Recall that Steele and Aronson (1995) showed that Black participants performed relatively poorly on a test when they were led to believe that it was a good measure of intellectual ability. This finding can be explained by:

Stereotype threat

Explanation:

Stereotype threat is being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group. In the beforementioned study blacks reflected the pressure of this stereotype vulnerability. I could think of another stereotype (girls are bad in maths) and I wonder if they would have performed badly as well under the stereotype threat.

Stereotype Threat

Explanation:

Stereotype Threat is a psychological term that describes the situation in individual or group of people believed themselves to be at risk of conforming negative stereotypes about an individual's racial, ethnic, gender or cultural group.

The concept was researched by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, who concluded that black college students performed worse on standardized tests than their white counterparts when they were informed, before taking the tests, that their racial group usually performed poorly on such exams.

However, in situation when their racial performance was not mentioned before the test, black students performed similarly to their white peers.