If you take two groups of African American students with the same levels of academic achievement and ask one group to identify their race before taking the test - check a box - that group will do significantly worse on the test. Researchers have been doing a lot of testing of what they call Priming: having people experience something before they take a test that influences them unconsciously. If you have two groups of equal academic levels and you ask one group to write down the qualities of a good professor and the other group to write down the qualities of a foolball hooligan, the second group will do worse on the test. In fact the first group will do better than control groups that are not primed. There are many implications of Priming. It shows that we can be influenced to perform and feel a certain way and not even notice it. In fact when asked in all the above cases none of the people thought the Priming had any effect on their performance. (it should be noted that often the tests were given in such a way as to hide the fact that they were intelligence related, to make the role of priming to be even less likely to be conscious. I found these studies in Blink, the Power of Thinking without thinking. Right now I cannot cut and paste. Some links to these studies can be found if you google Stereotype Threat Michigan. The implications raised by these studies relate to the myriad ways, for example, african americans are still primed to perform poorly. Merely being reminded moments before a test that they are categorized as African American lowers their scores. Further the most strongly influenced are the strongest students. Our confidence in IQ testing related to race should be very low.
Very appropriate. This conclusion cannot be drawn from the data unless African Americans are reminded of their race moments before they take every exam in the real world. Also, if they are not, then we must question the structure of the experiment itself as it insinuates to the subjects the very thing they are being tested on moments before they take the test. It creates self-consciousness which in turn will lead to poorer test scores regardless of who is taking them. It's harder to do things when one feels one is being 'watched'.
This remark about a book you know nothing about is simply a cheap shot. This is a good point and I will try to see if I can find the original studies to see why they generalized their conclusions. Whites did not have the same reaction. They also took IQ tests but were told that they were Eye Hand coordination tests. So there were questions similar to those on IQ tests, but the Afroamerican students thought that the focus was on how quickly they swung the cursor around and performed the Eye hand component. When told it was an EH test students did much better than same level groups who were told it was an IQ test.
A similar phenomenon seems to be rather widespread - And then there is the classic example from pedagogy, where the teacher is told that there are some above-average students in his class and those students are pointed out. But in reality, all students in that class are average and comparable. The teacher treats those supposedly above-average students differently and at the end of the year, those students do better than the rest.
Do you know of similar tests being done on blondes (reminded of their hair color) or the physically handicapped (reminded of their handicap) or low wagers (reminded of their low wage)?
The intention is to help ensure that minorities are not being discriminated against. For example, by tracking race the gov't can determine whether African-Americans are getting equal access to housing or education, etc.
Ah I see, makes sense, but is the self selection an accurate representation? In India, for example, offcial documentation does not require defining your caste, but any use of social reservations requires a separate document.
Grantywanty, "race priming" may be there. However, as you describe it, simply describing negative personality traits, thinking about them, whatever the races involved, seems to turn the trick.
