Wednesday is one of my favorite days of the week. And no, it’s not because it’s Hump Day, though that does add to its appeal. Wednesday is interesting-study day in the Washington Post.

Richard Morin, a fellow at the Pew Research Center, has a Wednesday column that analyzes some interesting studies that have come out of the academic and think-tank world. There’s one longer analysis followed by three or four annotated studies. It’s usually in the last three or four that the true gold lies.

Take this week. The last study is from some business professors in the Netherlands, who Morin says found that “people will accept two mailings from charitable organizations soliciting donations before they start to get really irritated.”

The professors conclude through their study that the more times you ask for money through the mail, the less you’re actually going to get because you are going to just end up pissing off the people who would have donated.

Now that’s pretty much what you would expect to happen, but when empirical data is put behind it, you hope that somewhere people are paying attention and can adjust their actions accordingly…maybe…

One of the more interesting ones was a study about how clueing people that one of their attributes might be being tested can affect how they do on a particular test. So a survey that asks questions about gender issues can make men and women score differently on a subsequent math test.

Morin says, “The phenomenon is known as ‘stereotype threat’–a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.”

In this study, women did worse on the math test after being asked questions that made them think about gender. Later, the women did much better on a math test after being asked about their experiences living in the northeast–no gender involved.

ABC’s 20/20 tackled this kind of study in an episode this month called “Race and Sex: We think, but can’t say stereotypes and biases.” They talked about a teacher who told her students one day that those of them with blue eyes were smarter and always did better on tests. The next day, the kids with blue eyes completed a flash card drill minutes faster than those with brown eyes. The kids with brown eyes cried because they thought they were inferior. The next day, she said she had made a mistake, and that actually it was the brown-eyed kids who were smarter. Those kids did better on the flashcard drill by minutes that day. When the kids were finally told that it didn’t make a difference, the times evened back out. Being told they were inferior made them perform as an inferior.

You might think such an exercise is bogus because kids are more impressionable. But today, that same teacher conducts seminars with adults using the same methods…with the same results. She does the seminars to show how an inferred bias can affect performance, presumably so that the participants can adjust their own behavior to avoid such actions.

Though there is also recent data that shows such sensitivity-type training isn’t working so well, that the participants go back to work without really changing the way they act even with the new information they have received. (I read this story earlier and for the life of me cannot remember where, thus no link…)