When stereotypes are evoked, they fill people’s minds with distracting thoughts—with secret worries about confirming the stereotype. People usually aren’t even aware of it, but they don’t have enough mental power left to do their best on the test.

This doesn’t happen to everybody, however. It mainly happens to people who are in a fixed mindset. It’s when people are thinking in terms of fixed traits that the stereotypes get to them. Negative stereotypes say: “You and your group are permanently inferior.” Only people in the fixed mindset resonate to this message.

Again, no predicament. So it’s not the stereotype per se that impairs their performance. It’s the stereotype plus who they are, what’s important to them, the stiffness of the challenge they face, and whether they are in a setting that is diverse enough that the stereotype could be in play. It’s these elements together that make a performance-impairing predicament.

There is poignancy to stereotype threat: It’s felt most by those in the stereotyped group who are most identified with achieving in the area where the stereotype applies, and who are trying to do challenging or frustrating things in that area. It affects most the vanguard of the group— as in Mirna wanting to succeed as an ultrarunner; as in women trying to break glass ceilings in finance; as in highly invested African American law students taking challenging state bar exams; as in white American males trying to succeed in elite basketball. That’s when, in the heat of frustration, the stereotype’s dark message— “everybody knows that, because of who you are, you probably can't do well at this, and that you probably don’t belong”— becomes personally relevant. That’s when it can cause enough churn to interfere with performance.

6. Making School and Work Settings Wise

And this could happen, I also knew, without them being aware of it. I intuitively understood how stereotypes worked. They specified what was normal. My weak performance could confirm a stereotype about African Americans, while my strong performance could be taken as unusual. One’s hands, of course, should be beneath notice in such seminars. But the sight of my hands could push me into a churn of “remembering”— even without anybody present doing anything in particular to provoke it.

Transitions often involve ambiguity over how to cope effectively in the new setting. They instigate in all of us a search for what the challenges are, and for how best to meet them. But for those negatively stereotyped in the setting, this search has an extra consideration. It inevitably raises the possibility that they may face bias— devaluation, low expectations, little tolerance for error, little willingness to be associated with— and then the further worry about how to cope with all of this.