Stereotypes disrupt probabilistic category learning.

Racial stereotypes exert pernicious effects on decision-making and behavior, yet little is known about how stereotypes disrupt people's ability to learn new associations. The current research interrogates a fundamental question about the boundary conditions of probabilistic learning by examining whether and how learning is influenced by preexisting associations. Across three experiments, participants learned the probabilistic outcomes of different card combinations based on feedback in either a social (e.

The Influence of Microaffirmations on Undergraduate Persistence in Science Career Pathways.

The present studies aimed to advance the measurement and understanding of microaffirmation kindness cues and assessed how they related to historically underrepresented (HU) and historically overrepresented (HO) undergraduate student persistence in science-related career pathways. Study 1 developed and tested the dimensionality of a new Microaffirmations Scale. Study 2 confirmed the two-factor structure of the Microaffirmations Scale and demonstrated that the scale possessed measurement invariance across HU and HO students.

'I'm Black and I'm Proud': A Majority Ecological Context Protects Affective Aspects of Black Identity Under Stereotype Threat.

We provide evidence that stereotype threat, a phenomenon that causes stigmatized individuals to experience group-based evaluative concerns (Steele in Am Psychol 52:613-629, 1997; Whistling Vivaldi and other clues to how stereotypes affect us, W.W. Norton, New York, 2010), impacts affective aspects of Black identity as a function of majority versus minority ecological contexts.

Enabling full representation in science: the San Francisco BUILD project's agents of change affirm science skills, belonging and community.

Background: The underrepresentation of minority students in the sciences constrains innovation and productivity in the U.S. The SF BUILD project mission is to remove barriers to diversity by taking a "fix the institution" approach rather than a "fix the student" one.

'Speaking Truth' Protects Underrepresented Minorities' Intellectual Performance and Safety in STEM.

We offer and test a brief psychosocial intervention, Speaking Truth to EmPower (STEP), designed to protect underrepresented minorities' (URMs) intellectual performance and safety in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). STEP takes a 'knowledge as power' approach by: (a) providing a tutorial on stereotype threat (i.e.

'Be prepared': an implemental mindset for alleviating social-identity threat.

Stereotype threat occurs when people who belong to socially devalued groups experience a fear of negative evaluation, which interferes with the goal of staying task focused. The current study was designed to examine whether priming socially devalued individuals with an implemental (vs. a deliberative) mindset, characterized by forming a priori goal-directed plans, would help these individuals to overcome threat-induced distracting states.