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

by Claude M. Steele

Then one day, for a little less than an hour, you are shown the results of a putative survey of upperclassmen that summarizes, in narrative form, their social experiences at this university. The survey interests you because you want to see what students who are just like you, but a few years ahead of you, have experienced at this school. The results show that upperclassmen felt great frustration during their freshman year, just like you, even deep alienation from the school—in the sense of feeling they would never belong there—but that, over time, they gained a sense of belonging and happiness there, thanks to the resources and advantages of the school and the many lasting friendships they’d made there.

This worked to great effect on African American freshman.

The racial segregation of friendship networks in college life means that when it comes to personal conversations, blacks talk mainly to blacks and whites to whites. Black students, then, might not be able to see that white students have problems similar to their own. And not seeing this, along with being more racially vigilant in light of the broader cues in the setting, they might see race as playing a bigger role in their experience—as something that would sustain greater vigilance toward the racial aspects of their experience.

they asked black and white Stanford students to write letters to ostensible minority elementary school students in East Palo Alto, California, advocating an expandable view of human intelligence. They were given information documenting the expandability of human intelligence; information on the nature of learning, on how the brain changes to reflect learning and experience, and evidence of people making great strides in building intellectual skills. And, of course, writing the letter gave them a chance to thoroughly process this narrative. For white Stanford students, not negatively stereotyped in this area, writing the letter had no effect on their subsequent grades. For black Stanford students, however, living under the suspicion of negative ability stereotypes, this changed narrative increased their grades by one-third of a letter grade in the next semester.

Fixed vs growth mindset. Got students to think about it by writing letters to schoolchildren. Had no effect on white students (isn’t hat a surprise, given Dweck’s hypothesis?), but lifted performance of the Black letter-writers

Girls as young as five to seven were thrown off their math performance by a cue as small as an ordinary drawing of a little girl holding a doll.

...and likely being in the presence of researchers who knew what effect they were looking for....

African Americans, a stereotyped group, displayed greater psychological vulnerability to early failure [and, I would add, to other identity-threatening cues as well]. For them, early failure may have confirmed that the stereotype was in play as a stable global indicator of their ability to thrive in school. By shoring up self-integrity at this time, the affirmation helped maintain their sense of adequacy and interrupted the cycle in which early poor performance influenced later performance and psychological state.

Writing self-affirmations (what their values are and why) lifted Black and Latino students’ performance, in large part for interrupting the cycle of misstep-frustration-more missteps

The Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) was given at the end of the school year. Both girls and boys whose mentors had focused them on the expandability of intelligence did significantly better on the reading section of this test than those who had focused on drug abuse prevention.

Being reminded of the brain’s ability to learn and grow—the growth mindset—also helps lift performance.

The effect of this constellation was somewhat stronger in the fifth grade than in the third. But it included the same things in both grades: positive relationships with students; more child-centered teaching; use of their diversity as a classroom resource rather than following a strict strategy of colorblindness; teacher skill, warmth, and availability; and so on.

“avoid cues that might instantiate a sense of stereotype threat in students and are, instead, aimed at making everyone in the class feel…as valued and contributive…regardless of their ethnic group or gender.”

Considering how modest these interventions were, their impact was dramatic. They show that, at least in these samples, even modest attempts to reduce this threat totally eliminated the classic pattern of minority student underperformance—a strong indication that this underperformance was being caused by stereotype threat. They also suggest that the earlier-taken measures of potential used to predict later performance (such as the SAT in the college-level interventions and prior grades used in Geoff, Julio and Valerie’s middle school intervention) were themselves biased;

Good news: stereotype threat is fragile and can be overcome with minor but deliberate interventions. Bad news: stereotype threat is everywhere and effects pretty much every tool we have of measuring performance (almost by definition: the threat arises when there is the opportunity to ‘conform’ to the negative stereotype...that is when we are measured).

Sheryll Cashin shares a private joke that she and her husband (both African Americans) have about flights on Southwest Airlines, which allows passengers to board on a first-come, first-served basis. If they arrive late, they hope for what they call “Southwest Airlines First Class.” They hope that a young, dark-skinned African American male will be toward the front of the line and will take one of the comfortable, exit-advantaging seats toward the front of the plane when he boards. Cashin says, “At least four out of five times, we can depend on the seats next to that black person being empty, even if his row is far up front, begging for the taking. I am always happy to take this convenient seat, feeling grateful for the discomfort of others and marveling at the advantage they are willing to pass up due to their own social limitations.

Southwest Airlines First Class. Love it. Well, I love the humor, not the basis on which it rests so successfully :/

It assumes, in light of present-day norms of civility, that most of these passengers are invested in not appearing as racist. It further assumes that this investment, ironically, may lead them to avoid situations like the seat next to the black passenger or, more importantly, in light of the issues raised in the last chapter, to avoid teaching in a minority school or taking on a minority student mentee.

Over time, as the Harvard Civil Rights Project recently described, American schools have been resegregating. In the 185 school districts in the nation with enrollments of over 25,000 students, the vast majority were more racially segregated in 2000 than in 1986, often markedly so.

The 2000 census shows that the average white American lives in a neighborhood that is 80 percent white and 7 percent black, while the average black American lives in a neighborhood that is 33 percent white and 51 percent black. This holds for suburbs as much as for cities.

As you might surmise, our real interest was in how participants arranged the chairs, in particular, how close they placed their chair to the chairs of their two black conversation partners. These two distances—the distances between the participant’s chair and the chairs of each of the two black conversation partners—were the basis of our measure of associational preference. We presumed that the greater these distances, like the choice of the more distant seat in the dental office, the less comfortable they anticipated being in the conversation.

The man in black vs the Sicilian. (The two groups of experimental subjects were eh e men who were about to discuss love/relationships or racial profiling with two African Americans they didn’t already know) Result: chairs farther apart when anticipating discussing racial profiling. But, again, we’re the two groups blind to the researcher in the room or not?

the experimenter gave the participants an instruction. He said that tension was natural in a discussion of racial profiling, that it was difficult for everyone. He said they should treat the conversation as a learning experience—that is, try to learn what they could about the issue and, more generally, about how to talk about charged issues with people who might have differing perspectives. Under this instruction, white male participants moved their chairs close to their black partner, as close as they were in any of the other groups in the experiment.

This freed subjects from thinking about being portrayed as racist and removed the “chair gap” from earlier wxperimenta

We tried first to assure them that they wouldn’t be judged by what they said in the conversation, that they should feel free to speak their minds without fear of recrimination. It didn’t work.

Next, we assured them that differences in perspective were valued, that a range of perspectives was appreciated in these conversations. This didn’t work either. Chairs were still placed far apart, sometimes even farther apart than if we’d said nothing.

But they had an unforeseen consequence: the more we assured participants that we wouldn’t hold their words against them, the more they feared we would.

When interactions between people from different backgrounds have learning from each other as a goal, it eases the potential tension between them, giving missteps less significance. Trust is fostered.

This is why we don’t yet have a postracial society. Our racial attitudes are indeed improving. Surveys show we oppose interracial marriage less; whites report being more comfortable working for a black boss; more Americans would be happy living next door to a person of a different race; and there is that election of an African American president. But it is contingencies in our lives, not racial attitudes alone, that count. And just because those contingencies are increasingly social psychological doesn’t mean they’re gone.

In fact, wonder if we’ve regressed on these measures under Trump. I’d expect so. :(

changing the conception of a test from being diagnostic of ability to being a puzzle that is nondiagnostic of ability brings black performance to the same level as white performance on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices IQ test, totally eliminating the typical racial gap in IQ scores;

Hello, Murray and Herrnstein!

or why reminding women math students about strong women role models just before they took a difficult math test could eliminate their typical underperformance on the test in relation to equally skilled men;

By changing the way you give critical feedback, you can dramatically improve minority students’ motivation and receptiveness.

By improving a group’s critical mass in a setting, you can improve its members’ trust, comfort, and performance in the setting.

Does this suggest aggregating people from underrepresented groups into more homogeneous subgroups where underrepresented groups exist in your endeavor? Does that help or hinder, as it seems like it would be transparent that groups are less diverse than the population as a whole...and why? Note: the next bullet says to mix people of different backgrounds up so they interact more. I guess this means you need your whole population of your endeavor needs critical mass—can’t fake it by pulling like backgrounds together?

By allowing students, especially minority students, to affirm their most valued sense of self, you can improve their grades, even for a long time.

The effect from this study lasted at least two years I think. And it just required monthly affirmation?