When Black students at Stanford University were told that a test was diagnostic of intellectual ability, they performed worse than their white counterparts. However, when this stereotype threat was ostensibly removed—by simply framing the test as a measure of problem-solving rather than intelligence—the performance gap Black and white students nearly vanished.
Just reading this description motivates me to reject the study out of hand. It's not plausible that university-level students responded meaningfully differently to being told "this is a test of problem-solving skill" versus "this is a test of intelligence" because it is commonly understood that problem-solving skill is a major component of intelligence.
it also became the darling of the political left who now had an answer to prevailing views of group differences held by the political right. This is partly because shortly before stereotype threat took its turn in the spotlight, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve... the octogenarian Murray is still considered a pariah, shouted down and deplatformed from talks he tries to deliver at respectable colleges to this day.
The characterization of Murray's views in the last several years has been grossly uncharitable and seems entirely disconnected from his actual arguments. It's strange that the book is 30 years old, but has seemed politically relevant for much less time than that.
Many years ago, long before "The Bell Curve", I spent way, way too much time reading Murray's book "Losing Ground" (1984) and going to the library to read the papers he referenced and reading the papers those papers referenced and then the papers those papers referenced. My conclusion was that his book is junk. My second conclusion was that citations are like a game of telephone and every time someone cites something, it changes slightly, so don't trust anything until you get to a primary source, and maybe don't even trust that. (This second conclusion applies in general, not just to Murray.) My third conclusion was that arguing online is a waste of time and approximately nobody cares about actual facts.
My second conclusion was that citations are like a game of telephone and every time someone cites something, it changes slightly, so don't trust anything until you get to a primary source, and maybe don't even trust that. (This second conclusion applies in general, not just to Murray.)
This part is definitely true. It has also been my experience -- but more so within academic areas with sloppy "researchers" and political problems. Linguistics is pretty good, gender "research" is awful. Intelligence research is pretty damn good, social "science" and psychology (outside of psychometrics) is awful. Economics is awful, apart from the basic ideas of competition, capitalism, and low taxes. Keynesianism is largely a fraud.
Your interlocutor might not care about facts but the audience might. I’ve learned interesting new things from reading the back-and-forth of others going at it online.
Eh, I mean the stereotype being "activated" is that Black people are less intelligent / have lower IQs, not that they lack problem-solving skills.
Even the replication attempt had two scenarios:
1 where women were told the test was to establish performance levels on the test between men and women
1 where they were told the test was a test of problem-solving skill (or primed to disregard negative stereotypes before the test).
So even the replication has the incorrect framing you worried about. I tend to believe the problem wasn't this, but the way the field was lax about sampling, methodology, etc. After all, there were many stereotype threat studies, not just this one, boasting similar results. And they didn't all use that framing.
The characterization of Murray's views seem extremely accurate and the fact that his book is still brought up despite being disproved as racist trash decades ago is ridiculous
Not to necessarily defend the study here, but I don't think that's a good reason to dismiss the study out of hand. Words themselves, the actual sounds independent of their technical meaning, still have very strong, deep-rooted associations that are hard to fight even if you've been educated. The subtext and day-to-day use of "intelligence" and "problem solving skill" are different, and color the way you think of them even if you know they're technically synonymous (which, do note, they're not quite). That association operates at the same deep level at which the supposed effect works.
Comments
Link for the claim that the results don't reproduce, without Facebook tracking: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qctkp
Just reading this description motivates me to reject the study out of hand. It's not plausible that university-level students responded meaningfully differently to being told "this is a test of problem-solving skill" versus "this is a test of intelligence" because it is commonly understood that problem-solving skill is a major component of intelligence.
The characterization of Murray's views in the last several years has been grossly uncharitable and seems entirely disconnected from his actual arguments. It's strange that the book is 30 years old, but has seemed politically relevant for much less time than that.
Many years ago, long before "The Bell Curve", I spent way, way too much time reading Murray's book "Losing Ground" (1984) and going to the library to read the papers he referenced and reading the papers those papers referenced and then the papers those papers referenced. My conclusion was that his book is junk. My second conclusion was that citations are like a game of telephone and every time someone cites something, it changes slightly, so don't trust anything until you get to a primary source, and maybe don't even trust that. (This second conclusion applies in general, not just to Murray.) My third conclusion was that arguing online is a waste of time and approximately nobody cares about actual facts.
This part is definitely true. It has also been my experience -- but more so within academic areas with sloppy "researchers" and political problems. Linguistics is pretty good, gender "research" is awful. Intelligence research is pretty damn good, social "science" and psychology (outside of psychometrics) is awful. Economics is awful, apart from the basic ideas of competition, capitalism, and low taxes. Keynesianism is largely a fraud.
This is unlikely to be true.
Your interlocutor might not care about facts but the audience might. I’ve learned interesting new things from reading the back-and-forth of others going at it online.
Eh, I mean the stereotype being "activated" is that Black people are less intelligent / have lower IQs, not that they lack problem-solving skills.
Even the replication attempt had two scenarios:
1 where women were told the test was to establish performance levels on the test between men and women
1 where they were told the test was a test of problem-solving skill (or primed to disregard negative stereotypes before the test).
So even the replication has the incorrect framing you worried about. I tend to believe the problem wasn't this, but the way the field was lax about sampling, methodology, etc. After all, there were many stereotype threat studies, not just this one, boasting similar results. And they didn't all use that framing.
The characterization of Murray's views seem extremely accurate and the fact that his book is still brought up despite being disproved as racist trash decades ago is ridiculous
Not to necessarily defend the study here, but I don't think that's a good reason to dismiss the study out of hand. Words themselves, the actual sounds independent of their technical meaning, still have very strong, deep-rooted associations that are hard to fight even if you've been educated. The subtext and day-to-day use of "intelligence" and "problem solving skill" are different, and color the way you think of them even if you know they're technically synonymous (which, do note, they're not quite). That association operates at the same deep level at which the supposed effect works.