Good to know

If we had a more balanced curriculum, we would encourage more young Māori to flourish at school, says a leading educator.

- Marc Wilson

You've come to Dr Marc's lab to take part in a study. I start by telling you the study is about "personal Y factors involved in performance on problems requiring reading and verbal reasoning abilities". Don't expect to get many answers right; this is a real "test of your verbal abilities and limitations" so I can get an idea of your verbal ability. Are you feeling the pressure yet?

If I did this in the US in the early 1990s, as Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson did, I'd find that people got about half the answers right, but African Americans would do a smidgen worse than "whites", even controlling for previous performance on standardised aptitude tests (the SATs that Americans are obsessed with).

Importantly, though, African Americans did just as well as Caucasian Americans if the instructions talked about "solving verbal problems" and not "verbal ability". Why? Steele and Aronson say it's because of stereotype threat - the psychological threat that comes when you have to do something that a dominant stereotype says you're not supposed to be good at.