Internalized racism or self-stereotyping is another mechanism by which the larger negative stereotypes about race can adversely affect health. One response of stigmatized racial populations to the categorical societal beliefs about their biological and/or cultural inferiority is to accept as true the dominant society’s ideology about them (Pettigrew 1964). The internalization of negative cultural images by stigmatized groups appears to create expectations, anxieties and reactions that can adversely affect social and psychological functioning. Fischer et al. (1996) show that across multiple national contexts, such as Japan, India, the United Kingdom and Israel, groups that are socially regarded as inferior have poorer academic performance than their more highly regarded peers. U.S. research indicates that when a stigma of inferiority is activated under experimental conditions, performance on an examination was adversely affected (Steele 1997). African Americans who were told in advance that blacks perform more poorly on exams than whites, women who were told that they perform more poorly than men, and white men who were told that they usually do worse than Asians, all had lower scores on an examination than control groups who were not confronted with a stigma of inferiority (Steele 1997; Fischer et al. 1996).
