How We Decide

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer discusses the phenomenon known as the stereotype threat. This simply means that a certain group of people with a negative stereotype attached to them will perform a task worse than they would if they did not know about the stereotype. For example, when one group of people are told that men traditionally do better than women on math test, men will indeed do better than the women on the math test. However, when the other group is told nothing about the test, men and women have similar average scores.

Lehrer discusses the study of Claude Steele, who gave a large group of Stanford sophomores a test containing sample questions from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). When the students were told it was a study of intelligence, white students outperformed black students by a wide margin, perpetuating the untrue stereotype of white people being smarter than black people. Another similar group of students was not told it was an intelligence test. In this group, the scores of white students and black students were nearly the same.

Another possible experiment could involve the stereotype threat, but in reverse. For example, if a large group of people were told that women do better on a specific type of intelligence test, would women perform better? Although this may not be true at all, it would surely test how strong the stereotype threat really is. Also, it is curious that standardized tests still ask for race and gender before you take them. If the stereotype threat has been proven, this may still be affecting scores across the nation. Everyone who takes those tests knows that it is a test for intelligence, so they do not need to be specifically told that. Would a simple thing like filling