Prometheus 6

John at Discriminations says

Now comes Amy Wax, a law professor at Penn, who demonstrates in OpinionJournal that "the belief that stereotype threat is the sole or even the chief cause of the differences [between blacks and whites in testing] is without foundation."

And she says it…

The Threat in the Air
Is fear of "stereotypes" really why blacks do poorly on tests?

BY AMY L. WAX
Sunday, April 18, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

People do badly on tests for different reasons. Some do badly because they're anxious or fear failure, others because they don't know how to answer the questions. How important are these factors? When it comes to the long-observed patterns of black-white differences on a range of academic measures, social science purports to know the answer. Journals and textbooks of psychology will tell you that the principal cause of black students' poor performance on tests is something called "stereotype threat." Black test-takers fall short because they're afraid that the results will be used to confirm negative views about their group's abilities. It follows that if some way can be found to dispel this "threat," group differences in scores will disappear.

Yet the belief that stereotype threat is the sole or even the chief cause of the differences is without foundation. In the main study in this area, done by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson in 1995, black and white Stanford undergraduates were given a difficult test of verbal ability. The students of both races were divided into two groups. Half of both black and white students were told the test would be used to assess their groups' intellectual ability--the "stereotype threat condition." The black students who were tested under threat did worse than the black students who were not told this. White students performed the same, whether or not they were threatened.

The key to this study, and to its misuse, can be found in how the results were reported. The average incoming verbal SAT scores of the black Stanford students lagged about 40 points behind the white students in the experiment. In order to control for those academic disparities, the authors adjusted scores on the experimental tests to account for any background SAT score differences. Since the adjustment allowed them to compare students as if they were equally qualified, it's no surprise that black and white students were reported as achieving the same scores when the stereotype threat was removed.

…but I think "demonstrates" is a bit strong.

Ms. Wax gets her information from On Interpreting Stereotype Threat as Accounting for African American–White Differences on Cognitive Tests by Paul R. Sackett, Chaitra M. Hardison, and Michael J. Cullen an article in January's American Psychiatrist magazine. And the fact that I'm only commenting now means I'm not a subscriber, but the fact that it was published in January means I ought to be able to find something more dispassionate than an OpinionJournal piece.

I found a review of the original research and the analysis done in the article at the National Association of Scholars Online Forum:

Steele and Aronson sought to find out why blacks with the same SAT scores as whites earn lower grades in college and take longer to graduate. They hypothesized that the pressure of a negative racial stereotype concerning intellectual ability might impede academic performance, especially among those for whom academic success is important. Their experiments used a series of verbal reasoning tests, in which some participants were given instructions that "primed" the stereotype, while others were not. (The priming consisted of describing the test as a measure of cognitive ability, or requiring the test taker's racial identification.) The participants were black and white Stanford University sophomores, whose average verbal SAT scores were 603 for blacks and 655 for whites. The results: When the stereotype was primed, black performance fell, but white performance did not. When the stereotype was not primed, black performance equaled that of whites who had similar SAT scores.

Note that the problem confronted by the researchers was not the racial gap in SAT scores, but a racial gap in the college achievement of students whose SAT scores are similar. And the result was not the elimination or reduction of the racial gap in SAT scores, but the elimination of a racial gap in the experimental test performance of students whose SAT scores were similar. [See the description by Steele and Aronson in Chapter 11, "Stereotype Threat and the Test Performance of Academically Successful African Americans," in C. Jencks & M. Phillips, (Eds.) The Black-White Test Score Gap, 401-430. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, online here. The original research report is Steele, C.M. & Aronson, J. (1995), "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, 797-811.]

The original research didn't set out to explain the "SAT gap," so it can't be blamed for failing to do so. And research as social criticism like the American Psychiatrist article is useful; pointing out the general misrepresentation of the results is a good thing. That's why I want to point out Ms. Wax says:

Since the adjustment allowed them to compare students as if they were equally qualified

when the actual adjustment made was to compare equally qualified students

The Frontline summary of the Steele-Aronson research gives a fair description of the experimental process, but misrepresents both the investigated problem and the experimental result. As we have seen, the problem was to explain the college under-performance of blacks as compared to whites who have similar SAT scores. The actual result was that the "Blacks who believed the test was merely a research tool did as well as the Whites" whose SAT scores were similar, while the "Blacks who believed the test measured their abilities" did less well than the whites whose SAT scores were similar. The qualification in red type makes all the difference. Its omission is the heart of the misrepresentations alleged. Leave it out, and you create the false impression that removing "stereotype threat" removed the black-white test score gap. Restore the qualification, and you make clear what was actually accomplished by removing the threat: similar performance by black and white participants with similar SAT scores.

The interesting thing is, Ms. Wax also disregarded the qualification in red type, rhetorically removing the "stereotype threat" from the realm of significant contributing factors. Keep the properly qualified statement in mind as you read her article and it will sound rather petulant.