Recall that Steele and Aronson (1995) showed that Black participants performed relatively poorly on a test when they were led to believe that it was a good measure of intellectual ability. This finding can be explained by:

Stereotype Threat

Explanation:

Stereotype Threat is a psychological term that describes the situation in individual or group of people believed themselves to be at risk of conforming negative stereotypes about an individual's racial, ethnic, gender or cultural group.

The concept was researched by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, who concluded that black college students performed worse on standardized tests than their white counterparts when they were informed, before taking the tests, that their racial group usually performed poorly on such exams.

However, in situation when their racial performance was not mentioned before the test, black students performed similarly to their white peers.