The Influence Of Spatial Stereotype Threat On Women's Attention Span And Its Behavior Mechanism

There are a lot of negative stereotypes about women in today's social culture.For example,it is widely believed that women are inferior to men in math and women have less spatial ability than men.These negative stereotypes can affect not only women's performance in related fields,buttheir mood,self-esteem,self-confidence,physical and mental health,and careers choices as well.Stereotype threat,which was first proposed by Steele and Aronson(1995),refers to the phenomenonwhereby individuals perform more poorly on a task when a relevant stereotype orstigmatized social identity is made salient in the performance situation.In particular,stereotype threat occurs when people feel that their performance would be evaluated in light of a negative stereotype,and a fear that they may confirm the negative stereotype.Also stereotype threat will make people feel upsetting,anxiety,worried,self-doubt,increase mental burden and damage working memory.Based on the stereotype threat effect proposed by Steele and Aronson(1995),our research combined stereotype threat and the scope of attention,and explored the effect of spatial stereotype on the scope of attention from a new angle.In this study,two experiments were carried out,and both of them examined the influence of female spatial stereotype threat on attention scope.In Experiment 1,female college students were randomly assigned to spatial stereotype threat group and control group.Then all of the participants completed Navon letters task,which could measuring the scope of attention.Finally,we checked the stereotype threat manipulation and asked participants to complete a series of post-tests.The results show that:(1)Spatial stereotype threat can influence females' performance in the spatial related task(scope of attention task),namely under spatial stereotype threat,women performed worse than those in the control group.(2)In the task of attention scope(Navon letter task),there was significant a global advantage,that is,the individual responds more quickly to the big letter but slowly to the little letter.(3)The effect of female stereotype threat on the scope of attention is not significant.Though experiment results are different from our hypothesis,but through the descriptive data,we can see that stereotype threat group had smaller reaction time difference between big letters and small letters than the control group.That is the global advantage effect in stereotype threat group was reduced,and the attention scope narrowed.Previous studies have shown that,on one hand,the stereotype threat effect can be more significant in difficult tasks compared to easy task.On the other hand,the scope of attention is also affected by task difficulty.The moredifficult the task is,the higher arousal level the individual experienced,and the more likely the scope of attention will be narrowed.Therefore,combined with previous studies,we speculated that the reason that the effect of stereotype threat on attention scope was not significant is the difficulty of the task was not high enough.In experiment 2,we took another experimental paradigm,which combined the paradigm of mental rotation task and letter task,to further explore the influence of spatial stereotype threat on attention scope.The normal or mirrorimage is judged by individuals,and the difficulty of the task is distinguished by rotating the letter at different angles.The results of Experiment 2 show that:(1)Spatial stereotype threat can influence females' performance in the spatial related task(scope of attention task),namely under spatial stereotype threat,women performed worse than those in the control group.(2)In attention scope task,which combined mental rotation task and letter task of tasks,female respond quickly to big letters but slowly to small letters.There is a global advantage effect in all individual.(3)In aspect of the mental rotation task,the rotation angle will affect the mirror or normal judgment of image.The larger the rotation angle,the longer reaction time.(4)The effect of spatial stereotype threat on the scope of attention not significant.Spatial stereotype threat narrowed females' attention scope.But this negative effect only exists in difficult task.The above results show the universality of spatial stereotype threat.And inducing the spatial stereotype threat will narrowfemales' attention scope.However,the effect of this female spatial stereotype threat on attention span only exists in higher difficulty tasks.