Stereotype Threat Triggering Avoiding Defensive Responses

Stereotype threat is a threat in the air(Steele,1997),referring to the sense of threat or pressure that certain cultural contexts hold negative stereotypes of certain social groups,and group members verify the negative stereotypes of their group due to worry and anxiety(Steele&Aronson,1995).As a form of self-verifying apprehension(迈尔斯,2006),stereotype threats can induce stigmatized individuals to worry about others and even fear that they will evaluate their own performance based on negative stereotypes.The Multi-Threat Framework subdivides stereotype threat into six quality-different threats according to target(self/group)and source(self,in-group others,out-group others)dimensions.Trapped in self-as-source stereotype threats,stigmatized individuals worry that in their own eyes,their performance will verify their own(self-concept threat)or group(group-concept threat)competence,threatening the positive views of self or group.On the account that people are motivated to maintain their self-integrity and self-positivity,stigmatized individuals will unconsciously produce defensive responses.Self-as-source stereotype threats are similar to the private situation,which focuses on the individuals’views of the individual self and the group self,and directs the attentional resources to one’s thoughts and emotions.According to the Objective Self-Awareness Theory,individuals trapped in self-focused attention tend to compare self-performance with internal standards and produce negative expectations on performance.Negative expectation will make threatened individuals withdraw from the task more often,showing avoidance tendency.Therefore,we hypothesized that self-as-source stereotype threats would elicit avoiding defensive responses.As for avoiding defensive responses,we mainly focus on domain avoidance and avoidance of social comparison.The former reflects an avoidance from the threatening realms.After being subjected to stereotype threat,stigmatized individuals avoid threat-related areas and invest resources in other non-threat areas.The latter is a kind of avoidance of social situations.When stigmatized individuals cannot avoid domains related to the threat or find alternative domains,they show social avoidance,unwilling to compare with others socially.Both domain avoidance and avoidance of social comparison can temporarily buffer the threat effect and maintain self-integrity.These self-defensive strategies,however,have a certain hazardous effect in the long run,which will not only damage stigmatized individuals’short-term performance in the threatening domains,motivation and desire for a long time,but also make stigmatized individuals trapped in the status quo of stigmatization,continue to maintain negative cognitive biases(including wrong cognitions and poor ability concept),and close their self-cognitions.Hence,it is necessary to explore and investigate the effect of stereotype threats on avoiding defensive responses.In the first study,we sought to investigate the effect of stereotype threats on domain avoidance defensive responses through experimental methods,including pre-experiment,Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.The pre-experiment recruited 20 female undergraduate students who were not majoring in mathematics and psychology,kept the balance of arts and science,and completed the domain avoidance test screening by individual test.In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,we selected gender-mathematical stereotype threat,recruited female undergraduates majoring in non-mathematics and non-psychology(liberal arts and science balanced),and respectively primed self-concept threat and group-concept threat.Davies,Spencer,Quinn,and Gerhardstein(2002)’s experimental paradigm was used to measure domain avoidance.The results indicated that both self-concept threat and group-concept threat,the number of women trying math problems was significantly less than the number of women trying Chinese problems,indicating the adoption of domain avoidance defensive responses.In the second study,we further explored the effect of stereotype threats on avoiding social comparison defensive responses based on the first study,consisting of Experiment 3 and Experiment 4.In Experiment 3 and 4,the effects of self-concept threat and group-concept threat on avoiding social comparison defensive responses were investigated using gender-mathematical stereotype threat and test-choice paradigm.The results showed that both self-concept threat and group-concept threat,women were unwilling to compare themselves with other people or women with men in terms of mathematical ability,resulting in the avoidance of social comparison defensive responses.Based on the Multi-Threat Framework,this study investigated the effect of stereotype threats on avoiding defensive responses.The above pre-experiment and the four behavioral experiments showed that stereotype threats can induce stigmatized individuals to take avoiding defensive responses.Specifically,in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,it was found that regardless of self-concept threat or group-concept threat,women would adopt domain avoidance defensive responses to maintain their self-integrity.Experiment 3 and Experiment 4 found that both types of stereotype threats elicited avoiding social comparison defensive responses.This study expands the research scope of stereotype threat outcome effect,which is helpful for future intervention of stereotype threat effect.