Tara C. Dennehy

Female peer mentors early in college increase women’s positive academic experiences and retention in engineering

Significance The scarcity of women in the American science and engineering workforce is a well-recognized problem. However, field-tested interventions outside artificial laboratory settings are few. We provide evidence from a multiyear field experiment demonstrating that women in engineering who were assigned a female (but not male) peer mentor experienced more belonging, motivation, and confidence in engineering, better retention in engineering majors, and greater engineering career aspirations. Female mentors promoted aspirations to pursue engineering careers by protecting women’s belonging and confidence. Greater belonging and confidence were also associated with more engineering retention. Notably, grades were not associated with year 1 retention. The benefits of mentoring endured beyond the intervention, for 2 y of college, the time of greatest attrition from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Scientific and engineering innovation is vital for American competitiveness, quality of life, and national security. However, too few American students, especially women, pursue these fields. Although this problem has attracted enormous attention, rigorously tested interventions outside artificial laboratory settings are quite rare. To address this gap, we conducted a longitudinal field experiment investigating the effect of peer mentoring on women’s experiences and retention in engineering during college transition, assessing its impact for 1 y while mentoring was active, and an additional 1 y after mentoring had ended. Incoming women engineering students (n = 150) were randomly assigned to female or male peer mentors or no mentors for 1 y. Their experiences were assessed multiple times during the intervention year and 1-y postintervention. Female (but not male) mentors protected women’s belonging in engineering, self-efficacy, motivation, retention in engineering majors, and postcollege engineering aspirations. Counter to common assumptions, better engineering grades were not associated with more retention or career aspirations in engineering in the first year of college. Notably, increased belonging and self-efficacy were significantly associated with more retention and career aspirations. The benefits of peer mentoring endured long after the intervention had ended, inoculating women for the first 2 y of college—the window of greatest attrition from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Thus, same-gender peer mentoring for a short period during developmental transition points promotes women’s success and retention in engineering, yielding dividends over time.

When an "Educated" Black Man Becomes Lighter in the Mind's Eye: Evidence for a Skin Tone Memory Bias

We offer novel evidence that a Black man appears lighter in the mind’s eye following a counter-stereotypic prime, a phenomenon we refer to as skin tone memory bias. In Experiment 1, participants were primed subliminally with the counter-stereotypic word educated or with the stereotypic word ignorant, followed by the target stimulus of a Black man’s face. A recognition memory task for the target’s face and six lures (skin tone variations of ±25%, ±37%, and ±50%) revealed that participants primed with “educated” exhibited more memory errors with respect to lighter lures—misidentifying even the lightest lure as the target more often than counterparts primed with “ignorant.” This skin tone memory bias was replicated in Experiment 2. We situate these findings in theorizing on the mind’s striving for cognitive consistency. Black individuals who defy social stereotypes might not challenge social norms sufficiently but rather may be remembered as lighter, perpetuating status quo beliefs.

Blurring Boundaries: Bisexual Versus Lesbian and Heterosexual Women's Self-Assessed Creativity

People who self-categorize as bisexual pose a challenge to a simplistic notion of linear separability/discreteness, as indicated by beliefs that “bisexuality does not exist.” The authors thus examined whether by blurring intergroup boundaries that challenge monosexuality, bisexual women would evince higher levels of self-assessed creativity. Bisexual womens self-assessed creativity was higher than lesbian and heterosexual womens. The latter two groups’ levels were similar (accounting for socioeconomic status). This finding is optimistic to the extent that not fitting easily into group norms might create an opportunity to perceive oneself favorably while challenging heterosexist and monosexist beliefs.

‘Be prepared’: An implemental mindset for alleviating social-identity threat

Stereotype threat occurs when people who belong to socially devalued groups experience a fear of negative evaluation, which interferes with the goal of staying task focused. The current study was designed to examine whether priming socially devalued individuals with an implemental (vs. a deliberative) mindset, characterized by forming a priori goal-directed plans, would help these individuals to overcome threat-induced distracting states. Participants from low and high socioeconomic status backgrounds (measured by maternal education; SESm ) completed a speeded mental arithmetic test, an intellectually threatening task. Low-SESm individuals performed comparably and exhibited similar confidence levels to high-SESm counterparts only when induced with an implemental mindset, suggesting that implemental mindset priming may help to create equity in the face of stereotype threat.

Is There Release from Masking from Isomorphism between Perception and Action

The phenomenon of “entry into awareness” is one of the most challenging puzzles in neuroscience. Research has shown how entry is influenced by processes that are “bottom-up” (e.g., stimulus salience, motion, novelty, incentive and emotional quality) and associated with working memory. Although consciousness is intimately related to action, action-based entry remains under-explored. We review research showing that action-related processing influences the nature of percepts already in conscious awareness and present three experiments that, using a “release-from-masking” technique, examine whether action plans can also influence that which enters awareness in the first place. The present data, though intriguing and consistent with previous research, are not definitive. The limitations and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed. We hope that these experiments will spur further investigation of this understudied topic.

Inherence is an aspect of psychological essentialism.

Inherence is not a distinct construct from psychological essentialism; it is one of several underlying beliefs. I propose that inherence is only one entry point to the perception of an essence and posit that context may influence which aspects of essentialist reasoning precede inferring an essence. I also discuss how psychological essentialism can uniquely account for violations of category-based expectancies.