Tell a girl that boys are better at math than girls, and she won’t perform as well. It appears that worrying about a stereotype can actually hinder success. New research by the University of Chicago focused on the old but too often still prevalent stereotype that boys are better at math than girls. After pre-test assessments, college women were randomly assigned to two groups: one was told that the research was to determine why men achieve better in math than women; the other was told that they were part of an experiment on mathematics performance. The results: scores for women who were told that men were better went down from nearly 90 percent in the pretest to about 80 percent. Women in the other group actually scored a bit higher than in their pre-test.

Read more about this intriguing research on mental processing online at ScienceDaily.com