762: Stereotype Threat Jan 8, 2017

Speech does certainly affect a person's psychology. Studies have found that the act of reminding someone of relevant, existing stereotypes hinders that person's ability to perform a particular action, which has been termed, stereotype threat. Several experiments conducted on female undergraduate students who were told of that men are better at math showed “in working memory intensive tasks such as mathematical problem solving, stereotype threat harms the cognitive system by co-opting working memory resources” (Merritt, Anna C., Effron, Daniel A. and Moni, Benoît “Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad" Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4 2010). Relatively little is known about how this or other types of discriminatory language affects the mind, so there is a big push from linguists and psychologists for more of this type of research.