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Summary And Response To Armor Against Prejudice By Neil Tyson

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Summary and Response to “Armor Against Prejudice“
False implications on oneself can affect your performance in work, school and sports. Neil Tyson who earned his PH.D. in astrophysics notes that in our society academic failures are expected and our academic success is because of others. This is similar to our sports performances. White athletes fear they won’t be as successful as their black peers. Another example is in gender prejudices, women in advanced math classes worry they won’t perform as well as men in those same classes. Tyson calls this type of anxiety “emotional tax”.
Psychologists believe that this is just one factor that contributes to social and academic inequality but it is also one that can be easily changed. In an experiment conducted by Claude steele and Joshua Aronson they gave 100 students an exam. They told one half of the students the exam wouldn’t measure their abilities and the outcome was that black and white students with comparable SAT scores did equally well yet when they told the other half that the exam would measure their intellectual ability black students scores fell but white students did not. They also noted that by asking them to record their race had the same …show more content…

Is affects men in social sensitivity, students from poorer backgrounds and white students suffer from stereotype threat when when compared to Asian students in academic tests or black athletes in sports. Paul Sackett from the University of Minnesota argues that stereotype threat could be less common and more easily overcome and in recent years psychologists have shifted from trying to prove that stereotype threat exists to understanding how it works and how it affects people. Most researchers agree that the threat operates in similar ways across all types of people. Anxiety arrives, motivation falls, and expectations lower so because of this individuals psychologically exhaust

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