It has been speculated that the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE; the negative impact of highly selective academic settings on academic self-concept) is a consequence of invidious social comparisons experienced in higher ability schools. However, the direct role of such comparisons for the BFLPE has not heretofore been documented. The present study comprises the first evidence that the BFLPE (a) is eliminated after controlling for students' invidious comparisons with their class and (b) coexists with the assimilative and contrastive effects of upward social comparison choices on academic self-concept. These results increase understanding of the BFLPE and offer support for integrative approaches of social comparison (selective accessibility and interpretation comparison models) in a natural setting. They also lend support for the distinction between forced and deliberate social comparisons and the usefulness of distinguishing between absolute and relative comparison-level choice in self-assessment.

There is ample evidence today in the stereotype threat literature that women and girls are influenced by gender-stereotyped expectations on standardized math tests. Despite its high relevance to education, this phenomenon has not received much attention in school settings. The present studies offer the 1st evidence to date indicating that middle school girls exhibit a performance deficit in quasi-ordinary classroom circumstances when they are simply led to believe that the task at hand measures mathematical skills. This deficit occurred in girls working alone or in mixed-gender groups (i.e., presence of regular classmates) but not in same-gender groups (i.e., presence of only same-gender classmates). Compared with the mixed-gender groups, the same-gender groups were also associated for girls in the stereotype threat condition with greater accessibility of positive role models (i.e., female classmates who excel in math), at the expense of both stereotypic in-group and out-group members (i.e., low-math-achievement girls and high-math-achievement boys). Finally, the greater accessibility of positive role models mediated the impact of the activated stereotype on girls' performance, exactly as one would expect from C. M. Steele's (1997) stereotype threat theory. Taken together, these findings clearly show that reducing stereotype threat in the classroom is a crucial challenge for both scientists and teachers.

The threat of being judged stereotypically (stereotype threat) may impair memory performance in older adults, thereby producing inflated age differences in memory tasks. However, the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat in older adults or other stigmatized groups remain poorly understood. Here, we offer evidence that stereotype threat consumes working memory resources in older adults. More important, using a process-dissociation procedure, we found, for the first time, that stereotype threat undermines the controlled use of memory and simultaneously intensifies automatic response tendencies. These findings indicate that competing models of stereotype threat are actually compatible and offer further reasons for researchers and practitioners to pay special attention to age-related stereotypes during standardized neuropsychological testing.