Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fear of a negative stereotype about one’s performance canlead to temporary underperformance on tests; e.g. womenmay underperform on a math test when prompted to thinkabout gender. The current study extends this literature toexamine whether stereotype threat not only leads tounderperformance on tests, but also may impact reasoningand learning more broadly. We focus in particular on theeffects of stereotype threat on analogical learning, a complexreasoning process that imposes a high working memory load.In this study, we examined the effects of gender stereotypeswhen females were asked to learn by comparing themathematical concepts of combinations and permutations.Overall, participants given a threat before learning gained lessfrom the instruction, as reflected by assessments administeredimmediately after the lesson and after a 1-week delay. Thiscould lead to systematic differences in the quality of abstractrepresentational knowledge for individuals from negativelystereotyped groups.