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Mindful maths: Reducing the impact of stereotype threat through a mindfulness exercise

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Abstract

Individuals who experience stereotype threat – the pressure resulting from social comparisons that are perceived as unfavourable – show performance decrements across a wide range of tasks. One account of this effect is that the cognitive pressure triggered by such threat drains the same cognitive (or working-memory) resources that are implicated in the respective task. The present study investigates whether mindfulness can be used to moderate stereotype threat, as mindfulness has previously been shown to alleviate working-memory load. Our results show that performance decrements that typically occur under stereotype threat can indeed be reversed when the individual engages in a brief (5 min) mindfulness task. The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed.

Highlights

► Stereotype threat has been shown to impair performance by draining working memory. ► Mindfulness, by contrast, has been shown to free up working memory. ► Here we show that a mindfulness exercise reduces the impact of stereotype threat.

Introduction

It has been known for more than a decade that performance in a given task suffers when people are under pressure of a stereotype that they fear may be unfavourable for them. This so-called stereotype-threat occurs under the presence of cues that point to one’s own (assumed) incompetence – one of the classical examples being that women underperform in a maths test when informed that the test is about assessing gender differences in maths. The effects of stereotype-threat have been observed across various social groups (e.g., Spencer et al., 1999, Steele and Aronson, 1995) and domains of performance (e.g., Levy, 1996, Stone et al., 1999; cf. Steele, 1997).

Different accounts of the mechanisms involved in stereotype threat have been proposed, including anxiety (Bosson, Haymovitz, & Pinel, 2004) and arousal (O’Brien & Crandall, 2003). One other compelling account that may well encompass these former two is that the stress imposed by stereotype threat drains the very same resources necessary for task performance (e.g. Beilock et al., 2007, Schmader and Johns, 2003). According to this account, it is the individual’s ability to exercise cognitive control and to direct attentional resources systematically and efficiently that is impaired by the experience of stereotype threat. Working memory capacity is critical in allowing one to exercise such cognitive control (cf. Engle, 2002). Working memory capacity has been shown to be implicated in various high level tasks such as language processing (e.g. Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), reasoning (Suess, Oberauer, Wittmann, Wilhelm, & Schulze, 2002) or inhibitory control (e.g. Redick, Calvo, Gay, & Engle, 2011). In their important work, Schmader and Johns (2003) have indeed shown that working memory capacity mediates the effect of stereotype threat on woman’s performance in a maths test.

Given these findings, one might hypothesise that alleviating the draining of working memory capacity is a suitable way to reduce the effects of stereotype threat. Such findings would be important given the significance of the stereotype threat effect and its impairment of performance in various contexts. A few studies have already explored the possibility of reducing the impact of stereotype threat on performance, for instance via the retraining of attitudes or by inducing a re-appraisal of the situation (e.g. Forbes & Schmader, 2010). These approaches tend to be effortful and task-specific, however. Perhaps more important, they do not always fall under the individual’s direct control as they often involve laboratory procedures that may not be easily applicable in everyday settings. Tasks that enhance cognitive control may prove more effective in reducing the effects of stereotype threat.

The last several years has seen a significant interest in the psychological construct of mindfulness – a state and trait in which individuals experience their environment by focusing on the present in an unbiased and non-judgmental way (Brown and Ryan, 2003, Brown et al., 2007). Mindfulness has been implicated in various attentional processes such as conflict monitoring or endogenous attentional control (e.g. Jha, Krompinger, & Baime, 2007) and – more pertinent to the current study – in modulating working memory capacity. More specifically, the training of mindfulness has led to a more effective use of available working memory resources (Chambers et al., 2008, Jha et al., 2010). In a mindful state, the individual takes a principled approach in directing attentional resources to a target, the consequence being that threat-related information that taxes working-memory and undermines performance is constrained. As such, we see a principled mindfulness task as being different from comparable activities (e.g. distractions) where individuals allow themselves to be carried away by other information in a less controlled way. We were particularly interested in studying the impact of state- rather than trait-mindfulness on stereotype threat because state-mindfulness can effectively be manipulated by the individual in a brief setting.

In the following experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a 5 min mindfulness or control task. We then induced stereotype threat (female = low math performance) in some of our participants and subsequently measured their performance on a test of mathematic ability. Our hypothesis was that the practice of mindfulness would counteract stereotype threat and hence attenuates the performance decrements that are typically associated with it.

Section snippets

Participants and design

Seventy-one female Psychology students between the ages of 18 and 37 years (M = 20.14, SD = 3.99) took part in the study in exchange for course credit. The participants were of various ethnicities (White British = 66%, Black African/British = 14%, Asian British = 11%, White European = 5%, Chinese = 4%). All participants studied Mathematics at Secondary School level (up to the age of 16), whilst 7 of those had studied Mathematics at Post-Secondary School level (up to the age of 18). None of the participants

Results

A 2 (mindfulness vs. control group) × 2 (threat vs. no threat) Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on TMS scores revealed higher scores in the mindfulness condition compared to the control condition, 27.8 vs. 15.1, F (1, 67) = 35.90, p < .001, η2 = .35, indicating that our mindfulness manipulation had the desired effect. There was no main effect of stereotype threat and no interaction between both factors, both Fs < 1.

In order to assess our central prediction regarding the moderation of stereotype threat by

Discussion

The central finding of our study – the fact that the impact of stereotype threat was reduced when participants engaged in a mindfulness task – is of particular interest in light of the significance of this effect and because of the debilitating impact it has on various parameters of performance. Of note is the fact that a 5 min mindfulness manipulation is sufficient to reduce the effect of stereotype threat in the present context. Although ours was a laboratory study, the task could be applied

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by Grant F/00 236/AB from the Leverhulme Trust to Ulrich Weger, Tim Hopthrow and Brian Meier.

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