Shawn Achor

speaker

398 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

Shawn Achor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Oprah Podcast · Your Life Changes When Your Beliefs Do with Shawn Achor and Oprah · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

I can.

There's actually amazing research on this very phenomenon that you're talking about.

They did studies where they had a student come in and they were about to give them a math test.

But if it was a woman about to take a math test or a black student, before taking the test, half of the students would be given a neutral article just talking about the world right now.

And then half would read an article about how women are not good at math or black students are not good at math.

And then they take the test.

And what they found is that the students were randomly assigned.

The scores, the math scores should have been the same for both groups.

But the groups that heard that they do not perform as well, when they read that, they start to believe that.

And when that happens,

the math scores actually dropped significantly.

And they've done this over and over again.

But I have to tell you, as I heard your introduction, there is something that we've heard some of these studies before, it's called stereotype threat.

That if I threaten you with a stereotype, you perform worse across the board.

But what's amazing in the research that not many people know about is that there's a 10% minority report that we never talk about.

10% of the women or those black students that read that racist article beforehand, 10% of them do better on the math test.

They hear that belief that you're not good at math and they actually perform better

than if they had not even had that prime.

And the reason for that is that you've touched on a signature belief, something that they believe so deeply that no matter what the world says, they believe that eventually my behavior matters if linked to the right people.

So I think we live in a world that doesn't look like it should.

Showing 21–40 of 398 · page 2 of 20