New research finds that both explicit and implicit stereotyping affect girls’ motor skill performance. The research team exposed a group of female children to either direct (explicit) stereotyping or indirect (implicit) stereotyping and then asked them to do their best during four trials of a standing long jump.
Their results revealed that girls exposed to stereotypes did worse than those in the control group. The findings, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, demonstrate that stereotype threat has consequences for children and their motor skills.
Stereotype threat is a well-researched social psychology concept in which individuals perform worse on tasks when they are aware of a negative stereotype about how they may do on the task. For example, if women are aware of a stereotype that says women struggle in advanced math, it can affect their performance in their calculus courses.
Individuals can experience a layered effect; if a Black woman is aware of stereotypes that say both women and African Americans will struggle in advanced math, the consequences of the stereotype threat may be more significant. The performance decline may be due to the individual’s increased focus on their behavior and its implications for the stereotype rather than on the task itself.
Prior research has found that stereotype threat has consequences for motor and cognitive skills. However, most of those studies have investigated the consequences of explicit stereotypes and adults. Esmaeel Saemi and colleagues intended to expand the scope of stereotype threat research and investigate how implicit and explicit stereotypes affect children’s motor skills.
The study recruited 204 female elementary students aged 11 years old; they were tested during their physical education class at school. Girls with any motor or cognitive impairment were excluded from the data. The girls were tested in a quiet room without distraction or any peers present. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups, a control group, an explicit-only group, an implicit-only group, and one group that included both implicit and explicit stereotype conditions. All girls completed a measure of state anxiety two weeks before the jump condition and immediately after they completed their eight jumps.
For girls in the explicit stereotype condition, they had a structured warmup and then completed 4 warm-up jumps in front of a female researcher. Then before they performed each of their last four jumps, they were told, “the objective of this study is to compare boys’ and girls’ performances during a standing long jump. Previous studies have shown that girls have less strength and are weaker than boys and, consequently, perform worse than boys on this type of task, and we are trying to understand why.”
The implicit condition had the same warm up and 8 jumps, except the last four were observed by a male researcher. In the explicit and implicit conditions, participants were exposed to both the statement and the male observer. Finally, the control condition completed 8 jumps in a row with a female researcher observing.
Statistical analysis of the data revealed that participants in the explicit/implicit and implicit groups performed worse for each jump than the control group. Those in the explicit condition did worse in the long jump in only the final two jumps. All three groups had higher state anxiety than the control group. The implicit-only group did worse on each subsequent jump. In the implicit and explicit condition, the fourth jump was worse than the explicit condition, indicating that implicit stereotype had a greater effect than explicit.
The research team acknowledged some limitations to their study. First, they recognize that using only those identifying as female limits some conclusions, and it may be beneficial to include males or those with other gender identities in a similar study. Second, the explicit stereotypical information was provided verbally. Reading the information in a newspaper or other publication may have elicited different results.
These minor considerations aside, the research team feels they contributed to deepening our understanding of stereotype threat. They conclude, ” In addition to obtaining interesting results, the present research has practical applications. As evoked, girls underperformed when the test was administered by a male experimenter. Consequently, it can be kept in mind that at school, during physical education evaluations, if the professor is a man, girls can potentially obtain worse results than expected; this can have deleterious effects on their global academic success.”
The study, “Gender stereotypes and motor performance: How explicit and implicit stereotypes influence girls standing long jump and anxiety“, was authored by Esmaeel Saemi, Ebrahim Moteshareie, Sara Jalilinasab, Sana Afrash, Maxime Deshayes.