Carmichael,
Chloe (4/11) Stereotype threat: threat accrual and social identity complexity
(Benjamin Saunders, Ph.D.; Gary Kose, Ph.D.; Joan Duncan, Ph.D.)
The present study is an investigation of
the double minority effect in African American women under stereotype threat,
and it is an investigation of the role of social identity complexity in
stereotype threat. Eighty African American female participants were recruited
from a private Northeastern university and completed a spatial rotations task
after receiving a stereotype threat that was either a) a single threat that was
either gender-based or race-based, b) a threat that was gender-and-race based,
or c) a control condition that contained no threat. As hypothesized,
participants who received a double threat performed worse than participants who
received a single threat. An unexpected result was that participants in the
control condition performed better than any of the experimental conditions.
There were no main effects for social identity complexity or significant
interactions between stereotype threat conditions and social identity
complexity. There was a trend towards an interaction between social identity
complexity and stereotype threat in which participants that were high or low in
social identity complexity exhibited different patterns of performance in the
gender-based threat and the double threat conditions.
