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Revisiting Stereotype Threat

A Reckoning for Social Psychology

In 1995, Steele and his student Joshua Aronson —who went on to become my postdoc supervisor years later—demonstrated that the notorious Black-white gap in academic performance could be partially closed when negative stereotypes impugning Black people’s intelligence were made irrelevant. This is partly because shortly before stereotype threat took its turn in the spotlight, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which resulted in a media firestorm that has had repercussions to this day. A small cadre of reformers then started raising awareness that all was not right in how we conducted our science: we did not bother replicating important studies, we were misusing and abusing our statistical tools, and we did not publish all our studies—particularly the failed ones.

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