Taking A Look At Dr. Claude Steele

Dr. Claude Steele theory on stereotype threat or social identity threat, show how it affects every part of our life. He outlines his theory from the premise that a person social identity - a person’s sense of who they based on their group membership, in contextual situation raise a threat of being seeing through the lens of a negative stereotype, that are assigned by the broader society.

Additionally, negative stereotype has an impact that can cause an alteration of behavior or to cognitively underperform. When a person is in a situation where his social identity can be judged according to a negative stereotype, his performance will be consistent with the stereotype. He explains that underperformance raises from the anxiety a person has of being judged, or the need to counterattack that negative stereotype.

Furthermore, Dr. Claude Steele does not forget to emphasize that negative stereotype is effective when the situation is important to the individual. Only if you care about the situation the prospect of being reduce to a stereotype will be upsetting. This frustration comes from the individual knowledge or belief that other people will judge him according to that stereotype. Moreover, Dr. Claude Steele made an experiment to test why women preform worse compare to men on math exams. In the experiment
Dr. Claude Steele research claim that a big part of the underperformance comes from the individual dividing his attention, one part of him continue to engage with the test while the other continually addresses the importance of fighting the stereotype. Maybe we can attribute it not only to the individual trying to fight being label and trying to prove the stereotype is false, but also to the social level trying to increase the group prestige and remove the negative stereotype from the group as a