Reverse “stereotype threat” – women chess players perform better against men

By Alex Fradera Stereotype threat is one of those social psychology concepts that has managed to break out of the academic world and into everyday conversation: the idea that a fear of conforming to stereotypes – for example, that girls struggle at maths – can make those stereotypes self-fulfilling, thanks to the adverse effect of anxiety and excessive self-consciousness on performance. A recent review suggested that stereotype threat has a robust but small-to-medium sized effect on performance, but a meta-analysis suggests that publication bias may be a problem in this literature, inflating the apparent size of the effect. Also, the majority of the work has been done under laboratory conditions, which may not reflect what happens in the wider world. So when a field study comes along, it’s worth paying attention to, and a paper published as a pre-print at PsyArXiv from Tom Stafford at the University of Sheffield looks at a domain involving high pressure, clear success criteria, and a presupposition that’s it’s more a guy thing: chess. The handy thing about chess is that we have so much solid data: vast databases of matches, and effective ranking systems that allow accurate predictions of who is likely to win upcoming matches. To date, lab-based studies have suggested that women playing chess do suffer from stereotype threat, so Stafford’s question is: what does that look like in real play? To find out, he explored a dataset of youngish (average age 32) players r...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Gender Social Source Type: blogs