Reducing the Threat -- Aronson Shatters Myths at Goldstein Lecture
For almost as long as there has been standardized testing, the debate has raged over why minority students have historically underperformed on tests such as the SAT. Charges of cultural bias and laments of underfunded urban school districts have long been accepted as being at least partially culpable for the scoring disparities, but others have been consumed with exploring the issue in search of a more satisfying explanation.
Among them is Joshua Aronson, Ph.D., an associate professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, who visited Rider University on Wednesday, October 29, to deliver the second annual Marvin W. Goldstein Lecture on Prejudice Reduction. Aronson, whose address was entitled Stereotypes and the Nature and Nurture of Intelligence, believes that a performance-inhibiting phenomenon – what he terms “stereotype threat” – occurs when students confront the negative expectations of the particular stereotypes assigned to their race and gender, and that this plays the biggest hand in predicting test scores among minorities and women of all races. To the standing room-only audience in the Bart Luedeke Center Theater, his evidence was compelling.
“When I was your age, I had a very different concept of intelligence,” Aronson said to the predominantly student-age audience. “This research has really been an epiphany for me. I hope to challenge your concept of intelligence and change your idea of your own intelligence and what you’re capable of.”
Aronson’s studies show that a minimization of the stereotype threat in testing situations can eliminate much of the gap between blacks and whites on standardized tests. This research offers a strong challenge to traditional, genetic explanations of why African-Americans and Latinos achieve lower scores on tests of intelligence than their Caucasian counterparts, and why women trail men in hard math and science.
Tests of cognitive ability given to African-American and white children between birth and preschool reveal their nearly equal ability through their scores, Aronson explained. But as they are tested again from kindergarten through 12th grade, the gap steadily widens at a pace that extends well beyond the educational disparities. Aronson cited the various rationalizations for this that have been proffered over the years, such as poverty and subcultures that actively discourage academic success. He even referenced the idea suggested in the 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, that genetics influence intelligence across racial lines. Ultimately, however, Aronson declared that “all of these traditional explanations fall short of explaining the gap,” he said. “Something else must be involved.”
Because of the research he has done over the past 15 years, Aronson is not only convinced that there is, but that he has found it.
“We think of intelligence as this lump of ‘thing’ we get,” he said, gesturing toward his own brain. “But intelligence is actually fragile. We tend to measure it by things like IQ scores, school performance and verbal fluency, but I say it’s fragile because those things all require a connection between two people.”
Aronson continued to elaborate by explaining how several social factors influence these connections, such as interpersonal intimidation and the idea of “threatened belongingness” – being overly concerned with what others will think. “The social psychologist Roy Baumeister found that when people are told ahead of time that they will ultimately be rejected by another social group and then administered a test of intelligence, they consistently score one standard deviation lower,” Aronson said.
The social factor Aronson’s research focuses on is that of stereotype threat, or identity threat. “Apprehension arises in people from an awareness of a negative stereotype or personal reputation, or from a situation where the stereotype or identity is relevant, and thus, confirmable,” he said. “Everyone experiences this in some form.”
Everyone, including the president of the United States, as it turns out. To illustrate what he termed “conditional stupidity – when everyone thinks you’re stupid,” Aronson juxtaposed two separate public-speaking performances by George W. Bush; one from a debate he had when he was running for governor of Texas against incumbent Ann Richards in 1994, and another as president in 2004, in an effort to show how “conditional stupidity” can influence personal performance when the subject knows he is being evaluated.
“In 1994, when he was still relatively unknown, Bush performed exceedingly well in his debate, even against a popular figure in Texas,” Aronson said. “But fast-forward to 2004. By this time, he had been cast in popular media as a bumbler, someone not very intelligent, and his performance was not nearly as strong.”
In a follow-up study, students were asked to estimate Bush’s SAT scores from his youth. While the estimates averaged approximately 1030, the Educational Testing Service, who administers the test, revealed that the president actually earned a 1330 – approximately 300 points higher than his perceived ability.
Aronson shared data from a number of studies he has conducted in support of his theories of identity threat and its effect on test-takers. One study involved a group of white male students at Stanford University who had all entered college as extremely high-achieving math students, averaging between 750 and 800 on the math portion of the SAT.
“They all entered the test extremely confident of their own abilities,” explained Aronson. “But then we told half of them, separately, that the study was being done to determine why Asians performed better in math than white students, according to the common stereotype. What happened was remarkable – the group who believed they were simply having their own abilities assessed, independent of anyone else, answered nine of the 18 questions correctly, while the other group, who had been just made to feel relatively inferior, calculated just six of the 18 right. That is a full one standard deviation higher – a huge disparity.”
One of the most widely cited social scientists of the past decade, Aronson is currently working with methods of boosting the learning and test performance of underachieving youth. He says that he was initially concerned about his findings manifesting a self-fulfilling prophecy in future test-takers, who might feel as though they are at the mercy of preconditioned inhibited performances on tests, but the opposite seems to be true.
“Those who learn about stereotype threat actually perform better,” he said. “It seems to be viewed less as a threat and more of a challenge, which is obviously good. People’s perceptions and motivations can rise and fall depending on situations and relationships they are in, and the mindsets they adopt.”
Aronson has authored numerous chapters and scholarly articles and is the editor of Improving Academic Achievement: Impact of Psychological Factors on Education, published by Academic Press. Aronson, who earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology from Princeton University, as well as a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California-Berkeley, has a forthcoming book entitled The Nurture of Intelligence.
The Marvin W. Goldstein Lecture on Prejudice Reduction endowed lecture series honors the 38-year career of Marvin W. Goldstein, Ph.D., a member of the Rider University Department of Psychology and the co-director of The Julius and Dorothy Koppelman Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center at Rider.
