One of the more pernicious dimensions of the hidden brain is the way in which it prompts many people to fulfill self-defeating stereotypes about their groups. If you tell a classroom of students that men tend to outperform women in math tests — right before you administer a math test — the women in the class are likely to perform more poorly on the math test than they would if you had not said anything. You don’t even have to remind people explicitly about the stereotype: Merely drawing attention to whether students are male or female before administering a math test can impair the ability of women to do their best.
You can show the same phenomenon in a variety of domains — you threaten the ability of white men to play basketball by telling them that on average blacks are better at basketball than whites (or just by making race salient in their minds before they compete in a basketball game.) It matters little whether the stereotypes are “accurate” or not — just that they are widely shared. The phenomenon is sometimes called “stereotype threat” — a clunky phrase, in my opinion, that does not do justice to this pernicious form of prejudice.
New research by the talented Adam Alter at New York University (whom I cite in The Hidden Brain for other research) and his colleagues suggests there may be a clever way to disable stereotype threats among high school and college students. If threats can be rephrased as challenges, Alter and his colleagues found, they no longer impair the ability of people to perform their best. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
When experimenters told black students between the ages of 9 and 13 that a standardized math test they were about to take would reveal how good they were at solving math problems, the performance of the students dropped compared to when they were told that the test would help them learn new things, or that “working on these problems might be a big help in school because it sharpens the mind.”
Alter and his colleagues found a similar phenomenon when it came to college students at Princeton University.
One way to think about these interventions is to think about how they changed what the students were paying attention to. Threats draw attention to our flaws, weaknesses and inadequacies. Challenges, on the other hand, remind us about our potential. It’s a useful lesson for educators to keep in mind.
