Stereotype threat occurs when the awareness of a negative stereotype about a social group in a particular domain produces suboptimal performance by members of that group (see Steele, 1997). For example, stereotype threat leads African-Americans to perform worse on tests described as assessing intelligence, Whites to perform worse on tasks described as assessing natural athletic ability, and women to perform worse in math. Indeed, stereotype threat is wide-ranging and affects many social groups in a variety of critical situations. Because the implications of stereotype threat are so considerable and are often revealed by members of underrepresented populations in society, it is important to understand how stereotype threat leads to less-than-optimal performances. In other words, why does stereotype threat occur? One hypothesis for how stereotype threat exerts its impact is that one's worries about confirming a negative performance stereotype reduce the working memory capacity necessary for successful skill execution. But reductions in working memory may not be the only explanation for how stereotype threat operates, especially for proceduralized skills (i.e., skills that run as multi-step procedures largely outside of working memory) such as high-level athletics, surgical procedures, or writing computer programming code. Previous research has demonstrated that proceduralized skills fail when performers are prompted to pay attention to skill execution in a manner that disrupts the fluent execution of automated behaviors, rather than by reducing the working memory capacity available for performance (Beilock & Carr, 2001). In the current work, we propose that stereotype threat can harm performance by multiple mechanisms, and that how particular skills are implemented and cognitively represented in memory (i.e., working-memory intensive skills vs. proceduralized skills) dictate how they will be harmed by one's awareness of a negative performance stereotype. Specifically, we examine how stereotype threat effects are realized as a function of the working memory demands of the skill being performed, the working memory capacity of the individual performing the skill, and the skill level of the performer. By focusing on understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying stereotype threat, a more comprehensive account of this detrimental phenomenon can be developed, which in turn generates novel predictions about how, when, and for whom stereotype threat effects will be revealed, and, ultimately, how they may be prevented.
