Article summary with Identity salience and changing performance by Shih a.o. - 1999

Activating socio-cultural stereotypes can influence the performance of the stereotyped individual. African Americans who were stereotyped to be poor students underperformed relative to white students when they were told before making the test that African-Americans were not good at that test. There are a lot of studies that have examined this effect, yet there are not a lot of studies that look at multiple social identities. Most studies also look at the negative effect and not at the positive effect of unconscious activation of stereotypes. The researchers of this study want to examine if activation of different dimensions of identity can positively influence them. They decided to test Asian-American women.

In the first study, Asian-American women had to take a quantitative test. The researchers thought that when their gender identity was made salient, they would perform less good than normal and that they would perform better when their ethnicity identity was made salient. This was all compared to Asian-American women for whom no particular identity was made salient. This was done by asking the participants questions about their ethnicity or their gender. Women in the control group had to answer questions unrelated to their ethnicity or gender. Data showed that the women in the ethnicity-salient condition answered more answers correctly than the women in other conditions. The data also showed that women in the gender-salient condition answered the least answers correct.

The second study examined whether it was the stereotype associated with an identity and not the identity itself that accounted for these differences. This study looks like the first one, but here the stereotypes were made salient. This study also used Asian-American women as participants and also made female-identity salient and ethnic-identity salient. They found the same results as the first study.

This study shows that somebody’s performance can be affected positively and negatively by implicitly activating an identity. This can be helpful for a lot of things. One of these is making one dimension of identity salient over the other and influence performance. People from stigmatised groups don’t have to feel so negatively anymore about themselves.