Massive collaboration
Inside the Psychological Science Accelerator.
This article was published in the “Collaboration” special issue of The Psychologist magazine, October 2020. It also features in the 2021 Best Australian Science Writing anthology (published Nov 2021).
At school, Neil Lewis Jr was always the ‘smart Black kid’. Aged nine, he and his family emigrated to Florida from his birthplace in Jamaica and he soon learned that his new classmates had low expectations of Black students. ‘They had a stereotype that Black people are not smart’, he explains, ‘so it surprised them that I did so well’. That sense of being judged in the light of racial stereotypes, he adds, has never really gone away. Through high school, university, and even now, as an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, he admits to a constant, nagging concern that any slip-ups on his part would only confirm other people’s preconceptions. ‘For me it’s still a regular experience being an academic where I’m often the only Black person in the room.’
As an undergraduate studying social psychology, Lewis learned about a study that resonated with his own experiences of racial stereotypes. The researchers, Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson, gave students at Stanford University a brief test. Some were told that it was measuring their academic aptitude. Others that it was a puzzle to be solved. For White students, these instructions made no difference to their performance. But amongst Black students, being told that their academic ability was being assessed led to poorer performance. In a further experiment, Black students performed worse if, prior to the test, they had been exposed to negative stereotypes about Black people. Again, White students were unaffected.
Steel and Aronson named this phenomenon ‘stereotype threat’. They argued that the distraction and anxiety caused by stereotypes can lead to poorer cognitive performance, becoming, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘I found it fascinating that scientists had actually studied this’, Lewis says. ‘It was one of the theories that really got me interested in becoming a social scientist in the first place.’
Since it was published in 1995, Steel and Aronson’s original study has been cited by over 9500 other research papers. It has also had real world impacts, prompting colleges and universities to adopt programs aimed at minimising stereotype threat and improving educational outcomes. In 2013, the concept of stereotype threat reached the US Supreme Court when the University of Texas at Austin was forced to defend its racial diversity policy for student admissions. It’s also been applied to other stereotypes — that girls aren’t cut out for maths, for example, or that elderly people necessarily have poor memory.
Lately, however, the evidence for stereotype threat has started to come undone. Attempts to replicate key findings have failed. Meta-analyses that pool the results of many individual studies suggest that the effects are smaller or more variable than originally thought — if they exist at all. Like others in the field, Lewis has begun to have doubts. ‘The phenomenon of being concerned that you might be judged in the light of these negative stereotypes, I think that’s real’, he says. What remains unclear is the extent to which those experiences actually affect performance. ‘Right now’, he admits, ‘I don’t know that we have a good sense of that’.
To try and answer this question, Lewis has turned to the Psychological Science Accelerator, a worldwide network of researchers prepared to take part in large-scale collaborative psychology studies.
