
Joshua m AronsonNew York University | NYU · Department of Applied Psychology
Joshua m Aronson
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42
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Publications
Publications (42)
We attempted to replicate a self-affirmation intervention that produced a 40% reduction in the academic achievement gap among at-risk students. The intervention was designed as a protection against stereotype threat—which creates stress and suppresses the performance, engagement, and learning of students stereotyped as intellectually inferior. In p...
Stereotype threat is the unpleasant psychological experience of confronting negative stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or social status.
Hundreds of published studies show how the experience of stereotype threat can impair intellectual functioning and interfere with test and school performance. Numerous published interv...
Can interventions meaningfully increase intelligence? If so, how? The Database of Raising Intelligence is a continuously updated compendium of randomized controlled trials that were designed to increase intelligence. In this article, the authors examine nearly every available intervention involving children from birth to kindergarten, using meta-an...
Responds to the comments by J. P. Rushton (see record 2012-24333-012); M. A. Woodley and G. Meisenberg (see record 2012-24333-013); and J. D. Mayer, D. R. Caruso, A. T. Panter, and P. Salovey (see record 2012-24333-014) on the present authors' original article, "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments" (see record 2011-30298-001). H...
We review new findings and new theoretical developments in the field of intelligence. New findings include the following: (a) Heritability of IQ varies significantly by social class. (b) Almost no genetic polymorphisms have been discovered that are consistently associated with variation in IQ in the normal range. (c) Much has been learned about the...
Reports an error in "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments" by Richard E. Nisbett, Joshua Aronson, Clancy Blair, William Dickens, James Flynn, Diane F. Halpern and Eric Turkheimer (American Psychologist, Advanced Online Publication, Jan 2, 2012, np). In the article, two correlational values are incorrect in the 10th line on p. 134...
Stereotype threat is an uncomfortable psychological state that has been shown to impair cognitive ability test scores. It is an open question whether and in what ways it affects processes involved in learning and knowledge acquisition. This research examined whether stereotypes also interfere with test preparation among women in the domain of scien...
The deleterious effects that stereotypes can have on girls’ school performance in mathematics are best exemplified by the stereotype threat paradigm (1) showing that when women are reminded of stereotypes alleging male superiority in math, their math performance suffers (2). However, evidence is mixed on how much these threat effects apply to girls...
Past research on stereotype threat and role model effects, as well as a recent quasi-experiment (Marx, Ho, & Freidman, this issue) suggested the possibility of an "Obama effect" on African American's standardized test performance, whereby the salience of Barack Obama's stereotype defying success could positively impact performance. We tested this r...
Stereotype threat arises from a fear among members of a group of reinforcing negative stereotypes about the intellectual ability of the group. This report identifies three randomized controlled trial studies that use classroom-based strategies to reduce stereotype threat and improve the academic performance of Black students, narrowing their achiev...
Jews rule the world by proxy. Or so says the former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. In October 2003, in a speech to the 57-nation Islamic Summit in Malaysia, the then-prime minister lashed out at world Jewry. “The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million,” stated Mohamad, “but today the Jews rule this world by proxy and g...
It is well established that negative stereotypes can undermine women's performance on mathematics tests. Despite considerable laboratory evidence for the role of “stereotype threat” in girls' and women's math test performance, the relevance of such findings for the “real world” gender test-score gap remains unclear and debates about causes focus pr...
This study investigated communicative strategies for helping female students cope with "stereotype threat". Participants completed a difficult math test after reading one of three coping messages: a control message encouraging perseverance, a "suppression" message describing stereotype threat and instructing participants to suppress associated thou...
Men tend to achieve higher response accuracy than women on surveys of political knowledge. We investigated the possibility that this performance gap is moderated by factors that render the communicative context of a survey intellectually threatening to women and thereby induce stereotype threat. In a telephone survey of college students' political...
This study investigated Black racial identity attitudes as a moderator of intellectual performance in potentially stereotype threatening situations. Ninety-eight African American students were randomly assigned to one of three stereotype threatening conditions: low threat, medium threat, or high threat. Analyses confirmed a stereotype threat effect...
Being in the numerical minority can impair intellectual performance. We suggest, however, that these negative effects need not extend to everyone because some people—specifically high self-monitors—can overcome the effects of situationally activated stereotypes. In two studies, we manipulated the race/sex composition of small groups and assessed in...
This research examined whether stigma diminishes people's ability to control their behaviors. Because coping with stigma requires self-regulation, and self-regulation is a limited-capacity resource, we predicted that individuals belonging to stigmatized groups are less able to regulate their own behavior when they become conscious of their stigmati...
This commentary highlights previous literature focusing on cultural and environmental explanations for the racial/ethnic group hierarchy of intelligence. Assumptions underlying definitions of intelligence, heritability/genetics, culture, and race are noted. Historical, contextual, and testing issues are clarified. Specific attention is given to stu...
This research examined whether stereotype vulnerability-the tendency to expect, perceive, and be influenced by negative stereotypes about one's social category-is associated with uncertainty about one's academic self-knowledge in two important ways. We predicted that stereotype-vulnerable African American students would (a) know less about how much...
Standardized tests continue to generate gender and race gaps in achievement despite decades of national attention. Research on “stereotype threat” (Steele & Aronson, 1995) suggests that these gaps may be partly due to stereotypes that impugn the math abilities of females and the intellectual abilities of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. A...
African American college students tend to obtain lower grades than their White counterparts, even when they enter college with equivalent test scores. Past research suggests that negative stereotypes impugning Black students' intellectual abilities play a role in this underperformance. Awareness of these stereotypes can psychologically threaten Afr...
People often cling to beliefs even in the face of disconfirming evidence and interpret ambiguous information in a manner that bolsters strongly held attitudes. The authors tested a motivational account suggesting that these defensive reactions would be ameliorated by an affirmation of an alternative source of self-worth. Consistent with this interp...
Research on “stereotype threat” (Aronson, Quinn, & Spencer, 1998; Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995) suggests that the social stigma of intellectual inferiority borne by certain cultural minorities can undermine the standardized test performance and school outcomes of members of these groups. This research tested two assumptions about the necess...
This chapter presents a theoretical model for understanding the negative impact of prejudice and perceptions of prejudice on academic performance and school persistence among women and minorities. The aim of the chapter is to describe research conducted under the rubric of a theory called "stereotype threat," focusing on the consequences for target...
In numerous self-affirmation studies, Claude Steele and colleagues have demonstrated that self-affirmations reduce the need to justify dissonant behavior even when the affirmation is unrelated to the dissonance-evoking action. However, research has not sufficiently examined the impact of reaffirming self-aspects that are related to the dissonance....
Stereotype threat is being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group. Studies 1 and 2 varied the stereotype vulnerability of Black participants taking a difficult verbal test by varying whether or not their performance was ostensibly diagnostic of ability, and thus, whether or not they were at risk of fu...
Two studies examined the relationship between the content of a self-threat and the attractiveness of available self-affirmations (C. M. Steele, 1988). After self-threat was induced by means of a cognitive dissonance procedure, participants' choices for affirmations were examined in order to explore whether the attractiveness of a given affirmation...
Two experiments investigated the effects of “perceiver-induced constraint” in the realm of ability attribution. In Experiment 1, subjects tried to influence a target person's performance on a series of anagram problems by offering clues. Half the subjects were motivated to enhance the target person's score whereas the remaining subjects focused the...