Bertrams Alex, Lindner Christoph, Muntoni Francesca, Retelsdorf Jan
Educational Psychology Lab, Institute of Educational Science, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
Faculty of Education, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 Apr 7;13:794896. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.794896. eCollection 2022.
Stereotype threat is a possible reason for difficulties faced by girls and women in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The threat experienced due to gender can cause elevated worry during performance situations. That is, if the stereotype that women are not as good as men in math becomes salient, this stereotype activation draws women's attention to task-irrelevant worry caused by the fear of conforming to the negative stereotype. Increased worry can reduce cognitive resources, potentially leading to performance decrements. We argue that such worry is more pronounced immediately after an unrelated self-control demand, which is assumed to temporarily decrease people's self-control exertion over their attention and stream of thought (i.e., relatively low self-control capacity). This prediction was examined in an experiment conducted with 102 participating university students enrolled in courses in which math plays a crucial role. After the manipulation of self-control capacity (low vs. high), stereotype threat was induced for the female students, but not the male students. Then, the students were asked to report their thoughts during a math performance situation (i.e., written thought protocols) three times. Multiple-group autoregressive path models revealed that when self-control capacity was relatively low, female compared with male students reported more intense worry in the initial two thought protocols. In contrast, in the relatively high self-control capacity condition, female and male students did not differ significantly in their reported worry at any time. These results expand on previous findings, suggesting that threat effects depend on definable situational self-control conditions.
刻板印象威胁是女孩和女性在科学、技术、工程和数学领域面临困难的一个可能原因。由于性别而感受到的威胁会在表现情境中导致担忧加剧。也就是说，如果女性在数学方面不如男性的刻板印象变得突出，这种刻板印象的激活会使女性将注意力集中在因害怕符合负面刻板印象而产生的与任务无关的担忧上。担忧增加会减少认知资源，可能导致表现下降。我们认为，这种担忧在无关的自我控制需求之后会立即更加明显，这种需求被认为会暂时降低人们对注意力和思维流的自我控制努力（即相对较低的自我控制能力）。在一项针对102名参加数学在课程中起关键作用的课程的大学生进行的实验中检验了这一预测。在操纵自我控制能力（低与高）之后，对女学生而非男学生诱发了刻板印象威胁。然后，要求学生在数学表现情境中三次报告他们的想法（即书面思维记录）。多组自回归路径模型显示，当自我控制能力相对较低时，与男学生相比，女学生在前两次思维记录中报告了更强烈的担忧。相比之下，在自我控制能力相对较高的条件下，女学生和男学生在任何时候报告的担忧都没有显著差异。这些结果扩展了先前的研究发现，表明威胁效应取决于可定义的情境自我控制条件。
