotype threat). As predicted, women in the stereotype threat condition showed significantly lower working memory scores (i.e., they recalled fewer words) than did men in the same condition or than women in the control condition. A second study replicated these effects among Latinos and Latinas who were told that the operation span task is highly indicative of general intelligence.

Finally, a third experiment tested whether reductions in working memory mediate the negative effects of stereotype threat on women's math performance. In the stereotype threat condition, women learned that they would be taking a math test as the only woman in a room of men. In the control condition, women learned that they would perform a problem-solving exercise in an all-female session. After these instructions, women completed a modified measure of working memory (instead of solving equations, participants had to count the number of vowels in a sentence) followed by a 20-min math test. Replicating earlier studies, women in the stereotype threat condition showed significantly lower working memory and performed worse on the math test. More importantly, mediation analyses demonstrated that the direct effect of stereotype threat on math performance was significantly reduced and became nonsignificant when controlling for working memory, which was significantly associated with math performance. This set of experiments provides the most direct evidence that situations of stereotype threat reduce working memory specifically and that this reduction in executive attentional processes mediates the effects on test performance.

Since we published this work, other studies have provided converging support for general impairments in executive function in stereotype threatening situations. Croizet et al. (2004) found that when psychology and engineering students were aware of intellectual stereotypes favoring engineers, both groups of students showed a decrease in heart rate variability while taking a diagnostic test. However, only psychology students performed more poorly on the test and showed test scores that were correlated with their heart rate variability. Although fluctuations in heart rate variability can indicate a number of things (e.g., emotion regulation; Applehans & Luecken, 2006 ), some research has linked situational decreases in heart rate variability to increased mental load ( Jorna, 1992 ; Mulder, 1992 ). Thus, these findings suggest that stereotype threat might increase the cognitive load of stigmatized individuals under stereotype threat.

Other research shows that working memory interference could be an important consequence of stereotype threat. For example, Beilock, Rydell, and McConnell (2007) recently showed that individuals under stereotype threat do more poorly on a series of mathematical problems but only if those problems are complex enough to require working memory. These effects were eliminated when participants were given the opportunity to practice the difficult math problems, presumably because practice decreased the need to rely on working memory resources to solve the problems.

Additional research has specifically isolated stereotype threat effects on the ability to inhibit response conflict—a central function of working memory ( Kane & Engle, 2003 ). For example, Inzlicht, McKay, and Aronson (2006) showed that situations of stereotype threat impair Black college students' performance on a Stroop task, a standard measure of cognitive interference. In a similar vein, Jamieson and Harkins (2007) showed that women under threat make more errors on an antisaccade task, a task that requires inhibition of a prepotent response. These findings suggest that increased motivation (due to stereotype threat) can produce the ironic effect of derailing performance on tasks where inhibition is necessary to avoid errors ( Harkins, 2006 ).

In addition to threat experienced during tests of intellectual ability, we also see the role of working memory in other, nonacademic domains where attention regulation is likely involved. Whereas Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians are stereotyped in terms of intellectual skill, White Americans are stereotyped as being racist ( Sommers & Norton, 2006 ; Vorauer, 2003 ). Thus, White Americans are likely to experience stereotype threat during interracial interactions or on tasks that they believe will reveal their racial biases. Not only does research support these predictions but the effects found specifically implicate the same sorts of central executive processes. For example, Richeson and colleagues (e.g., Richeson & Shelton, 2003 ) found that White participants with implicit negative biases against Blacks exhibit a decrease in performance on a test of executive function (a Stroop task) following an interracial interaction. Richeson and colleagues followed up on this work by showing activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (regions of the brain thought to be involved in executive attention and control) that corresponds to increased self-regulation during an interracial interaction ( Richeson et al., 2003 ; see also Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones, 2007 ; Cunningham, Raye, & Johnson, 2005 ; B. K. Payne, 2005 ).

In a similar vein, Lambert et al. (2003) found that non-Black perceivers who are both socially anxious and racially biased have difficulty inhibiting a stereotyped judgment of a Black target when they anticipate public evaluation of their judgment. As a result, those who might be most concerned about saying the wrong thing in public actually make the most negative stereotypic judgments (see also Frantz et al., 2004 ). By applying a process dissociation procedure, these researchers showed that the effect was due more to decreases in cognitive control than to increases in stereotype accessibility. The fact that social anxiety moderates this effect suggests that stress is a factor in reducing the inhibitory processes needed to regulate responding in this kind of social situation.

In sum, evidence converges to suggest that when individuals find themselves in situations where self-relevant negative stereotypes are made salient, they exhibit reduced efficiency of working memory. More importantly, this disruption in working memory corresponds with diminished performance on both cognitive and social interaction tasks. However, this information is merely descriptive unless we can offer an understanding of why situations of stereotype threat impact this specific mechanism.

Cognitive, Physiological, and Affective Processes That Tax Working Memory

Knowing that stereotype threat interferes with difficult cognitive tasks by consuming working memory leads us to ask what precise processes are responsible for this effect. Why might marking one's race on a test booklet ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ), taking a math exam in a room of men ( Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000 ; Sekaquaptewa & Thompson, 2003 ), or speaking about racial issues ( Richeson & Shelton, 2003 ) lead Black students, women, and Whites, respectively, to experience impairments in attention regulation processes? We propose that these effects are produced by an interrelated set of cognitive, physiological, and affective processes (see Figure 1 ). We describe each of these processes and the evidence to support them in more detail below.

Physiological Stress Response

Before discussing how stress impacts attentional resources such as working memory, we first review the evidence that situations of stereotype threat are, in fact, stressful. Theoretically, the cognitive imbalance that results when stigmatized individuals are placed under stereotype threat should lead to increased arousal, distress, or discomfort that motivates a need for cognitive consistency. For example, studies have shown that individuals who experience other forms of self-inconsistency, such as cognitive dissonance, report a greater sense of discomfort ( Elliot & Devine, 1994 ) and show increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) as indicated by increased heart rate ( Etgen & Rosen, 1993 ) and skin conductance ( Harmon-Jones, Brehm, Greenberg, Simon, & Nelson, 1996 ; Losch & Cacioppo, 1990 ). Thus, we might expect that as individuals find themselves in situations of stereotype threat, attempts to reconcile the imbalance between self, group, and domain associations may in and of itself be distressing.

Although attempts to document stress under stereotype threat using self-report measures have yielded mixed results ( Gonzales et al., 2002 ; Schmader, 2002 ; Schmader & Johns, 2003 ; S. J. Spencer et al., 1999 ), studies relying on physiological and other indirect measures of stress-based arousal ( Ben-Zeev et al., 2005 ; O'Brien & Crandall, 2003 ) have yielded more promising support for Path b in Figure 1 . For example, Murphy, Steele, and Gross (2007) recently observed greater SNS activation among women merely watching a gender-imbalanced group of male and female college students discuss a math and science conference. Similarly, Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, and Steele (2001) showed that Black, but not White, students experience increased blood pressure while performing a test described as diagnostic of intellectual ability. Similarly, White Americans, who are likely to feel threatened by the stereotype that Whites are racist, exhibit a physiological threat profile of cardiovascular responses (increased cardiac output combined with increases in total peripheral resistance) when interacting with a Black male (compared with a White male; Mendes, Blascovich, Lickel, & Hunter, 2002 ). Whites also perform more poorly on a verbal task in this condition. Although these studies have not shown a direct link between increases in cardiovascular threat reactivity and poorer cognitive performance, they have provided general evidence that individuals in situations of stereotype threat experience stress-induced physiological arousal.

However, a complete understanding of how stereotype threat impairs attentional resources requires a nuanced account of arousal. Specifically, the physiological processes elicited under situations of acute stress—of which stereotype threat is one kind—are likely to include activation of both the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that reflect an increase in SNS activation (as seen in the studies reviewed above) and the release of corticosteroids and catecholamines as part of an integrated stress response ( Schommer, Hellhammer, & Kirschbaum, 2003 ). Although these stress reactions serve the function of orienting the individual to the demands of a taxing situation, they might also impair cognitive performance ( Eysenck & Calvo, 1992 ). Moreover, stress could have its biggest impact on cognitive processes that rely on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex due to the high concentration of receptors in these regions sensitive to cortisol ( Blair, 2006 ; Metcalfe & Jacobs, 1998 ). This would explain why stress can specifically impair processes such as memory consolidation and spatial memory that are mediated by the hippocampus (e.g., J. D. Payne, Nadel, Allen, Thomas, & Jacobs, 2002 ; Revelle & Loftus, 1990 ) and tasks involving executive function, attentional focus, and working memory that are mediated by the prefrontal cortex (e.g., Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002 ; Pruessner, Hellhammer, & Kirschbaum, 1999 ). Such evidence has implications for the types of tasks on which stereotype threat effects might be most pronounced.

In addition, research on stress and cognition more generally shows evidence for the role of stress-induced cortisol levels in these cognitive impairments (e.g., Bohnen, Houx, & Nicholson, 1990 ; Kirschbaum, Wolf, May, & Wippich, 1996 ), particularly in prefrontal processes such as working memory ( Elzinga & Roelofs, 2005 ). Thus, in addition to research showing a correlation between chronic stress and less efficient working memory ( Klein & Boals, 2001 ), this research suggests that acute social stressors elevate cortisol levels, which might directly reduce the efficiency of executive processes. Interestingly, the effects of cortisol on general arousal, selective attention, and memory form an inverted-U shape where some level of cortisol facilitates focused attention and resulting memory, but extreme levels impair these same processes ( Lupien & McEwen, 1997 ), particularly when paired with high levels of SNS activation ( Elzinga & Roelofs, 2005 ). This would explain why some studies find improved performance on selective attention tasks in high-pressure performance situations ( Chajut & Algom, 2003 ; Ellenbogen, Schwartzman, Stewart, & Walker, 2002 ), while others show impairment on similar types of tasks that include greater cognitive load ( Bernstein-Bercovitz, 2003 ; Vedhara, Hyde, Gilchrist, Tytherleigh, & Plummer, 2000 ).

The above findings suggest that performance should be most impaired when stress levels are more extreme and the task requires more complex cognitive processing. When tasks are easy and do not require sustained attention provided by working memory, increased arousal elicited under stress can provide a boost in performance. However, as tasks become complex, perhaps even contributing to one's overall level of arousal, stress-induced arousal has the potential to directly impair performance via its impact on specific executive processes such as working memory (e.g., Blair, 2006 ). These observed patterns in the general stress and attention literature parallel the finding that stereotype threat manipulations have their largest effects when the task is complex ( O'Brien & Crandall, 2003 ; Quinn & Spencer, 2001 ).

Furthermore, cortisol increases are highest in situations where one fears being negatively evaluated during a task on which individuals are motivated to do well ( Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004 ). Thus, it seems likely that individuals who experience stereotype threat will show increased levels of cortisol in addition to other increases in sympathetic activity. Although there have been no studies that link increased cortisol reactivity to lower performance in a stereotype threat context, there has been some research suggesting a relationship between cortisol reactivity and social identity threat more generally ( Matheson & Cole, 2004 ). In this research, individuals who were presented with a threat to their social identity (a suggestion that students at their university are less competent) showed increased levels of cortisol to the degree that they had an emotion-focused coping style, and they exhibited lower levels of cortisol to the degree that they had a problem-focused coping style. This evidence indicates that cortisol is likely to be increased even in experimental inductions of stereotype threat. Furthermore, the interactive effects of coping style suggest that people's appraisals of, or response to, the situation also play a role in modulating their physiological stress response. For this reason we represent Path g in Figure 1 as a reciprocal pathway where stress can elicit appraisal processes but appraisal processes could also modulate the stress response.

When pairing this evidence of cortisol reactivity in response to social identity threat with evidence that injections of cortisol directly impair cognitive functioning ( Kirschbaum et al., 1996 ), it is clear that a physiological stress response could play a direct role in impairing task performance under stereotype threat (Path c in Figure 1 ). More research is needed to examine whether this specific hypothesis holds both in naturalistic situations of stereotype threat where the real-world implications of performance have greater power to produce a strong physiological stress response and in short-term laboratory contexts where the stakes are often lower.

Monitoring the Self-Relevance of Performance

As specified earlier, we conceive of stereotype threat as a primed state of imbalance among concepts of self, group, and domain. In addition to eliciting an acute physiological stress response, this state of imbalanced self-perception also elicits vigilance to performance cues, internal states, and social feedback in an effort to disambiguate the uncertainty aroused by stereotype threat. Disambiguating that experience can be accomplished by attending to information that will change the links summarized in Figure 2 to create a more balanced state.

For example, if one's preexisting identification with the domain is very strong (e.g., a stable positive link between self and domain), individuals might search for cues that allow them to restore balance by reversing the link between self and group. Indeed, research has shown that Blacks and math-identified women under threat distance themselves from activities, interests, and attributes commonly associated with members of their group ( Pronin, Steele, & Ross, 2004 ; Steele & Aronson, 1995 ). Furthermore, some individuals might be able to restore balance if information in the situation suggests that the link between the group and the domain is positive. For example, stereotype threat effects can be eliminated if people are provided with positive or stereotype-inconsistent exemplars of their group ( Marx & Roman, 2002 ; McIntyre, Paulson, & Lord, 2003 ). Thus, situations that contain these cues hand targets the tools they need to restore balance in a way that preserves the positive link between self and domain. However, in the prototypical situation of stereotype threat, the negative link between self and domain that is suggested by stereotype threat, in combination with the motivation to disconfirm the stereotype, translates into a strong motivation to avoid failure. As a result, targets focus attention on themselves and their performance, becoming more vigilant to detect signs of failure. Although others have suggested that avoidance motivation is a key element of stereotype threat (e.g., J. L. Smith, 2004 ), here we extend these ideas to outline the cognitive mechanisms that might explain why this particular motivation can disrupt performance.

Becoming more conscious of the self and one's performance

One aspect of the motivation to avoid failure under stereotype threat is that it switches people from a more automated state of functioning into a more conscious and controlled state of monitoring the self within the situation. Adopting a more conscious and controlled processing strategy is designed to resolve the discrepancy represented in the triad of primed constructs. In some respects, this reaction is similar to that seen in any high-pressure performance situation where attention is more likely to be focused on oneself ( Baumeister, 1984 ; Lewis & Linder, 1997 ). However, situations of stereotype threat are unique because the concern with one's performance stems from one's association with a negatively stereotyped group. Put another way, the person under threat finds him- or herself confronting two alternative hypotheses about his or her performance: “Will I do well, consistent with my personal link to the domain?” or “Will I do poorly, consistent with the negative link to the domain suggested by the stereotype?” Although these alternatives are unlikely to be consciously considered, the primed state of cognitive imbalance manifests phenomenologically as a more conscious focus on the self and one's performance. As a result, behavior that might have been enacted efficiently is now attended to more consciously in an effort to test these alternative outcomes against available cues.

In line with this logic, Seibt and Förster (2004) showed in a series of experiments that individuals under stereotype threat become more focused on avoiding failure, leading to more cautious and systematic performance, as opposed to the eager and creative performance seen by those who are positively stereotyped. In addition, Beilock et al. (2007) recently found that women under stereotype threat about their math abilities reported worrying more about and monitoring their performance. Beilock et al. suggested that such thoughts contribute to the effect of stereotype threat because working memory becomes loaded with distracting information that competes for attentional resources.

Increased vigilance to threat- and failure-related cues

The second aspect of this monitoring process is that, because individuals feel cognitive conflict between an imbalanced set of cognitions, they then become more vigilant to internal or external cues that might help disambiguate this conflict. It has been well documented that when an individual experiences visceral arousal engendered by an environmental threat, systems are brought online to focus attention on the perceived threat ( Davis & Whalen, 2001 ). For example, recent studies using an emotional Stroop or dot-probe task showed that anxious individuals are more likely to be vigilant to anxiety-related stimuli ( MacLeod & Mathews, 1988 ; Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996 ). Although this past research suggested that such attentional shifts to threat stimuli happen automatically, such automatic vigilance to task irrelevant cues has the potential to harm performance on complex tasks that depend heavily on working memory efficiency to maintain focus on the task at hand (e.g., Conway, Cowan, & Bunting, 2001 ). Moreover, if situations of stereotype threat are episodes of acute stress, it follows that targets of threat might also show similar signs of vigilance to threat-related cues, particularly those that are highly self-relevant. For example, women anticipating working with a sexist man become more vigilant to identifying sexism-related cues in their environment ( Kaiser, Vick, & Major, 2006 ), and cues to minority status in a stereotyped domain increase women's vigilance to domain-relevant items in their physical environment ( Murphy et al., 2007 ).

However, in active performance situations, stereotyped targets are likely to be monitoring not only for signs of threat but also for cues that might offer evidence for how one is coping with that situation. The question to be answered is whether one is in fact behaving in a stereotype-consistent way. This means that the monitoring process, informed by the motivation to avoid failure, will be more biased to detect any signs of failure at the task. For example, Amodio et al. (2004) have found that when White Americans perform a task that will reveal their racial biases, their bias-consistent errors on the task activate neural regions critical for monitoring responses that conflict with goals. Importantly, the level of activation to errors consistent with racial bias is greater than that observed to errors that are not indicative of bias. Thus, White Americans become more vigilant to internal signs of bias in situations where they are aware that such biases could be revealed. As is discussed more below, this vigilance is likely to be a necessary first step in controlling those biases that conflict with impression-management goals ( Amodio, Kubota, Harmon-Jones, & Devine, 2006 ).

The above example focuses on situations of stereotype threat that involve some real or imagined social interaction; however, vigilance processes can also play a role in the academic testing contexts when individuals become vigilant to external feedback that might indicate that one is performing poorly and confirming the stereotype. To test this idea, we used the same event-related potential (ERP) methodology employed by Amodio et al. (2004) to examine stereotype threat effects on minority students' tendency to be vigilant to task errors ( Forbes et al., 2007 ). Black and Latino college students completed a rather basic response-conflict task (i.e., a flankers task) described as diagnostic of intelligence or as a neutral pattern recognition task. While they completed the task, ERPs were recorded from scalp regions located above the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain involved in monitoring behavior that conflicts with goals. Previous research showed that when individuals make errors on this type of task, their ERP waveforms contain a negative deflection approximately 30-180 ms after the response that is not present on correct responses ( Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, & Donchin, 1993 ). This error-related negativity (ERN) pattern is indicative of a performance-monitoring process sensitive to behaviors or outcomes that conflict with current goal states. Results from Forbes et al. (2007) revealed that academically identified minority students showed larger ERN amplitudes when the task was described as an intelligence test compared with a more neutral test frame. In other words, these engaged students under stereotype threat showed neural activity indicative of increased vigilance to their errors on the task.

However, in addition to monitoring the situation for actual signs of failure, individuals under threat might also become more vigilant toward their internal states that could aid in drawing inferences about how one is coping. For example, women anticipating a difficult math test show increased attention toward anxiety-related words, suggesting an increased vigilance for cues to their own level of anxiety ( Johns, Inzlicht, & Schmader, 2007 ). Moreover, a recent functional imaging study showed that women in a stereotype threat condition exhibited greater activation in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, a region that has been implicated in detecting and processing emotionally relevant information ( Krendl, Richeson, Kelley, & Heatherton, in press ). Furthermore, studies have shown that threat-induced performance decrements can be reduced by providing individuals with an external explanation for arousal experienced under stereotype threat ( Ben-Zeev et al., 2005 ; Johns, Schmader, & Martens, 2005 ; Stone et al., 1999 ). These same reappraisals have no effect on those who are not targeted by stereotype threat, suggesting that it is only those susceptible to threat who are prone to monitor their internal states and seek an explanation for them. Together, these findings indicate that awareness of one's anxious feelings and thoughts could signal that one is performing poorly on a test just as awareness of biased reactions might be an important self-relevant cue to the person facing the threat of being seen as racist.

How do monitoring processes tax working memory?

The process of monitoring performance for self-relevant information is likely to rely on the same working memory resources necessary to do the task efficiently. As working memory is often defined in terms of controlled processing ( Kane et al., 2007 ; Miyake & Shah, 1999 ), any activity that involves consciously attending to the self as a performer of that task will rely on this central executive resource (e.g., Beilock et al., 2006 ). With respect to the vigilance aspect of this process, even basic research on sustained attention suggests that remaining vigilant to cues in the immediate environment is an effortful cognitive process ( Grier et al., 2003 ). We might also expect that monitoring emotionally arousing cues is particularly taxing to working memory ( Dolcos & McCarthy, 2006 ). However, we make the point not just that individuals are vigilant to threatening cues but that their vigilance is designed to reconcile two competing cognitions in the form of a negative link between self and domain or a positive link between self and domain. Unfortunately, such resolutions are likely to come at some cost to executive resources.

For example, E. R. Smith and Henry's (1996) demonstration that individuals are slower to make judgments about themselves on traits for which they and their social group differ suggests that stereotypic knowledge about one's ingroup that conflicts with self-knowledge requires additional processing. Similarly, reaction time measures such as the implicit association test that are used to measure the cognitive association between one's self-conceptions and one's group conceptions are based on an assumption that inconsistencies between these two concepts will slow processing speed (e.g., Nosek et al., 2002 ). In other words, longer response latencies when a set of imbalanced cognitions are simultaneously activated clearly reflect the difficulty of attentional switching between inconsistent cognitions.

The process of engaging in heightened vigilance and attentional switching alone could account for impairments in working memory. However, as we discuss in the next section, the combination of cues that are gleaned from this monitoring process and how they are interpreted could engage coping efforts that might also be resource demanding.

Thought-Suppression Processes Tax Working Memory Resources

A third mechanism contributing to cognitive inefficiency under stereotype threat includes suppression processes aimed at actively regulating negative thoughts and feelings. Before turning to those suppression processes, we consider the origin of the threatening thoughts and feelings that individuals are motivated to suppress. We suggest that stereotype threat elicits appraisal processes engaged to help an individual make sense of the cues that are detected. Moreover, the cues that feed into the appraisal process stem from the primed state of cognitive imbalance (Path f in Figure 1 ), the heightened state of stress (Path g in Figure 1 ), and the monitoring system (Path h in Figure 1 ). Because threatened targets' focus of attention might be particularly drawn toward negative emotional stimuli and signs of failure ( Forbes et al., 2007 ), we reason that negative thoughts and feelings will often be the outcome of these appraisal processes. 1

The above line of reasoning suggests that stigmatized and non-stigmatized individuals would have different phenomenological experiences during a performance situation. Those who benefit from positive stereotypes might feel challenged, confident, and exhilarated, whereas those who bear the burden of negative stereotypes might experience self-doubt and feelings of anxiety. Indeed, stereotype threat has been shown to activate thoughts of self-doubt ( Steele & Aronson, 1995 ), negative expectancies ( Stangor, Carr, & Kiang, 1998 ), feelings of dejection ( Keller & Dauenheimer, 2003 ; Marx & Stapel, 2006b ), and task-related worries ( Beilock et al., 2007 ). Similarly, Cadinu, Maass, Rosabianca, and Kiesner (2005) showed that women taking a difficult math test reported having more negative thoughts under stereotype threat. Moreover, the number of negative thoughts they had during the first half of the test mediated the effect of stereotype threat on lower performance during the second half of the test.

While the above research suggests that stereotype threatened targets do experience more negative thoughts and feelings, it must be mentioned that studies have not always been so successful at detecting these phenomenological experiences when using standard self-report measures (see Wheeler & Petty, 2001 , for a review). However, studies that have used less conscious indicators of anxiety have been more revealing. For example, Bosson et al. (2004) found that homosexual men under stereotype threat exhibited more nonverbal anxiety than did heterosexual or nonthreatened homosexual men when asked to interact with preschool children. However, these same men did not explicitly report feeling more anxious.

Given this evidence that stereotype threat makes individuals anxious, why do they not report this feeling on a questionnaire? One possible reason for the mixed results on self-reported anxiety measures is that in addition to trying to do well at the performance situation, targets of negative stereotypes are also engaged in efforts to regulate unwanted thoughts and emotions that result from the experience of threat, perhaps as part of a more general tendency to deny the experience of threat ( von Hippel et al., 2005 ). Thus, the negative phenomenological experience that results from the appraisal process should elicit attempts to regulate these stressful experiences (Path i in Figure 1 ). 2 In addition, people have an intuitive belief that feeling anxious during a performance task or social interaction can interfere with the goal of doing well ( T. W. Smith, Snyder, & Handeslman, 1982 ). Imagine the student giving a speech who loses her train of thought because she is consciously trying to not feel anxious in front of an audience. Because she is trying to suppress or even deny that she is anxious, when asked on a questionnaire, she may not freely admit (even to herself) the anxiety she is feeling. However, indirect measures such as non-verbal behavior or subtle shifts in attention can reveal those anxious feelings.

The problem with this sort of coping strategy is that such acts of emotional suppression and thought suppression more generally are effortful and therefore present another pathway by which stereotype threat impairs working memory (Path j in Figure 1 ). Evidence for the depleting effects of emotion regulation comes from various sources. First, it is generally assumed that suppressing unwanted thoughts from consciousness is an effortful and resource-depleting process (e.g., Muraven & Baumeister, 2000 ; Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000 ). Furthermore, recent neuroimaging evidence supports the role of the prefrontal cortex in thought suppression over a sustained period of time ( Mitchell et al., 2007 ). More specific to emotional suppression, efforts to regulate emotional responses have been found to tax cognitive resources (e.g., Gross, 2002 ; Richards & Gross, 2000 ; Schmeichel, 2007 ) and have the ironic effect of increasing accessibility of anxiety-related thoughts ( Wegner, Erber, & Zanakos, 1993 ). Thus, if working memory is used to suppress irrelevant information ( Rosen & Engle, 1998 ), the same cognitive process needed for successful performance might be hijacked under stereotype threat for the purpose of regulating one's emotions. Even if the physiological stress-arousal mechanism or increased vigilance described previously does not affect working memory directly, self-regulation is still another process by which performance on difficult cognitive tasks could be impaired in situations of stereotype threat.

There is emerging research showing that targets under threat try to suppress negative thoughts. For example, S. Spencer (2003) reported that adding further cognitive load to women who are already experiencing stereotype threat leads to a heightened activation of stereotype-related constructs, supporting the notion that the load interferes with their attempts to suppress this information. Research has also shown that instructing women to replace stereotypic thoughts during the test with less threatening thoughts eliminates the negative effects of stereotype threat on performance ( McGlone & Aronson, 2007 ). We suspect that individuals under threat might not always have negative stereotypes consciously brought to mind, particularly when cues to threat are subtle. However, individuals are likely to be conscious of the anxiety and discomfort that are the outcomes of the monitoring processes described above. If active regulation of thoughts and feelings requires some degree of conscious awareness of those thoughts or feelings, then targets might more commonly attempt to regulate and push out of mind their own feelings of anxiety or self-doubt rather than more abstract negative stereotypes about their group.

We have recently obtained additional evidence that individuals under stereotype threat attempt to regulate their feelings of anxiety during a performance situation and that these attempts at self-regulation predict lower working memory. Earlier, we described a study using a dot-probe task that allowed us to measure attention being directed toward threat-related stimuli ( Johns et al., 2007 ). In one condition, women under stereotype threat showed evidence that their attention was directed toward threat-related words, indicating that they were anxious in the situation. We included a second condition where we described how the dot-probe task measures anxiety. Our reasoning was that if women know that this task is a measure of anxiety and they know how the task works (that anxious individuals would tend to look toward anxiety-related words), then a motivation to regulate one's anxiety would be evidenced by women trying to look away from the anxiety-related words. This tendency would be revealed in the time it takes them to identify a dot that appears in the same position as, or opposite position from, the target word. The findings suggest that women under stereotype threat attempt to suppress the expression of anxiety when they know that their anxiety is being assessed. Moreover, the more participants engage in this suppression pattern, the more their working memory decreases on a subsequent task.

Other evidence for the role of emotion regulation in reducing processing efficiency under stereotype threat comes from a recent functional imaging study of women performing a mental rotation task under conditions designed to create stereotype threat (by emphasizing men's superior spatial skills) or stereotype lift (by emphasizing women's superior perspective-taking skills) compared with control ( Wraga, Helt, Jacobs, & Sullivan, 2007 ). Results from that study revealed greater activation in the right orbital gyrus during threat compared with control that correlated with a greater number of errors made on the task in this condition. Given that the orbital gyrus has been implicated in the regulation of negative self-conscious emotions such as shame ( Beer, Heerey, Keltner, Scabini, & Knight, 2003 ), this pattern of results adds support to our assertions that stereotype threat increases negative thoughts and feelings about the self that individuals are motivated to control.

If emotion regulation does underlie some of the cognitive deficits seen in situations of threat, then manipulations designed to redirect appraisal processes or prevent emotion-focused coping should eliminate stereotype threat performance deficits. Indeed, giving targets an external attribution for heightened arousal is one way to deflect stereotype threat effects on performance ( Ben-Zeev et al., 2005 ). This finding suggests that it is because arousal gets interpreted as indicative of anxiety that individuals try to engage in self-regulatory processes in the first place. In addition, telling participants that anxiety does not harm test performance eliminates stereotype-induced reductions in working memory, presumably because such a reappraisal of anxiety eliminates the need to regulate emotion ( Johns et al., 2007 ).

To summarize, our process model of stereotype threat argues that when individuals find themselves having to perform complex tasks, cues that activate negative self-relevant stereotypes set in motion a series of processes including a physiological stress response, monitoring of the performance situation for self-relevant information, and efforts to suppress negative thoughts and feelings that result from the previous two processes. Each of these mechanisms can impair the same executive resources (i.e., working memory) necessary for successful performance on many (but not all) of the types of tasks that have been studied in the stereotype threat literature.

Accounting for Stereotype Threat Effects Found on Tasks Requiring Automated Routines

To this point, the model has focused on stereotype threat effects on tasks that require some amount of working memory to coordinate controlled processing (e.g., solving mathematical or verbal problems, regulating behavior during an interaction). However, not all tasks that have shown performance impairments under stereotype threat require working memory for their successful execution. For example, programs of research by Beilock and Stone ( Beilock et al., 2006 ; Stone et al., 1999 ) have shown that priming negative stereotypes about a certain athletic skill can hurt individuals' golf-putting performance. Other research has shown stereotype threat effects by men on tests of social or emotional sensitivity (e.g., Leyens, Désert, Croizet, & Darcis, 2000 ). Consideration of these effects requires recognition that optimal performance on some tasks does not require conscious attention to performance, and in fact, conscious attention to one's behavior or decision making can actually impair performance. For example, part of becoming an expert golfer means that one no longer has to consciously attend to one's stance, grip, swing, and follow-through; in fact, these well-practiced and now automated behaviors can be performed more reliably by not consciously attending to performance. Similarly, during social judgment, controlled attention leads one to overthink details and neglect gestalt impressions that are more accurate ( Ambady & Gray, 2002 ). We briefly consider how our model accounts for stereotype threat impairments on tasks where successful performance depends on using more automated, as opposed to controlled, processes.

Beilock's research conclusively showed that performance on a proceduralized motor task like golf putting is impaired under stereotype threat but not because of reduced efficiency of working memory. In fact, providing threatened participants with a concurrent cognitive load eliminates the effect of threat on putting performance ( Beilock et al., 2006 ). This finding suggests that performance is reduced on these tasks because of the monitoring component already described (Path m in Figure 1 ). More specifically, individuals under threat become more conscious of their performance and more vigilant for signs of failure, leading to a controlled rather than automated form of behavior regulation. Because these monitoring processes rely on working memory, the addition of a cognitive load occupies this executive control mechanism and makes the individual unable to consciously monitor his or her performance. Thus, on these types of procedural tasks, hijacking working memory for a secondary task has the effect of enhancing performance under stereotype threat by allowing automatic processes to guide behavior.

Although skilled motor tasks have been the most common form of automatic tasks studied under stereotype threat, there is another class of stereotype threat phenomena that we consider under this umbrella of automated performance. These are tasks that require social judgments where a reliance on an automatic or heuristic mode benefits performance more than relying on a controlled or systematic mode of processing. For example, Koenig and Eagly (2005) compared the performance of women and men on a test of social sensitivity that involved answering questions about the relationships and intentions of the actors in a series of video clips. Men were less accurate in these assessments when reminded of women's superior social sensitivity skills. More relevant to our analysis, Koenig and Eagly found that the stereotype threat effect was strongest among men who reported using a deliberate, conscious strategy to interpret the scenes, whereas previous research showed that performance on this test is facilitated when respondents rely on their intuitions. Leyens et al. (2000) reported a parallel effect in which men under threat performed poorly on a supposed test of emotional sensitivity by overinterpreting the affective meaning of words. Together, these findings suggest that stereotype threat can harm performance in some situations simply by motivating targets to shift their attention to conscious monitoring and control of their behavior. Again, performance here is not being impaired because of degraded working memory per se but more specifically because of the conscious mode of processing enacted by the monitoring mechanism.

Note that the experience of threat in these kinds of performance situations could still involve increases in physiological stress arousal (e.g., Stone et al., 1999 ). Although prior research suggests that physiological arousal alone might increase performance on automated tasks by facilitating the well-learned or prepotent response ( Zajonc, 1965 ), more recent work indicates that the specific nature of such arousal (threat or challenge) should moderate performance on such tasks, with threat leading to poorer performance (e.g., Blascovich, Seery, Mugridge, Norris, & Weisbuch, 2004 ; Mendes et al., 2002 ). Given this complex relationship between physiological arousal and performance on sensorimotor tasks, we do not represent a direct relationship between these constructs in Figure 1 . Moreover, in the context of stereotype threat, the relationship between physiological stress and performance on sensorimotor tasks is likely to be mediated through the appraisal and monitoring processes articulated in the model (Paths g and h in Figure 1 ). Furthermore, individuals could also be engaged in suppression processes during automated tasks, which could leave them cognitively depleted. However, given the need to monitor for unwanted thoughts and feelings to suppress them, these suppression attempts are likely to exacerbate monitoring tendencies (Path l in Figure 1 ), even if the depletion that results from suppression may not be directly responsible for impairing performance.

Qualifications, Clarifications, and Comparisons

In articulating our model of the processes that underlie stereotype threat, we have reviewed evidence to support the proposed pathways by which activating self-relevant negative stereotypes impairs working memory. In many cases, a trail of studies drawn from a variety of literatures supports the role that these processes might have in stereotype threat. In other cases, the articulation of this model could be generative in highlighting future avenues of inquiry. In addition, because there has been a great deal written on stereotype threat in the years since Steele and Aronson's (1995) article, we next consider how our model relates to several other themes in the stereotype threat literature that have not been explicitly integrated into our discussion.

Assessing Alternative Perspectives to the Role of Working Memory in Stereotype Threat

There are several lines of research that seem to offer different views on the role played by working memory in stereotype threat. These merit more focused discussion.

Should We Expect Stereotype Threat to Cause Decreased Activation in Regions Associated With Working Memory?

We mentioned previously a functional imaging study by Wraga et al. (2006) of women performing a mental rotation task under conditions of stereotype threat, stereotype lift, or control. Although the study yielded the expected pattern of performance, it did not reveal significant differences between threat and control conditions in level of activation in regions associated with working memory (the anterior prefrontal cortex). A recent study by Krendl et al. (in press) also failed to find evidence of activation differences in working memory regions due to stereotype threat. These studies would seem to speak against the idea that stereotype threat has a negative effect on working memory.

However, there is reason to be cautious when interpreting these null effects. Participants in these studies all completed cognitive tasks that should activate areas associated with working memory. Therefore, a lack of change in activation suggests only that participants in all conditions were in fact using working memory at equal levels. This point is important because our model does not imply that working memory processes are not operating during stereotype threat or even that they are operating to a lesser degree. The more apt description is that stereotype threatened individuals use working memory resources for a purpose other than performing the task. Because measures of activation do not provide insight into what information or tasks working memory is engaged in, they cannot inform us about the nature of these processes, a problem that Krendl et al. (in press) echoed.

Do Individual Differences in Working Memory Moderate Stereotype Threat Effects?

One prediction that could follow from our model is that individuals with dispositionally high working memory should be less affected by stereotype threat. That is, if stereotype threat impairs working memory, those who start out with a higher threshold for being able to juggle complex information should be better equipped to cope with threat. However, evidence by Beilock and Carr (2005) has shown that high-working memory individuals are actually harmed more by high-pressure performance situations. How do we reconcile these two viewpoints?

One difficulty in examining working memory from a dispositional approach is that this variable is likely to be confounded with task engagement. In Beilock and Carr (2005) , the low-working memory individuals responded more slowly and did poorly regardless of whether or not the situation was highly threatening, suggesting lower engagement. Furthermore, a recent follow-up by Gimmig, Huguet, Caverni, and Cury (2006) suggests that the reason low-working memory individuals are less affected by evaluative threat is because they experience less anxiety due to this threat. Together, these findings imply that engagement is the variable that really distinguishes low-working memory individuals from high-working memory individuals. By this logic, if one was able to have individuals matched on task engagement who merely differ in terms of working memory efficiency, those with higher baseline working memory should show relatively less susceptibility to stereotype threat.

Does Evidence of “Mere Effort” Rule out a Role for Working Memory?

Jamieson and Harkins (2007) recently proposed that stereotype threat harms performance because it motivates mere effort at the task. According to their view, the motivation to do well increases activation of the prepotent response, which is often incorrect on difficult tasks ( Zajonc, 1965 ). To provide evidence for this explanation, they examined the effect of stereotype threat on an antisaccade task. In this task, participants have to inhibit an automatic tendency to look toward a flashing stimulus that appears on one side of the screen, to correctly identify a target that appears briefly on the other side of the screen. Jamieson and Harkins found that women under stereotype threat perform more poorly at this task when the critical target is displayed only briefly because they are more likely to look toward the flashing stimulus. Stereotype threatened women do, however, launch corrective saccades more quickly and are able to perform the task well if it is made easier by displaying the target on the screen for longer. However, performance is again reduced if they are given a concurrent cognitive load.

Although we believe that these findings shed light on the component processes involved in working memory impairments, Jamieson and Harkins (2007) interpreted their results as being incompatible with the idea that stereotype threat affects working memory. In their view, stereotype threat motivates mere effort at the task, which then leads to an increased potentiation of a prepotent response. One problem with reconciling these two interpretations, however, is that their data cannot distinguish between the overproduction of a prepotent response (which is their view) and the failed inhibition of a prepotent response, which would result from working memory disruption and goal neglect ( P. K. Smith, Jostmann, Galinsky, & van Dijk, in press ).

In addition, the primary evidence Jamieson and Harkins (2007) invoked to support their interpretation is that stereotype threatened targets are faster to try to correct after making a reflexive (incorrect) response. They cited prior cognitive research showing that reduced working memory typically leads to slower corrections and inferred that since their participants were faster to make corrections, they could not be suffering working memory impairments. The problem with this inference is that lower working memory can sometimes be confounded with lower task engagement ( Gimmig et al., 2006 ). Although situations of stereotype threat induce the kind of ego involvement that can impair cognitive processing while keeping motivation high, we have no such assurance that other working memory or cognitive load studies were able to retain high levels of motivation from their low-working memory participants.

In sum, we disagree with Jamieson and Harkins's (2007) assertion that an increased motivation to correct one's errors is inconsistent with taxed working memory. The fact that threatened participants continued to produce incorrect responses even though they appeared motivated to correct these mistakes suggests to us that the ability to inhibit the prepotent response and produce goal-consistent behavior is diminished. This is exactly what would be expected if working memory is impaired ( Kane & Engle, 2003 ; Mitchell, Macrae, & Gilchrist, 2002 ).

Is Stereotype Threat a Cognitive or Motivational Phenomenon?

Wheeler and Petty (2001) published a provocative examination contrasting the literature on stereotype threat with the literature showing that priming stereotypes leads to automatic behavior effects. In comparing stereotype threat with ideomotor effects, Wheeler and Petty placed stereotype threat research in the context of a meta-theoretical debate that has surfaced in several research areas since the cognitive revolution ( Schwartz, 1998 ). The basic question is whether stereotype threat is best explained as the result of a simple, “cold” cognitive process or a “hot” motivational one. However, as Wheeler and Petty pointed out, this distinction is likely to be an oversimplification of the complex processes that underlie social behavior.

The model that we propose is designed to move beyond overly simplistic accounts of stereotype threat to consider how motivated processes and activated cognitions interact to elicit physiological responses and active forms of processing that impair task performance. Our integrative approach compliments recent examinations of automatic priming effects that have begun to introduce the role of self-motivated processes ( Cesario, Plaks, & Higgins, 2006 ). For example, Wheeler, DeMarree, and Petty (2007) proposed a model of automatic priming effects on behavior that assumes such effects only occur to the degree that primed content changes the currently active self-concept. Thus, situations can induce nontargeted individuals to assimilate an outgroup stereotype into their own working self-concept, but for those who are chronically the target of these preconceptions, self-relevance is the norm ( Marx & Stapel, 2006a , 2006b ).

The above work suggests that just as stereotype threat involves more than purely cognitive processes, stereotype priming effects seen with nontargets are also likely to involve motivational processes ( Wheeler & Petty, 2001 ). This raises the possibility that general effects of primes on behavior might involve some of the processes outlined in our model. For example, nontargets who internalize a stigmatized identity temporarily might fall prey to the same processes of increased stress arousal, vigilance, self-doubt, and self-regulation described in our model (e.g., Bosson, Prewitt-Freilino, & Taylor, 2005 ). Together, these findings suggest that situations that merely lead individuals (stigmatized or not) to see themselves as a member of a targeted group or to identify with someone experiencing threat can trigger the threat-based processes discussed in our model. This includes activation of negative stereotypes and increased feelings of doubt. The hypothesis that the specific processes identified here are involved in automatic priming effects, however, has yet to be examined.

Can This Model Also Explain Stereotype Lift Effects Stemming From Positive Stereotypes?

If the processes outlined here are important in reducing performance when stigmatized targets are primed with negative stereotypes, can they also help us understand the process by which stereotype lift occurs ( Walton & Cohen, 2003 )? Many stereotype threat studies report evidence of a small but noticeable increase in performance among the positively stereotyped group in the same condition that reduces the performance of those who are negatively stereotyped ( Shih, Ambady, Richeson, Fujita, & Gray, 2002 ; Shih et al., 1999 ). Although it has seldom been significant in any given study, Walton and Cohen (2003) confirmed in a meta-analysis that this stereotype lift effect is reliable. How might our model account for the performance of positively stereotyped group members?

First, rather than activating negative stereotypes, situations in which stereotype lift occurs are likely to activate self-relevant positive stereotypes. Assuming the activation is implicit, this indirect priming of positive performance concepts should buffer against the typical stress responses that operate in any social evaluative setting, such as taking a standardized test. In terms of our balance framework, the primed positive stereotype and activation of the group concept yield positive links between group and domain and between self and group that facilitate a positive link between self and domain. This balanced state should reinforce the tendency to assume that one will do better than average at a given task, which should negate any need to monitor the performance situation for signs of threat. Finally, any interpretation that does occur should operate through the lens of a positive stereotype, which would bias self-assessments in a more favorable direction and eliminate any need to regulate thoughts and emotions. Without the influence of the processes that are likely to compete for working memory (i.e., stress arousal, performance monitoring, and suppression), individuals performing under the protective glow of a positive stereotype should have the best chance of performing up to their full potential.

Furthermore, it makes sense that the effect size for stereotype lift might be smaller than that seen for stereotype threat if we assume that a given sample of individuals in a control condition are performing close to, but not at, their maximum potential. Because any individual might feel social evaluative threat that could lead him or her to perform somewhat below his or her true ability, any testing instructions will likely create variance in performance in a condition where no group stereotype is activated. Priming a positive social stereotype, then, might reduce this variance and elevate scores. For those under stereotype threat, there is more room for failure, and thus performance is impaired more dramatically by priming negative stereotypes in situations where one might do quite well under less threatening circumstances.

Finally, choking under pressure is likely to involve some of the same processes outlined in our model. The lift effect described above assumes that a positive self-relevant stereotype is primed implicitly ( Shih et al., 2002 ). However, choking is most likely to occur when a positive stereotype is primed for an individual who lacks confidence in his or her own ability to live up to that expectation ( Cheryan & Bodenhausen, 2000 ). This situation should also induce a state of cognitive imbalance where the positive links between group and domain and between self and group prime a positive link between self and domain that is in conflict with a preexisting negative link between these two constructs. In other words, individuals find themselves trying to reconcile contrasting cognitions about the self: “According to the stereotype, I should do well; but what does it mean if I don't?” As already described, individuals might spend some of their attentional resources searching the environment for evidence to reconcile these competing hypotheses. This situation is the obverse of that faced by the stigmatized target who is confident about his or her personal ability but fears that his or her performance could confirm a negative stereotype. In both cases, the discrepant cognitions and explicit monitoring of the performance situation have the potential to redirect working memory for a purpose other than the task at hand.

How Is Stereotype Threat Different From Situations of Social Evaluative Threat or Test Anxiety?

Given our emphasis on how different mechanisms play into a larger process of impaired performance, some aspects of our model are likely to apply to other forms of social evaluative threat. For example, vigilance and cognitive interference are thought to contribute to individual differences in text anxiety ( Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001 ; Sarason, 1984 ). Furthermore, research on social evaluative threat examines stress more generally by placing individuals in challenging performance situations that share many of the same features with those studied by stereotype threat researchers ( Kirschbaum, Pirke, & Hellhammer, 1993 ). Is stereotype threat merely a subtype of social evaluative threat or test anxiety more generally? We contend that stereotype threat is unique in several key ways.

First, the most obvious difference is that only stereotype threat is triggered by activating one's membership in a negatively stereotyped group—an element that is absent from standard situations of test anxiety and social evaluative stress. In these more personalized cases of performance anxiety, a negative association between self and domain is probably cued directly and explicitly by the negative expectations that oneself (in the case of test anxiety) or others (in the case of social evaluative threat) have for one's performance. Thus, a unique aspect of stereotype threat is that individuals who typically view their abilities positively can find themselves in an ego-involving situation that is not explicitly evaluative and still perform poorly.

A related distinction between stereotype threat and these other forms of stress-induced performance impairments is that only situations of stereotype threat have been shown to increase one's motivation to do well as one tries to disconfirm the stereotype ( Forbes et al., 2007 ; Jamieson & Harkins, 2007 ; Kray, Thompson, & Galinsky, 2001 ; O'Brien & Crandall, 2003 ). It is less clear that test anxiety and social evaluative threat have the same positive effects for motivation. Instead, test-anxious students appear to become less motivated in evaluative contexts (e.g., Hancock & Dawson, 2001 ), and classic situations of evaluative threat promote behavioral disengagement from the task (e.g., Tomaka & Palacios-Esquivel, 1997 ).

The third way in which stereotype threat is distinct from other types of stress-induced performance impairments lies in phenomenological experience. As discussed earlier, stereotype threat can be induced through subtle cues that simultaneously impair performance but leave individuals unaware of (or unwilling to acknowledge) their resulting feelings of anxiety ( Johns et al., 2007 ). In contrast, individuals who suffer from chronic test anxiety seem more willing to freely admit their predicament on standard self-report measures of test anxiety ( Spielberger, 1980 ). Likewise, manipulations of social evaluative threat are designed to create an explicit sense of public critique during an impossibly difficult task ( Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004 ). Thus, individualized forms of stress-induced performance impairments are readily observable and recognized by those who suffer their consequences. Perhaps as a result, these situations are unlikely to evoke the same degree of impression-management strategies undertaken by individuals trying to deny their experience of stereotype threat.

In sum, stereotype threat involves a conflict between one's positive self-concept and negative group concept in a stereotype-relevant domain; its experience can be cued by situations that are not explicitly threatening; it can have effects that individuals are unable or unwilling to consciously report; and in spite of these obstacles, individuals remain motivated to excel even while the situation conspires against their success. In contrast, situations of test anxiety and social evaluative threat are cued by directly priming a negative link between the self and the domain in a way that is explicit, readily acknowledged, and likely to lower motivation. Both types of situations might lead to the same physiological stress response and conscious vigilance to performance with a biased focus on errors—both processes that interfere with executive functioning. However, given the greater tendency toward denial in situations of stereotype threat, active suppression might be more unique to those situations. Finally, given that stereotype threat effects do not require public evaluation of one's performance ( Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2003 ), they are also likely to be activated for stigmatized individuals in a broader set of circumstances.

Considering the Relative Role of Each Pathway and Applying the Model to Reduce Stereotype Threat Effects

The model we present identifies separate pathways by which negative self-relevant stereotypes could impair working memory and lead to performance disparities between groups. We conceptualize these pathways as part of a system where each not only has the potential to directly affect working memory but also feeds back into other components in the model. For example, the link between suppression and a physiological stress response (Path k in Figure 1 ) reflects recent research suggesting that suppression elicits a profile of cardiovascular threat reactivity ( Mendes, Reis, Seery, & Blascovich, 2003 ). Suppression is also shown as having a reciprocal link to monitoring processes (Path l in Figure 1 ) given Wenzlaff and Wegner's (2000) assertion that thought suppression engages both the search for to-be-suppressed thoughts and the controlled process of keeping such thoughts out of mind. 3 Given this systemic view, it might be unfeasible to design a study that would include perfect and simultaneous measures of each of the processes proposed in the model to estimate and compare the unique contribution of each of these variables. However, we might get more traction on the role of specific pathways in the model by considering the factors that moderate the effect of each component process in creating stereotype threat-induced cognitive impairments. This analysis not only allows us to consider the relative impact of specific processes but also helps to identify potential switches within an individual or situation that would essentially turn the threat off.

Moderating the Physiological Stress Response

We have argued that situations of stereotype threat often elicit an increased physiological stress response that could directly impair cognitive performance when stigmatized individuals are in highly evaluative situations. Thus, the physiological pathway could play a substantial role in real-world performance contexts such as standardized tests, interviews, or public speaking, especially for individuals prone to experiencing performance anxiety. In comparison to these real-world situations, more short-lived encounters that are of a private nature ( Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2003 ) might not be stressful enough to induce a large physiological response. Given that many laboratory studies of stereotype threat fall closer to this second category, we suspect that the physiological processes described in the model can exacerbate stereotype threat effects on performance but cannot alone account for the full complement of findings in the literature.

However, even if most laboratory inductions of stereotype threat are not strong enough to elicit hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal activation, some degree of sympathetic responding could still be necessary for the biased processing of one's internal states that could lead to felt anxiety and efforts to suppress it. If this is the case, drug treatments that reduce activation of the SNS should be effective in reducing stereotype threat effects. If stigmatized individuals in a treatment group do not show performance impairments under stereotype threat conditions, this would provide some indication that sympathetic arousal does play a necessary role in the process. Indeed such treatments have had some success in reducing physiological stress and facilitating the performance of musicians suffering from stage fright (see Kenny, 2005 , for a review).

Other nonpharmacological solutions to reducing stress could entail making the performance context seem less self- or group relevant, less of a test of inherent ability, or less evaluative. As an example, several years ago the College Board revised the A in SAT to emphasize assessment over aptitude. Such a change can help disabuse people of the lay intuition that a given testing session will reveal one's inherent ability and help lower their levels of stress.

Moderating Performance-Monitoring Tendencies

A second pathway by which working memory is directly reduced in situations of stereotype threat is through increased monitoring of the performance situation. Although we suspect that some degree of heightened vigilance is a hallmark of all stereotype threat situations, it is unclear whether vigilance alone is enough to produce the deficits in working memory that impair cognitive performance. However, any diversion of attention away from the task to situational cues or internal thoughts could arguably reduce performance on tasks that require controlled attention. Moreover, this impairment will be exacerbated by heightened levels of cognitive inconsistency or uncertainty. This analysis implies that certain individual differences could moderate the degree to which individuals engage in these monitoring processes. For example, individuals who are high in stigma consciousness might be especially prone to become hypervigilant to signs of social bias ( Brown & Pinel, 2003 ). On the other hand, high self-monitors seem to be buffered from stereotype threat effects because they are more practiced at being socially vigilant and thus less bothered by having to do this in a given context ( Inzlicht, Aronson, Good, & McKay, 2006 ).

In addition to these variables, other general personality factors could be important moderators of performance-monitoring effects. For example, individuals with a high need for cognition ( Cacioppo & Petty, 1982 ) might engage in more cognitive work to reconcile discrepant cognitions about the self, further siphoning resources away from the task, whereas those high in self-concept clarity ( Campbell et al., 1996 ) might have a more stable link between self and domain that is unaffected by the balance processes described. Any of these variables could moderate the influence vigilance processes exert in reducing the efficiency of working memory.

Drawing from these hypotheses about person variables moderating threat susceptibility, manipulations could also combat stereotype threat by suppressing this specific pathway. If the activation of imbalanced cognitions shifts people from automatic processing of their behavior to a more conscious monitoring of their behavior, then manipulations designed to restore ego-enhancing biases should also alleviate threat. For example, manipulations that affirm positive characteristics about oneself ( Martens, Johns, Greenberg, & Schimel, 2006 ) or one's group ( Marx & Roman, 2002 ; McIntyre et al., 2003 ) have been successful at reducing stereotype threat. Our model suggests that such manipulations work by specifically reducing vigilance processing, although this hypothesis remains to be tested directly.

Moderating Suppression Processes

The third pathway involves stigmatized individuals' active attempts to cope with or suppress the phenomenological manifestations of stereotype threat. Just as test anxiety would exacerbate the physiological stress response and stigma consciousness could exacerbate performance-monitoring processes, there are also person factors that should moderate the tendency to engage in suppression processes when under stereotype threat. For example, individuals who have a dispositional preference for emotion-focused styles of coping (e.g., Folkman & Lazarus, 1985 ) might be more likely to cope with stereotype threat by regulating their emotions as opposed to focusing solely on performing the task. Given Wegner and Erber's (1992) demonstration that suppression processes are likely to fail, we could expect to see hyperaccessibility of stress-related thoughts due to suppression attempts. This could explain the results of a study by Matheson and Cole (2004) whereby stigmatized individuals high in emotion-focused coping showed greater cortisol reactivity in response to a threat to their social identity.

This latter point highlights again the systemic nature of the model we describe. Even though suppression processes are considered to be downstream from other load-producing processing, it is a process that is still likely to have reciprocal relations with other variables in the model including physiological stress, monitoring, and negative thoughts and feelings (Paths k, i , and l in Figure 1 ). This implies that manipulations that reduce suppression tendencies can also reduce overall stereotype threat effects on working memory by down-regulating a more systemic threat response. For example, emotional expression is an adaptive way to cope with negative emotions in that it is associated with a challenged profile of cardiovascular reactivity ( Mendes et al., 2003 ).

Another strategy to counteract suppression is to instead cope with negative thoughts and feelings by reappraising their source and meaning. We earlier mentioned that women in a stereotype threat condition who reappraise anxiety as being good for performance exhibit less expressive suppression, higher working memory, and better performance on a math test compared with women in a standard stereotype threat condition ( Johns et al., 2007 ). In other research, we have employed a more naturalistic way to get stigmatized targets to reappraise their anxiety. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that learning about stereotype threat as an external explanation for why one might feel anxious in a testing situation could effectively reduce the underperformance of women on a math test ( Johns et al., 2005 ). In this study, women under-performed men on a math test when told that the study would be examining gender differences in math ability. They performed equally to men when told that the study would be examining individual differences on a problem-solving exercise. In a third condition, women were told that the study examined gender difference in math ability but were also told about stereotype threat and the way in which it might lead women to feel more anxious while taking a math test and underperform as a result. In this condition, even though women expected to do more poorly than men, they actually performed just as well as men, and their performance was predicted by the degree that they attributed their anxiety to gender stereotypes.

From this evidence, it is clear that how individuals interpret their experience when under threat plays a critical role in affecting their performance. For this reason, we have represented all of the pathways to the subcomponent appraisal process as reciprocal relationships because reappraisal might be an important means of down-regulating threat. Group differences might be substantially reduced, if not eliminated, by encouraging stigmatized individuals to reappraise what anxiety, arousal, or even task errors mean and to avoid interpreting them as signs of personal failure. While it seems likely that such reappraisal could reduce or qualitatively change the level of physiological stress (e.g., from threat to challenge), it is not known whether reappraisal also works in the other direction to reduce performance-monitoring tendencies. Testing these reciprocal relationships among the component processes in the model is an important avenue for future inquiry. However, the research described by Johns et al. (2005) also offers some hope that interventions to reverse the long-standing group differences in intellectual performance could be as simple as educating the public about these effects.

Summary and Implications

The 21st century brings with it increasing diversity in organizations, schools, and communities, making it essential to understand how the salience of stigmatized status affects performance. We have outlined a model of stereotype threat that integrates physiological, affective, cognitive, and self-regulation processes to illuminate the unique challenges associated with situational stigma. We contend that most, if not all, situations of stereotype threat set in motion certain physiological and psychological processes that impair the domain-general executive resource needed for performance on a variety of different tasks. If physiological stress does not directly reduce working memory, then the increased vigilance to one's performance, or suppressing negative emotions, can. The predicament faced by those who are socially stigmatized is particularly pernicious because it is likely to be multidetermined by these various pathways.

As described, this model has the potential to explain a variety of phenomena ranging from why minorities and women underperform in certain academic arenas to why interracial interactions are often experienced as uncomfortable and awkward. Although anyone can experience the processes outlined in our model, for those who contend with negative stereotypes about their abilities, the chronic experience of stress, heightened vigilance, self-doubt, and emotional suppression not only can impair performance directly but also can lead them to avoid situations where these aversive phenomena reside ( Davies, Spencer, & Steele, 2005 ; Steele, 1997 ). The far-reaching consequences of these effects increase the need to translate our understanding of basic processes into effective interventions. Fortunately, the strength and appeal of a stereotype threat perspective on group differences in behavior and ability are that situations, or people's appraisals of those situations, can be modified to reduce the threat. By demystifying the process by which stereotypes affect behavior, we are better equipped to alter those processes for the better.

Acknowledgments

Work on this article was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 1R01MH071749 awarded to Toni Schmader. We would like to thank Lynn Nadel, Alfred Kaszniak, and David Sbarra for their comments and advice on an earlier version of the model articulated in this article.

1 Appraisal processes are not represented as directly taxing working memory because studies showing that reappraisal or misattribution can buffer working memory resources or task performance would suggest that appraisals alone do not lead to performance impairments ( Johns et al., 2007 ).

2 Negative thoughts and emotions are not represented as directly taxing working memory given evidence that active expression of negative thoughts and feelings has psychological, physiological, and performance benefits rather than costs (e.g., Mendes et al., 2003 ). The links between negative thoughts/emotions and suppression are represented as reciprocal pathways in light of evidence that active suppression leads to the ironic effect of these states becoming more accessible ( Wegner & Erber, 1992 ; Wegner et al., 1993 ).

3 We do not represent physiological stress responses and monitoring processes as having direct links leading to suppression because these elements alone have little meaning before the appraisal process they elicit produces phenomenological experiences (doubt, anxiety) that would need to be suppressed.

Contributor Information

Toni Schmader, University of Arizona.

Michael Johns, University of Wyoming.

Chad Forbes, University of Arizona.

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IMAGES

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COMMENTS

Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators
Further research suggests that stereotype threat can be activated through subtle cues in the environment rather than explicit stereotype activation [58,82]. It is therefore plausible that expectancies regarding performance may be further undermined when stigmatized in-group members are required to perform a stereotype-relevant task in front of ...
Stereotype Threat: Definition and Examples
Stereotype threat is the psychological phenomenon where an individual feels at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about a group they identify with. Stereotype threat contributes to achievement and opportunity gaps among racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural groups, — particularly in academics and the workplace.
Unhealthy Interactions: The Role of Stereotype Threat in Health
STEREOTYPE THREAT. Interactions between patients and health care providers may induce stereotype threat, a phenomenon shown by extensive psychological research to generate negative effects in interpersonal contexts, including the classroom and the workplace. 12 First identified by Steele and Aronson in 1995, 13 stereotype threat can be defined as a disruptive psychological state that people ...
Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of ...
This systematic literature review appraises critically the mediating variables of stereotype threat. A bibliographic search was conducted across electronic databases between 1995 and 2015. The search identified 45 experiments from 38 articles and 17 unique proposed mediators that were categorized into affective/subjective (n = 6), cognitive (n ...
Stereotype threat
A 2007 study extended stereotype threat research to entrepreneurship, a traditionally male-stereotyped profession. The study revealed that stereotype threat can depress women's entrepreneurial intentions while boosting men's intentions. ... In such cases, further research suggests that the manner in which the information is presented ...
Frontiers
The mere publication of such a paper suggests a debate in the field of industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology on the extent to which research on stereotype threat is applicable to the workplace. Stereotype threat is the fear or anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype about one's social group (e.g., women are bad at math).
Stereotype Threat Experiences Across Social Groups
Stereotype threat is the concern or worry that one will be perceived or judged through the lens of negative group-based stereotypes which, under specific conditions, can undermine outcomes in academic and other important life domains (Steele 1997).The broader theory outlines situational triggers, processes, and boundary conditions of the stereotype threat phenomenon and applications to various ...
Stereotype Threat
When members of a stigmatized group find themselves in a situation where negative stereotypes provide a possible framework for interpreting their behavior, the risk of being judged in light of those stereotypes can elicit a disruptive state that undermines performance and aspirations in that domain. This situational predicament, termed stereotype threat, continues to be an intensely debated ...
A Review of the Stereotype Threat Literature and Its ...
Stereotype threat is a situational phenomenon, leading to test performance decrements, in which a member of a stigmatized group feels pressured by the possibility of confirming or being judged by a negative stereotype. This review article highlights the progression of research in the stereotype threat field, and its relevance to neurological populations. Early studies focused on demonstrating ...
Stereotypes and the Achievement Gap: Stereotype Threat Prior to Test
A second line of criticism addressed the real-world applicability of stereotype threat findings. Stereotype threat research suggests that standardized tests such as the SAT underestimate the true ability of stereotyped individuals due to stereotype threat (e.g., Aronson and Dee 2012), but this conclusion is questioned by others (Sackett and ...
PDF Literature Overview: Stereotype Threat: Causes, Effects, and Remedies
Research suggests that the negative effects of stereotype threat on performance are mediated by psychological and physiological mechanisms such as anxiety, arousal (i.e., readiness to respond to ... stereotype threat. Recent research reveals that stereotype activation is an important component for activating stereotype threat. For instance ...
Strategies and Resources About Stereotype Threat
Research suggests that when a student is in a performance situation with the potential to confirm negative stereotypes about the student's identity, possible outcomes include: ... Aronson, J. (2002). Stereotype threat: Contending and coping with unnerving expectations. In J. Aronson, Ed. Improving Academic Achievement: ...
Stereotype Threat Among Girls: Differences by Gender Identity and Math
The vast majority of research on stereotype threat, gender identity, and math performance has been conducted with college student samples. However, research with children and adolescents reports that knowledge of math gender stereotypes seems to emerge as early as first grade (Lummis & Stevenson, 1990), and first-grade students report that math ability is more important for boys' identity ...
Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of ...
Further research suggests that stereotype threat can be activated through subtle cues in the environment rather than explicit stereotype activation [58,82]. It is therefore plausible that expectancies regarding performance may be further undermined when stigmatized in-group members are required to perform a stereotype-relevant task in front of ...
The Role of Stereotype Threat in Ethnically Minoritized Students
This finding may be explained by existing research that suggests stereotype threat is associated with effort investment such that individuals who anticipate experiencing discrimination are more likely to withdraw effort and engage in self-handicapping behavior (Keller, 2002; Stone, 2002). Individuals may perceive that investing effort in a task ...
8: Stereotype Threat and Ten Things We Can Do to Remove the Threat in
2. Affirm students' sense of belonging. According to Steele (1997), negative-ability stereotypes raise the threat that one does not belong in the learning environment: "They cast doubt on the extent of one's abilities, on how well one will be accepted, on one's social compatibility with the domain, and so on" (p. 625).
Stereotypes Harm Black Lives and Livelihoods, but Research Suggests
Management researcher Modupe Akinola explains on how stereotypes hurt Black Americans and what we can do to counter them ... Research suggests some roots of racism lie in the stereotypes we hold ...
Addressing Stereotype Threat is Critical to Diversity and Inclusion in
Recent research suggests that non-cognitive stereotypes have been largely ignored in the organizational stereotype threat literature (Dhanani and Wolcott, 2014). For example, the stereotype of African Americans as aggressive may affect African Americans' workplace behaviors (e.g., withholding information or being less assertive) because of ...
Advances in stereotype threat research on African Americans ...
The lack of external validity of stereotype threat studies is recognized as a major shortcoming (e.g., Whaley 1998).For this and other reasons, Sackett et al. questioned the applicability of the research to everyday experiences of people of color in achievement-related contexts of the regular social environment.Efforts to bring the stereotype research into more ecologically valid social ...
Stereotype Threat and College Academic Performance: A Latent Variables
Abstract. Stereotype threat theory has gained experimental and survey-based support in helping explain the academic underperformance of minority students at selective colleges and universities. Stereotype threat theory states that minority students underperform because of pressures created by negative stereotypes about their racial group.
Research on stereotype threat suggests that stereotypes
Research on stereotype threat indicates that. a. only a handful of minority groups experience such threats. b. such threats can be attenuated by giving targets the opportunity to self-affirm. c. stereotypes are just as likely to lift the math scores of women as they are to threaten them. d. it is an exclusively American phenomenon.
Effects of Stereotype Threat, Perceived Discrimination, and Examiner
Stereotype threat has been found to account for racial/ethnic performance discrepancies on IQ testing among populations who would otherwise be expected to perform similarly (Steele, 1997). According to stereotype threat theory, a person who belongs to a group for which there is a negative stereotype may underperform in the domain to which the ...
Large language models show human-like content biases in ...
In the original study , while stereotype-consistent information was preferentially retained across the overall chain, earlier chain steps showed an advantage for stereotype-inconsistent information. Later research suggested that a bias for stereotype-consistent information is a product of communicative intent, rather than memory . No such ...
An Integrated Process Model of Stereotype Threat Effects on Performance
Research suggests that working memory impairments cannot easily account for the effect of stereotype threat on such tasks (e.g., Beilock, Jellison, Rydell, McConnell, & Carr, 2006). However, because performance on automated tasks suffers to the degree executive resources are used to monitor and control one's behavior—a process also implicated ...

Stereotype Threat: Definition and Examples

Stereotype Threat Examples

Theories of Stereotype Threat

Stereotype Threat and the Achievement Gap

How to Fight Stereotype Threat

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Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators

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REVIEW article

Effects of Stereotype Threat Beyond Performance

Stereotype Threat Processes

Reduced Openness to Feedback

Reduced Domain Identification

Reduced Engagement

Reduced or Changed Career Aspirations

Consequences of Stereotype Threat for Organizations

Entrepreneurship

Negotiations

Competitiveness

Stereotype Threat Interventions in the Workplace

Institutional and Structural Level Interventions

Valuing Diversity Among Employees

Wise Feedback and Organizational Mindset

Individual and Psychological Focused Interventions

Reframing the Task

Values-Affirmation

Utility-Value Interventions

Belonging Interventions

Communal Goal Affordances and Interdependence

Discussing Stereotype Threat

A Note of Caution

Summary, Limitations, and Future Directions

Where Do We Go From Here?

Author Contributions

Conflict of Interest Statement

Acknowledgments

Annual Review of Psychology

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What is a stereotype threat?

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Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators

Introduction

Stereotype Threat: An Overview

Susceptibility to Stereotype Threat

Mediators of Stereotype Threat

A Multi-threat Approach to Mediation

Literature Search

Eligibility Criteria.

Distinguishing Different Stereotype Threats.

Affective/Subjective Mechanisms

Individuation tendencies.

Evaluation apprehension.

Performance expectations.

Explicit stereotype endorsement.

Self-efficacy.

Cognitive Mechanisms

Working memory.

Cognitive load.

Thought suppression.

Mind-wandering.

Negative thinking.

Cognitive appraisal.

Implicit stereotype endorsement.

Motivational Mechanisms

Effort/motivation.

Self-handicapping.

Achievement goals.

Limitations of Stereotype Threat Research

Supporting Information

S1 Table. PRISMA Checklist.

S2 Table. Summary of affective, cognitive and motivational mechanisms that have been found to mediate stereotype threat effects.