Three conceps, a reflection

Abstract

During my training as a university teacher, through the text What the best university professors do, by Ken Bain, I was able to learn about the concept of “stereotype vulnerability”. This phenomenon was studied by Claude Steele, a psychologist at Stanford, who theorized that “when victims of negative stereotypes are faced with a task that popular prejudice says they are not very good at, but nonetheless want to do and believe that they are capable of doing, yet they cannot escape the shadows of the beliefs that surround them”. In turn, the awareness that these people have of their negative stereotype adds a load of anxiety, which would generate a delay and deterioration in performance, which would worsen the situation. In this way, he explained that the vulnerability of the stereotype “often appears when individuals feel that they could be judged or treated in terms of the negative stereotype or when they could do something that confirms that stereotype”. This is not an isolated concept. It is related to various phenomena, such as the Pygmalion effect and the Rosenthal effect.