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Twenty years of stereotype threat research: A review of psychological mediators

Pennington, Charlotte R.; Heim, Derek; Levy, Andrew R.; Larkin, Derek T.

Authors

Derek Heim

Andrew R. Levy

Derek T. Larkin



Abstract

Copyright © 2016 Pennington et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This systematic literature review appraises critically the mediating variables of stereotype threat. A bibliographic search was conducted across electronic databases between 1995 and 2015. The search identified 45 experiments from 38 articles and 17 unique proposed mediators that were categorized into affective/subjective (n = 6), cognitive (n = 7) and motivational mechanisms (n = 4). Empirical support was accrued for mediators such as anxiety, negative thinking, and mind-wandering, which are suggested to co-opt working memory resources under stereotype threat. Other research points to the assertion that stereotype threatened individuals may be motivated to disconfirm negative stereotypes, which can have a paradoxical effect of hampering performance. However, stereotype threat appears to affect diverse social groups in different ways, with no one mediator providing unequivocal empirical support. Underpinned by the multi-threat framework, the discussion postulates that different forms of stereotype threat may be mediated by distinct mechanisms.

Citation

Pennington, C. R., Heim, D., Levy, A. R., & Larkin, D. T. (2016). Twenty years of stereotype threat research: A review of psychological mediators. PLoS ONE, 11(1), e0146487. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 15, 2015
Publication Date Jan 11, 2016
Deposit Date Sep 11, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal PLoS ONE
Electronic ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 11
Issue 1
Pages e0146487
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487
Keywords stereotype, threat, research, review, psychological mediators
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/915320
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487