StereotypeThreat < Kitchen

25 Sep 2006 - 12:45

stereotype threat

Jerry Becker^* posted this Pew Research Center press release on "stereotype threat" at Math Forum over the weekend.

I'm posting it in full because, having experienced a near-fatal case of stereotype threat myself when I appeared on a game show called Sale of the Century, I've seen stereotype threat in action.

Sitting in the contestant bleachers that day, waiting to see whether I would be tagged to go on camera, I was in a state of near panic. I was so frightened by the prospect of having to go on camera and compete against two other people on national television that I wanted to flee the studio, and the only reason I didn't flee the studio was that I was too terrified to do even that. Deer in the headlights.

Years later, when I was doing the research for Animals in Translation I learned that "freezing" is one of our four built-in responses to threat, the other three being fight, flight, and — this one took me by surprise — appeasement.

I made this discovery post 9/11, post-Afghanistan, and pre-Iraq, and it knocked me out.

Appeasement isn't just a Neville Chamberlain thing? I thought.

Appeasement is a mammal thing?^*

Who knew?

stereotype threat on Sale of the Century

Not long into my terror-stricken wait there in Burbank, the show producer tagged me to take my seat between two other contestants, both of them men.

Men!

The studio lights were blinding; there was what seemed like an immense studio audience staring at us from the dark; and I was now to compete against two men.

These are the words that sprang into my mind: "I can't compete against men."

Seriously.

I can't compete against men.

I'd gone to Wellesley & Dartmouth — Dartmouth! plenty of highly competitive men at Dartmouth! — I'd earned a Ph.D.; I'd taught huge lecture courses at UCLA, the back rows of which were filled with very large football players. None of these things had been a problem.

Put me on a game show and all of a sudden I can't compete with big, scary men.

It was mortifying.

It was also infuriating. Here I was, this feminist career-woman Ms. Magazine reader with big plans for her life, and my only thought while waiting to appear on a game show is "I can't compete against men." I was a joke.

I was so disgusted with myself that I managed to take my seat and play the game.

But just barely. It's a miracle I could remember any game show-type factoids at all. And although I could remember game show-type factoids, my reactions were slow. I was a mess.

stereotype threat on Sale of the Century part 2

So there I was, flanked by two guys, caught in the headlights with my lizard brain in charge.

The guy to my left was white.

The guy to my right was black.

Before the game began, the white guy acted gentlemanly towards me and probaby a bit nervous, too. (Hard to remember now.) He didn't seem panicked out of his mind (although I probably didn't, either), and he was playing faster & better than I was.

lesson: You can be in the game, or you can be in your head. Pick one.

I don't know whether the white guy was experiencing any kind of stereotype threat, mostly because I'm not sure how codes of gentlemanly behavior relate to a direct public competition with a woman. Is it "OK" for a man to defeat a woman in a televised game show?

I don't know! But whatever he may have been feeling, he was playing a lot better than I was.

Lucky for me, when it came to knowledge of game show trivia I blew him out of the water. So I beat him fair and square, even in my petrified state.

The black guy was a different story.

He knew all the answers; he knew way more than I did. If you'd sat the 3 of us down in a quiet room somewhere and given us the same questions we had on the show, he would have won handily.

But he was panicked, too. He was sitting next to a young white woman whose fiancee was watching from the audience. (Ed and I were to be married three days later and, as I recall, they'd announced this fact at the start of the show.) From where I sat, which was 6 inches away, it looked as if he simply could not defeat me, not in the spotlight like that, not with an audience watching.

I can't tell you exactly how I knew this, but I did. Some of it has to do with stories my folks told me of having visited the deep south during Jim Crow, the way the young black man from the restaurant chased them down the street to give them back the baby bottle they'd left behind, the way he'd had to run towards them and avert his eyes at the same time.

In the game he was making all kinds of errors, though I no longer remember examples. He obviously knew the answers to all the questions — I could tell because I was sitting next to him and I think he may actually have said the right answers under his breath — but he kept screwing up.

Things didn't get better as the game wore on. The most painful moment arrived fairly late, I think, when it was again his turn to choose one of the celebrity photos on the game board. There were maybe 9 or 12 photos of celebrities with questions concealed behind them, and contestants picked a celebrity, then tried to answer whatever question came up.

The black guy looked at the board and chose Mr. Smith. The orangutan from the Clint Eastwood movies.

It was excruciating. He was the only black person in the building, and he chose the only nonhuman primate on the game board. He may have winced as he did it, and he let out a little self-deprecating laugh. It was almost as if he couldn't stop himself.

If I'm remembering correctly, and I think I am, that was the question that gave me the game. Behind Mr. Smith: "Who is Norman Lear's producing partner?" Answer: Bud Yorkin

Everyone, including the show's host, was pretty stunned that I knew Bud Yorkin was Norman Lear's producing partner. Every once in awhile having a Ph.D. in film studies comes in handy.

Stereotype threat had nothing to do with the black guy losing that question.

But it had everything to do with choosing Mr. Smith.

object lesson

That day has stayed with me.

I learned:

stereotype threat — the term hadn't been invented yet — is a force to reckon with

the amount of sheer energy, anger, and force of conviction it takes to overcome a paralyzing case of stereotype threat isn't something everyone's going to possess

even if you do possess it, stereotype threat is still a handicap — you're going to have to be way better than the other guy to win

racism, sexism, antisemitism and all the rest aren't only things other people do to you. They are things you do to yourself.

The concept of stereotype threat falls under the heading of being your own worst enemy. Nobody in that studio was telling me, "You can't compete against men." Just the reverse; the show was built on a boy-girl-boy-girl contestant seating arrangement.

Nobody in the studio was telling the black guy, "You can't compete against white people & you especially can't compete against white women." Again, just the reverse.

A good game show isn't built on people sitting down in the contestant seats and freaking out about whatever racial, sexual, or ethnic category they happen to occupy. A good game show is built on people sitting down in the contestant seats and actually playing the game.

The black guy should have won. He didn't win because he self-destructed.

Everything that happened after that is a blank right up to the point where I won a third day's game in a row (they film 5 shows per day) and retired with my winnings. At that point I'd racked up a cash prize of $9,000 in traveller's cheques, a couple of pieces of furniture, and a set of Italian dishes.

The producer tried to talk me into staying on. She said the audience wanted me to keep playing, and Ed told me afterwards that I'd developed a fan base in the bleachers. My friend Cassandra, who'd gone to the audition with me, said, "It was amazing watching you revert to pure Midwestern Farm Girl on TV." So I figure my audience was basically ladies from the Midwest visiting Los Angeles on vacation.

I would have liked to stay — after the first game I'd gotten into the swing of things — but I said no. Sale was a high-stakes game; you had to gamble all your winnings with each new show, and if you lost you lost everything. The grand prize of $100,000 was a good 5 or 6 games away, my husband-to-be was an assistant professor, I was a brand-new baby free lance writer. Nine thousand dollars, at that stage of the game (also at this stage of the game) was a huge sum of money.

So I retired and we went to Nieman Marcus and bought Ed a hundred-dollar white dress shirt to wear to our wedding.

Today is our 23rd anniversary.

how to fix a roaring case of stereotype threat

Years later, when I first read about Claude Steele's work on stereotype threat in blacks,^** my reaction was Been there, done that. I know stereotype threat exists, and I know that it can be bizarrely powerful.

So this study is very good news:

Women Can't Do Math...Or Can They?
by Richard Morin
Pew Research Center
August 31, 2006

Strange but true: Women score much lower on math tests if they are first asked unrelated questions about gender issues. The phenomenon is known as "stereotype threat" -- a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.
Since then, dozens of other experiments have confirmed that subtly cuing women, minorities and other stigmatized groups to think subconsciously about their gender or race causes them do poorly in areas where the general stereotype suggests they are weak.
University of Texas psychologist Matthew S. McGlone wondered if there wasn't another side of the story. What if you prompted people to think about their strengths rather than their stereotypical weaknesses -- would that be enough to improve performance in areas where they weren't supposed to do well?
In a novel set of experiments, McGlone, working with Joshua Aronson of New York University, found that the answer is yes. "The idea that something is immutable due to some biological factor can be trumped," McGlone said.
Their ingenious study involved 90 undergraduate students, half men and half women, at Lafayette College, where McGlone taught. To hide the purpose of their experiments, they told the students they were going to be asked some questions as part of a study of living conditions on the Lafayette campus.
The questionnaire was composed of two parts. All the students answered one common set of general questions about campus life. In the second section, researchers varied the questions to prime these students to think in slightly different ways.
A third of the students were asked whether they lived in a single-sex or co-ed dorm. McGlone wanted to subtly trigger "thoughts about their experiences as a gendered person on campus." Previous studies found that even this seemingly benign question would unconsciously activate male and female stereotypes, McGlone said.
Another group answered questions about why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college. The goal was nudge these young women and men into thinking how smart and accomplished they were.
"We were activating their snob schema," McGlone chuckled.
The control group was asked to write about their experience living in the northeastern United States.
Then the researchers engaged in a bit of scholarly deception. After the students finished the questionnaire, McGlone asked them for a favor. "'I have a friend doing this study across the hall. Could you help us out?'" he asked. The students agreed, went to another classroom, and took Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test, a standard test of visual-spatial ability.
The items on this test consist of two-dimensional depictions of three-dimensional objects presented at various angles. Test-takers are asked to pick out the identical objects from dissimilar ones.
Studies have repeatedly found that men are far better than women at mentally rotating objects, a skill linked to math ability. [ed.: I am still waiting for someone to tell me how rotating objects mentally is linked to math ability. It's not that I don't believe these folks, though I'm beginning to wonder. It's that I just don't get it.] The gender differences on this test are the biggest gender differences yet found on any of the various mental aptitudes that psychologists say comprise "intelligence," McGlone and Aronson write in an article summarizing their results in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
Then McGlone looked to see if cuing people to think about their gender, their status as college students at prestigious private school or their experiences living in the northeast had any effect on their performance on the rotation test.
It did. Among those in the control group, the tests produced a familiar result: The men did 15 to 20 percent better on the Vandenberg test than the women. And among those who had been subtly cued to think about their gender, the gap was even wider-guys did "25 percent to 30 percent better than the women."
But the surprise came among those who were primed to think about their status as students at an exclusive private college. The gender gap closed dramatically as women's performance improved while men's did not change. "There was no significant difference between men and women," McGlone reported.
The results suggest that stereotype threat can be counteracted, at least in part, by cuing people about other aspects of their lives. "With a pretty simple manipulation we could significantly reduce this gap," he said. "There might be things that make all of these biological factors go away."

This is so bizarrely simple it seems unbelievable at first pass. I'm enough of a Freudian to wonder how exactly you surmount a lifetime of fully assimilated wrong messages in 2 minutes of snob schema activation.

But as I think about it, I can see where it might make sense by analogy to dog psychology — to animal psychology as a whole, in fact.

The interesting thing about dogs is that a dog can be a follower or a leader, depending on the cirumstances. Any dog can be a follower or a leader; it's on the menu. A pit bull or a Rottweiler, two of the most dominant breeds on earth, are both perfectly happy trotting along behind whichever dog bested them in the contest for alpha.

All normal animals, as I understand Jaak Panksepp's work, have all animal emotions and built-in behaviors available to them to some degree. You can even trigger the "killing bite" used by predators like dogs and cats in a prey animal like a mouse or a rat.

Here's another data point:

All social animals have dominance hierarchies.

We are built to live inside of dominance hierarchies. The strong horse and all that jazz....

I'm wondering how much of "stereotype threat" is actually "dominance hierarchy."

To the extent that stereotype threat is actually dominance hierarchy, it makes sense to me that dealing with children and adults who've been put through the public school wringer may be simpler than it seems. All you need to do is activate the snob schema everybody already possesses in some form or another.

Move them off follower dog to alpha dog for the duration of math class.

snob schema praise, anyone?

I think that's what I did with most or even all of the kids in my Singapore Math class.

I told them, in a tone of ringing conviction, that they were "math brains." (I told their parents, too.) Two years later, these kids still think they're good at math, and they're holding their own in the accelerated track.

People say not to give effusive, global praise. Here's Willingham:

Most researchers take it as self-evident that the praise will not have much impact if the student perceives that it is not truthful—the student will simply dismiss it (Henderlong and Lepper, 2002). There has not been extensive research on when students perceive praise to be insincere, but it has been suggested (e.g., O’Leary and O’Leary, 1977) that very global, effusive praise (“You are the smartest boy ever!”) carries a higher risk of disbelief than specific praise (“You did very well on that set of problems”). There also may be times that the praise may be demonstrably untrue to the student, such as praising a student for her hard work when she knows quite well that she didn’t work hard.

I'm sure it's true that dishonest praise doesn't work.

But my praise wasn't dishonest.

It was effusive, it was global, and I meant every word.

I think it worked.

conclusion: we need more travelling salesmen teaching school.

Affective Neuroscience
by Jaak Panksepp

^* A thank you to Barry Garelick for supplying the link.

^* I don't think it's just a mammal thing; I think it's univeresal thoughout the animal world. Not sure about insects, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it there, too.

^** I should add that I'm fairly certain stereotype threat doesn't make the "IQ gap" go away. (not fact-checked)

-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Sep 2006

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I wonder about the link between rotating objects mentally and math ability as well. Is this ability indicative of math skill or does it lead to math skills? Do girls who are really good at math all have good mental rotating skills? Would the early exposure of girls to this make them better at math? I was a strong math student—I earned the highest grade in my HS calculus class. I also scored unusually high for a girl (above the average boy) on tests involving rotating objects mentally.

When I took “Math for Elementary School Teachers”, the teacher asked me after class if I had played with Legos, because I seemed to grasp the math concepts from many different angles better than my other female classmates. I told her that as a kid, I played with blocks, Legos, and an Erector set extensively. My dad also used me as his helper when building, designing, or assembling things. She believed that this early exposure to stereotypical boy pursuits caused me to better understand math because I learned mental object-rotating skills.

I wonder if I really learned to think more like a boy or if I was already wired that way. From an early age I sought out building toys. I had no brothers, and my parents never pushed “boy” toys on me. I remember that when I was 5, I raided the house for random supplies that I used to build a highway system for my one matchbox car. As soon as I discovered Legos at a friend’s house, I begged for them. I asked for a slot-car track and an Erector set for Christmas when I was 11. I STILL pull out my Legos for fun and relaxation. For years I planned on growing up to be an architect.

My younger sister was given the same chances to play with Legos and help my dad build things, but she never cared to do so. She was a “good” math student in that she did all her work and got A’s and high B’s, but it never came easy to her. She was never able to finish the math portion of a standardized test because it took her too long to complete the problems.

I joke that I know that I am indeed a girl, however, because of how I played with Legos. I liked building cars, planes, etc., but I mostly built buildings. When I was a teen, I babysat three boys ages 7, 9, and 11 with an extensive Lego collection. As we all built, they were astonished to see me build a house with little beds, a living room, kitchen, etc. It had never occurred to them to build anything except vehicles, robots, or garages in which to store them! They told me I was “such a girl.” They were captivated by the idea, however, and decided to “enhance” my design by adding a TV, satellite dish, garage, etc. to it.

-- AndyJoy - 25 Sep 2006

"I am still waiting for someone to tell me how rotating objects mentally is linked to math ability."

I'm not the neurologist you're looking for, but here's my speculative answer:

The ability to hold and manipulate the whole of a complex object in your mind probably correlates well with the ability to hold and manipulate the parts of a complex mathematics problem in you mind. You need to manage complex relationships with specific (and not particularly intuitive) logical relationships in real time in both cases.

-- DougSundseth - 25 Sep 2006

"All you need to do is activate the snob schema everybody already has in some form or another."

I've thought for years that arrogance is a useful counteragent for peer pressure. High-status groups feel no pressure to comply with the social norms of lower-status groups. If you believe that complying with destructive behaviors is a low-status marker, you should be more able to resist such temptations.

Obviously, arrogance has negative externalities, but the question then devolves to cost-benefit analysis and mitigation of the externalities.

-- DougSundseth - 25 Sep 2006

I draw as a way of doing maths/engineering quite a bit (and I'm female).

Of course I did quite a bit of graphic design and technical drawing at school, so that's a skill I've practised to automaticity. But sometimes it's easier just to draw things rather than worry about getting the right equation in algebraic form.

Perhaps that's the connection. Graphs and algebra have been deeply linked for several centuries now.

When I think about converting word problems (or real world problems) to maths I often visualise them in my head too or on paper as a way of working out what I need to know.

Even the time I finally understood a klein bottle (which is a moebius strip in four dimensions) it had a lot of some sort of weird visualisation involved.

-- TracyW - 25 Sep 2006

Math, math, stereotype threat, public education, math, math, blah, blah, Sale of the Century--

SALE! OF! THE CENTURY!

I loved that show! I love game shows in general. Reg Grundy, Mark Goodson, Bill Todman and all those other guys are responsible for a huge portion of my childhood TV viewing. Them, and the voice of Mel Blanc.

I did Teen Week on Wheel of Fortune. Lots of fun. But if I hadn't picked a 'D' when trying to solve "National Geographic Magazine", I probably would have won a Jeep. And stereotype threat had nothing to do with it.

I'm only a little bitter. I wouldn't have been able to drive the thing for at least two years anyhow.

-- BrendaM - 26 Sep 2006

I wonder about the link between rotating objects mentally and math ability as well.

I started wondering about it when Bernie said, more than once, that he knew all kinds of mathematicians who had poor spatial intelligence (he may have said "skills".....)

Carolyn said the same thing.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

I also scored unusually high for a girl (above the average boy) on tests involving rotating objects mentally.

Interesting.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

Brenda M

I feel for you.

A couple of years later Ed went on a game show with two other colleagues. They were a team (you have to have a team of people who had the same profession or role in life).

First they played a team of pregnant mothers & beat them.

Then they played a team of gay firemen and lost.

The firemen didn't say they were gay, btw. They just looked obviously gay. They looked like Village People.

Ed & his team-of-teachers lost because they knew too much.

The question was whether tomatoes were a fruit or a vegetable & Ed's team said "fruit."

AND THEY LOST!

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

Andy

That is fascinating!!!

wow!

Kids have all kinds of brain plasticity, so while I don't think it's possible to sort out chicken & egg with you, this does imply to me that it would be worthwhile to make sure kids of both sexes spend time building Legos.

This is interesting, because I've always been concerned that Christopher didn't spend enough time building Legos!

Now I'm thinking he probably didn't!

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

I think that HAS to be true.

It is a HUGE drain on working memory to hold AND rotate an object in working memory (though this, too, can be improved with training.)

Very likely, training leads to "superchunking" or whatever people are calling it now.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

I'm going to get some more Lego sets.

The Big Fiasco a couple of Christmases ago was that I bought a huge, expensive Erector set for Xmas that turned out to be missing a piece & now may be missing an instruction sheet....

You guys have galvanized me to get that thing out and GET IT BUILT.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

Obviously, arrogance has negative externalities, but the question then devolves to cost-benefit analysis and mitigation of the externalities.

YES!

I've started using this a bit with Christian.

Christian has an Asian grandparent, I believe it is. (Or grandparent? Something like that.)

That's an interesting thing in and of itself, because he didn't know he was part Asian & teachers kept calling up his mom to tell her there was something wrong with his eyes. In grade school they always thought he needed glasses; in high school they always thought he was on drugs. She was getting the drug call constantly. (Which probably speaks well for the school, but still...)

One day his aunt said "Well you have an Asian grandmother." That's why your eyes look different.

She just popped off with this!

He had no idea!

Anyway, we all got into a whole riff on the Ms. Kahl situation the other night.....we were trying to build an airtight case that MS. K IS ANTISEMITIC!

We were trying to do this because in our school's moral universe Group Rights appear to trump Individual Rights.

So we were listing all the Jewish boys (SHE'S AGAINST BOYS, TOO!) she'd come down on.....when Christopher said, "She's mean to the Asian kids, too" and started naming names of Asian kids in Phase 4 who'd gotten the Ms. K treatment....

The other branch of the conversation was my ongoing shock to discover that Ms. K is not, herself, Jewish.

I revealed to the room that I had assumed she was Jewish because - brace yourselves - "Jews are good at math."

(There. I've said it. Now I can never run for office.)

So we were in the midst of this project, and everyone was laughing, and finally when Christopher started reeling off the names of Kahlian-oppressed Asian kids Christian said, "That's it! She's mean to kids she thinks should be good at math!"

I told him, "Right, Christian. You have to stop screwing around with math. You have no excuse. YOU'RE ASIAN."

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

This kind of thing does help.

Christian is taking his Saxon placement test today (!) — and he told me he'd thought about "moving it up" and taking it last Friday.

Then on Saturday, in the car, I gave everyone a "work problem" out of Zaccaro's book on problem solving, and Christian's reaction was completely different from what it used to be.

He was interested in the problem, he thought he might be able to solve it, and he tried to solve it, coming up with an answer pretty quickly.

The answer was wrong, but at this stage of the game all he needs is motivation & some confidence.

Lately he's told me things like, "My grandmother was good at math." (He's always said his dad was good at math.)

These things matter - or at least they matter when you've had an entire school career of failure in math.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

Tracy

Right, absolutely.

Anecdotally I've seen a connection between drawing and math - ESPECIALLY amongst women - over and over again.

I believe Carolyn said she learned to draw intentionally to help with math.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

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Title:	stereotype threat
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