Social behaviors such as impatience and disrespect can be one important component of different types of SEN such as autism or challenging behavior (McClintock et al., 2003) but can also be associated with gifted students (Preckel et al., 2015). As such, gifted students often are associated with behavioral difficulties and negative social behavior, as are students with SEN. Teachers as well as preservice teachers know about typical social behavior patterns of students and how they are related to stereotypes about a particular student group. Stereotypes as generalized knowledge about the members of a particular social group (Smith, 1998), can color people’s perceptions and bias the judgments of the members of this groups. Many studies have already provided evidence for stereotypes biasing teacher judgments, in the domain of ethnic minority students, students from families with low socio-economic background, or students with special education needs (Glock et al., 2020).1 With this vignette study at hand, we were experimentally investigated whether very rare social information about a student biases teacher judgments. Among a sample 88 preservice teachers, we investigated the influence of social behavior on their academic achievement judgments and feelings of resignation. We described two students, one showing respect and patience in the interaction with others, while the other student was described as disrespectful and impatient. We asked the preservice teachers to judge the student’s language proficiency and in mathematics ability. Additionally, we asked the participants to judge the student’s learning behavior, general ability, concentration, motivation, and intelligence. The participants judged the concentration, motivation, and learning behavior of the student described with the positive social behavior more positively than of the student with the negative social behavior. Most impressively, the preservice teachers judged the student with the positive social behavior as higher achieving in mathematics than the student with the negative social behavior. The preservice teachers felt more resignation (e.g. “I would feel helpless”) when imagining a confrontation with the student with the negative as compared to the positive social behavior. Our study shows that simply adding very rare information about the social behavior of a student can bias preservice teachers’ judgments. This implies that students with SEN and also gifted students might at a double risk, because they might cause feelings of resignation and also because teachers might judge them worse even when the remaining information is controlled for.

Glock, S., Kleen, H., Krischler, M., & Pit-ten Cate, I. M. (2020). Die Einstellungen von Lehrpersonen gegenüber Schüler*innen ethnischer Minoritäten und Schüler*innen mit sonderpädagogischem Förderbedarf: Ein Forschungsüberblick [Teachers' attitudes toward students from ethnic minorites and with special education needs]. In S. Glock & H. Kleen (Eds.), Stereotype in der Schule (pp. 225–279). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27275-3_8 McClintock, K., Hall, S., & Oliver, C. (2003). Risk markers associated with challenging behaviours in people with intellectual disabilities: A meta-analytic study. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 47(6), 405–416. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2788.2003.00517.x Preckel, F., Baudson, T. G., Krolak-Schwerdt, S., & Glock, S. (2015). Gifted and maladjusted? Implicit attitudes and automatic associations related to gifted children. American Educational Research Journal, 52(6), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831215596413 Smith, E. R. (1998). Mental representation and memory. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition (pp. 391–445). McGraw-Hill.