An Empirical Research About The Effect Of Self-affirmation On The Math-Gender Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat is one of the main reasons that lead to gender differences in academic achievement. Stereotype threat is a kind of social psychological threat. Performing in a domain in which one is negatively stereotyped produces feelings of stress and discomfort. This stress and discomfort, stemming from the knowledge that one’s behavior might confirm a negative self-relevant stereotype, often results in confirmation of the stereotype, which affect one’s performing in the relevant domains.Encouraging self-affirmation is one of the effective ways to combat stereotype threat that quite receive favor nowadays. Self-affirmation is that, one can maintain the self-integrity, reduce defensive responses, and eliminate the problem of poor performance in the threat domain, by affirming the self-worth or characteristics unrelated to the provoking threat. Although the effect mechanisms of self-affirmation were just beginning, there was no consensus on them; the previous researches had found that reminding people of either their important values or self-worth can reduce subsequent defensiveness and increase open-mindedness to various forms of threatening information, which was rejected by the people once. It was the implicit way that self-affirmation used to affect people’s emotions and self-esteem, change people’s attribution way, reduce the negative thoughts that kept going through people’s heads, and even affect the brain processing including working memory. Even though self-affirmation might not resolve or dismiss the actual problem or cause of the inconsistency, people might not attempt to dismiss every threat, but instead accept or acknowledge some, as long as their global self-evaluation remained positive.For now, the relevant researches on self-affirmation were just beginning in China. Past research has confirmed that the Chinese may also have the self-affirmation effect. However, whether encouraging self-affirmation can truly combat the problems of poor performance caused by stereotype threat? Whether the different ways of self-affirmation (value affirmation/attribute affirmation) can have the same effect? Which one was better? This research was based on them.Two experiments were designed in this research. The main aim of experiment 1 was to explore whether the Chinese undergraduates were also have the growth promoting effect of self-affirmation:whether self-affirmation can reduce defensive responses of math-gender stereotype threat. The experiment revised the manipulate paradigm of self-affirmation written by Sherman et al. Subjects of the experimental group were conducted self-affirmation manipulation. In addition to value affirmation on the subjects, there were also ten other exercises which made self-affirmation manipulation ten times. The main aim of experiment 2 was to compare the differences between different ways of self-affirmation (value affirmation/attribute affirmation) which affected the growth promoting effect. It was divided in three groups in this experiment:the value affirmation group, the attribute affirmation group, and the non self-affirmation group. Subjects in value affirmation group wrote down the most important values for themselves, and then wrote down two reasons and examples. While subjects in attribute affirmation group wrote down two qualities or skills better than others, and gave examples respectively. After that the subjects would take ten moderately difficult math problems chosen from GMAT. To do this was to examine whether the self-affirmation manipulation could combat the defensive responses originated from stereotype threat effectively. Through the experiments we drew the following main conclusions:(1) Students performed better on a difficult math test when they accepted the self-affirmation manipulation than that in the control group, which did not conduct the self-affirmation manipulation.(2) Girl students performed better on a difficult math test when they accepted the self-affirmation manipulation than that in the control group, which did not conduct the self-affirmation manipulation. Therefore, encouraging self-affirmation can improve girl students’math performance.(3) There were no significant differences in difficult math tests of boy students between the self-affirmation group and the non-self-affirmation group.(4) There existed differences between different ways of self-affirmation on improving girl students’ math performance. Attribute affirmation had more effect on improving girl students’ math performance than value affirmation.