UCLA Anderson Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Jenessa Shapiro began her academic career in UCLA’s Psychology Department after earning her Ph.D. at Arizona State University in 2008. By then, she had already co-authored and published groundbreaking work on stereotype threat — the distracting concern about being reduced to a negative stereotype.
In recognition of her research record, Shapiro was awarded UCLA Anderson’s Eric and "E" Juline Faculty Excellence in Research Award in 2013. She is the recipient of numerous grants to fund her research on reducing the effects of stereotype threats — with concrete aims like promoting women’s interest in STEM careers.
Now Shapiro is one of five early-career academics to be recognized by the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, in collaboration with SAGE Publications, with the SAGE Young Scholars Award for 2015. It is the only early-career award in the field, honoring significant promise in the work of younger academics. The winning scholars represent the broad spectrum of personality and social psychology research areas, and the qualifying criteria include innovation, creativity and potential to influence the field significantly.
When individuals belong to a negatively stereotyped group they may be concerned that others will see their actions through the lens of this negative stereotype. Two decades of research have found that this distracting concern uses important cognitive resources that are necessary for important high-stakes tasks like SAT tests, interviewing and public speaking. Studies find that as a result of these distracting concerns, members of negatively stereotyped groups — such as women in math or racial minorities in academic contexts — tend to underperform relative to their abilities under high-stakes circumstances. Shapiro’s recent research examines interventions that attempt to protect against the pernicious effects of these stereotype threats. She finds that self-affirmation interventions (considering values that are personally important) and role model interventions (considering ingroup members who excel in the stereotyped domain) are effective at reducing stereotype threat.
This research is valuable because it can help identify whether stereotype threats are behind employees’ decisions to leave a workplace or decamp from a profession altogether. The larger outcome is that threats might be more easily intercepted before they take negative effect.
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