Poster #29 - Essentialist Beliefs Affect Children's Math Performance

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Many people experience math anxiety, a feeling of nervousness when thinking about math-related situations (Richardson & Suinn, 1972). In addition, people often discuss math performance as stemming from innate skill—or lack thereof. Consider the oft-heard statement, “I’m just not a math person”: statements like this reflect essentialist beliefs about math, implying biological causes and fixedness, rather than malleability and effort (Gelman, 2004). Essentialist statements about novel tasks can decrease children’s performance and lead them to avoid future challenges (Cimpian et al., 2012; Park et al., 2016). However, to date, the effect of essentialist statements on children’s math performance remains untested. Given the prevalence of essentialist messaging about math (including movies and books about “math geniuses”), and the importance of math for later achievement (including income level and heath care decision making), it is important to understand the consequences of essentialist statements on children’s math abilities.

Here we asked whether essentialist messages impact children’s math performance in 200 children 6- to 8- years old (M = 84 months; 99 female). Children first completed a survey that revealed their relative math anxiety (math anxiety minus general trait anxiety). Children then were assigned to one of four priming conditions in which they heard either an essentialist or non-essentialist story about how aliens on another planet acquired either math or spelling abilities. The essentialist versions described the aliens as being very good at either math or spelling because they were born that way, whereas the non-essentialist versions described the aliens as being very good at math or spelling because they worked hard and practiced. All children were then administered a math assessment by an experimenter who did not know which priming story children had heard.

Replicating previous work (Dowker, Sarkar & Looi, 2016), we found a significant effect of math anxiety on children’s math performance: children with higher math anxiety performed worse overall (p < .001). Critically, we also found a significant interaction between children’s math anxiety and their story prime condition. Non-math-anxious children performed similarly on the math assessment regardless of which of the four priming stories they heard (all ps > .05). In contrast, children with math anxiety performed significantly worse on the math assessment after hearing the essentialist story about math (p = .002); this was true across math problems of varying degrees of difficulty. The negative consequences of essentialist messaging about math abilities applied equally to boys and girls, and to older and younger children. But notably, this effect was domain-specific: even among math anxious children, hearing an essentialist story about spelling did not impair children’s math performance the way the essentialist story about math did (p = .0016).

Our findings suggest that essentialist messages—even messages about excelling in math—can hurt children’s math performance, with math anxious children being especially vulnerable to this effect. Thus, even well-intentioned stories (think, for example, of the recent movie “Hidden Figures”) may have negative consequences for the math achievement of some children.

Authors

• Alex M. Silver, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Courtney Gregor, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author