A researcher, who doesn’t want his name or any potentially identifying information mentioned, for unfortunately obvious career reasons, recently attended a presentation at a scientific conference. Here is his summary of what he heard:
“One talk presented a meta-analysis of stereotype threat. The presenter was able to find a ton of unpublished studies. The overall conclusion is that stereotype threat does not exist. The unpublished and published studies were compared on many indices of quality, including sample size, and the only variable predicting publication was whether a significant effect of stereotype threat was found. …
This is interesting, but not exactly what I’d call public evidence.
Wicherts’s papers are in the public domain. Steve Sailer’s link to the abstract of the talk in question is broken, the document having been moved to here.
I don’t see anything on his website about the meta-analysis, except for a line on his CV saying that the paper is under review. That means all we have to go by is the one-paragraph abstract from his 2009 talk, and the report of one person who saw that talk. And the abstract, though critical of stereotype threat research, doesn’t actually claim that stereotype threat does not exist.
Point taken; that particular criticism of stereotype threat is absent from the papers available on his site.
Blip’s comment may shed light on reasons why the paper is yet unpublished, although YMMV.
And the abstract, though critical of stereotype threat research, doesn’t actually claim that stereotype threat does not exist.
I’ll quote the abstract to clarify matters:
Numerous laboratory experiments have been conducted to show that African Americans’ cognitive test performance suffers under stereotype threat, i.e., the fear of confirming negative stereotypes concerning one’s group. A meta-analysis of 55 published and unpublished studies of this effect shows clear signs of publication bias. The effect varies widely across studies, and is generally small. Although elite university undergraduates may underperform on cognitive tests due to stereotype threat, this effect does not generalize to non-adapted standardized tests, high-stakes settings, and less academically gifted test-takers. Stereotype threat cannot explain the difference in mean cognitive test performance between African Americans and European Americans.
Edit: in the absence of the most helpful Wicherts paper, here is another paper, referred to in a longer Steve Sailer article, discussing the misinterpretation of findings in stereotype threat (particularly in pop science and the media, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell).
Quote:
C. M. Steele and J. Aronson (1995) showed that making race salient when taking a difficult test affected the performance of high-ability African American students, a phenomenon they termed stereotype threat. The authors document that this research is widely misinterpreted in both popular and scholarly publications as showing that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates the African American–White difference in test performance. In fact, scores were statistically adjusted for differences in students’ prior SAT performance, and thus, Steele and Aronson’s findings actually showed that absent stereotype threat, the two groups differ to the degree that would be expected based on differences in prior SAT scores. The authors caution against interpreting the Steele and Aronson experiment as evidence that stereotype threat is the primary cause of African American–White differences in test performance.
The reference to “high-stakes settings” in the Wicherts abstract concerns the obvious problem that stereotype threat is rarely if ever tested in real settings (e.g. college admissions) because this would be unethical. But if the test is meaningless and the subject is smart enough to figure out what the experimenter is hoping to prove, the potential source of bias is obvious.
This is interesting, but not exactly what I’d call public evidence.
Wicherts’s papers are in the public domain. Steve Sailer’s link to the abstract of the talk in question is broken, the document having been moved to here.
I don’t see anything on his website about the meta-analysis, except for a line on his CV saying that the paper is under review. That means all we have to go by is the one-paragraph abstract from his 2009 talk, and the report of one person who saw that talk. And the abstract, though critical of stereotype threat research, doesn’t actually claim that stereotype threat does not exist.
Point taken; that particular criticism of stereotype threat is absent from the papers available on his site.
Blip’s comment may shed light on reasons why the paper is yet unpublished, although YMMV.
I’ll quote the abstract to clarify matters:
Edit: in the absence of the most helpful Wicherts paper, here is another paper, referred to in a longer Steve Sailer article, discussing the misinterpretation of findings in stereotype threat (particularly in pop science and the media, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell).
Quote:
The reference to “high-stakes settings” in the Wicherts abstract concerns the obvious problem that stereotype threat is rarely if ever tested in real settings (e.g. college admissions) because this would be unethical. But if the test is meaningless and the subject is smart enough to figure out what the experimenter is hoping to prove, the potential source of bias is obvious.