Math Performance, Stereotype Threat and Gender Concept Manipulation

The current study examines male and female math performance under stereotype threat, a situational pressure that targets group membership and can cause reduced performance on a given task. Building on earlier work by Wheeler et al., the current study primed both male and female participants with either a male or a female name in a short essay before the test. These primes were designed to induce the participants to think like a particular gender. Participants were 83 college students who completed a difficult math test after the essay prime. The main hypothesis that participants primed with a female name would perform worse on the math test was not found. We also examined the effects of psychological disengagement phenomena such as discounting, but inconsistent with the results of Lesko (2002), discounting was not found to be strongly related to math performance in the current study. Ancillary analyses demonstrated that math identity strongly predicted performance on the math testsuch that participants with a higher math identity scored higher on the test. Also, these analyses revealed a number of unexpected interactions.