The Washington Post covered a study conducted by Min-Hsiung Huang, associate research fellow of Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica.  ‘Department of Human Behavior’, a column exploring how ideas from the social sciences speak to news events, interviewed Huang and covered his research in its Feb. 2, 2009 article, “How a Self-Fulfilling Stereotype Can Drag Down Performance” on page A5.  Huang’s study, published in Social Science Research in 2009, finds that black respondents perform more poorly when tested by a white interviewer as opposed to a black interviewer.  The reason for this finding, Huang suggests, is that the presence of a white interviewer can trigger a stereotype threat and subtly remind the black test-takers of the societal stereotype that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.  As conventional research typically overlooks the race of the interviewer, this study shows that the black-white test score gap is likely to be overestimated because the majority of interviewers are white.

Article website:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/01/AR2009020102171.html?sub=new