Stereotype threat
Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson did research for this theory of social psychology. They had African-American and European-American college students take a difficult verbal portion of the Graduate Record Examination. The design was a 2x3 factorial. The factors were the race of the participant (black or white)and the test description (diagnostic of intelligence, non diagnostic, or non diagnostic and challenging). Performance on the test was the dependent variable. 117 male and female participants were recruited from Stanford University. After comparing the results of the three groups, it was found that the differences were not very significant. However, in their second study results were significant.