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Social Class is Dead. Long Live Social Class! Stereotype Threat among Low Socioeconomic Status Individuals

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Abstract

Stereotype threat effects occur when members of a stigmatized group perform poorly on a task because they fear confirming a negative stereotype that is associated with their ingroup. The present study investigates whether the observed achievement gap in standardized testing between high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) American students can be due, in part, to this phenomenon. Participants were placed in one of four conditions that varied in level of “threat” related to socioeconomic status. Results show that when socioeconomic identity is made salient before taking a test, or when the test is presented as diagnostic of intelligence, low-SES students perform significantly worse, and report much lower self-confidence, than low-SES participants in the non-threatening conditions. When threatening conditions converge, performance of low-SES students is at its worst level. These results help us better understand the role stereotyping plays in the academic performance of low-SES students, and may partly explain the disparity on standardized test scores between low- and high-SES students.

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Notes

  1. “The Simpsons” is a popular American animated television show.

  2. This study is based on a survey of 5,001 American adults, conducted between April 23 and May 31, 1998.

  3. Following Tabachnick and Fidell (2001) a log transformation was used, which resulted in a significant reduction in skewness and kurtosis and eliminated the deviation from normality (Shapiro-Wilk W = .96, p < .20).

  4. We are grateful to Vincent Yzerbyt for his suggestions regarding these analyses.

  5. This variable did not show significant skewness, so it was not transformed. Due to one missing value on this variable, the sample size for these analyses is 45.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Bill Hirst and Ernesto Verdeja for comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as John Nikkah and Tava Auslan for help with data collection and coding. We are also grateful for a Clara Mayo Grant from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, which funded portions of this study.

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  1. Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Bettina Spencer & Emanuele Castano

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  1. Bettina Spencer
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  2. Emanuele Castano
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Correspondence to Bettina Spencer.

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Spencer, B., Castano, E. Social Class is Dead. Long Live Social Class! Stereotype Threat among Low Socioeconomic Status Individuals. Soc Just Res 20, 418–432 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0047-7

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