Stereotype based stressors in group contexts: the role of stress contagion
Date
2019
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Walk into any science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) classroom and you’re bound to find students solving problems together in groups. These group interactions may seem benign, if not successful forums for learning. However, these group-based contexts could be problematic for women since women are the targets of negative ability-oriented stereotypes in STEM domains. As such, these contexts may lead some women to experience stereotype based threats such as social identity threat; the fear that either themselves or others will be perceived in a way that confirms negative STEM stereotypes specific to their gender. Past research has extensively documented the negative downstream consequences of these threats on women in STEM, particularly with respect to the stress that these situations engender. This research, however, has occurred almost exclusively at the individual level, focusing on the people directly experiencing threat. Thus, a critical question is whether these stress-oriented consequences of stereotype-based threats experienced by individuals can undermine, or even be transmitted to otherwise non-threatened women during dyadic interactions. Utilizing neural and behavioral indices of dyadic synchrony, the current study examined whether social identity threatened women could transmit their stress to otherwise non-threatened women via a process we refer to as stereotype-based stress contagion (SBS Contagion), and how this collective stress affected women in a dyadic performance context. If threatened women can transmit their stress to otherwise non-threatened partners, does it hurt or benefit the woman directly under threat, and, to what extent does this come at a cost to their otherwise non-threatened partners?