ABSTRACT
In the 1994 race for governor of Texas, Ann Richards, the popular incumbent, was expected to easily win the debates and to go on to win the election. She was a brilliant debater whose public speaking earned her a reputation for being feisty, “silver tongued,” and quick on her feet. Her underdog opponent, by contrast, was an undistinguished political newcomer; his résumé included many failed business ventures and a losing bid for Congress many years earlier. People were, therefore, naturally surprised when the newcomer turned out to be an artful debater-polished, articulate, and intelligent. In the debate he made Richards look awkward and defensive by comparison. The truly surprising thing about this is that the articulate newcomer was none other than George W. Bush, a man whose current reputation as a public speaker has inspired a cavalcade of ridicule: books cataloguing his frequent and embarrassing gaffes-with such titles as The Bush Dyslexicon and Bushisms-interview programs devoted to discussing the question “Is Bush an idiot?” and countless late-night talk show jokes on the subject of his inability to form a coherent sentence. Tapes of the 1994 debate show a Bush utterly unrecognizable to viewers a decade later:
This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two (“million” when he clearly meant “billion”; “stole” when he meant “sold”), but fewer than most people would in an hour’s debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. (Fallows, 2004)
The obvious question is to ask what happened. How does an articulate person become so decidedly bumbling and verbally maladroit? One observer of this 10-year difference, a doctor, concluded that Bush suffers from “pre-senile dementia,” but other doctors dispute this, citing recent neurological exams Bush underwent that showed no sign of impairment. Although we cannot prove it, we believe the answer is both more complex and more interesting than dementia-and a good deal more relevant to the psychology of prejudice and discrimination. We believe that Bush suffers from an especially extreme case of what psychologists call stereotype threat, or social identity threat, a mental impairment arising from his negative reputation rather than a faulty brain. We return to exactly why we believe this later, but rst we turn to a discussion of social identity threat phenomena and the research that has examined it. The research makes the general point that, like Bush, people who regularly display intellectual underperformance-African Americans, Latinos, and women in the domains of math and science-frequently are smarter than they appear and that many of their difculties are rooted not in inferior intelligence, but rather in the more tractable social forces that confront them in their daily interactions.
