Activating stereotypes undermines task performance expectations

According to the theory of stereotype threat (C. M. Steele, 1997; C. M. Ste ele & J. Aronson, 1995), activating stereotypes about a group's typical und erperformance on a task can undermine a group member's performance on that task. The goal of the present research was to more fully delineate the cont exts that activate task-performance stereotypes and the mechanisms that mig ht lead to, or potentially prevent, such performance decrements. In 2 exper iments, individuals led to believe that they had high ability on a task pre dicted that they would do better on future performances of the same or simi lar tasks than did those given ambiguous feedback about their task abilitie s when stereotypes were not accessible. However, activating group stereotyp es-for instance, by creating expected solo status-undermined these positive expectations.