Revisiting Black Americans' self-protective strategies: The effect of negative intelligence feedback on implicit (vs. explicit) self-esteem.

Objectives: Black Americans use identity-based self-protective strategies to maintain their explicit self-esteem after a threat to their intelligence. This effect is consistent with the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, which suggests that self-protective strategies operate during a propositional process that results in no change in explicit self-esteem. However, the APE model also suggests that implicit self-esteem may be sensitive to an intelligence threat because it increases the accessibility of automatically activated evaluations about Black Americans, namely the stereotype that their group is unintelligent. These hypotheses are tested across two experiments.

Method: Black American participants across both experiments (Experiment 1: N = 57; 40 females, M_age = 21.60; Experiment 2: N = 79; 64 females, M_age = 24.86) completed an intelligence test, then were randomly assigned to receive either negative feedback about their performance or no-feedback. Participants then completed measures of implicit and explicit self-esteem. Participants in Experiment 2 also completed a measure of subjective identity centrality.

Results: In support of the hypotheses, Black American participants across both experiments who received negative performance feedback on an intelligence test exhibited lower implicit self-esteem compared to those who did not receive feedback. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that this effect emerged only among strongly identified Black American participants. Finally, and consistent with past research, explicit self-esteem was unaffected by negative performance feedback among all participants.

Conclusions: This research demonstrates the boundary conditions of Black Americans' adoption of identity-based self-protective strategies to protect their implicit versus explicit self-esteem following an intelligence threat. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).