in areas segregated from the high-caste individuals. Fables, history, and the examples of
continued atrocities against upwardly mobile low-caste individuals make children aware of these
ideas at an early age. In this set of experiments, high-caste and low-caste junior high school boys
in India solve mazes under piece rate incentives in a session consisting of six subjects. Three
different conditions vary the salience of their caste identity. For some subjects, caste identity is
not made public in the session. This is the control condition. For other subjects, caste identity is
made public in a session consisting of three high-caste and three low-caste individuals. For the
third group, the conditions are the same as for the second group except that a session consists of
only members of high-status castes or only members of low-status castes. This is the caste-
status-segregated condition.
The study finds that the high-caste subjects solve significantly fewer mazes in the caste-
status-segregated sessions than in either the unsegregated condition where caste identities are
made public, or in the control condition, where caste identities are not made public. Subjects
solve mazes in two 15-minute rounds. In round 1, the high-caste subjects in the caste-status-
segregated condition solve 18% fewer mazes than do the high-caste subjects in the two other
conditions. In round 2, by which time there has been more opportunity for improving one’s
maze-solving skills, the comparable divergence across conditions is 27%.
Under the piece rate incentive scheme, the output and payoff to an individual are
completely independent from the output of the other individuals - individual output thus depends
only on the individual’s preferences and ability. There is no plausible reason why the ability of
the high-caste subjects should be impaired by placing them in sessions of only high-caste boys
rather than in sessions of three high-caste and three low-caste boys. The phenomenon of
"stereotype threat/stereotype susceptibility" would predict that because the high caste is
stereotyped as naturally superior, the greater the situational cues to caste identity, the more self-
confident the high-caste subjects should feel. With greater self confidence, they should perform
better, not worse. The results in this study on the number of subjects who completely fail to learn
how to solve a single maze are consistent with the stereotype threat/susceptibility phenomenon:
the high-caste subjects are much less likely to fail when their caste identity is made public, and
the reverse is true for the low-caste subjects.