stereotype

Negative stereotypes about aging affect how well older adults remember

March, 2012

Another study has come out supporting the idea that negative stereotypes about aging and memory affect how well older adults remember. In this case, older adults reminded of age-related decline were more likely to make memory errors.

In the study, 64 older adults (60-74; average 70) and 64 college students were compared on a word recognition task. Both groups first took a vocabulary test, on which they performed similarly. They were then presented with 12 lists of 15 semantically related words. For example, one list could have words associated with "sleep," such as "bed," "rest," "awake," "tired" and "night" — but not the word “sleep”. They were not told they would be tested on their memory of these, rather they were asked to rate each word for pleasantness.

They then engaged in a five-minute filler task (a Sudoku) before a short text was read to them. For some, the text had to do with age-related declines in memory. These participants were told the experiment had to do with memory. For others, the text concerned language-processing research. These were told the experiment had to do with language processing and verbal ability.

They were then given a recognition test containing 36 of the studied words, 48 words unrelated to the studied words, and 12 words related to the studied words (e.g. “sleep”). After recording whether or not they had seen each word before, they also rated their confidence in that answer on an 8-point scale. Finally, they were given a lexical decision task to independently assess stereotype activation.

While young adults showed no effects from the stereotype manipulation, older adults were much more likely to falsely recognize related words that had not been studied if they had heard the text on memory. Those who heard the text on language were no more likely than the young adults to falsely recognize related words.

Note that there is always quite a high level of false recognition of such items: young adults, and older adults in the low-threat condition falsely recognized around half of the related lures, compared to around 10% of unrelated words. But in the high-threat condition, older adults falsely recognized 71% of the related words.

Moreover, older adults’ confidence was also affected. While young adults’ confidence in their false memories was unaffected by threat condition, older adults in the high-threat condition were more confident of their false memories than older adults in the low-threat condition.

The idea that older adults were affected by negative stereotypes about aging was supported by the results of the lexical decision task, which found that, in the high-threat condition, older adults responded more quickly to words associated with negative stereotypes than to neutral words (indicating that they were more accessible). Young adults did not show this difference.

Reference: 

Thomas, A. K., & Dubois, S. J. (2011). Reducing the burden of stereotype threat eliminates age differences in memory distortion. Psychological science, 22(12), 1515-7. doi:10.1177/0956797611425932

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Stereotype threat's effect on black students' academic achievement

August, 2011

Another study on the dramatic impact of stereotype threat on academic achievement, and how you can counter it.

In a two-part experiment, Black and White students studied the definitions of 24 obscure English words, and were later tested, in threatening or non-threatening environments. In the threatening study environment, students were told that the task would assess their "learning abilities and limitations" and "how well people from different backgrounds learn”. In the non-threatening environment, students were told that the study focused on identifying "different learning styles". When tested one to two weeks later, students were first given a low-stress warm-up exercise with half of the word definitions. Then, in order to evoke concerns about stereotypes, a test was given which was described as evaluating "your ability to learn verbal information and your performance on problems requiring verbal reasoning ability".

The effect of these different environments on the Black students was dramatic. On the non-threatening warm-up test, Black students who had studied in the threatening learning environment performed about 50% worse than Black students who had studied in the non-threatening environment. But on the ‘real’ test, for which stereotypes had been evoked, all the Blacks — including those who had done fine on the warm-up — did poorly.

In the second experiment, only Black students were involved, and they all studied in the threatening environment. This time, however, half of the students were asked to begin with a "value affirmation" exercise, during which they chose values that mattered most to them and explained why. The other students were asked to write about a value that mattered little to them. A week later, students did the warm-up and the test. Black students who had written about a meaningful value scored nearly 70% better on the warm-up than black students who had written about other values.

Reference: 

[2348] Taylor, V J., & Walton G. M.
(2011).  Stereotype Threat Undermines Academic Learning.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 37(8), 1055 - 1067.

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Negative stereotypes affect learning, not just performance

August, 2010

Following on from several studies showing that being reminded of a negative stereotype for your group (be it race or gender) affects your test performance, a new study shows it also impairs learning.

A number of studies have demonstrated that negative stereotypes (such as “women are bad at math”) can impair performance in tests. Now a new study shows that this effect extends to learning. The study involved learning to recognize target Chinese characters among sets of two or four. Women who were reminded of the negative stereotypes involving women's math and visual processing ability failed to improve at this search task, while women who were not reminded of the stereotype got faster with practice. When participants were later asked to choose which of two colored squares, imprinted with irrelevant Chinese characters, was more saturated, those in the control group were slower to respond when one of the characters had been a target. However, those trained under stereotype threat showed no such effect, indicating that they had not learned to automatically attend to a target. It’s suggested that the women in the stereotype threat group tried too hard to overcome the negative stereotype, expending more effort but in an unproductive manner.

There are two problems here, it seems. The first is that people under stereotype threat have more invested in disproving the stereotype, and their efforts may be counterproductive. The second, that they are distracted by the stereotype (which uses up some of their precious working memory).

Reference: 

[1686] Rydell, R. J., Shiffrin R. M., Boucher K. L., Van Loo K., & Rydell M. T.
(2010).  Stereotype threat prevents perceptual learning.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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