On the causal mechanisms of stereotype threat: Can skills that don’t rely heavily on working memory still be threatened

For example, when negative stereotypes are activated, African Americans perform worse on tasks described as assessing intelligence (e.g., Steele & Aronson, 1995), Whites perform worse on tasks described as assessing natural athletic ability (e.g., Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, & Darley, 1999), and women perform worse on math-related tasks (e.g., Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999). Although the prevalence of stereotype threat effects has been widely demonstrated across many diverse social groups and task types, relatively less is known about the cogni-tive processes that underlie these effects (Wheeler & Petty, 2001). That is, how does activating a negative performance-related stereotype lead to less-than-optimal skill execution among members of the stereotyped group