The Poisonous Placebo

Before we begin our discussion on stereotype threats, I'd like to briefly talk about the placebo effect. The placebo effect is a phenomenon in which a placebo -- a fake treatment -- can sometimes improve a patient's condition simply because the person has the expectation that it will be helpful. Now, instead of using a positive placebo, if we gave the patients a fake poison, it would have a negative effect on their health only because they believe in the negative outcome the placebo has. Now, stereotype threats are like the poisonous placebo that leads to a predicament in which people are, or feel themselves to be, at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group.

Here are some examples of stereotype threats.

• Women perform worse on math tests when they think the test will produce gender differences. (Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999)
• White men perform worse on math tests when they think they are competing with Asians. (Aronson et al., 1999)
• Black students perform worse than white students on the GRE when they think that the test is measuring their abilities, but when black students are told that the test is not measuring their abilities (when told the test is not yet valid or reliable), they perform just as well as white students. (Steele and Aronson, 1995)
• Black athletes do worse than white athletes when they are led to believe that a game of miniature golf tests "sport strategic intelligence," but when the test is framed as a measure of "natural athletic ability," the white athletes do worse than the black athletes. (Stone et al., 1999)
• Female chess players perform worse than male chess players when they are aware that they are playing against a male opponent. When they are (falsely) led to believe that they are playing against another woman, they perform just as well as the male players. (Maass, D'Etolle, & Cadinu, 2008)

I must say, I am not a stranger to stereotype threats myself. Immigrated from South Korea in 2002, my life in the United States was a whole new experience. During the early stages of my life in the States, I often found myself being the victim of stereotype threats. In middle school, I performed poorly on vocabulary quizzes or reading assignments because I assumed that it would be much easier for the other students who were born in America. However, in my ESL class -- a class designed specifically for foreign students -- I was more confident and did very well on quizzes that were on the same level as my regular English class. Even through college, stereotype threats remained to be a challenge. Whenever I had to give a presentation in front of my classmates, namely White students, I became more timid and unable to bring out the full potential of myself and express my thoughts entirely. On the other hand, when I was to give public speech in front of my fellow KSA (Korean Student Association) students, I did an excellent job speaking to the crowd. I even cracked a joke or two. These are some personal accounts of stereotype threats that I myself encountered because I am an Asian American, an ethnic minority. It is definitely getting better over time because I have been working with many White people and realized that we are in fact the same. However, it still makes a difference in my mentality whether I'm with other Asian students or with White students.