Freewrite #4

Sian L Beilock and Allen R. McConnell wrote an article entitled "Stereotype Threat and Sport: Can Athletic Performance be Threatened?." Their article talks about the ways in which stereotypes can have a negative effect on an athletes performance.  They define a stereotype threat as "when knowledge of a negative stereotype about a social group leads to a less-than-optimal performance by members of that group." The authors believe that the less than average academic performance by black student athletes is not due to a lack of intelligence, but is due to the stereotype of black student athletes not being as intelligent as white student athletes. Steele and McConnell coined the phrase stereotype threat and set up a series of experiments to test the phenomenon. Results of their experiments showed that those who were informed of a negative stereotype before performing, performed significantly worse than those who were not informed of the negative stereotype and exponentially worse than those who were informed of a positive stereotype.