ABSTRACT
Over the past four decades African-American college students have been more in the spotlight than any other American students. A significant part of the negative stereotype about African Americans concerns intellectual ability. Thus, in the stereotype threat conditions of the experiments in this series, the chapter merely mentioned to participants that the test was a measure of verbal ability. If the pressure imposes by the relevance of a negative stereotype about one's group is enough to impair an important intellectual performance, then Black participants should perform worse than whites in the ''diagnostic'' condition of this experiment but not in the ''nondiagnostic'' condition. The chapter needs some way to determine if it was indeed stereotype threat that depressed the Black students' scores. Is everyone equally threatened and disrupted by a stereotype. One might expect, for example, that it would affect the weakest students most.
