 As a final illustration of the significance of generics for the social world, consider the phenomenon of stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson 1995; Steele 2010). Stereotype threat occurs when members of a stigmatized social group perform worse than they otherwise would have, because their membership in that group was made salient to them. For example, the performance of women and African-Americans on standardized tests is lowered if they are reminded first of their group membership by, e.g., being asked to report their gender or race before the exam. Interestingly, stereotype threat on a totally novel task can be induced by simply uttering a generic—e.g., telling a girl “boys are really good at this game” (Cimpian 2013; Cimpian, Mu and Erickson 2012). Simply hearing an evaluative generic statement about a gender group was enough to impair children’s performance.