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

by Claude M. Steele

There was nothing I could do about that, and if being black was reason enough to restrict my swimming,

His condition, like my swimming pool condition, made him feel his racial identity, his whiteness, in that time and place—something he hadn’t thought much about before.

downwardly constitute black students.

First, like many institutions of higher education in the United States, this school had inherited a social organization from the larger society and from its own history that might well place black students under downwardly constituting pressures—powerful

society. They knew how people in this culture tend to see math ability, as something men have more of than women.

Almost invariably, they take an observer’s perspective, and they are trying to explain poor performance,

“psychic damage.”

This explanation followed logically from an observer’s perspective, and it was supported by the weight of tradition.

When that pressure was removed—by presenting the test as a laboratory task—they performed at the top of their skill level.

And throughout the whole of it we’d gotten no evidence that the underperformance we’d observed came from characteristics of the person who was underperforming. It seemed, instead, to come from the pressure of group stereotypes they had to deal with on tests or in classrooms.

he changed the contingencies that went with it—the constraints he had to face, the opportunities he would be given, the pathways he could go down.

What differed was his social identity. He

Maalouf’s emphasis is similar to mine: of all the things that make an identity prominent in one’s feeling and thinking, being threatened on the basis of it is perhaps the most important.

could be changed dramatically by changing contingencies of that identity, by changing, in this research, the degree to which test takers were at risk of confirming bad stereotypes about their group. And the phenomena of identity change—“passing” and expatriation-—

They suggested that the degree to which a given social identity had any presence in a person’s life depended on contingencies, realities down on the ground that the person had to deal with because they had the identity.

To make the stereotype about aging and memory vivid for some participants—thereby putting the older people in the group under the threat of confirming the stereotype—they had them first read a newspaper article claiming that age did, in fact, impair memory.

As the number of women in these groups went down—an incidental and ambiguous cue—so did their performance. These women were not “islands.” They were affected by context; a background cue they might have been expected to overcome.

We aren’t islands: our life-shaping choices and critical performances can be affected by incidental features of our environments, even as we have little awareness of those features. So now we had evidence that

And that’s the point. It’s difficult to just assure away the stereotype threat that whites can feel in interracial situations, such as having a conversation with black colleagues about racial profiling, or that any group can feel in situations where negative stereotypes about them are relevant.

Along these lines, I’ve come to recognize that knowing how to address this side of the human character, especially in integrated settings, is an increasingly important skill for our teachers, managers, and leaders.

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. By simply fostering intergroup conversations among students from different backgrounds, you can improve minority students’ comfort and grades in a setting. By allowing students, especially minority students, to affirm their most valued sense of self, you can improve their grades, even for a long time. By helping students develop a narrative about the setting that explains their frustrations while projecting positive engagement and success in the setting, you can greatly improve their sense of belonging and achievement—which if done at a critical time could redirect the course of their lives.