CarlShulman comments on RAND Health Insurance Experiment critiques - Less Wrong Discussion
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Thanks. What's your take on the claim that stereotype encouragement, along the lines of "you're part of a group that's good at math" or "this is a test that you'll be good at," can boost performance above baseline on high-stakes tests? I've heard this claimed with regard to men and Asian-Americans, but worried about publication and reporting biases.
I don't know much about stereotype encouragement. Mostly I hear about stereotype threat, which strikes me as more than a little suspicious - smells like a Clever Hans or publication bias sort of situation.
There was earlier discussion of publication bias on this here (which makes sense given the attractiveness of the claim, along with general psychology research standards). This article is paywalled, but if it matches the abstract and is itself kosher, it shows a devastating pattern in the published studies:
That was a surprisingly difficult article to obtain; Google Scholar failed, my UWash access as usual didn't work on Psycnet, a straight fulltext search failed, and when I finally found the journal in Ebscohost, the PDF download didn't work! After a while, I figured out that I could email the citation - with PDF attached - to myself. Here it is:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-stoet.pdf
EDIT: I had to laugh at this from the conclusion (or should that be cry?):