Thinking About Stereotypes Can Affect Your Performance
/via https://xkcd.com/385/ It turns out that just thinking about stereotypes can impair your performance — especially if it’s a stereotype about you . The emphasis here is critical to understanding how and why so much bulls**t has spread around “ women suck at programming ”, “ men are logical, women are emotional ” and so forth. Roll the tape back to 1995 when a huge NIH study (•) showed that there were sex-based differences in spatial abilities, with men outperforming women by over one standard-deviation. The result was a plethora of follow-up studies trying to figure out whether this was due to testosterone , brain wiring , and whatnot. Well, guess what — it turned out that this was all based on flawed research . A subtle flaw, mind you, based on expectations, but a flaw nevertheless. In 2008 (why did it take so long?) folks at the University of Berlin did a follow-on study (••) where they “primed” the subj...