Revisiting Black Americans' self-protective strategies: The effect of negative intelligence feedback on implicit (vs....

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Psychology of Stereotypes
• Self-Esteem Research

Background:

• Black Americans employ identity-based self-protective strategies to maintain explicit self-esteem following intelligence threats.
• The associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model explains how self-protective strategies preserve explicit self-esteem.
• Implicit self-esteem may be vulnerable to intelligence threats due to increased accessibility of negative group stereotypes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test whether implicit self-esteem is affected by intelligence threats among Black Americans.
• To investigate the role of identity centrality in the response to intelligence threats.
• To examine the differential impact of intelligence threats on implicit versus explicit self-esteem.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted with Black American participants.
• Participants completed an intelligence test and received either negative feedback or no feedback.
• Measures of implicit and explicit self-esteem, and in Experiment 2, subjective identity centrality, were administered.

Main Results:

• Negative feedback on an intelligence test led to lower implicit self-esteem in Black American participants.
• This effect on implicit self-esteem was significant only for strongly identified Black American participants in Experiment 2.
• Explicit self-esteem remained unaffected by negative performance feedback, consistent with prior research.

Conclusions:

• Intelligence threats can negatively impact implicit self-esteem among Black Americans, particularly those with strong group identification.
• Identity-based self-protective strategies effectively shield explicit self-esteem but not implicit self-esteem from intelligence threats.
• This research highlights the boundary conditions of self-protective strategies concerning implicit and explicit self-esteem.