Yet another study in the War on Telling the Truth: Researchers found that, when you tell women they’re genetically bad at math and then give them a math test, they don’t do as well. The scientists concluded that expectations matter, so we should stop telling girls the truth about the gender gap.

All this might really prove, though, is that either (A) the subjects figured out what was going on, which isn’t that hard, and subconsciously gave the researchers what they were looking for or (B) a comment like “you suck at math, here’s this math test” distracted them. It does not — and those doing the study admit this — say anything about genetic roots for the male-female math difference, and it doesn’t say much about the expectations in general, either.

Those familiar with psychology will recognize this as yet another version of the idiotic “stereotype threat” study by Claude Steele. He did the same thing with blacks, telling them they wouldn’t do as well as whites and then acting like he’d made a major breakthrough when their scores suffered.

The absurd thing about the Steele study, though, is that it controlled for SAT scores. That is, when blacks were not reminded of the stereotype, they didn’t do as well as the whites (despite endless assertions in the media and academia to the contrary). They did as well as their SATs predicted, which is to say not as well as the whites. When they were reminded of the stereotype, they did even worse. The same seems to go for this study, as the news account doesn’t claim that women did as well as men, just that their “expectations” affected their scores.

In other words, if you try, you can make blacks’ or women’s scores lower. How helpful.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.