Study links negative expectations and women's performance

I just rediscovered this story that came through in early January when I was out of town. Have a great weekend!

A new study by Associate Professor of Psychology Maryjane Wraga documents, for the first time, how certain regions of women's brains react to positive and negative stereotypes. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Wraga and fellow researchers Molly Helt '05 and Emily Jacobs '04 documented brain activity in 54 women between the ages of 18 and 34 after they had read a stereotypical message about women and then performed a spatial reasoning task. The task required them to view pictures of objects and describe what the objects would look like from different, imagined perspectives.

The group exposed to a negative stereotype made 6 percent more errors than the group exposed to a neutral message, and 14 percent more errors than the group exposed to a positive stereotype. "The results demonstrate the remarkable power of culture in determining performance," said Wraga, lead author on the study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. For more information about the study see the study press release.