Abstract
Is the perception of academic performance among peers biased to the disadvantage of students with migration background (MB)? What role does friendship among peers play for the perception of performance differences? In a quasi-experimental study, 9th graders with and without MB attending school in Germany rated the performance of a comparison partner relative to their own performance after taking a mathematics test. Degrees of correspondence between perceived and actual performance in intragroup (both partners with or without MB) and intergroup (comparer or partner with migration background) situations were tested in multilevel analyses. In both intragroup comparison situations, students evaluated their partners’ performances benevolently. In contrast, in intergroup situations students with MB overestimated the performance of partners without MB relative to their own. Only students without MB judging partners with MB showed no such positivity bias. The pattern was replicated in the sub sample of friends, suggesting a subtle, yet powerful negative performance stereotype towards students with MB.
Highlights
Imagine Murat, a student whose parents were born and raised outside of the country where he is attending school, ask himself the following questions: How well did I score on that math test? How did my friend Peter—a native of that country —do, better or worse than me? Questions like these are typical in classrooms where students engage in social comparison with fellow classmates to evaluate and improve their abilities (Dijkstra, Kuyper, van der Werf, Buunk, & van der Zee, 2008)
We argue that perceptions of the academic performances among peers are guided by a negative performance-related stereotype towards students without migration background, possibly even among friends
We argue that a socially shared stereotype—according to which students with migration background perform more poorly in academic domains than students without migration background—should bias students’ perceptions of performance differences in the direction of the stereotype whenever one of the two persons in the comparison situation is a member of that stereotyped group
Summary
Imagine Murat, a student whose parents were born and raised outside of the country where he is attending school, ask himself the following questions: How well did I score on that math test? How did my friend Peter—a native of that country —do, better or worse than me? Questions like these are typical in classrooms where students engage in social comparison with fellow classmates to evaluate and improve their abilities (Dijkstra, Kuyper, van der Werf, Buunk, & van der Zee, 2008). We argue that perceptions of the academic performances among peers are guided by a negative performance-related stereotype towards students without migration background, possibly even among friends Such a stereotype about students with migration background can impact students’ perceptions of their own achievements and that of their classmates, in intergroup comparison where group membership is the most salient (Brewer & Weber, 1994). The negative performance-related stereotype about students with migration background implies opposite predictions for intergroup comparisons: comparers with migration background should perceive existing performance differences positively biased in favor of their comparison partners without migration background. Laboratory research indicates that stereotypes bring about their strongest effects when the relationship between perceiver and target is not characterized by a strong interpersonal orientation (dual-process model; Brewer, 1988) It needs to be examined whether a positive interpersonal relationship between student and comparison partner can “buffer” the impact of a negative performance-related stereotype. We further examine whether our hypotheses apply if the comparison partners are friends
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