stereotype threat and women’s math performance（刻板印象威胁和女生的数学成绩）.pdfVIP

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 35, 4–28 (1999) Article ID jesp.1998.1373, available online at on Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance Steven J. Spencer University of Waterloo Claude M. Steele Stanford University and Diane M. Quinn University of Michigan Received February 25, 1998; revised May 23, 1998; accepted June 16, 1998 When women perform math, unlike men, they risk being judged by the negative stereotype that women have weaker math ability. We call this predicament stereotype threat and hypothesize that the apprehension it causes may disrupt women’s math performance. In Study 1 we demonstrated that the pattern observed in the literature that women underperform on difficult (but not easy) math tests was observed among a highly selected sample of men and women. In Study 2 we demonstrated that this difference in performance could be eliminated when we lowered stereotype threat by describing the test as not producing gender differences. However, when the test was described as producing gender differences and stereotype threat was high, women performed substantially worse than equally qualified men did. A third experiment replicated this finding with a less highly selected population and explored the mediation of the effect. The implication that stereotype threat may underlie gender differences in advanced math performance, even This paper was based on a doctoral dissertation completed by Steven J. Spencer under the direction of Cl