To see how people manage conflicting identities, social psychologist Margaret Shih designed a study that examined AsianAmerican women’s relationship to math. As Asian Americans they are stereotyped as more proficient at math, but as women they are stereotyped as less proficient at math. To study this, Shih and her colleagues asked a group of Asian-American women to self-identify differently: sometimes as Asian American, other times as women. And then they gave them a math test.
When asked to provide their ethnicity before the test, the participants in the study performed better than those asked to identify their gender. All that had changed was a shift of the mirrors around them, a shift in their reflections. And yet, real outcomes shifted.
This underperformance is most often attributed to the cost of knowing that people expect you to underperform. But that is a change in self: the anxiety that affects performance is tied to a change in relationships that define the self. When people thought about themselves as Asian American or as women, their relationships with others shifted and their test performance changed—a tangible result. And that is a literal change in their selves.