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This study
examined whether Black racial identity might moderate
vulnerability to stereotype threat. Recent research on
Black racial attitudes suggests that African-Americans
conceptualize their racial identity in different ways,
and the relative salience of various conceptualizations
(termed statuses) can modulate inter-racial
interactions. Pre-Encounter status tends to be
associated with a de-emphasis or even denigration of
being Black. Encounter status refers to an
emphasis on race in one's self-identity.
Immersion-Emersion pertains to the celebration of
Black identity and culture but includes denigration
of Whites, and Internalization status refers to a
strong Black racial identity that is non-exclusionary
and egalitarian. To examine whether racial identity
status affects stereotype threat, African-American
undergraduates completed subscales to assess the
relative strength of each racial identity status. Later,
they were randomly assigned to be exposed to a low,
medium, or high level of stereotype threat before
completing some verbal items from a standardized test.
Students were told that the study focused on
"understanding how students respond when confronted with
a challenging problem solving exercise" (low threat),
"verbal ability or verbal intelligence" (medium threat),
or "verbal ability or verbal intelligence" and that they
would complete another measure that, unbeknownst to
them, was designed to highlight racial identity
and racial identity attitudes (high threat). Results
showed that test performance was best in the low threat,
and worst in the high threat, condition. Internalization
status was positively related to performance in the low
threat, but not the high threat, condition. These
findings suggest that Internalization attitudes can be
helpful in low threat situations but may not protect
against poorer performance under stereotype threat.
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