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Does exposure to gender stereotypes cause women to perform poorer in tests involving working memory?

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Stereotype threat & working memory capacity

The term "stereotype threat" was first coined by Steele & Aronson (1995) to describe the fear of confirming negative stereotypes of one’s group. While some studies have found that women primed with gender stereotypes performed worse in tests that engage working memory, other recent studies and meta-analyses have suggested otherwise. Hence, in light of the mixed literature, we conducted an experimental study to see if such a phenomenon would be observed in samples of women from Singapore and an Mturk sample of women.

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