A Simple Act of Violence

They were simply in a БЂњsmartБЂ«frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easierБЂ”in that stressful instant after a trivia question was askedБЂ”to blurt out the right answer. The difference between 55.6 and 42.6 percent, it should be pointed out, is enormous. That can be the difference between passing and failing. The psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson created an even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and twenty questions taken from the Graduate Record Examination, the standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievementБЂ”and the number of items they got right was cut in half. As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test takerБЂ™s ability and knowledge ...»