Stereotype threat
Fear of confirming a stereotype can make you perform worse.
What it means
The risk and felt pressure of confirming a negative stereotype about one's own group, which can impair performance in the stereotyped domain. When a relevant stereotype is salient — through a reminder of group identity or the framing of a task as diagnostic of ability — the resulting anxiety, monitoring, and working-memory load can depress performance, ironically producing the very outcome feared. It has been studied across gender and math, race and academic testing, age and memory, and other domains. The size and replicability of some effects are debated, and effects appear stronger for already-identified, high-stakes individuals. Even so, it has reshaped thinking about achievement gaps and motivated lightweight interventions such as self-affirmation and reframing tasks as non-diagnostic.
Examples
Women told a math test reveals gender differences scored lower than equally able women told it was gender-neutral.
Older adults told a word task measures age-related memory decline recall less than those given the same task framed as a test of general knowledge.
The only woman on an engineering team, asked to present the technical deep-dive, spends half her working memory monitoring how she sounds rather than on the material itself.
First described in Steele & Aronson (1995).