The Stereotype Threat

The minority under performance phenomenon, an event in which minority groups average worse scores than whites and Asians on standardized tests and academic endeavors in general. At this point the question becomes why.

The answer it seems, may lie in the idea of “stereotype threat”, an idea that certain stereotypes can subconsciously influence certain groups of people to perform better or worse based on their stereotype. A psychologist at the University of Harvard, Claude M. Steele, tested this theory by conducting an experiment. His theory was that once a group believes a stereotype, they will subconsciously behave in a manner to make it true.  He picked three groups of students, with a mix of African American and white students from Stanford University and gave them a test containing verbal acuity questions from the Graduate Records Exam (GRE). 

He conducted the test with two groups of students, both a mix of genders and races. The first group was told that the test would measure their intellectual ability and the second group was told it would measure their problem solving ability. The results conformed with Steele's hypothesis, in the first group African American students were threatened by the possibility of them conforming to their stereotype and they performed much worse then they did in the second group. The white students weren't under this same threat since there wasn't any negative stereotypes about their intellectual ability so they performed the same throughout. 

A similar experiment was conducted by a group of social Psychologists at Princeton University led by Jeff Stone who tested white vs. black student performance on a golf course. The white students who were told the course was to measure their “natural athletic ability” under performed unlike black students who were unaffected. And the black students who were told the experiment measured "sports intelligence" under performed.