Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time)

by Claude M. Steele

identity contingencies—the things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity, because you are old, young, gay, a white male, a woman, black, Latino, politically conservative or liberal, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a cancer patient, and so on. Generally speaking, contingencies are circumstances you have to deal with in order to get what you want or need in a situation.

Our understandings and views of the world are partial, and reflect the circumstances of our particular lives. This is where a discipline like science comes in. It doesn’t purge us of bias. But it extends what we can see and understand, while constraining bias. That is where I would stake my claim, at any rate. The constant back-and-forth between ideas and research results hammers away at bias and, just as important, often reveals aspects of reality that surpass our original ideas and insights.

In the sense that I am using the term, contingencies are conditions you have to deal with in a setting in order to function in it. And identity contingencies are contingencies that are special to you because you have a given social identity, things like the availability of a bank loan to Broyard only when he was white, or the lowered expectations for mental alertness one might experience as an older person, or the social avoidance a southerner might experience as his accent is heard at a New England cocktail party. These are identity contingencies.

Identity threat, diffuse and Delphic though it may be, is nonetheless powerful enough to single out an identity and make it the center of a person’s functioning, powerful enough to make it more important, for the duration of the threat at least, than any of the person’s other identities—more important than her sex, her race, her religion, her being young, her being a Stanford graduate.

“[W]hy do so many people commit crimes [and violence] in the name of identity?” Its answer is that, in the name of an identity that one sees as under siege, one can do things that one could never do as an individual, things that one could never do in one’s own name. In defense of one’s country, one’s religion, one’s region, one’s ethnicity, the image of one’s group in the world, one can do things that would otherwise be unimaginable.

People often see themselves in terms of whichever one of their allegiances [identities] is most under attack. And sometimes, when a person doesn’t have the strength to defend that allegiance, he hides it. Then it remains buried deep down in the dark, awaiting its revenge. But whether he accepts or conceals it, proclaims it discreetly or flaunts it, it is with that allegiance that the person concerned identifies. And then, whether it relates to colour, religion, language or class, it invades the person’s whole identity.

Being threatened because we have a given characteristic is what makes us most aware of being a particular kind of person.

To see this in your own life, think of the important settings in your life, your school, your workplace, your family. The argument, put most strongly, is that if there is nothing in these settings that you have to deal with because you are a woman, or older, or black, or have a Spanish accent, then these characteristics—being a woman, being older, being black, or having a Spanish accent—will not become important social identities for you in that setting. They’ll be characteristics you have. You may cherish them for a variety of reasons. But in that setting they won’t much affect how you see things, whom you identify with, how you react emotionally to events in the setting, whom you relate to easily, and so on. They won’t become central to who you are there.

Masks vs anti masks

even the most minimal identity threats are enough to make us think and behave like a group member.

Why do we discriminate so easily? Tajfel and his student John Turner posited a simple answer: self-esteem. We think well of our group in order to think well of ourselves—even when the group is “minimal,”

If you want to change the behaviors and outcomes associated with social identity—say, too few women in computer science—don’t focus on changing the internal manifestations of the identity, such as values, and attitudes. Focus instead on changing the contingencies to which all of that internal stuff is an adaptation.