A Research Of Stereotype Threat And Women's Math Performance

Stereotype,which is a common cognitive phenomenon throughout our daily life,is also a remarkable research focus in the field of sociology. Gender stereotype, which is a very important content, has many topics, one of which is gender-math stereotype. Implicit measure has become the main research content of implicit social cognition.Stereotype threat a situational phenomenon, leading to test performance decrements, in which a member of a stigmatized group feels pressured by the possibility of confirming or being judged by a negative stereotype. Few researches have conducted in this field in China. This dissertation used SEB to measure whether implicit gender-math stereotype exists or not, whether this stereotype leads stereotype threat.The entire research consists of two parts.Experiment 1 introduced a new measure instrument SEB questionnaire. The results show that the SEB tool is real effective to assess the implicit Gender-math stereotypes. Furthermore, no gender difference or major difference is found.Experiment 2 shows that there is stereotype threat when implicit gender-math stereotype are activated. When gender-math stereotype is activated on female, the performance of female is worse than it is not activated. However, the stereotype threat is not always exist.