Attention, college football players: The next time you take an exam, don’t wear a sports jersey. Student athletes may be vulnerable to “stereotype threat” if they think about their jock identities before they take a test, according to a new paper by an economist at Swarthmore College.
The researcher, Thomas S. Dee, recruited 84 Swarthmore students, 44 percent of whom were athletes, and gave them half an hour to answer a set of moderately difficult questions drawn from the Graduate Record Examination. The students were randomly assigned into a control group or an experimental group. In the experimental group, the students — both athletes and nonathletes — were asked a series of questions about their participation in college sports before they took the test. Athletes in this experimental group performed significantly worse on the GRE questions than did the athletes in the control group. Among nonathletes, there was no such difference.
Over all, Mr. Dee estimates, the pre-test reminders of their athletic identities hurt the athletes’ test performance by 7.3 to 9.5 percentage points. The effect was strongest among students in sports that are stereotypically associated with low academic performance.
Mr. Dee is not the first scholar to plow this field. A 2005 paper by a pair of social psychologists also found that athletes can suffer from stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat is a much-debated concept that suggests that anxiety can temporarily impair students’ cognitive functions if they’re reminded (even very subtly) of negative stereotypes about groups that they belong to.
The new study has several potential limitations, all of which are duly noted by Mr. Dee. For one thing, it was conducted in an experimental setting that might not perfectly mimic students’ everyday classroom experiences. For another, Swarthmore is just a single small Division III institution — and one with an idiosyncratic culture. As Mr. Dee puts it, “A fairly long history of animus in the college community with respect to the relationship between athletics and the core academic mission of the college suggests that a definite athletic stigma exists in the community.” —David Glenn
