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Understanding and Addressing Stereotype Threat

Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

Dr. Monica Johnson is a clinical psychologist and owner of Kind Mind Psychology, a private practice in NYC specializing in evidence-based approaches to treating a wide range of mental health issues (e.g., depression, anxiety, trauma, and personality disorders). Additionally, she works with marginalized groups of people, including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and alternative lifestyles, to manage minority stress.

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Stereotype threat is an uncomfortable psychological state that can impair performance on a variety of tasks, from standardized tests to memory tasks for older individuals. Stereotype threat arises in situations where an individual is being evaluated, and a stereotype is relevant. The term was coined by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson in 1995.

For example, when both African American and White college students were given a standardized test and told it was a diagnostic tool used to measure verbal ability, the African American students performed significantly worse than they did when they were told the test was a non-evaluative exercise.

This article will go over what causes stereotype threat, list examples of the phenomenon, and discuss the prevalence of stereotype threat. It will wrap up with a discussion of some things that will combat stereotype threat.

What Causes Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat can be triggered, intentionally or unintentionally, by reminders of the stereotypes that a given group has endured . For example, when men and women took a challenging math test, women, who are often stereotyped as less proficient at math than men, performed 15% worse than men unless this result was nullified by putting the statement, “This test has never produced gender differences in the past” on the front of the test.

Any stereotype relevant to a particular situation can cause a stereotype threat in the individual even if they themselves don’t believe it. This is because the cognitive load of worrying about the stereotype is so high.

“When something triggers worry or anxiety, part of your brain that typically is operating smoothly, your prefrontal cortex, …gets an extra burden added to it,” explained Joshua Aronson , an associate professor of applied psychology, Director of the Mindful Education Lab at New York University, and co-originator of stereotype threat. “It’s like how in addition to solving this math problem or difficult verbal problem, I have to solve the problem of what does my extra stress here mean? And that translates to reduced bandwidth for the brain, reduced working memory….”

In addition to poorer performance on a test or other evaluative problem, stereotype threat can also lead to disengagement or reduced effort, anxiety , lower creativity, and lower speed on a task.

It’s like how in addition to solving this math problem or difficult verbal problem, I have to solve the problem of what does my extra stress here mean? And that translates to reduced bandwidth for the brain, reduced working memory….

Examples of Stereotype Threat

Examples of stereotype threats are everywhere. The theory originated with African Americans’ inability to take a test as well as their White counterparts if a stereotype was triggered, but many other examples have arisen, including:

• Women, who are aware of a stereotype portraying women as less proficient in a STEM-test prep than men, did a worse job at note-taking activities than men.
• Older individuals who are made aware of the stereotype that old people’s memories were faulty and deteriorating performed worse on a test of short-term memory than people who were reminded of the stereotype “old people are wise.”
• White males, who were told when taking a math test that part of the objective for taking the test was to understand why Asians perform better, performed significantly worse on the test than those who were not given this stereotype threat.
• Employees who have clinical obesity, often stereotyped as lazy and less competent than employees who are not affected by obesity, reported more weight-based stereotype threats, including lower work ability.

Prevalence of Stereotype Threat

There are numerous examples of stereotype threats across many realms, from school and work to sports. While there aren't precise numbers for how prevalent stereotype threat is, anywhere that a stereotype is brought up either directly or indirectly about a given group has the potential to evoke stereotype threat.

Even worse, “a lot of times people come out of these situations… with a slight confirmation of the stereotype,” says Aronson. “They’re taking a standardized test; they don’t do well on it. The stereotype guides their attribution [and they’ll interpret it] as ‘I’m not that smart at this,’ and… they’ll avoid the work, they’ll avoid those situations that reveal their weakness.” So it's in our best interest to combat stereotype threat in the various places where it exists.

Combatting Stereotype Threat

Aronson says the key to combatting stereotype threat is a growth mindset , which says that your skills aren’t set in stone and will improve over time with work. Unfortunately, that growth mindset has been watered down to the point that it no longer has much impact. “Instead of embodying my belief in your growth, I give you a little slogan that says you should believe in your own growth. That’s not going to do much…,” Aronson explains.

They’re taking a standardized test; they don’t do well on it. The stereotype guides their attribution [and they’ll interpret it] as ‘I’m not that smart at this,’ and… they’ll avoid the work, they’ll avoid those situations that reveal their weakness.

Still, stereotype threat can be improved if we have relationships that combat it. “Stereotypes play a big role in the fact of not knowing people very well,” Aronson says. “But in a small class, where you really can get to know kids, stereotypes don’t matter. What really matters is who you know the child to be, how you treat them, how they treat you, what your relationship is, that transcends everything.”

This is the same in the realm of work too. If you can have a good relationship with your boss and co-workers, you can have a better time at work.

To combat stereotype threat further, Ariel Landrum, a licensed marriage and family therapist and Clinical Director at Guidance Teletherapy , recommends the following:

• Awareness and education . "Educate people about the concept of stereotype threat because awareness is the first step for any form of change," says Landrum.
• Promote diversity and inclusion . In environments where individuals learn, work, and socialize, dispelling stereotypes through diversity and inclusion will reduce the fear of confirming them.
• Providing positive role models . When people from marginalized groups can see people from their own group become successful and overcome challenges, it reduces stereotype threat.
• Create safe spaces . For individuals who are part of a specific marginalized group, have groups available where people can come together and talk about stereotype threat and the other pressures they face.

Aronson J, Steele CM. Stereotypes and the Fragility of Academic Competence, Motivation, and Self-Concept. In: Elliot, AJ, Dweck, CS, eds. Handbook of Competence and Motivation . The Guilford Press; 2005:436-456.

Bogdewiecz A. Avoiding Stereotype Threat in the Workplace . Association for Talent Development. 2021.

Appel M, Kronberger N, Aronson J. Stereotype threat impairs ability building: Effects on test preparation among women in science and technology .  Eur J Soc Psychol . 2011;41(7):904-913. doi:10.1002/ejsp.835

Zacher H, von Hippel C. Weight-based stereotype threat in the workplace: Consequences for employees with overweight or obesity.  Int J Obes . 2022;46(4):767-773. doi:10.1038/s41366-021-01052-5

By Cynthia Vinney, PhD Cynthia Vinney, PhD is an expert in media psychology and a published scholar whose work has been published in peer-reviewed psychology journals.

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

Charlotte r. pennington.

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

Andrew R. Levy

Derek t. larkin.

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.

Associated Data

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, funding statement.

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.

Data Availability

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.

Learn about our Editorial Process

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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Breaking free of stereotype threat with Claude Steele (Transcript)

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ReThinking with Adam Grant Breaking free of stereotype threat with Claude Steele January 24, 2023

[00:00:00] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Claude Steele. He's one of the most influential social psychologists, not just of our time, but of all time.

Claude is best known for his pathbreaking research on stereotype threat, prejudice, and self-affirmation, and he's won more awards for distinguished scientific contribution and honorary doctorates than I can count. He's an emeritus psychology professor at Stanford, where he was previously Dean of their Graduate School of Education and the author of Whistling Vivaldi.

Claude Steele, what an honor to finally meet you.

[00:00:56] Claude Steele: Well, it's a great pleasure to be here and right back at you with that sense of being honored. Pleasure to meet you, even electronically.

[00:01:04] Adam Grant: Same. I've been a big fan of your work since I was an undergrad studying psychology, and I remember first reading about stereotype threat and finding it intellectually fascinating and just extremely, practically important.

And I, I remember that being a defining moment where I first started thinking about “Maybe I could become a, a psychologist. This work really matters, and it's endlessly interesting.” So thank you for the enormous impact you've had on my life. I have never gotten to hear the backstory of how you discovered it. Was there an experience in your life that paved, paved the way or a moment that opened your eyes?

[00:01:39] Claude Steele: It was a long grueling process, but it was anchored, the effort, by a finding that, that was just an interesting puzzle. And the, and the puzzle was that at, at the University of Michigan where you two were, were a graduate student. By the way, when were you there?

[00:01:59] Adam Grant: I was there from 2003 to ’07.

[00:02:00] Claude Steele: Okay. We missed each other by, by a decade. But I saw a chart which graphed out students' grades as a function of the SAT scores they had when they entered. And the intriguing thing about the chart was that at every level of SAT score that a student had when they entered, African-American students were doing worse than other students in Michigan.

And the puzzle was if you'd told me they weren't on average doing as well as other students, I might have found that plausible in that, you know, there are differences in preparation level and prior schooling and educational opportunity, and so that could explain such a thing. But here you have them roughly equated by their SAT scores to the extent that that equates people in terms of preparation for, for college.

But at each level of preparation as measured that way, Black students were doing worse than other students. And why would that be? That, that was the puzzle. I had a lot of conversations with Dick Nisbett and Steve Spencer, and we went around and around, and we tried experiments and we got a research grant and we did some studies, and maybe four years later, Steve Spencer and I had a clear finding that later became stereotype threat.

So stereotype threat was no flashing insight. It was the product of sort of a grinding pursuit of what could be causing this underperformance as the term was. That's the origin.

[00:03:28] Adam Grant: Fascinating. This is a rare case where data actually led to a discovery as opposed to something happened to you, and then you went to go and study it.

[00:03:36] Claude Steele: Yes. Exactly. Every preconception that I had about what could be causing that underperformance was proven wrong by the data. So every idea we had, none of those seemed to work, but eventually, we got it a clear evidence. This was with women in, in math, women who were really good at math and committed, and advanced, uh, math.

We give them a very difficult test. And if we just gave it to them as a, as a, a standardized test of math skills, women did worse than, than men. We'd selected them for having roughly equal backgrounds in skill levels, in, in math. But when you give them a really difficult test at the frontier of their skills, women were doing worse than men, uh, of the classic underperformance that we'd observed in the, in the grades and college grade data we had. But we could eliminate that by making the stereotype about women's math ability irrelevant to taking that test.

So, uh, we did that, uh, Steve and I by just saying, “Well, you may have heard women don't do as well at stan—on standardized math tests as men do, but that's not true for this test. The test you're taking today is a test on which women have always done just as well as men involved.” With that simple instruction, their scores went up to match that of equally skilled men. So, that was the day, we had something—

[00:04:59] Adam Grant: Seems more than something.

[00:05:00] Claude Steele: —that seemed to account for this mystery of, of the underperformance.

[00:05:04] Adam Grant: It's remarkable that on the exact same test. Right? Just randomly assigning them to—

[00:05:09] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:05:09] Adam Grant: —decouple their ability or their performance on that test from stereotypes about their group was enough to elevate their ultimate results.

[00:05:17] Claude Steele: Yeah. We know now, you know, 20-plus years, maybe 25 years later. We know a lot of, um, of moderators of that effect and, and conditions. But when you look at a, a group that feels the performance is very important, and these, these are not women that are casually taking introductory math courses. These are women that are, that are really dedicated to it.

It's gonna be part of their career path, they assume, so they're invested. When they get frustrated on that test, they're distracted by the possibility that they're confirming the stereotype or will be seen to confirm the stereotype, and that distraction seems to interfere with performance.

[00:05:56] Adam Grant: That's one of the things that I found so fascinating about your work is you wrote about this threat in the air, right, that I, I might be confirming a negative assumption about my group and that that actually disrupts, you know, not only my emotions but also my cognitive processing.

I was stunned to discover that just the threat of, of confirming a stereotype is enough to interfere with working memory, executive function, and also shift attention away from actually doing the task and toward worrying about, well, how well am I doing the task?

[00:06:28] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:06:28] Adam Grant: And, I love the way that you talked about this as having kind of constant background processing going on. Can you, can you talk a little bit about the psychology of what happens inside the mind when people are experiencing stereotype threat?

[00:06:40] Claude Steele: Yeah. I think a term that, a term that I'm using these days to explain exactly that experience is churn. You're just in churn. What does this mean, and how am I doing, and what does the sense of frustration I have mean? Does this mean that that's true or just mean I'm gonna confirm this? A lot of worrying, fretting is going on. It does interfere with short-term. I mean, these days there's a pretty substantial literature, as you may know, on, on what precisely the mediating processes are, interference with short-term memory patterns of brain activation. Pre, pre-frontal cortexes, sort of suppress the amygdala, which is more sensitive to threat is activated, and so it, it puts a, uh, a person in, in quite a, a bit of distress.

I'm in, in the midst of writing another book, which tries to use the concept to explain a broader phenomenon in, in society, this idea of being in churn. Interracial conversations. Both parties, there are stereotypes that are relevant to how well the conversation goes, how they connect, this kind of thing. I, I've been using this example of, of a conversation between a set of, of African-American parents and a white school teacher at a typical parent-teacher conference about a young seventh-grade kid and the African American couple, they're dealing with stereotypes about their group.

They want, you know, “Boy, we want them to really invest in the, in developing the ability of our son, and this is our opportunity to get that to happen, to make that case.” And, and the teacher for her part, she's white. She's worried, “Well, yeah, I really am dedicated to this student's developing his skills, but I know if I say something critical here, I, I could be seen as racist.”

That's, that's the stereotype about my group that is relevant in this situation. So both parties enter the conversation with a good deal of churn and worry that, that you were just pointing to: “How am I doing? How will my, how will my identity here play out? How will it be interpreted? Am I gonna survive this situation?”

[00:08:55] Adam Grant: I think in a situation like that, a lot of people will say, “Well, let's, let's make sure that both parties come really caring about that conversation going well.” And I think your research shows us that it's not enough to care. And sometimes caring might even backfire because the more invested you are in that situation going well, the more likely you are then to be distracted by the very stereotype that you're trying to disconfirm.

[00:09:17] Claude Steele: That's a, an ironic dimension of this. Interestingly, the parties who are the least prejudiced often have the most churned because they don't want the conversation to go badly. They're invested in the conversation going well and smoothly and in a normal kind of rhythm to it. So when it doesn't do that, when there’s any trouble, then they start to worry: “Oh my goodness, I've got something to worry about here ‘cause I care about this.”

All stereotype threat effects assume the person is really committed to the activity. One way you can protect yourself against feeling stereotype threat is to not care about the activity involved, can disidentify with the performance. And then the fact that your group is stereotyped there, it's maybe something you don't approve of, but it, it's not personally relevant because it's not something that you take on as a part of your own self and, and, and your personal accountability. So that's one way to defend against it. But when you do care and you are invested, then the prospect of being negatively stereotyped is upsetting and distracting.

[00:10:26] Adam Grant: I want to talk about how we fix this ‘cause you've studied a lot of remedies. Before we go there, I think one of the things that, that often gets underestimated when people learn about stereotype threat is because so much of the research has been about intellectual stereotypes of women in STEM or racial minorities on tests, we often forget that this can apply to any group that, you know, can be stereotyped.

I remember in one of your early papers, um, you showed that even white men who were good at math and knew it, you were able to activate stereotype threat by comparing them to Asians, who they thought in relative terms, were much better at math. And all of a sudden they're like, “Oh no, I'm not gonna be good at math.”

[00:11:06] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:11:06] Adam Grant: Talk to me a little bit about how stereotype threat can affect all of us, even if we’re not members of groups that we think of as traditionally marginalized or stereotyped.

[00:11:16] Claude Steele: As individuals, we have a host of, social identities. I'm an African American, I'm a male. I'm of a certain age or vintage, shall we say. There, there are stereotypes about people of that vintage that say, for example, we're not good at technology, or we're behind in technology, so I can feel as I, uh, try to turn my television on in front of my much younger son-in-law, that, that I'm kind of on the spot, that as I experience frustration, I wonder, well, you know, how's he gonna see me?

That's a, a form of stereotype threat. A pretty mild one because I'm not so deeply identified with being able to turn my television on.

[00:11:59] Adam Grant: I hope not.

[00:12:00] Claude Steele: As human beings, we're incredibly sensitive to how other people see us. We like to have the, the, uh, the idea, let's put it that way, that we're very independent and, you know, we are our true selves, but when we're doing things that are important to us, and we're under the prospect or possibility of being seen in terms of some bad image of one of our identities, it gets our attention in a, in a way, and that that's a real fundamental mechanism of, you know, social regulation, I suppose.

[00:12:33] Adam Grant: I, I definitely wanna make sure we talk about systemic and cultural solutions for schools, for workplaces, for other domains where stereotype threat is known to interfere with, with group performance. But I wanna start at the individual level since we're all grappling with this in one moment or another, and you've already given us one technique that is appealing in principle, but as you noted, it's hard to practice, which is “I'm just gonna choose not to care. I don't care how my future goes. I don't, you know what? I don't care at all if I confirm people's stereotypes of a shy introvert and bomb on stage. Like my, my whole career will be over, but I'm good with it.” How do you do that? How do you de-identify?

[00:13:13] Claude Steele: It's usually a pretty painful process. Let's take women in math. I mean, you know, woman, uh, goes to college and she's been a good math student in high school, where often women do quite as much as, as well as, as men do. She takes introductory courses in college, and she does pretty well. Then as she gets, keeps going in that area, there are fewer and fewer women around. The, the work is really difficult and challenging, increasingly so, and the stereotype is, starts to emerge as a consideration, as part of her churn in her everyday churn about her experience. I think tragically at that point, a lot of women do disidentify. You, you start to look around for “Maybe I really like history. Maybe I'll major in history and become a lawyer. This whole STEM field, I look ahead, I don't see many women there. I'm not sure I'm gonna be comfortable in those environments.”

And, so the weight of that pressure can push a person into disidentifying, dropping out of their aspirations and goals, something that they’ve, for a long time, been committed to. I don't think it's, it's something that you can just turn on and off, like a switch in an area li—like that. Maybe in a, in another more casual area of life that isn't as important. “Well, I'm not good at turning on my television, but I'm really, really good at managing my Spotify, you know.” So you, you, disidentifying there might not be such a dramatic thing, but when it's something that, that you have cared about and, and invested in, the very principle ingredient of stereotype threat, then I, I think it is a pretty distressing experience.

[00:14:57] Adam Grant: It seems like the, the psychology of attributions is, is useful here. Right? The mistake a lot of us make in stereotype threat situations is we think, “Okay, if this performance goes poorly, it's creating a, a permanent and pervasive signal about my lack of ability. You know that that's bad. I'm never gonna be good, and I'm never gonna be good at anything.”

And if people learn to make more—

[00:15:18] Claude Steele: Yes.

[00:15:18] Adam Grant: You know, more specific and local attributions and say, “Okay, this performance or this test is not diagnostic of my ability. It's not diagnostic of my ability today. And it's also not diagnostic of my ability tomorrow. It's just a, a snapshot of my performance in one particular moment, which happened to be a very stressful, high-anxiety experience,” it's a little bit easier then to not dis-identify with the domain, but not overreact to the performance in that moment as representative of the domain. What do, what do you think of that?

[00:15:48] Claude Steele: That's really well put. Uh, ‘cause I, I do think in, in that experience of churn, that state of, of, of churn, it can be reduced by exactly the line of thinking that you've, you've described that, that, “Okay, this isn—This isn't my whole soul here, my whole being on the line. It's just a particular test.” Now, the culture and the, the stereotype is often has in it as a kernel, the allegation that it is a deep and essential part of who you are. That's what's upsetting about it. So the threat is that you're about to confirm some real essential part of you.

But the defense, as you describe, is to particularize the experience and, and see it as just, you know, this is just a test. So I, I think the, the, the more we can demystify tests and get them seen outside of the, essentially, what should I say, almost eugenicist tradition of capturing an essential ability about somebody, I think we would reduce the, the, the stereotype threat effects around testing and, and intellectual ability and the like.

And I think gradually as a society, I'd like to believe we're moving in that direction, that we're getting more realistic about these things. I mean, it's okay to think in the thirties and the forties and the fifties, and an IQ test captured some essential dimension of who you are that was totally encompassing of your abilities, and that you could be reduced to your IQ number. But I think now we're just much more sophisticated about human cognition and, and human intellectual life. Hopefully, we're moving in a direction where exactly what you describe is, is available to people as a defense.

[00:17:29] Adam Grant: Part of the problem is this is a big and infrequent experience, right?

[00:17:34] Claude Steele: Yep.

[00:17:34] Adam Grant: You take a midterm or a final, it's a huge portion of your grade. It's something you know you get really worked up on because the stakes are so high. You don't have a lot of practice dealing with that level of anxiety. And it makes me wonder if more frequent, lower-stakes testing would be helpful.

We know already empirically it's better for learning, right? That, that when students are quizzed more frequently, they have better retention, better recall. But your work is leading me to wonder whether more frequent testing is also a way of lowering the anxiety that comes with stereotype threat and, and making each test less diagnostic of, of who I am or what I'm capable of.

[00:18:08] Claude Steele: Brilliant. I couldn't agree more. You know, the idea, the whole threat of a standardized test. You know, you, you go all the way through high school, and at the end, your whole life is gonna be summed up by those two and a half hours of taking the SAT.

If, if you told a Martian that we have a test that we can give you, only takes two and a half hours or so, and it will give a score that will so accurately measure a person's capacities to do intellectual work that we can use it to, henceforth, allocate opportunity to people on a very general… And you can just give it to anybody, and it will give us that same score, that would be kind of implausible to somebody who hasn't been acculturated to think about tests in the way we think about them.

I couldn't agree more that that is where the threat is, is in part in the conception of the test and its allegation that what it's measuring is something essential about you. And then a way around it is to just treat tests as the useful things they can be, which is feedback on how you're doing as you learn an area of work like mathematics or STEM fields. Frequent low-stakes tests that give you real feedback about where you need to improve and how you can improve, that’s an incredibly useful regime. It’s this use in this other conception that makes tests more problematic.

[00:19:30] Adam Grant: Well, okay. If that's the case, I want to have you put on your university leadership hat for a second. Uh.

[00:19:35] Claude Steele: Uh-oh.

[00:19:35] Adam Grant: You, you, you have been the Dean of the Stanford Ed School. You've been the Provost at Berkeley and Columbia. You've been Department Chair in Psychology at Stanford. You've led a lot of university departments and groups. What, what is the intervention here? Are we proposing that you get a mini SAT every week, and we just keep your highest score? What does the overhaul of this look like?

[00:19:58] Claude Steele: That, that's almost precisely what I would point to is, is frequent low-stakes tests and using those in, in the admissions process at, at colleges, let’s say. Part of what's keeps the SAT in play is that people say, “Well, what else are we gonna do? You know, we gotta, we gotta have some kind of quote ‘fair measure’ here. So what else are we gonna do?” Well, I, this is something else to do. It takes a reconception, maybe some years of transition. I don't think it’s that… It’s not technically not that hard. Difficulty with being infusing it into the education systems that we have.

[00:20:30] Adam Grant: Well, ETS, if you're listening, we have a proposal for you. And I, I do think this might be a window of opportunity because we've seen them.

[00:20:38] Claude Steele: Some of my best friends are there. But nonetheless, here's a message for them.

[00:20:42] Adam Grant: I think this moment is, is meaningful because we've seen for the first time in my memory, a bunch of top universities allows students to waive their standardized test scores as part of admissions.

[00:20:53] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:20:53] Adam Grant: And so this may be a moment when testing organizations are, are more open to experimenting than they were before. And universities are more receptive to it too.

[00:21:02] Claude Steele: I think so. What, you know, one thing that isn't broadly known is that they don't predict that that well, so they don't really help that much. That is, I think, one of the reasons a lot of universities and university systems like University of California were not gonna do that.

The other downside, of the SAT since we're on that, uh, is that it discriminates pretty, pretty powerfully. SAT scores correlate with your income just about as well as they correlate with another taking of the SAT. That is their, they're very sensitive to the kind of educational experiences you've had in, in the past, and so if you've been benefited by being able to go to a, a strong K-12, you're gonna get higher scores that's tied to income.

So, if you use them in the admissions process, you're going to, it's gonna be harder for people with low-income minority backgrounds to get in. So that, and at the same time, they don't predict that well. So when you have a big public university system, supposed to serve the broad public like the University of California, that's a real downside as that, as those facts become known.

[00:22:14] Adam Grant: While we're waiting for an overhaul, of, of the testing system—

[00:22:18] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:22:19] Adam Grant: —let’s come back to the, the individual level. Some of the, the work that you've done has, you know, has really changed my thinking about how we can prepare ourselves for stereotype threat situations. And of course, I'm thinking about your, your pathbreaking work on, on self-affirmation. Let's say I'm nervous about math, and I belong to a group that has negative stereotypes lingering around math.

Instead of trying to care less about math or the math test, I affirm some other aspect of my identity. And I, you know, think about how I'm really creative, or I'm an excellent writer, and that allows me to feel a little bit more secure in that domain. And then I'm, I'm less on edge about math. Please correct my interpretation of self-affirmation theory.

[00:23:03] Claude Steele: That's perfect, dude. No correction needed.

[00:23:06] Adam Grant: Okay, elaborated on that for me.

[00:23:08] Claude Steele: The affirmation gives you a chance to gain a little perspective. “There are other things about me that, you know, I can rely on and that I believe in and that I'm good at. And, and so this particular testing situation or this particular course, my whole soul doesn't ride on this.” It gives you a little comfort, and it, it lowers the churn, the interfering churn that you're experiencing. You're just a little calmer now, and you probably pay attention to the test a little more clearly, clear eyed-ly, and, and do better now.

[00:23:40] Adam Grant: Now, I think the, the power of self-affirmation is, you know, it, it just seems so much more palatable instead of saying, “I'm gonna care less about this domain”, “I'm gonna care more about other domains.”

[00:23:51] Claude Steele: Yep. Yes.

[00:23:51] Adam Grant: And that helps me put it in perspective.

[00:23:54] Claude Steele: Yes.

[00:23:54] Adam Grant: I think there are people who will hear about self-affirmation and think of, uh, Stuart Smalley, um, on SNL. “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough.”

[00:24:01] Claude Steele: I've worried about that for 30 years now.

[00:24:04] Adam Grant: “Oh, dog-gone it, people like me.” Right? Uh, what is different about how you study self-affirmation from kind of the parody of daily affirmation of looking in the mirror and trying to build up your own self-esteem?

[00:24:17] Claude Steele: The kind of general self-bromides that Stuart Smalley gave to himself, funny as they are, are not gonna work, that's not gonna affirm the self. They could even backfire. It's affirming something that you really know about yourself that is a real dimension of who you are, reflects commitments, achievements in the past. Let’s say when I was a kid, I was a swimmer, of all odd things. Most swimmers are not African American. But I swam for the YMCA, and I never really thought about that when I was 10 years old. I was pretty good at it. So that was something that I, was a part of me that I could rest my sense of self on. There, that's something good about me. And so raising that up as I dealt with other things just keeps the self in perspective.

[00:25:09] Adam Grant: Yeah. So it actually sounds like, then there, there are two key distinctions there. One is that it has to be accurate, what you're affirming.

[00:25:16] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:25:16] Adam Grant: And two, it needs to be more specific. It can't be, you know, “I'm good” or “I'm likable.”

[00:25:22] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:25:22] Adam Grant: It needs to be “I have this particular skill.”

[00:25:24] Claude Steele: If you say, “ I'm good and people like me,” really? Do you really know that? And, I, I mean, I suppose maybe for some rare person that might be true, but for most of us it's other things that are very specific. Even, you know, relationships with the family. “I'm valued in my family and my parents love me.” Those things become affirmations, which put particular threats in contexts that sort of takes the punch out of them.

[00:25:54] Adam Grant: One of the things that I love about self-affirmation theory is how far-reaching the implications are even beyond stereotype threat. I've found myself, you know, reading the evidence on how it's an effective way to give narcissists critical feedback.

You know, if you're about to tell, let’s say a politician who has a big ego, uh, or you know, a boss, um, that they made a terrible decision. You could start by praising their imagination, or—

[00:26:19] Claude Steele: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:19] Adam Grant: You know, or their curiosity or, or some other aspect of their, you know, of their identity. And then empirically, they do become more open to the criticism. This, I think this leads to an important modification of the, the ever popular, ever terrible feedback sandwich idea, or as it was called on Family Guy: “compliment sandwich”.

But I, I think what, what, what, one of the things that I learned from reading your work on self-affirmation is you have to be really careful if you're gonna lead with a compliment before you criticize, to separate the domains and say, you know, “I want to talk about your strength in this area, and then I want to give you some suggestions for improvement in a separate area.” And then I don't need to go back to the affirmation at the end.

[00:27:01] Claude Steele: Right. Yeah. Yeah. You've kind of positioned the critique in a way that it doesn't indict the whole person in their whole soul. Once you've done that, you've, you don't have to do it again.

[00:27:14] Adam Grant: Good. So we only need one slice of bread, not two.

[00:27:16] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:27:16] Adam Grant: It’s an open-face sandwich.

[00:27:18] Claude Steele: Yeah, exactly.

[00:27:20] Adam Grant: You've studied this in a way that I think is, is applicable to all of us and what you and some colleagues have called “the mentor's dilemma.” I have quoted this research more times than I can count where, yeah, I think what you've essentially taught people to do is to deliver tough feedback in a way that still conveys support and essentially saying, “Look, you know, I'm giving you these comments ‘cause I have very high expectations and I'm confident you can reach them.” Talk to me a little bit about how that works.

[00:27:46] Claude Steele: You know, it kind of pulls a variety of ideas together from, from this body of research, but, but I think you have the potential. You don't have to say the ability, “I think you have the potential to meet those standards.” That's explosively effective with most people.

Many of us can look back on our own autobiographies and see when somebody, especially an adult, said something to us like that. It set your whole career path or path in life. The person's really saying, “I, I trust you here.” So it's a very powerful message when it, when it, when it it comes, but it's something we don't typically think we need to do or we don't think to do it.

Typically, we give feedback. “Well, here's the feedback.” Or we, or we say we do the Stuart Smalley thing. We say some, some very big positive bromite first. “You're, you know, you bring such wonderful energy to my class. Here's the feedback.” Those don't carry the same meaning as, as saying, “We use high standards, and I think you've got the potential to meet them.”

[00:28:50] Adam Grant: It, it's surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success.

[00:28:58] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:28:58] Adam Grant: I will never forget the first time I taught your research in this, in this area to my students. I was teaching feedback. People do become more open to criticism if you just say roughly these 19 words: “I’m giving you these comments ‘cause I have very high expectations and I'm, I'm confident you can reach them.” Couple weeks later, I gave mid-course feedback forms out, and three different students had written at the top, “I’m giving you these comments ‘cause I have very high expectations and I'm confident you can reach them.”

I was like, “No, you don't have to recite the words verbatim. The point is to deliver the message, right, that my standards are high and I believe in your potential.”

[00:29:30] Claude Steele: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I guess they're thinking what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I dunno.

[00:29:38] Adam Grant: I got a literal taste of my own medicine there.

[00:29:40] Claude Steele: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:45] Adam Grant: We do like to insert a lightning round in these conversations, so are you up for one?

[00:29:50] Claude Steele: Sure.

[00:29:52] Adam Grant: Excellent. All right. Claude, is there a stereotype that you personally had a hard time letting go of?

[00:29:57] Claude Steele: Hmm. Yes. A lot of them. I'm a person of my, of my society and my time and there's, there's a lot of stereotypes, stereotypes about athletes. I was an athlete. I felt the threat of being seen as an athlete, but still sometimes that that was one that, “Oh, that's a stereotype. I shouldn't, perhaps I should see beyond that.” Yes.

[00:30:25] Adam Grant: It’s comforting to know that even a world expert on stereotypes is not immune to them.

[00:30:30] Claude Steele: Yeah. Nope.

[00:30:31] Adam Grant: What about, is there a self-affirmation strategy that you're particularly fond of in your own life?

[00:30:37] Claude Steele: I can think of relying on them throughout my life. As an African American, there's always available the possibility that you were being discriminated against. And that's what gives your, that's part of the weight, the psychological weight of being a minority is that you know the stereotypes and you know how you could be seen and you know, it could have played a role in this outcome or that outcome.

So my churn, my trying to work through that situation, I try to be as thoughtful and evidentially based as I can be in making, coming to those conclusions. You can't rule it out altogether that this didn't happen because of that or so you, you can't, but, but I wouldn't just fall into it easily. I, I try to really be careful about that, that kind of attribution.

So, when I look at my own life, my own career, and so on there, there's an area where I see myself doing what I've theorized about. I've prob—the theory is probably stolen entirely from that habit, that psychic habit of dealing with that ambiguity.

[00:31:40] Adam Grant: Is there a favorite depiction in pop culture that you have of, of challenging stereotypes? I'm thinking maybe a movie, a TV show, a song, a book.

[00:31:49] Claude Steele: There is that movie of the three Black women who were really tremendous, who were really amazing mathematicians who worked in the NASA program. I'm forgetting what the name of that of the movie was.

[00:31:59] Adam Grant: Hidden Figures?

[00:32:01] Claude Steele: Yeah. Yeah. I was greatly affected by it because I've seen that, that there, there's a lot of intellectual force and, and power within a community of people who are seen as not having that, and that is always something I and African-Americans live with. Part of the tragedy is that you actually see the, the competence and the, and the genius, but it's got no outlet. Uh, so that, that, that's a, a, a movie that I think really helped bring to light a reality that undermines some stereotypes.

[00:32:37] Adam Grant: Is there a lesson you learned as a swimmer that applies to your life today still? [00:32:42] Claude Steele: Oh, I learned so much as a swimmer. You'll probably understand this as a diver, how you can work really, really hard at something that most people don't care about. That was good, that was good training for being an academic.

[00:32:58] Adam Grant: Luckily, you transcended that training.

[00:33:00] Claude Steele: I can remember the cheerleaders in my high school, you know, kind of drawing straws about who had to go to the swim meets. Uh, that was good training. And you, you, you're dedicated to it, but you're not dedicated to it because you're going to get a lot of, of accolades and public recognition for it. There's something that helped.

[00:33:20] Adam Grant: Nope. It’s a lot like when I hit the treadmill later today, and I'm gonna push myself to try to beat my personal best for no apparent reason.

[00:33:26] Claude Steele: Yeah, for no apparent reason. Nobody cares. You would tell your wife that, well, whatever. Why weren't you home on time?

[00:33:35] Adam Grant: From all your expertise, is there a piece of terrible advice you've gotten or a piece of advice that's often given that you think is wrong?

[00:33:44] Claude Steele: This will sound controversial. I think we overstress the power of the individual against the circumstances of life, the contingencies that one has to contend with, and that if we, when we want to see change happen, we should pay a lot more attention to the contingencies and the, the things that a person has to deal with based on the identity they have, based on the family they come from.

We over-interpret the power of the individual as they move through their life against circumstances. We do fall in love with the idea of grit. I fall in love with the idea of grit. I love it. It's been a bi—it’s, it’s, it's something been essential to my, uh, to my moti—personal motivation throughout, uh, throughout my life, but you, you, you be resilient. And so you, you have to have that.

But, but we overlove it. We love it because it gives us psychologically a sense of control over things that I, that I, I, I've got control over. The, the most conservative, the most people, people who I've interviewed in my life who had the greatest commitment to grit were when I interviewed a number with David Sherman—student at the time, now a professor. We interviewed for six weeks a group of homeless mothers on welfare. They, they would say, you know, “Life is what you make it.” I just never forget that. The irony of that, here they are in those circumstances, and they, they had that as their bi—well, they have that because that's the only thing they can depend on is themselves, and they need to believe that that's true.

I, I would advise them to hang onto that idea. I, that's an idea I hang onto, but as a society, I think we need to get more mature. We can't rely on that to have a completely, to have a, a fair society. We need to be much more sensitive to circumstances, the conditions, the kind of threats people are under if we're going to move forward. And I, I, I see that as something I'd like to see as a bigger part of our future as a society, maybe even as a civilization.

[00:35:43] Adam Grant: It's hard to disagree with that one. I think, I think we, we, we could all, I think probably be, I mean this is, is a version of the fundamental attribution error.

[00:35:53] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:35:53] Adam Grant: Still alive and well, right?

[00:35:55] Claude Steel: Yep.

[00:35:55] Adam Grant: Attributing people's actions and their experiences too much to their own personal traits and too little to the conditions around them.

[00:36:04] Claude Steele: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[00:36:07] Adam Grant: So another application of self-affirmation that I, I think is just fascinating and timely is the work that, that you did with Cohen and Aronson on opening people's minds to evidence that challenges their beliefs. Talk to me a little bit about how self-affirmation can help someone rethink a conviction or maybe, you know, confront some evidence that they were not receptive to.

[00:36:30] Claude Steele: You know, I think at, at base a kind of a manipulation of attention or expansion of, of what we're attending to in this situation. I feel this with regard to certain psychopathologies, even suicide. The person is tunneled in on something that's very distressing to them. They're so captured by the emotion in that situation that they don't see anything else about themselves. People: we're, we're capable of getting lost in a rabbit hole and having the whole worldview colored by the, the thing we're worried about and the thing we're distressed about at, at some level.

It colors everything, and what we need at this point is something that expands what we're able to attend to, and it, it starts to include other good things about ourselves. Other good things about other people, important things, brings in more of the world into that, into that hole, so you get out of it, and with a little perspective, the threatening thing isn't as threatening.

That's the basic story of, of affirmation. That, that’s kind of what it does. That's why people think they go repeatedly to church on Sunday. They're looking for that on a weekly basis. “Ah, the things that I'm worried about, they are bad. But look at the whole picture here.” It enables people to accept that war. And that's true, as you were just mentioning, about any kind of, any information.

You expand the, the perspective you bring. You take the person back up to 30,000 feet, so to speak. They're down at about 2000 feet, completely absorbed, bring them up to 30. They see a lot more, and that 2000-foot problem isn't so bad. It's more manageable. It isn’t… You aren't totally reducible to that problem. It gives us a little latitude.

[00:38:16] Adam Grant: Excellent. So something we haven't talked about yet, and I've been very curious to hear your take on, is the small but intriguing literature on stereotype reactants. I think I first read the, the Laura Kray et al. paper when it came out showing that, that sometimes when people face a stereotype instead of being threatened by it, they actually become motivated to disprove it. What's your, your perspective on, you know, how, how common is that and how can we activate that response?

[00:38:45] Claude Steele: One thing that's really important to point out about, really almost all of the stereotype threat data that where it's been looked at with regard to testing or maybe even athletic performance, it isn't that people, when they're under that pressure, are just giving up, and what the stereotype says, it's the opposite.

They're trying hard to defeat the stereotype, but when you double down and you'd really try to, in the middle of that timed test defeat the stereotype, “I'm gonna just prove this thing”-stereotype reactance, “I'm gonna just prove this thing”, now you're doing two things. Now you're taking the test and you're monitoring how well you're doing and whether you really are defeating that stereotype, and that all becomes part of the churn. It ironically increases the churn, which ironically increases the underperformance. Most of the performance-interfering effects of stereotype threat are actually mediated by stereotype reactants of, of that sort where you're trying too hard, and it can be a condition of life.

We looked at this with regard to professional women. I think I used the term “over-efforting” that, you know, “I'm gonna show that I, because I'm a woman and I have a family and a household… Man, I'm gonna show I can really do all these things,” and just kind of taking on almost too much to, in stereotype reactants to disprove the stereotype, so it, it becomes a weight of its own in a person's life and in and, and on their performances.

[00:40:18] Adam Grant: What else can we do collectively if we think about this at work, for example, to try to mitigate against that reaction?

[00:40:24] Claude Steele: That, that the context of, of our lives, of the work context, the people in it, our families, these can play really important roles in reducing stereotypes. If people feel accepted in a deep way, then the particular threat isn't as powerful and it's disruptive because what they're really after, acceptance, is kind of a short, in a pretty, pretty stable situation. But when that's all, when all of that is on the line, then the particular threats are powerful and really disruptive.

[00:40:54] Adam Grant: I think your emphasis on acceptance and belonging is important because one of the mistakes that I see made in a lot of workplaces is I think well-intentioned people trying to counter stereotypes and inadvertently replacing them with what you might think of as a positive stereotype. Right?

Somebody asked me the other day, I was on stage, and in the Q&A, somebody said, you know, “Talk to me about the latest evidence about women as leaders. You know, a lot of people thought that women couldn't lead. But there's some new evidence suggesting that women might be better at leadership than men.”

Yes. Empirically, Meta-analysis, what, 95 studies, over a hundred thousand leaders by Paustian-Underdahl and colleagues. Yes, men are more self-confident in their leadership, but when you look at other people's ratings of their abilities, women do score higher. Do I believe though, that women are biologically wired to be better leaders than men?

Well at this point, maybe, in the state of the world. But no, in general, of course not. Of course not.

[00:41:51] Claude Steele: Yup.

[00:41:51] Adam Grant : Do I believe that women have had to be that much better to break through glass ceilings and you know, get through bottlenecks in the middle and clear sticky floors? Absolutely.

[00:42:00] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:42:00] Adam Grant: But I don't think it helps people to say women are better leaders than men any more than it, you know, it helps to, you know, to, to say women are worse leaders than men.

[00:42:10] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:42:10] Adam Grant: It seems like the message is anyone has the potential to lead, and this is not a skill that should be tied to your gender or any other demographic group that you belong to.

[00:42:20] Claude Steele: I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think that's so important to, to point out positive stereotypes can be intimidating too, and just creating them is not the answer. It, elucidating what maybe women, because of all the things you just described, experiences tied to their identity as women had to contend with things that gave them skills that, that transfer well to leadership positions that, but the real message there is that being good at leadership is rooted in a set of skills you can learn, and anybody can learn them.

[00:42:48] Adam Grant: That makes so much sense. It brings me to a, I guess, a fundamental question, which in some ways is career question rather than a, you know, an individual study question, but, is there hope for eliminating stereotyping altogether? I understand that we're categorizing and pattern-recognizing creatures, but the whole idea has never fully made sense to me.

Why would you make assumptions about an individual based on properties of a group? Wouldn't you want to find out what is that individual like? And it just seems absurd to me that, that people are so quick to draw conclusions about a complex human being with different motives and personality traits and values and life experiences from, you know, one, one category that they happen to belong to and probably didn't even choose.

And I guess I'd, I'd love to know, this is very core to your expertise. What hope is there? Can we, can we reduce stereotyping, or do we just need to learn how to live with it and challenge it in the moment?

[00:43:45] Claude Steele: I do think we can. I think it happens every day. There's this very little attended-to research that Dick Nisbet did years ago on the dilution of stereotypes.

They would give people a label. This person is, is uh, Latino. That’s all the information they would give. And then they would find that people tended to respond to that person in, in, in experimental settings, stereotypically. But if they put in a lot of seemingly irrelevant information about that person, that the person's father owned a yellow Packard, that the person went to a community college before he went to a c—you know, just that his, his mother-in-law played the piano. I mean, all kinds of irrelevant information.

The, it melted away the use of the stereotype. It individualized the person, and I think in that finding is a, is an important lesson that the more we know about people, the less likely we are to stereotype. I mean, stereotypes just becomes less useful to us in trying to understand people when we have a lot of information.

So in friendships, we often can get past that pretty quickly. We're not thinking about the stereotypes at all. We're not thinking about our friends in terms of group identities or stereotypes at all. Stereotypes come into play more when we don't have other information about people.

The policeman approaches a driver. They don't know each other, not a thing about them. That's where stereotypes are gonna be in dangerous play in a situation like that. They don't have anything else to use to interpret what's happening, what's unfolding in front of them, and that stereotype starts to shape how they interpret all of that.

And you got, you've got an incendiary situation driven in big part by stereotypes. But if the policeman found his brother-in-law behind the wheel, he knows so much else about them. It, it, the stereotype isn't as relevant there. So I, I think that's one way. I think also, I'm, I'm really fascinated now, now by the notion of trust and the, the effort to build trust that once we do come to trust people, stereotypes and these things tend to fade away as, as cause they're just not as relevant.

[00:45:54] Adam Grant: Part of me wants to start a little earlier and say, you know, before we get to the point of being able to individuate someone or learn personal information about them, could we attack the very idea of stereotyping as exercising poor reasoning. You're making a big leap from, you know, maybe a, a questionable group average to a member of that group. Is that a logical thing to do? Is, is that a conversation worth having?

[00:46:20] Claude Steele: I think a question a lot of us have as we learned these things, like we learn about stereotypes and the impact they can have. Well, why can't we just undo that? Unwire that somehow, in our socialization of people? Just, you know, when when we think that way, uh, a red flag goes up and we reel that back in.

It is possible, especially when you're in a situation where you can, you've got a little time to think about it. Stereotypes, I think have their greatest, uh, impact and danger when we're tired, we're in a hurry. We’re information overloaded, then they pop out as a shortcut. Here I am, stopping a citizen as a police officer in a, in a car.

There's a lot of threat going on there. There’s a high emotion in that situation. That's where they're particularly dangerous in that. Or at the end of the day, I'm really tired, and I've exhausted by all kinds of things, and I'm in a situation where the stereotype arises about how I'm perceiving someone.

I'm gonna be less able… I just don't have the energy to unravel it at that, that point. And I, bam, before I know it, I've seen that person and judged them. Now my colleague, Jennifer Eberhart, and really a number of social psychologists, but she has a particularly compelling anecdote to the kind of, the kind of speed, the kind of when I'm in a hurry or pressured use of stereotypes.

With policing, for example, as a police officer gets out of the car after having stopped somebody, she tries to put a lot of things in, into their routine that ha, that slows them down. And then a few linguistic suggestions about how to approach the person that deescalates the situation. Don't go in and immediately try to establish authority, but use, you know, polite language and slow the situation down.

Then you kind of diffuse the, the role of the stereotype in that situation. So I, I think we're getting more sophisticated about that, that approach to it, putting things in that, that frustrate the use of stereotypes. But if we don’t, and we are tired, and we are in a hurry, uh, people who would be appalled at themselves for stereotyping can wind up doing it without really a second thought.

That's what’s, that's kind of the frontier, if you will. In, in ritualized situations like policemen stopping, uh, drivers, you can begin to develop a systematic way of doing that. In organizations when we're around hiring and promoting, and there are systematic ways of helping us do that. U h, in doctors with patients, lawyers with clients, and I think there are, there are these, these ways that we can use, that will undermine the use of stereotypes in these important situations.

[00:49:15] Adam Grant: I find that really encouraging and you know, occasionally when, when I talk about some of these systemic solutions to, you know, to trying to root out stereotypes and bias, I hear, “I understand, but we don't have time,” and—

[00:49:29] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:49:29] Adam Grant: The way, the way that I end up getting through to people in some of those moments is to say, so you're saying you don't have to make a good decision or an accurate judgment instead of a bad one? Because—

[00:49:40] Claude Steele: Yeah.

[00:49:40] Adam Grant: —if this decision doesn't matter, by all means, wing it. Do it quickly.

[00:49:45] Claude Steele: Yeah. Yeah, get it out of the way.

[00:49:46] Adam Grant: Yeah. If this counts, if there are real stakes, then isn't it important to try to do it as thoroughly as possible and to, to try to make sure that the, the process is as systematic and rigorous as possible? And it's kind of hard to argue with that one, right?

[00:50:01] Claude Steele: Yeah, I, I mean that's a, that's a good hook.

[00:50:05] Adam Grant: Try it at your own risk.

[00:50:05] Claude Steele: I, I, I, I, yeah, that, that I hope is effective because in, in, in many of these situations, people do wanna do a better job. They don't really know how, they don't know that this would be important, that to slow the thing down, you know, their classic ways, but you, you select the, the, the next horn player for the symphony with a blind test as opposed to having the, the musician be visible.

There, there are a host of things that I think as a society we're gonna get better at. My hope there because I do think people want to get better at it. Our society aches for these kinds of things at some level. They, you know, it's not that everybody enjoys anti-bias training or anything of that sort, because there, I think the part of the problem is often the offering of the training carries with it the allegation that you need the training, and there may be something about you that, and I, I think that puts up a real stereotype threat resistance that can undermine things. But I think as we get a little, a little beyond that and, and, and recognize that we can use the context, we can partner with the context of our organizations in, in undermining this. It isn't just something that individuals have to control themselves. There are things that, that, that organizations can do that will systematically reduce the play of stereotypes.

[00:51:29] Adam Grant: Well, Claude, this has been wonderful. Thank you for taking the time.

[00:51:32] Claude Steele: My great pleasure. I'm a real podcast devotee. I don't know if I need to say more about how much I've heard you over the years, and it's been a real pleasure to talk to you.

[00:51:41] Adam Grant: Well, thank you. We need to get you in the audio universe more often.

[00:51:44] Claude Steele: Thank you, Adam. Real pleasure.

[00:51:47] Adam Grant: Pleasure's all mine.

[00:51:47] Claude Steele: Take care.

[00:51:51] Adam Grant: My biggest takeaway from this conversation is the realization that we are constantly giving bad advice to other people. “Try harder. Care more.” Sometimes that's not just unhelpful, it's actually counterproductive. And I think we don't just do this to other people. We do it to ourselves too, right? Every time we beat ourselves up for saying, “Well, I just didn't prioritize that task enough”, or “I need to raise the stakes”, we’re increasing the risk that just as we see with stereotype threat, that we're gonna worry more about whether we're good enough, we're gonna put more pressure on ourselves to be perfect, we're going to be distracted and even suffer a hit to our short-term working memory or our executive function.

I've read some of this evidence before, but it wasn't until I talked with Claude that it hit me that in some of the situations where we care most about our results, it actually serves us to care less, and it's hard to do that, as we discussed. Thinking about other things that you care about, other areas where you excel seems to be a powerful step toward putting each performance, each test in perspective. And that's something we could probably all benefit from.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Aja Simpson, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, BanBan Cheng, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rodgers. This episode was produced in mixed by Cosmic Standard.

Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.

[00:53:36] Claude Steele: But if the policeman found his brother-in-law behind the wheel, there'd be, and brother-in-law could be of a different group too. The stereotype isn't, isn't as relevant there.

[00:53:46] Adam Grant: I think you underestimate the number of people who have stereotypes of brothers-in-law as a group.

[00:53:53] Claude Steele: I probably did.

[00:53:55] Adam Grant: Let me, let me tell you some things about brothers-in-law.

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Claude Steele On Understanding ‘Stereotype Threat’ — Part 1

Stanford University social psychologist Dr. Claude Steele has provided substantial contributions to the world of diversity, cultural acceptance, and understanding of the human brain in terms of race, stereotypes, and social norms.

At the 2017 Diversity Symposium in Fort Collins, Colo., Steele explained specific ways universities can create a less-threatening setting for diversity among college campuses. His overarching question for the speech was, “How do you create a successful diverse community?”

Steele explained that addressing threats to the self, how these threats infiltrate the mind and understanding their consequences is the step in the right direction.

Steretype threat

In order to recognize the findings of Steele’s research, one must first understand his social-psychological theory of stereotype threat .

This theory can be defined when an individual is in a situation where a negative stereotype affects one of his/her/their identities, in which one knows they could be judged by other groups in the situation.

The more the individual cares about the task at hand, the more stereotype threat will inhibit their intellectual ability of the topic.

Are men better at math than women?

A classic example Steele used to explain this threat was the stereotype that men are better at math than women.

In one of his first research studies about two decades ago, results showed that women did around one standard deviation below the mean of men on a facilitated math exam when the stereotype was known and present. This equated to about 15 IQ points difference.

However, in the same study when researchers convinced participants that the test had no effect on gender, race, etc., women performed equally to men. Steele spent years of research testing this theory throughout many different populations, including race, gender, sexuality, and various cultural factors. His findings always spit out the same result.

Steele on ‘The least prejudiced person’

Steele’s research found that stereotype threat is most prominently experienced among whites in interracial conversations revolving around race. The threat was not experienced, however, in an interracial conversation not revolving around race. The threat is also more prominent in people who have the strongest commitment to the topic or are the “least prejudiced person.” Hence, the more passionate one is about the task or situation at hand, the more stereotype threat will inhibit their abilities.

Stereotype threat hinders mental ability because one’s mind does not want to be susceptible in a situation they are passionate about. Vigilance causes one to be on edge, attempting to watch every move in order to say or do all the right things.

At the same time, the brain is trying to assess the extent to which the individual is being judged, while also attempting to perform the task at hand. When the threat is present, the mind is trying to juggle too many thoughts at once, leading to distraction, frustration and inevitably, underperformance.

Steele on human perceptions

Steele explained that it’s not our fault, as human nature forms our perceptions around how we experience life. The base structure of society and its various systems cause people to form their perceptions around recognizable and unrecognizable groups and behaviors. Because society has always revolved around class, race, and gender separations, our brains evolve our defense mechanisms around these classifications.

The same findings have been shown to occur universally, but in their own ways revolving around specific cultural and societal norms. For example, France is not as affected by race as many other western cultures. They do, however, experience extreme stereotype threat among social classes.

So how do we eliminate this inevitable threat among society? Steele had an answer for that as well, which we’ll touch on in the next post.

With a passion for Journalism and Media Communications, Olive Ancell is a Third Culture Adult and content creator who is passionate about social and cultural differences that have the potential to bring the world’s people together. She has traveled to nine countries, which has influenced her love of travel and the desire to share unique world perspectives that can offer unlimited opportunities to connect people in different ways. Her talents in content creating include photography, videography, writing, and multiple art mediums. Ancell believes the power of media is one of the most powerful tools for international awareness and communication, which can be utilized or abused. Olive is determined to be a part of a larger picture, in which the use of media for coverage ranging from hyper-local to international is encouraged to celebrate and elevate diversity and all of the Earth’s spectacular cultures.

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Stereotype Threat: 15 Examples, Definition, Criticisms

Stereotype threat occurs when members of a group fear their behaviors may contribute to a negative stereotype about their social group.

Stereotype threat leads to feelings of anxiety, self-consciousness, and decreased confidence. Studies (Pennington et al., 2016; Schmader, Johns & Forbes, 2008) reveal that self-consciousness about adhering to a stereotype can tangibly decrease performance in both academic and workplace situational contexts. It is believed that the increased cognitive load of worrying about the stereotype threat decrease performance.

It can therefore lead to disparities in success and achievement between different racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural groups, thereby exacerbating social inequality .

Stereotype Threat Effects

Stereotype threat can have a wide-ranging effect, not just on an individual, but on society as a whole.

Examples of effects include:

Stereotype Threat Examples

The following are examples of situations where stereotype threat may arise:

• Women in STEM: Women in some fields of science feel judged and may be stereotyped as not having the same technical abilities as their male counterparts.
• Women in leadership: Women in positions of leadership often have their behavior highly monitored and judged and have a sense that they are representing their gender. As a result, they may fear that coming across as bossy or even failing may help to confirm other people’s negative gender biases (Hoyt & Murphy, 2016)
• Gay Men: Gay men may be highly conscious that people distrust them around their children. For example, gay teachers may be conscious of parents’ distrust which may implicitly affect their student-teacher interactions (Bosson, Haymovitz & Pinel, 2004).
• Male teachers: To a lesser extent, male teachers are conscious of stereotypes around predatory behaviors, making them conscious of ensuring distance between themselves and their students. For example, they may be less likely to accept a hug from a student than female teachers (Kalokerinos et al., 2017).
• Consciousness of bias in the workplace: 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.
• Working-class students at university: Students from lower socioeconomic classes being deemed less capable of succeeding in an academic setting due to their financial situation.
• People with disabilities: People with disabilities or developmental challenges stereotyped as not having the same capacity to achieve a task as someone without the same challenges.
• Religious groups: Muslims being stereotyped or associated with terrorism or extremism
• Asians in math: Asian people have a stigma of being superior at mathematics and science and they often feel as if people are expecting them to fit into this model minority stereotype .
• Mental health: People with a mental illness are stereotyped as dangerous or unstable
• Stereotypes about African Americans: African Americans being falsely associated with deviance and aware that people may implicitly distrust them.
• Anti-Semitism: A Jewish person being self-conscious of long-standing negative stereotypes (e.g., greed and thriftiness).
• Immigrant consciousness: Negative stereotypes pertaining to immigrant groups that may cause anxiety or stress (e.g., being aware that people might consider you to be an unlawful immigrant).
• When traveling: Travellers may be highly conscious that people are judging them as representative of their nationality. Your accent stands-out in a foreign country, so if you do something embarrassing, it may help confirm people’s negative biases about your nationality.
• Parenting: Parents may worry that their parenting styles are highly monitored. For example, parents from minority groups (gay parents, parents who are people of color) may feel as if their misbehaving child may contribute to negative stereotypes from people around them about their class or race.

Case Studies

1. religion.

Case Study 1: Muslims being stereotyped or associated with extremism.

For many Muslims, stereotype threat manifests itself in the form of microaggressions , biases, and baseless judgements from surrounding non-Muslim groups.

Stereotypes that Muslims are in some way suspicious, dangerous, or untrustworthy, have made it more challenging for some Muslims to lead a successful life in society.

This was particularly evident in the early 2000’s. Overwhelming Islamophobia, and stereotyping towards Muslim communities after the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks in NYC, was rampant in the United States.

In recent years, efforts have been made to ease stereotyping, and prejudiced treatment of Muslims in society. However, Hakim et al. (2020) state that:

“Tolerant discourse in the United States has responded to heightened stereotyping of Muslims as violent by countering that “not all Muslims are terrorists.” This subtyping of Muslims—as some radical terrorists among mostly peaceful “moderates”—is meant to protect a positive image of the group but leaves the original negative stereotype unchanged. We predicted that such discourse may paradoxically increase people’s support of anti-Muslim policies because the subtyping and its associated negative stereotypes justify hostile actions toward Muslims” (para 1).

They explain that is a common intercultural stereotype to classify Muslims as either radical or moderate (breaking Muslims into two categories “good or bad”).

This stereotype is still frequently used as a way to gain public approval for aggressive political actions, because it comes with a veil of being anti-prejudiced.

They continue that this “novel form of stereotyping against Muslims is related to geopolitical attitudes, given the emergence of this subtyping within the context of the U.S.-led “War on Terror”(para 14).

This can be damaging for Muslim communities, as it perpetuates a negative stereotype based in duality (goodness and badness) applied to an entire religion; this often leads to immigration issues from certain regions, surveillance of daily activities, and other prejudice.

2. Social Class

Case Study 2: Students from lower socioeconomic classes may be deemed less capable of succeeding in an academic setting due to their financial situation.

Social class-based stereotypes can contribute to inequality in a variety of ways. Not only do they form in children’s minds from an early age, and they can affect academic achievement in a variety of educational settings.

Although wealth-based stereotypes tend to be more common in societies with greater disparities in wealth, they often portray people with lower social status (less wealth) as being less capable, and therefore less likely to succeed.

In many schools, social class stereotypes generally benefit those of a higher social class, and this can be reinforced by the educational system.

The situation grows progressively worse when race overlaps economic class stereotyping. This can create negative or false perceptions (e.g., both White and Black individuals tend to assume that Black people are employed in low-income occupations, and White people are employed in higher-income ones) (Durante & Fiske, 2017, para 2-9).

Durante & Fiske (2017) add:

“Rich people are stereotyped as intelligent and, psychometrically speaking, wealthier people do tend to have higher IQ and SAT scores compared to low-income people. Despite various explanations for such a class gap in testing, scholars have only just started to investigate this phenomenon within the stereotype-threat framework (albeit even so, rarely): namely, a situational predicament affects intellectual performances of individuals who belong to negatively stereotyped groups in the intellectual domain; their performance potentially reflects on their SC group as well as themselves” (para 11).

3. Immigrant Groups

Case Study 3: Negative stereotypes pertaining to immigrant groups that may cause anxiety or stress (e.g., non-citizenship).

Immigrant populations often confront generalizations about their achievement potential and cognitive performance in the countries where they live.

Based on stereotype and social identity threat theory and research, negative stereotypes can impair the performance of members of a group due to additional pressures to succeed.

Latin American migrants in both the US and Spain, as well as immigrants from Turkey, the Maghreb region, and the Balkans in Northern and Western Europe, have been observed to demonstrate low academic performance in school.

Utilizing social-psychological tactics, and examination of data, Appel et al. (2015) hope to promote equality in education school systems, and positively enhance experiences for immigrants who are impacted.

Their investigation efforts on stereotype threat imply that of proactive and preemptive measures are employed with at risk immigrant groups, it can reduce the hazardous effects of stereotype threat.

They are actively containing to search for proof that of these strategies for the benefit of immigrant students.

Appel et al. (2015) conclude:

“Stereotype threat theory posits that negative stereotypes about one’s group can elicit an extra pressure not to fail which leads to cognitive underperformance. Thus, stereotype threat could explain a substantial part of the immigrant achievement gap, one of the arguably most pressing problems for educational research and practice.”

Stereotype Threat Theory Criticisms

Stereotype threat occurs when people are conscious of confirming negative biases about their social group , leading to self-monitoring, anxiety, and stress. It has been found to directly lead to poor outcomes in both academic and workplace contexts and therefore may exacerbate social inequalities for marginalized and oppressed groups.

For more on how people develop stereotypes (including the two signals people use to judge a person or group, consult our article on the stereotype content model here .

Appel, M., Weber, S., & Kronberger, N. (2015). The influence of stereotype threat on immigrants: review and meta-analysis.  Frontiers in Psychology , 6 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00900

Bosson, J. K., Haymovitz, E. L., & Pinel, E. C. (2004). When saying and doing diverge: The effects of stereotype threat on self-reported versus non-verbal anxiety.  Journal of experimental social psychology ,  40 (2), 247-255.

Casad, B. J., & Bryant, W. R. (2016). Addressing Stereotype Threat is Critical to Diversity and Inclusion in Organizational Psychology.  Frontiers in Psychology , 7 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00008

Durante, F., & Fiske, S. T. (2017). How social-class stereotypes maintain inequality.  Current Opinion in Psychology ,  18 , 43–48.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.033

Hakim, N. H., Zhao, X., & Bharj, N. (2020). The Paradox of the Moderate Muslim Discourse: Subtyping Promotes Support for Anti-muslim Policies.  Frontiers in Psychology ,  11 .  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612780

Hoyt, C. L., & Murphy, S. E. (2016). Managing to clear the air: Stereotype threat, women, and leadership.  The leadership quarterly ,  27 (3), 387-399.

Kalokerinos, E. K., Kjelsaas, K., Bennetts, S., & von Hippel, C. (2017). Men in pink collars: Stereotype threat and disengagement among male teachers and child protection workers.  European Journal of Social Psychology ,  47 (5), 553-565.

Pennington, C. R., Heim, D., Levy, A. P., and Larkin, D. (2016). Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators.  Plos One ,  11 (1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487

Schmader, T., Johns, M., and Forbes, C. (2008). An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance. Psychological Review. 115 (2): 336–356. doi: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.115.2.336

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 15 Self-Actualization Examples (Maslow's Hierarchy)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Forest Schools Philosophy & Curriculum, Explained!
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Montessori's 4 Planes of Development, Explained!
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Montessori vs Reggio Emilia vs Steiner-Waldorf vs Froebel

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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
• Reader Comments

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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Stereotype Threat: Women’s Abilities in Math Report

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Introduction

Why introduce st, previous studies, methodology, reference list.

There has been an immense concern of the impact of gender and racial stereotyping on the academic performance of individuals stereotyped from these angles. Poor performance of women in comparison to men in some subjects such as mathematics had been attributed to the existing differences, both biological and social, between them and men.

However, this was before the emergence of the discipline of stereotype threat in 1995. In the current research, it is confirmed that elimination of stereotypes on women’s abilities in mathematics can enhance their performance in mathematics, a subject that has been taken a reserve for men.

Before the development of research in the field of stereotype threats, psychologists coupled with various practitioners in the field of social psychology enormously believed that the differences in performance between boys and girls in intelligence and mathematics tests were related to their sociological and biological differences.

However, emerging researches as from 1990s have shown that the existing differences in social situations can often truncate into the depiction of differences in performance in intelligence and math tests among boys and girls.

These social situations involve the creation of awareness of negative stereotypes especially in a situation encompassing stereotyping of the relevant group domains. The impacts of stereotyping are found as being incredibly pronounced among groups of persons who identify themselves strongly with particular groups and domains (Stone et al, 1999, p.1213).

Claude Steele introduced the topic of ST in the discipline of social psychology in 1995. He defined it interactively as the fear that people have while confirming their negative stereotype characteristic on their individual groups (Steele & Aronson, 1995, p.798). They argue that the reason why women in general coupled with minority groups perform poorly in math is that they have an immense fear of confirming any stereotype associated with them akin to their perceived capabilities.

Apart from the group euphoria, certain personal traits are also associated with ST. These include consciousness of stigmas acerbated by the members of a group that a person identifies himself or herself with, setting high expectations, and hefty investments in personalised domains.

Several studies have confirmed ST as having negative impacts in the performance of women in math. For instance, Spencer et al. (1999) conducted a study on “stereotype threat and women’s math performance” (pp. 4-28). They accomplished this task in three different experiments.

Collectively, the three experiments confirmed that the performance of women in math faces many risks of being judged from the contexts of negative stereotypes that confirm that women are essentially weaker in math (Spencer et al., 1999, p.4). In the first study, they “demonstrated that the pattern observed in the literature that women underperformed on difficult math tests” (Spencer et al., 1999, p.4).

On the other hand, in study 2, they demonstrated that it is possible to reduce the performance differences when elimination of the stereotype that is descriptive of the anticipated performance is done to ensure that gender differences are not reflected. Lastly, their third experiment deployed a lesser portion of the population to explore the mediation effects that are produced in ST.

The results of the experiment indicated that ST related to gender differences capabilities produced differences in performance in math even upon administration of advanced math tests without the elimination of the stereotype domains. From this perspective, the aim of the current study is to investigate whether cognitions of stereotyping on a group in which one belongs to affect the performance of an individual in academics based on his or her gender group’s traditional stereotypes.

Prior learning of stereotype associated with a person’s gender acts as a stereotype lift, which increases stereotype threats, and hence the performance of that individual, in math and intelligence tests.

The methodology used in this lab report is conducting a research on the existing body of literature to help in garnering the data utilised in the discussions of the impacts of cognitions of stereotype threats among people belonging to a particular social group defined by common racial and gender characteristics. This is done by conducting a search of literature on ST by using “stereotype threats among minority groups and women” as the key words. This means that the findings of this research are predominantly dependent on secondary data.

Hence, this methodology introduces some drawbacks such as the absence of primary data, which, upon statistical analysis, could aid in arriving at valid hypothetical inferences that would need further research to clarify on their rigidness in contributing to the incensement of body of knowledge in the field of ST. However, the approach used in this lab report mitigates such a disadvantage by concretising the results of a variety of studies in ST into one paradigm of explaining the impacts of ST on performance in intelligence tests and math.

Upon conducting a search using the keywords “stereotype threats among minority groups and women”, a variety of data was acquired. Steele and Aronson’s (1995) results on the impacts of emphasis on race on the performance of standardised tests when the white race is emphasised (p.797) form one of the plausible results of this research that help in making inferences of the study.

According to the number of experiments that were conducted by these researchers, emphasis on the white race led to poor performance in the standardised tests among the college freshmen belonging to the black race coupled with sophomores (Steele & Aronson, 1995, p.809). On the other hand, in case no emphasis was made on the white race, the results of their experiments showed that the black people performed much comparably to the white people.

The results also reveal that the scope of ST has broadened to include studying on the consequences of the ST beyond academic performance. For instance, results on the studies conducted by Stone et al. (1999) show that stereotyping could also lead to self-handicapping impacts such as the reduction of practice time (p.1214).

It is also found out that directly consistent to various exposures to an environment characterised by ST, for instance, ST encountered by minorities and women in the environments of academics, can incredibly reduce the manner in which such people value their domain (Steele, 1997, p.616). Stone et al. also found out that individuals prefer refraining from choosing careers that justify their stereotyped traits hence reducing the number of professionals with such domains in certain careers (1999, p.1215).

This leads to social inequality. Other secondary sources also indicate that ST also has the capacity to impact individuals in other domains that are beyond academics among them being sports (Stone et al., 1999, p.1213), performance of women in debates, negotiations (Kray, Galinksy & Thompson, 2002, p.386), and the performance of women in driving (Yeung & von Hippel, 2008, p.667).

ST produces harmful impacts in the performance of Hispanics in academics, as well as to students who come from poor economic backgrounds. This happens especially when ST leads to invoking certain performance anticipations in comparison to some other people who are deemed superior in some group domains.

In case members of a particular group that is stereotyped are informed about the implication of ST on them, it is possible to “buffer their performance on stereotyped-relevant tasks” (Schmader, Johns & Martens, 2005, p.178).

According to the findings of these researchers, despite the fact that the performance of women in comparison to men when diagnostic tests were administered was worse, women who had been taught about the ST were never impaired by cognitions associated with anxieties of their ST. Consequently, prior learning about ST can hike the performance of women in intellectual and math test (Schmader, Johns & Martens, 2005, p.178).

However, this prior learning helps to reinforce the perception that men would perform better in math than women due to the existing differences in their abilities. Now, it is safe to deduce that from Schmader Johns and Marten’s findings, inculcating knowledge of ST among people who are likely to be impacted negatively by the stereotypes threats before the administration of a test may help to improve their performance.

In particular, performance among groups whose abilities to perform in a test are stereotyped is increased by providing a means of arousal externalisation. In this dimension, Schmader, Johns, and Marten’s study confirms, “women’s math performance in the teaching intervention condition tended to increase the more they attributed their anxiety to gender stereotypes” (2005, p.178).

This work confirms Steele (1997) findings that performance of women in math deteriorates whenever they articulate their anxiety experiences with stereotyping their abilities on gender basis (p. 616). Therefore, prior learning through teaching persons on the negative and detrimental impacts of their ST may act as an ample mechanism of dealing with the implications of ST on performance of women in math and intellectual tests.

Activating various stereotype perceptions has the ability to impair performance of person in various stereotyped tasks. The work of Schmader, Forbes, and Johns (2008) provides substantive mechanisms of affirming that ST has the capacity to disrupt the performance of people in three main ways (pp. 336-356).

These are “physiological stress response that directly impairs prefrontal processing, a tendency to actively monitor performance, and efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions in the service of self-regulation” (Schmader, Forbes & Johns, 2008, p.336). Additionally, the authors find out that the three mechanisms have the capacity to disrupt tasks whose execution is dependent on the sensory motor performance.

For persons who contend with certain negative stereotypes concerning their abilities, with regard to the results of Schmader, Forbes and John’s study, “ chronic experience of stress, heightened vigilance, self doubt, and emotional suppression can not only impair performance directly but also can lead them to avoid situations where this aversive phenomena reside” (2008, p.352).

In this dimension, a subtle result on impacts of ST on the performance in intellectual test is achieved in that the appeal coupled with strength of any ST perception related to contemplation of either individual or group abilities become possible to harness to facilitate the reduction of the capacity of such situations from truncating into reduced performance.

This means that possessing the knowledge through which stereotypes may alter individual’s behaviours provides proactive mechanisms of helping people to change such behaviours hence reducing the thresholds of ST. The overall capacity for a person to manage stereotypes threats rests on the ability to manipulate the psychological perceptions of that individual on the capacity of the stereotype threats to influence his or her performance.

The results of this study make it indispensable to seek a clear understanding of the situations that are likely to truncate into ST since, upon the elimination of such situations, it is possible to eliminate the social inequalities based on anticipations on certain performance levels of people of different gender, minority group, and or ethnic groups. The condition that has the highest probabilities of producing stereotypes threat is the one that highlights both conditions by replicating self-social associations with particular social categories.

This implies, for instance, that, when women see themselves from the perspective, “they are women, therefore they are not anticipated to performance to a certain degree in math test, and hence the test taken is difficult” (Spencer et al., 1999, p.13), they can never perform to their full potential. This follows because they have already constructed some other negative altitudes about their performance even before attempting the test.

Therefore, it is possible to “undermine performance because of the concerns of the possibility of confirming negative stereotypes about one’s group” (Stone et al., 1999, p.1221). Consequently, based on the results of this study, it sounds plausible to infer that a situation that hikes any group’s stereotype salience has the capacity to hike the probabilities of vulnerabilities to ST.

Consistent with Stelle et al. (2002) findings, upon a thorough introspection of the scholarly works on the consequences of ST, it is arguable, “disengagement can also produce “misidentification” if an individual copes with the long-term threat by avoiding the domain or detaching one’s identity from a domain” (Stelle et al., 2002, p.48).

This is because there is a correlation between self-esteem and academic performance among white and black students. The more the black students perceive themselves as inferior in terms of academic performance apparently because of invoking negative stereotype associated with their ethnicity, the poorer they perform in academics.

When such a situation is replicated based on gender, segregation and seclusion of women may occur especially on career paths deemed as a reserve for men. Hence, undergraduate women pursuing studies in disciplines that are male-dominated will have increased chances of facing ST and discrimination. Consequently, such women have higher probabilities of thinking to change their areas of specialisation in comparisons to women who do not pursue careers that are dominated by men (Steele et al., 2002, p.47).

This means that, in case stereotypes attributes are emphasised in classroom settings, the sense of self-belonging to a particular discipline is disrupted. Therefore, emphasising on stereotypes that women have poor abilities in math performance would result to making them perceive themselves as outcasts in the math community.

Of great paramount to note is that the results of this lab report study reveal that ST may seem likely to be experienced by persons belonging to a particular group than groups having differing characteristics with it. However, it is not accurate to infer that ST is a reserve for members of a group of people that has been stereotyped since time immemorial. Consequently, a stigmatised social identify may surface itself in a number of social situations.

Indeed, the results of studies on impacts people’s identities before and after the administration of tests reveal that performance is deterred when information on a person’s identity is sought first before the test administration. Unfortunately, the standard way of conducting exams such as GRE and SAT is to seek out information about the candidates’ gender identity coupled with race before taking the tests.

Kray, L., Galinksy, A., & Thompson, L. (2002). Reversing the gender gap in negotiations: An exploration of stereotype regeneration. Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 87( 1), 386-409.

Schmader, T., Forbes, C., & Johns, M. (2008). An integrated process model of stereotype threat effects on performance. Psychological Review, 115 (2), 336-356.

Schmader, T., Johns M., & Martens, A. (2005). Knowing Is Half Battle: Teaching Threat As Means of Improving Women’s Math Performance, Psychological Science,16 (3),175-178.

Spencer, S., Steele, C., & Quinn, M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35 (4) , 4-28.

Steele, C. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52 (1), 613-629.

Steele, C., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African-Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69 (3), 797-811.

Steele, J., James, B., & Barnett, R. (2002). Learning in a man’s world: Examining the perceptions of undergraduate women in male-dominated academic areas. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 26 (2), 46-50.

Stone, J., Lynch, C., Sjomeling, M., & Darley, J. (1999). Stereotype threat effects on black and white athletic performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 (4), 1213-1227.

Yeung, N., & von Hippel, C. (2008). Stereotype threat increases the likelihood that female drivers in a simulator run over jaywalkers. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 40 (7), 667-674.

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IvyPanda. (2018, November 6). Stereotype Threat: Women's Abilities in Math. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stereotype-threat/

"Stereotype Threat: Women's Abilities in Math." IvyPanda , 6 Nov. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/stereotype-threat/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Stereotype Threat: Women's Abilities in Math'. 6 November.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Stereotype Threat: Women's Abilities in Math." November 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stereotype-threat/.

1. IvyPanda . "Stereotype Threat: Women's Abilities in Math." November 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stereotype-threat/.

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IvyPanda . "Stereotype Threat: Women's Abilities in Math." November 6, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stereotype-threat/.

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1 Introduction

• Published: December 2011
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Stereotype threat is one of the most widely studied social psychological concepts of the past 20 years. In this introductory chapter, we provide a broad overview of the theory and introduce the goals of this volume. The significance of the theory lies in its ability to offer a more optimistic account of group differences in performance. By side-stepping the nature–nurture debate entirely, stereotype threat seeks to identify how factors in the immediate performance situation contribute to—if not create—the appearance of systematic differences in ability. Interest in these effects is not restricted to academic circles but has gained broad recognition in the popular press with applications beyond education to intergroup interactions, organizational behavior, and clinical diagnoses. We review the four main sections of the book: an examination of basic processes that trigger and mediate how negative stereotypes impair performance, a discussion of recent theoretical extensions to the original formulation of the theory, a review of the variety of groups in which stereotype threat has been documented, and a description of how the theory can be applied to alleviate the debilitating effects that negative stereotypes can have in academic contexts. The book is intended for anyone with an interest in the behavioral science of performance, whether from an academic, organizational, or social policy perspective. To facilitate application of basic theory to the field, each chapter provides policy recommendations stemming from the research reviewed. To inspire future research, we conclude the chapter with a review of unanswered questions that await further inquiry.

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Whistling Vivaldi

Claude steele, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The central theme of Whistling Vivaldi is identity, and, furthermore, the different ways people respond to each other’s identities. During his decades of research into social psychology, Claude Steele has studied many different forms of identity, including, race, gender, ethnicity, social orientation, class, and age. One of the premises of his research is that human beings will inevitably judge each other on the basis of their identity. Furthermore, Steele argues that every unique identity has a related stereotype—a kind of short-hand for perceiving how people with that identity will behave. Stereotyping is, of course, a common form of bigotry. For example, a math professor who assumes that a female student isn’t going to be able to understand the material is using a sexist stereotype—that women aren’t good at math—to judge the student’s behavior. Steele shows how stereotyping, and the threat of being stereotyped, can exert a huge influence on different people’s behavior.

Arguably Steele’s most important insight about stereotyping is that the awareness of stereotypes (and particularly the fear of being stereotyped) can be more powerful than an explicit case of stereotyping. Much of Steele’s research is centered around the fear of being stereotyped—or, put another way, of living up to a stereotype, particularly in a university setting. For example, Steele and his colleagues organized experiments in which black and white Stanford students were asked to take a difficult test. Half of the students were told that the exam measured intelligence, while the other half were told that the exam was a diagnostic test, and that black and white students did equally well on it. Steele found that black students who’d been told that the exam measured intelligence did worse than white students who’d received the same information. However, black students who’d been told the exam didn’t measure intelligence performed at the same level as their white counterparts. Steele interprets his experiments to suggest that black students’ fear of confirming a stereotype—namely, that black people are less intelligent than white people—acted as an obstacle to their success on the test. The extra stress and anxiety of thinking about the stereotype distracted them, and resulted in lower average test scores. The peculiar thing about Steele’s research is that his subjects weren’t responding to any overt display of racism—simply the announcement that their test measured intelligence was enough to trigger a “stereotype threat.”

Steele’s findings have been replicated among many different identity groups, including women, Asian Americans, and the elderly. Other studies have found physiological evidence for the stereotype threat, including higher blood pressure and an elevated heart rate. Perhaps most surprisingly, Steele’s experiments suggest that identity groups may experience a stereotype threat even if they haven’t previously experienced that stereotype threat in their life. For example, studies suggest that white students will underperform on an exam if they’re informed that Asian Americans generally do better on the exam—even if the white students haven’t ever devoted a lot of time to thinking about the stereotype that Asian Americans are good at math. In short, Steele’s research suggests that the fear of confirming a stereotype exerts a powerful, measurable influence on people’s behavior—and, furthermore, that this fear can be curbed or provoked through a variety of environmental factors.

It’s not surprising that Steele’s findings have faced a lot of criticism, both from laypeople and other social psychologists. As Steele himself acknowledges, some social psychologists continue to deny that stereotype threats really exert such a powerful influence on people. However, this is slowly changing, as Steele’s findings are replicated in an ever-growing number of settings. Others have argued that, even if Steele is correct about stereotype threats, he’s wrong to emphasize their importance. While the perceived threat of a stereotype does seem to have a measurable influence on students’ performances on exams, real, explicit displays of racism and bigotry play a much bigger role in American society overall. Put another way, Steele focuses his research on minor, specialized, “ivory tower” cases in which there’s no explicitly bigoted actor—whereas, in America overall, it’s more common to see inequality on a structural, systemic level, or people engaging in unambiguously bigoted behavior. In response to these criticisms, Steele argues that stereotype threats aren’t minor at all. A young student’s academic performance is a major part of the student’s success later on in life—and therefore, it’s very important to understand the kind of anxiety and uncertainty that the student might experience, even if the students’ teachers and classmates don’t bear the student any ill will for his or her identity.

Identity, Stereotyping, and Identity Threats ThemeTracker

Identity, Stereotyping, and Identity Threats Quotes in Whistling Vivaldi

I have a memory of the first time I realized I was black. It was when, at seven or eight, I was walking home from school with neighborhood kids on the last day of the school year—the whole summer in front of us—and I learned that we "black" kids couldn't swim at the pool in our area park, except on Wednesday afternoons.

Whistling Vivaldi is about the experience of living under such a cloud—an experience we all have—and the role such clouds play in shaping our lives and society.

On the second day Ms. Elliott turned the tables. She put the felt collars around the necks of the blue-eyed students and treated them the same way she'd treated the brown-eyed students the day before. The blue-eyed students now lost the energy they'd had the day before and behaved the way the brown-eyed students had on that day, huddled and downcast. The brown-eyed students, for their part, were once again eager learners.

Steve Spencer and I weren't especially interested in the genetic explanation of sex differences in math. Our idea was that stigma had more to do with these differences than people commonly thought. But we knew, long before the Summers episode, that the genetic question carried huge cultural weight.

It's conventional wisdom, a virtual stereotype of what causes members of negatively regarded groups to fail. So if something causes black and women college students to perform less well than you'd expect from their skills, it must be—the idea goes—these psychic deficiencies, deficiencies of confidence and expectation, self-sabotaging deficiencies.

And third, in finding a reliable means of reproducing in the laboratory the black student underperformance we'd seen in real life, we knew we could examine it up close—tear it apart and see how it worked.

Here was the irony we had suspected. What made Mikel's vanguard black students susceptible to stereotype pressure was not weaker academic confidence and skills but stronger academic confidence and skills.

Maalouf's emphasis is similar to mine: of all the things that make an identity prominent in one's feeling and thinking, being threatened on the basis of it is perhaps the most important.

If you want to change the behaviors and outcomes associated with social identity—say, too few women in computer science—don't focus on changing the internal manifestations of the identity, such as values, and attitudes. Focus instead on changing the contingencies to which all of that internal stuff is an adaptation.

The stereotype threat created by this comment impaired the math performance of exceptionally strong white male math students. No special self-doubting susceptibility seemed necessary.

[Treisman] saw black students—in an effort to succeed where their abilities are negatively stereotyped—following a strategy of intense, isolated effort, a strategy that often set them up for defeats and discouragements.

The harder the psychology majors (at risk of confirming the stereotype) thought, the more stable their heartbeat interval, the worse they did. Hard thinking for the science majors, under little stereotype pressure, reflected constructive engagement with the test. Hard thinking for the psychology majors, at risk of confirming the stereotype, reflected performance-worsening rumination.

John Henryism sounds like the attitude of people who show stereotype threat effects—people who are identified with, and care a lot about succeeding in, an area where their group is negatively stereotyped.

The term "critical mass" refers to the point at which there are enough minorities in a setting, like a school or a workplace, that individual minorities no longer feel uncomfortable there because they are minorities—in our terms, they no longer feel an interfering level of identity threat. When Justice O'Connor was alone on the Court, she lacked critical mass.

Herein may lie a principle of remedy: if enough cues in a setting can lead members of a group to feel "identity safe," it might neutralize the impact of other cues in the setting that could otherwise threaten them.

Why was it so effective? It resolved their interpretative quandary. It told them they weren't being seen in terms of the bad stereotype about their group's intellectual abilities, since the feedback giver used high intellectual standards and believed they could meet them. They could feel less jeopardy. The motivation they had always had was released.

Black students who got a brief narrative intervention of the sort I just described averaged one-third of a letter grade higher in the next semester than black students in a control group who got the results of a survey about political attitudes rather than about college life.

Heart attacks also have background causes that are difficult to change—genetic history, long-term habits of diet and exercise, smoking, life stress, etc. Nevertheless, the likelihood of a heart attack can be greatly reduced by drugs and surgery. They do nothing to counter the background causes of heart disease; they treat the most immediate cause of a heart attack, blocked coronary arties.

The identity threat explanation doesn't require attributing prejudice to the white passengers. All one need assume, it says, is that they have a worry like Ted's: the risk of saying, doing, or even thinking something that would make them feel racist or like they could be seen as racist in interacting with the black passenger. It takes the perspective of the person whose actions one is trying to explain—the woman or minority taking the math test, for example, or in this case the perspective of the white passengers passing up the seat next to a black passenger. It assumes, in light of present-day norms of civility, that most of these passengers are invested in not appearing as racist. It further assumes that this investment, ironically, may lead them to avoid situations like the seat next to the black passenger.

This was Glenn Loury’s reasoning. It led him to a surprising claim: the everyday associational preferences that contribute to racially organized networks and locations in American life—that is, racially organized residential patterns, schooling, friendship networks, and so on—may now be more important causes of racial inequality than direct discrimination against blacks. He's not announcing the end of racial discrimination. He's simply underlining the importance of preferences that organize blacks out of networks and locations that could better their outcomes.

The prospect of an interracial conversation on a racially sensitive topic made white participants mindful of the whites-as-racist stereotype. And the more mindful they were of this stereotype, the more they distanced themselves from black conversation partners. Worry about being stereotyped was driving them away.

It wasn't prejudice that caused them to sit farther from their black partners conversation. It was fear of being seen as racist—pure and simple. It was stereotype threat, a contingency of their white identities in that situation. It was probably this threat, too, rather than racial prejudice, that caused Ted's intense discomfort in his African American political science class, and that caused at least some of the white passengers to give Sheryll Cashin her Southwest Airlines First Class seat and that might make it difficult for white teachers to engage poor-performing minority students. Who needs the hassle?

When I look over my life as an African American, I see improvements in the contingencies attached to that identity. The swimming pool restrictions of my youth are gone. So are the suffocating limitations Anatole Broyard would have faced as a black man in New York City in the late 1940s. Things have gotten better. But remember, contingencies grow out of an identity's role in the history and organization of a society—its role in the DNA of a society—and how society has stereotyped that identity.

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

Supported by

By M.H. Miller ,  Brendan Embser ,  Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

• June 3, 2024

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the photograph, which also contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. The work was first presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 4, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Community Party. The previous night, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; that morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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