A condition called “stereotype threat” can cause a decrease in the academic performance of students, a prominent social sciences professor argued in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union Wednesday night.

The lecture, titled “How Stereotypes Affect Intellectual Performance” detailed the research by Claude Steele, Lucy Stern professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences.

“Stereotype threat is a very simple thing. It just means you are in a situation where you are doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities becomes relevant,” Steele said. “You’re in a situation where I’m doing something, and they can see me in a particular way that matches the stereotype. And when that happens you know you could be judged or treated in terms of that stereotype.”

Steele said everyone has a social identity made up of a variety of group memberships and social categories such as age, sex, race and religion. He said it is from this identity that stereotype threat often comes.

He said what can happen is that a person will identify with a certain group, and then have a fear of living up to a stereotype that fits that particular group. The determining factor of whether you become subject to stereotype threat is how strongly you relate to that identity.

“Whether or not a social identity means anything to you – [or] has any role on your psychological function – depends on your having to deal with that in your environment because you have that identity,” Steele said.

Steele defined that as an “identity contingency” and said the ones that happen to do with the restriction of retaining goals can amplify the risk for stereotype threat. He also said these contingencies are not something that can be controlled, because most of the time they deal with things in the environment.

“If you want to make someone preoccupied of an identity, somehow threaten them, or leave the slightest cue around that that identity might be a source of evaluation in that environment,” Steele said. “You don’t know whether or not anything will come of it, just that it could possibly come from it, it’s in the air so to speak.”

Once a person feels their identity is threatened, it can have some adverse effects on performance, because they feel pressure to live up to prove the stereotype wrong, or live up to the identity.

An example Steele gave was when his team researched the effect of stereotype threat on females when it comes to math. The popular stereotype goes that men are better than women at math. His team set up an improbably hard math test and gave it to men and women of the same skill level. The women performed substantially worse, which he feels is a result of feeling pressured to disprove the stereotype. When people feel pressure to perform, this can cause them to perform worse, Steele said.

“There is a lot of anxiety going on, but if you ask them after the exam is over if they are feeling anxious, people say no,” Steele said. “So you don’t get the self-reporting, but if they are hooked up to physiological recording, you get all kinds of reaction in the brain.”

In order to disprove that this is a result of being a difference between men and women, they did a second study, where they told the women before the test that the test had nothing to do with sex. When they did this, the women didn’t feel at risk of confirming the stereotype, and their scores were the same as men.