My own research and that of my colleagues reveals another identity-linked contextual pressure that affects especially the academic vanguard of African-American students: stereotype threat. Joshua Aronson and I first demonstrated the effect of this threat in a series of experiments conducted at Stanford University. One at a time, we gave academically strong black and white students a difficult section of the advanced Graduate Record Exam in literature. This situation alone, we reasoned, would be enough to put black students under a special pressure. For them, but not for white students, frustration on this test can confirm the negative stereotype about their group's lower intellectual ability--or at least raise the possibility that they might be seen that way. And because these are strong students who care about performing well, the prospect of confirming or being seen to confirm this stereotype could be upsetting and distracting enough to undermine their performance right there on the test. It did. Under this pressure--a pressure that is likely to be present for black students on the difficult sections of any important academic test, during academic performances more generally and even during interpersonal interactions in an academic context--black students performed worse than white students, even though we had statistically matched the two groups of students in skills.

Yet consider what happened when we gave another set of black and white students the same exam. This time, we told them it was an instrument we used to study problem-solving but that it did not measure intellectual ability. This simple instruction changed the meaning of the testing situation for black students. No matter how they did on this test--defined this way--it would not reflect on their ability and thus could not confirm or disconfirm the negative stereotype about blacks. With the pressure off, black students' performance went up to match that of statistically matched white students. This tells us that what depressed their performance when they understood the test to be a normal test of intelligence was stereotype threat.

Taking a step backward, one can see that our social identities--like being African-American--have contingencies attached to them, specific things that a person with that identity has to cope with in specific settings. Black students face a particularly daunting set of identity contingencies in school--from having teachers with less training to being treated with low expectations to stereotype threat. This makes the experience of school different for them than for some other groups, even when they are in the same classroom, with the same teacher and with the same pictures on the wall.

As a cause of lower black test scores, these contingencies are bad enough. But the ability paradigm expands their effect. Treating their lower scores as if they were caused by low ability rather than by these contingencies, this paradigm puts African-American students on a track that insures they will not get the education they need to rise to the level of the other students. It seals the test-score gap in place.

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