Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Asian Americans: Math Genes or Better Students?

superiorrain · 05-26-2005, 11:40 AM

I remember reading a while back in a consumer behaviour book, that this question already has an answer.

So there was this study, i forget where it was taken place but nontheless it did take place and with was with students studying maths. Now the experiment continued for the duration of one yeah, where each class was equally weighted with Asian Males. Asian Males were always stereotyped as being good at maths. Now one class was constantly reminded of this stereotype, the teacher would always repeat and reenforce this idea that the Asian Males would find it easy, or for you guys especially that was probably very easy...blar blar. Contently feeding them the image that they were of a particular cultural and ethnic background this would help them.

The other class with the same number of Asian Males were never alerted to this stereotype and it was never mentioned in the class. So everyone just worked as normal and no one was getting any particular praise.

The result of this (and this shows you how powerful marketing/conditioning is) was that the control group was found to have a normal distribution of results with no particular class, gender, ethnicity, culture and the rest of it doing anything significantly better than anyone else. Whereas the Asian Males in the other class did significantly better than their Asian counterparts in the other class and were all top of the class.

So we can conclude from that, that it is not genes. It is more a case of what is expected of you and what people around will say you will be able to do, if you hear it enough you believe it and in the case of maths if you believe you can do it, then chances are you'll work at it till your belief is fulfilled.

05-26-2005, 11:40 AM	#9 (permalink)
superiorrain Psycho Location: London	I remember reading a while back in a consumer behaviour book, that this question already has an answer. So there was this study, i forget where it was taken place but nontheless it did take place and with was with students studying maths. Now the experiment continued for the duration of one yeah, where each class was equally weighted with Asian Males. Asian Males were always stereotyped as being good at maths. Now one class was constantly reminded of this stereotype, the teacher would always repeat and reenforce this idea that the Asian Males would find it easy, or for you guys especially that was probably very easy...blar blar. Contently feeding them the image that they were of a particular cultural and ethnic background this would help them. The other class with the same number of Asian Males were never alerted to this stereotype and it was never mentioned in the class. So everyone just worked as normal and no one was getting any particular praise. The result of this (and this shows you how powerful marketing/conditioning is) was that the control group was found to have a normal distribution of results with no particular class, gender, ethnicity, culture and the rest of it doing anything significantly better than anyone else. Whereas the Asian Males in the other class did significantly better than their Asian counterparts in the other class and were all top of the class. So we can conclude from that, that it is not genes. It is more a case of what is expected of you and what people around will say you will be able to do, if you hear it enough you believe it and in the case of maths if you believe you can do it, then chances are you'll work at it till your belief is fulfilled. __________________ "The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke