Stereotype Threat

Belief in witches is never peculiar to Nigerians, nor is it an ‘African thing’, for there are stories of witchcraft practices and witch-hunting in countries all over the world. Thousands of lives have been lost at stakes, village squares, witch pits, etc., all in the name of witch-hunting globally. However, the contemporary practice of witch-hunting in different parts of Africa, when similar beliefs have been thrown into the rubrics of history in other parts of the world, and, or, in the face of ‘modernity’ and contemporary advancements in science and technology, is quite disturbing. Again, considering that children, the bundles of joy in almost all cultures of the world, are now the targets of witchcraft accusations in some African countries such as Congo, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, among others, one can’t but be moved to ask: is it a case of barbarism? Or is it a resurgence of primitively acts? Or, considering the role of churches, is it a case of ignorance of proper interpretation of religious texts? Does poverty has any role to play in these accusations?

Contributors to Suffereth Not a Witch to Live have one or two answers to proffer to the above questions. Although the book is essentially on the Nigerian case-study, some contributors attempted to go wider to explain the phenomenon in an African context. Indeed, the book can be taken as an amalgam of theoretical and applied contributions on the understanding of the menace called childwitch hunting by academics and social workers researching and working with the victims of the menace. Also included, for personal reflections of the readers to possibly deduce answers to the questions, are excerpts of interviews had with ten victims of childwitch hunting abuse (those who lived to tell the stories).

The acceptance of 'others' in an organization can be a long and protracted process that can take years. Seldom is there a smooth assimilation into the corporate ranks for outsiders. Given the increasing number of inpatriate managers arriving in the domestic organizations of many global organizations, the issues impacting the acceptance of inpatriate managers by homecountry managers will invariably increase. The purpose of this paper is to prescribe a program/process designed to suppress the stigmatization and stereotyping of inpatriate managers located in the home-country organization, as stereotype threats may impact not only the performance of the inpatriate managers but also the performance of an organization that is attempting to globalize its operations. #

A general theory of domain identification is used to describe achievement barriers still faced by women in advanced quantitative areas and by African Americans in school. The theory assumes that sustained school success requires identification with school and its subdomains; that societal pressures on these groups (e.g., economic disadvantage, gender roles) can frustrate this identification; and that in school domains where these groups are negatively stereotyped, those who have become domain identified face the further barrier of stereotype threat, the threat that others' judgments or their own actions will negatively stereotype them in the domain. Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups (offering a new interpretation of group differences in standardized test performance), that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.

I am almost confident that most of you would not open the door to a Syrian refugee if you have the slightest doubt that this person could harm you in any way. I am also confident that this doubt and fear could be explained and dissolved and that inclusion could triumph.
In this paper, I posit that the similarity-attraction hypothesis, the integrated threat theory(ITT), the contact hypothesis, the common in-group identity model, and the mutual identity differentiation model could clarify some of the factors that are at stake when it comes to the inclusion and the integration of the Syrian refugees in host societies.

"Entrepreneurship is challenging, whatever your background, in the current science- and technology-driven Western world. However, unlike traditionally dominant, native-born, white male entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, those who face greater hurdles blocking their path to success primarily come from marginalized and minority groups, both real and self-perceived—including immigrants, refugees, women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Despite their potential to innovate and add value in the global marketplace, they persistently struggle, or fail, because they lack the requisite code-breaking skills. This book helps these underdog entrepreneurs acquire those skills with actionable advice to achieve and sustain success.

It proposes a framework that pinpoints what the author calls the outsider problem—that is, situations in which individuals are primarily disadvantaged because they lack access to networks that facilitate superior learning and performance outcomes. He completes the framework by incorporating personal qualities and strategies that can solve this problem.

Along the way, Morgan distills insights and evidence from multiple fields, combined with a fresh look at the familiar stories of initially marginalized business leaders, such as Indra Nooyi, Jack Ma, Hilary Devey and Mike Lazaridis. He also shares the less known, but equally inspiring stories of others.

This book will help readers thrive while transcending their underdog status."

Over 5.5 million Syrian refugees were forcibly displaced worldwide according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR, 2017), fleeing an inhumane war in their country. Many of them are now facing a different kind of war: they are being accused of being terrorists, parasites and rapists, through a powerful and almost unstoppable hate speech propaganda on social media. Throughout this study I posit that host society youth are key players in the integration and the inclusion of these refugees. However, programs in educational settings are ill-designed to equip youth and empower them to face racism and to withstand the online flux of disinformation, let alone to play a leadership role in counterbalancing social media propaganda and manipulation.
The objective of my study was twofold: First I wanted to understand how this youth viewed their role in the integration and the inclusion of refugees in their societies, in a context where the image of refugees was deeply influenced by social media, especially after terror attacks. Second, I wanted to discover the knowledge and the skills they developed through the process of learning about themselves, more specifically through identifying the construct systems they used when facing digital propaganda targeting sensitive and controversial issues such as the Syrian refugee crisis. To meet this objective, I conducted 66 in-depth interviews with 22 youth between 18 and 24 years old from Canada. The instruments I used stemmed from Personal Construct Psychology because this theory considers experiences to be at the core of how construals about concepts are formed. During the first meetings, the participants were convinced that despite the fact that they were able to withstand the digital propaganda against the refugees, they were helpless when it came to helping others recognize the signs of manipulation. Through the in-depth discussions, however, the participants had an “aha” moment. They suddenly realized that not only they could control how social media influenced them, but also that they could and should shape the online image that was shared online of the refugee presence in Canada. Their bystander stance was by itself an act against the resettlement of refugees, and this act had to stop.  They started questioning their own answers, reflecting on their own behaviours online, trying to make sense of their decisions and of what made them think that they were different than other Canadians.  Their empathy towards refugees increased and another developed towards the groups who rejected refugees. They identified factors that could lead to islamophobia, racism and fear and developed strategies to counterbalance them and to help host societies make informed choices.  The results of this study provide a concrete model, tools and strategies to be adopted by educators, civic educators, social workers, curriculum developers, policy makers and parents to help youth learn about themselves, as a first step to cease being manipulated by the media, and to become ready to confront hate speech, to act as influential agents of change, and to voice their concerns and ideas in the matters that affect their lives.

Individuals who experience stereotype threat – the pressure resulting from social comparisons
that are perceived as unfavourable – show performance decrements across a wide
range of tasks. One account of this effect is that the cognitive pressure triggered by such
threat drains the same cognitive (or working-memory) resources that are implicated in
the respective task. The present study investigates whether mindfulness can be used to
moderate stereotype threat, as mindfulness has previously been shown to alleviate working-
memory load. Our results show that performance decrements that typically occur
under stereotype threat can indeed be reversed when the individual engages in a brief
(5 min) mindfulness task. The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed.

Qualitative research provides opportunities to study bullying and peer harassment as social processes, interactions and meaning-making in the everyday context of particular settings. It offers the possibility of developing a deep understanding of the culture and group processes of bullying and the participants’ perspectives on peer harassment as well. It gives participants opportunities to discuss their own understanding and experiences of bullying in their own words. This article reviews qualitative studies on bullying or peer harassment in school (including some studies in which qualitative and quantitative methods — so-called mixed methods — have been used).

Previous research on stereotype threat in children suggests that making gender identity salient disrupts girls' math performance at as early as 5 to 7 years of age. The present study (n ϭ 124) tested the hypothesis that parents' endorsement of gender stereotypes about math moderates girls' susceptibility to stereotype threat. Results confirmed that stereotype threat impaired girls' performance on math tasks among students from kindergarten through 2nd grade. Moreover, mothers' but not fathers' endorsement of gender stereotypes about math moderated girls' vulnerability to stereotype threat: Performance of girls whose mothers strongly rejected the gender stereotype about math did not decrease under stereotype threat. These findings are important because they point to the role of mothers' beliefs in the development of girls' vulnerability to the negative effects of gender stereotypes about math.

Objective: Accurate assessment of pain is central to diagnosis and treatment in healthcare, especially in pediatrics. However, few studies have examined potential biases in adult observer ratings of children’s pain. Cohen et al. (2014) reported that adult participants rated a child undergoing a medical procedure as feeling more pain when the child was described as a boy as compared to a girl, suggesting a possible gender bias. To confirm, clarify, and extend this finding, we conducted a replication experiment and follow-up study examining the role of explicit gender stereotypes in shaping such asymmetric judgments.

Method: In an independent, pre-registered, direct replication and extension study with open data and materials (https://osf.io/t73c4/), we showed participants the same video from Cohen et al. (2014), with the child described as a boy or a girl depending on condition. We then asked adults to rate how much pain the child experienced and displayed, how typical the child was in these respects, and how much they agreed with explicit gender stereotypes concerning pain response in boys versus girls.

Results: Similar to Cohen et al. (2014), but with a larger and more demographically diverse sample, we found that the ‘boy’ was rated as experiencing more pain than the ‘girl’ despite identical clinical circumstances and identical pain behavior cross conditions. Controlling for explicit gender stereotypes eliminated the effect.

Conclusions: Explicit gender stereotypes—e.g., that boys are more stoic or girls are more emotive—may bias adult assessment of children’s pain.

Does placing females in environments in which they have contact with males cause deficits in their problem-solving performance? Is a situational cue, such as gender composition, sufficient for creating a threatening intellectual environment for females-an environment that elicits performance-impinging stereotypes? Two studies explored these questions. Participants completed a difficult math or verbal test in 3-person groups, each of which included 2 additional people of the same sex as the participant (same-sex condition) or of the opposite sex (minority condition). Female participants in the minority condition experienced performance deficits in the math test only, whereas males performed equally well on the math test in the two conditions. Further investigation showed that females' deficits were proportional to the number of males in their group. Even females who were placed in a mixed-sex majority condition (2 females and 1 male) experienced moderate but significant deficits. Findings are discussed in relation to theories of distinctiveness, stereotype threat, and tokenism.

"Entrepreneurship is challenging, whatever your background, in the current science- and technology-driven Western world. However, unlike traditionally dominant, native-born, white male entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, those who face greater hurdles blocking their path to success primarily come from marginalized and minority groups, both real and self-perceived—including immigrants, refugees, women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Despite their potential to innovate and add value in the global marketplace, they persistently struggle, or fail, because they lack the requisite code-breaking skills. This book helps these underdog entrepreneurs acquire those skills with actionable advice to achieve and sustain success.

It proposes a framework that pinpoints what the author calls the outsider problem—that is, situations in which individuals are primarily disadvantaged because they lack access to networks that facilitate superior learning and performance outcomes. He completes the framework by incorporating personal qualities and strategies that can solve this problem.

Along the way, Morgan distills insights and evidence from multiple fields, combined with a fresh look at the familiar stories of initially marginalized business leaders, such as Indra Nooyi, Jack Ma, Hilary Devey and Mike Lazaridis. He also shares the less known, but equally inspiring stories of others.

This book will help readers thrive while transcending their underdog status."

This investigation began with the thought that women in philosophy were likely to suffer stereotype threat, which could lead to both underperformance and departure from the subject.  We expected to find that women implicitly associated philosophy with maleness, but instead we found that women increasingly implicitly associated philosophy with femaleness, an in-group bias that we did not expect to find.  Our UK study allowed us to rule out drop-out rate as an explanation for this.  However, we also found that male (and related items) are common components of the explicit stereotype for philosopher, which could plausibly serve to underpin stereotype threat amongst women in philosophy. 

Our findings, then, lend empirical support to the implicit bias and stereotype threat explanations for the underrepresentation of women in philosophy. The necessary conditions for these explanations to make sense seem to be in place: there is (among men, the majority of philosophers) an implicit tendency to associate philosophy with maleness, and for both women and men maleness (and associated items) are part of the explicit stereotype of a philosopher.

Multiracial individuals are more likely to have a heightened awareness of race as a social construct than monoracial individuals. This article examines the impact that a heightened awareness of race as a social construct has on the relationship between racial stereotypes and performance. Study 1 finds that multiracial individuals reported subscribing less to the notion that race biologically determines ability. Study 2 finds that monoracial individuals show stereotype activation, whereas multiracial individuals show stereotype inhibition in reaction to race salience. Study 3 draws on the work on stereotypes and performance to test the susceptibility of multiracial individuals to racial stereotypes about ability. The authors find that Asian/White and Black/White multiracial individuals were less susceptible to racial stereotypes than monoracial individuals. Whereas monoracial participants showed significant performance changes in reaction to race salience, multiracial individuals did not. Study 4 finds that emphasizing the social construction of race buffers individuals from stereotype threat effects.

Across two experiments, the cognitive salience of a stigmatized ingroup identity harmed self-evaluation and elicited stereotype-consistent behavior to the degree that participants endorsed the political status quo. In Experiment 1, ethnic identity salience caused Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong to evaluate their own labor as meriting less pay if they were high in social dominance orientation but more pay if they were low in social dominance orientation. In Experiment 2, gender identity salience caused women in the US to evaluate their work on a logic task (but not a verbal task) as meriting less pay if they were politically conservative but more pay if they were politically liberal-a pattern mirrored in task performance. Depending on the degree to which the political status quo is accepted or rejected, findings suggest that members of stigmatized groups can be either implicit participants in their own subjugation or agents of change.

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 fulfilling the racial stereotype about their intellectual ability. Reflecting the pressure of this vulnerability, Blacks underperformed in relation to Whites in the ability-diagnostic condition but not in the nondiagnostic condition (with Scholastic Aptitude Tests controlled). Study 3 validated that ability-diagnosticity cognitively activated the racial stereotype in these participants and motivated them not to conform to it, or to be judged by it. Study 4 showed that mere salience of the stereotype could impair Blacks' performance even when the test was not ability diagnostic. The role of stereotype vulnerability in the standardized test performance of ability-stigmatized groups is discussed.

Gender has been consistently controlled as a variable in usability and playability tests. However, there is no consensus on whether and how gender differences should influence the design of digital environments. According to some research, digital environments may be unintentionally designed especially for males as a result of the existing gender biases which risks reproducing gender-polarized culture in a computational field. This study attempts to highlight that females are still being negatively affected by existing gender stereotypes and prescribed gender identities despite relatively equal access and use of computer technology. This qualitative study aims to provide insights about the first-time user experience in a home environment of 16 middle school children in Turkey (8 males-8 females), aged between 11 and 14 years, with a code learning game named "Code Combat". The analysis is supported with complementary quantitative findings. The present study investigates the participants' conceptualizations and opinions toward coding concept and this specific coding game. Further, it explores how existing gender stereotypes and gender biased expectations impact their behaviors and attitudes in the context of game experience. Our results indicated that perceived computer competence and perceived coding difficulty had important effects on the participants' performance relatedly with their gender identity. According to our findings, there are important gender differences to be found in our 9 constructs, namely; perceived computer competence, perceived coding difficulty, identification, perceived game difficulty, perceived success, level of enjoyment, level of anxiety, the likelihood of playing it another time and the likelihood of trying new features.

The present study examined how exposure to the performance of in-group and out-group members can both exacerbate and minimize the negative effects of stereotype threat. Female participants learned that they would be taking a math test that was either diagnostic or nondiagnostic of their math ability. Prior to taking the test, participants interacted with either an in-group peer (a female college student) or an out-group peer (a male college student) who had just taken the test, and learned that the student had either performed well or poorly on the test. Exposure to either an in-group or an out-group peer whose performance was consistent with the negative stereotype (a poor-performing female or a strong-performing male) exacerbated stereotype threat effects. In contrast, exposure to an in-group or an out-group peer whose performance challenged the negative stereotype (a strong-performing female or a poor-performing male) eliminated stereotype threat effects. These findings demonstrate that people can look to both in-group and out-group peers as sources of inspiration in the context of a negative stereotype.

This paper attempts to further understand the lived experiences of racial oppression by bringing together personal testimonies, resources from phenomenology, and empirical work on stereotype threat. Integrating these three areas provides a psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied understanding of the fundamental harm of racial oppression. My aim is to show that the harm of existing as racially oppressed is not just psychological or physiological. That is, racial oppression is not only harmful with regards to the immediate and lasting effects of the compiled stresses that result from continually being made aware of one’s bodily existence as ‘other’ in a predominantly and normatively white world. In addition, racially oppressed people also often lose a sense of themselves, become alienated from themselves, and come to understand themselves vis-à-vis the oppressor. Combining contextualized analyses of the psychological, existential, physiological, and embodied dimensions of oppression, I argue that existing as racially oppressed in a white supremacist society also changes the ontological structure of one’s being-in-the-world.

Over the past decade clever marketing and wider access to the internet has led to the exponential growth of 'mail-order' marriage industries, vastly increasing the number of women who migrate for marriage using these commercial services. Taken within the context of global predatory capitalism, such phenomenon is of interest in that it appears to convene in its dynamics the intersecting operation of gender and class inequality, sexism, racism, and colonialism that, far from diminishing, seems only to further intensify with the increase in transnational cross-border traffic between populations. In this study, we investigate the complicity of knowledge-production practices within popular culture in the perpetuation of such dynamics within the 'mail-order' marriage industry. In particular, we focus on the politics of representation around the figure of the so-called 'mail-order bride' as produced in various genres and sites in North America over the past 15 years. Our study revealed, as expected, an intensely narrow and colonialist discourse constituting the women involved in such commercial transactions as commodity objects, victims, or victimizers. But, as well, we found five potentially counter-hegemonic works that serve to represent an alternative discourse that at least gestures toward a more diverse and complex representation of these women and of married life, employing devices such as irony, parody, spoofing, and other tongue-in-cheek references. However, as our conclusion demonstrates, despite such admirable interventions, some aspects of agency-arranged marriages remain utterly absent in North American popular culture, thereby perpetuating and ultimately failing to displace the dominant discourse on this population of women.

The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefore, messages containing negated concepts can ironically prime mental representations and evaluations that are opposite to those intended. We hypothesized that the subtle presentation of a negated concept (e.g., “no smoking”) would activate ironic motivational orientations as well. We tested this hypothesis in a public health context. Smokers viewed photographs in which no-smoking signs were either inconspicuously embedded (prime) or edited out (control). Primed smokers showed amplified automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli, but not toward smoking-unrelated stimuli. Since passive priming effects generally serve to facilitate forms of action, not inhibit them, anti-smoking and other public health campaigns may ironically increase the very behaviors they seek to reduce.

A general theory of domain identification is used to describe achievement barriers still faced by women in advanced quantitative areas and by African Americans in school. The theory assumes that sustained school success requires identification with school and its subdomains; that societal pressures on these groups (e.g., economic disadvantage, gender roles) can frustrate this identification; and that in school domains where these groups are negatively stereotyped, those who have become domain identified face the further barrier of stereotype threat, the threat that others' judgments or their own actions will negatively stereotype them in the domain. Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups (offering a new interpretation of group differences in standardized test performance), that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.

With the rapid shifts in the education of women in the United States, and the underrepresentation of women in fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), an issue generating much controversy is whether women may benefit more from single-sex education or coeducation. The present study surveyed 548 U.S. highschool boys and girls from single-sex and coeducational high-schools from the Midwest. Half of the participants completed a mathematics test under stereotype threat (ST) condition and half under no threat condition. Although girls in single-sex schools had higher achievement motive and self-esteem than those in coeducational schools, they were not more likely to pursue STEM careers. Overall, students in single-sex schools outperformed students from coeducational schools on the math test. Girls' math performance was significantly higher in the ST condition than in the no threat condition.

The purpose of this study was to validate data collected between 2009-2013 via an instrument used to assess middle school girls’ identification with and interest in engineering and technology following the Society of Women Engineers’ WOW events.

Recognizing the importance of measuring the impact of such mentored E & T activities on young females’ attitudes about and interest in STEM, and more specifically, engineering and technology, SWE outreach experts developed a participant survey based on event objectives and domain knowledge, but never rigorously examined whether it produced statistically valid data that could be used to draw inferences about girls’
propensity to enter the field, essentially a priming factor for future engagement.

Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the survey data evaluated in this study (N = 332) successfully validated a four factor latent construct, albeit not precisely as proposed with respect to item loading. Longitudinal use of such a validated tool could provide reliable data to better predict female engagement. It also establishes a jumping-off point for additional discourse and research on the effects of  mentored E & T activities on female engagement in male-dominated career fields such as engineering and technology.

In the present manuscript we draw on the Multi-Threat Framework to explore gender-related math attitudes and how they put girls and women at risk for stereotype threats. Gunderson et al. (2011) detail how negative stereotypes about women’s math abilities are transmitted to girls by their parents and teachers, shaping girls’ math attitudes and ultimately undermining performance and interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The social psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat complements this approach and demonstrates the additional ways in which gender-related math attitudes undermine girls’ and women’s interest and performance in STEM domains. Considering the phenomenon of stereotype threat also identifies how stereotypes and other gender-related math attitudes can undermine women’s and girls’ interest and performance in STEM domains even when women and girls have positive math attitudes.

People’s fear and anxiety about doing math—over and above
actual math ability—can be an impediment to their math achievement.
We show that when the math-anxious individuals are
female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students.
Early elementary school teachers in the United States are
almost exclusively female (>90%), and we provide evidence that
these female teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement
via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math. First- and second grade female teachers completed measures of math anxiety. The
math achievement of the students in these teachers’ classrooms
was also assessed. There was no relation between a teacher’s
math anxiety and her students’ math achievement at the beginning of the school year. By the school year’s end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that “boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading” and the lower these girls’ math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall. In early elementary school, where the teachers are almost all female, teachers’ math anxiety carries consequences for girls’math achievement by influencing girls’ beliefs about who is good at math.

This article explores Black identities within the U.S. advertising industry—an atmosphere charged by a history of discrimination against, and continuing underrepresentation of, African American practitioners. Drawing on theories of code switching and stereotype threat, the author interprets data from a set of focus groups with Black interns working at agencies in New York City and argues that their supposed race-based affiliations conceal deeper anxieties of cultural belonging marked by fissures of class and language that trigger self-monitoring and thus undermine retention and advancement in the advertising field. Furthermore, the author contends that the added psychological burden of stereotype threat makes Black interns wary of seeking out help from other more established Black employees—for fear of being seen as preferring their own race—thus placing them at a career development disadvantage vis-à-vis Whites, who have no qualms about affiliating with and mentoring other Whites. The author then offers some strategies for closing the White–Black labor gap in advertising ranging from agency reform from within to clients exerting structural pressure from without and concludes with a call for communication scholars to move beyond the text and critique race representation at the point of production.

During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the word "beguine" was used by women to identify themselves as members of a wide-spread and influential women's movement. The same term was used by their detractors and overt opponents, with the highly charged negative meaning of "heretic." The etymology of the term “beguine” and ultimate origins of the movement have never been satisfactorily explained.

American prevailing perceptions of the Cold War serve current US national foreign policy process goals that emphasize the expansion of US global influence. The prevailing view in the American polity remains that the Soviet Union was an aggressive, imperialist threat that the US defeated through its containment strategy. The validity of this ultimately self-serving assumption requires critique because Communist state postwar foreign and public policy behavior patterns did not conform with this prevailing position. Failure of the academy generally to predict the remarkably peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union is further evidence that this politically prevailing viewpoint was fundamentally flawed. Current dissent is in effect tied to the New Left that emerged partly as a critique to Cold War assumptions that produced the Vietnam debacle. This article analyzes the political interests that support the prevailing belief that the US nevertheless won the Cold War despite this left dissent. These interests overwhelm current critique of US global dominance that continues to rely on Cold War-era formulated hard power containment prescriptions. By accepting the validity of this assumption that the US won the Cold War, the academy weakens its ability to critique US foreign policy behavior in the so-called war on terror.

Video games are increasingly becoming an important media today, despite the light connota-tion of its initial categorization. Today they are an industry that produces billions of dollars and employs engineers and artists alike in an art form spanning interactive games, to virtual socie-ties where millions of people dwell. However, like all human products, our same fears, flaws and xenophobia show in the games, with the reflection of hatred, racism and stereotypes that are our everyday experience. Also, because of the influence of other media, like television, with misrepresentations of blacks, Latinos and other races, or the objectification of women are pre-sent in video games. The significant thing found researching for this assignment is that most of those who use these games are themselves part of minorities or races that are not exactly white Americans. Abuse of the frustrations and desires of the user, handling codes and the system an-swers of gamers to maintain the player engagement, has more resemblance to the use of illegal drugs than with art, but however, the complexity of the design, stories and global assessment, have led to other considerations by experts. Competing in the games could be considered as having more of escapism that the reality of engaging, but all human beings are expected in their tribes to compete and demonstrate their value as a member while complying with social norms or expectations. Same as satisfying or surrender to corporate or group interests. Here are some thoughts for the purpose of this study.

Labeling theory has long held a rather significant place in sociology generally, and in symbolic interaction more specifically. Yet, in its long history, labeling theorists have seldom considered how interactional contexts mediate the effective application of labels. Similarly, labeling theory, with its focus on deviance, has largely neglected positive instances of labeling. In this article, I consider an instance of labeling in a tutoring session and show how the local interactional context of the application of a label is accomplished such that the label “smarter than you think” is made to stick to the student. In doing so, I demonstrate how labeling theory can be productively extended to consider positive labeling as well as the interactional contexts that mediate these labeling processes. In closing, I propose that this approach could help develop labeling theory into a complex and nuanced theory of the social constitution of human behavior.

Discussions of issues confronting law enforcement can be enhanced by using a social psychological perspective that emphasizes the importance of contexts’ influence on internal capacities and characteristics to the understanding of human behavior.  This chapter shows the utility of such an approach within the context of racial disparities in policing.  We focus on judgments of fairness, especially as it pertains to how officers treat people and make decisions, and outline how racial disparities drive the perception that law enforcement is procedurally unfair and serve to erode public trust and support for the law.  Attention is then turned to how normal mental functioning that is essential to social behavior can promote such disparities in even the most egalitarian individuals.  In particular, we describe (1) the role of implicit racial bias and how automatic associations between racial groups and criminality can motivate differential behavior and (2) the importance of social identity and how threats to that identity can evoke responses that facilitate racial disparities.

One of the central points in Sally Haslanger’s influential article, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not By Reason (Alone),” is that we must root out biases that work against women and minorities at every stage of the profession. Yet, with some notable exceptions, most of the work on implicit bias concentrates on issues that plague women and minorities at later stages in their education, career, and in the profession. In this paper, I take up Haslanger’s imperative to consider how we can root out biases at an earlier stage, namely, in the classroom. Within the context of key insights from the literature on implicit bias and stereotype threat, and acknowledging that there is no one size fits all solution to the problem, I delineate five strategies for creating safe learning spaces in philosophy classrooms in which underrepresented minority students can feel comfortable and confident to be active participants and thereby to flourish.

Seemingly insignificant features of the context can undermine the quantitative performance of skilled females-an effect attributed to stereotype threat. The present studies tested the hypotheses that stereotype threat triggers arousal, and that attributions about that arousal could moderate the effects of stereotype threat on performance. To examine whether arousal is triggered by stereotype threat, we conducted two experiments in which female participants were asked to take a math test under conditions of stereotype threat or not. In Study 1, women under stereotype threat performed better on an easy threat-irrelevant task, but worse on a difficult threat-irrelevant task than women not under threat. In Study 2, threatened women underperformed on a math test, but this underperformance was attenuated for women directed to misattribute their arousal. These results suggest that arousal-and how arousal is attributed-may play an important role in the debilitating effects of stereotype threat.

In the past 40 years, the proportion of women in science courses and careers has dramatically increased in some nations but not in others. Our research investigated how national differences in women’s science participation related to gender-science stereotypes that associate science with men more than women. Data from 􏰀350,000 participants in 66 nations indicated that higher female enrollment in tertiary science education (community college or above) related to weaker explicit and implicit national gender-science stereotypes. Higher female employment in the researcher workforce related to weaker explicit, but not implicit, gender-science stereotypes. These relationships remained after controlling for many theoretically relevant covariates. Even nations with high overall gender equity (e.g., the Netherlands) had strong gender-science stereotypes if men dominated science fields specifically. In addition, the relationship between women’s educational enrollment in science and implicit gender-science stereotypes was stronger for college-educated participants than participants without college education. Implications for instructional practices and educational policies are discussed.

Girls tend to have more negative math attitudes,
including gender stereotypes, anxieties, and self-concepts,
than boys. These attitudes play a critical role in math
performance, math course-taking, and the pursuit of mathrelated
career paths. We review existing research, primarily
from U.S. samples, showing that parents’ and teachers’
expectancies for children’s math competence are often
gender-biased and can influence children’s math attitudes
and performance. We then propose three new directions for
future research on the social transmission of gender-related
math attitudes. First, parents’ and teachers’ own math
anxieties and their beliefs about whether math ability is a
stable trait may prove to be significant influences on children’s
math attitudes. Second, a developmental perspective that
investigates math attitudes at younger ages and in relation to
other aspects of gender development, such as gender rigidity,
may yield new insights into the development of math
attitudes. Third, investigating the specific behaviors and
mannerisms that form the causal links between parents’ and
teachers’ beliefs and children’s math attitudes may lead to
effective interventions to improve children’s math attitudes
from a young age. Such work will not only further our
understanding of the relations between attitudes and performance,
but will lead to the development of practical
interventions for the home and classroom that ensure that all
students are provided with opportunities to excel in math.

Whether or not students are able to perform up to their potential in the classroom can be influenced by their perceptions of situational pressures to perform at a high level, their anxiety about succeeding in subjects such as math, and even the awareness of negative academic stereotypes regarding the ability of the gender or racial group to which students belong. In this
chapter, we provide an overview of research that has been conducted to date on a diverse set of negative emotion-inducing situations known to influence performance in the classroom. Despite differences in the stressful academic situations that students encounter, we propose that a common set of mechanisms operate to affect performance. We conclude by outlining work exploring classroom interventions designed to ensure that all students perform at their best in important learning and testing situations.