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

by Claude M. Steele

This book is about what my colleagues and I call 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.

In a single stroke, he made the stereotype about violence-prone African American males less applicable to him personally. He displayed knowledge of white culture, even “high white

The contingencies they faced were threats in the air—the threat that their golfing could confirm or be seen to confirm a bad group stereotype as a characterization of their group and of themselves. Still, it was a threat with a big effect. On

The first pattern is that despite the strong sense we have of ourselves as autonomous individuals, evidence consistently shows that contingencies tied to our social identities do make a difference in shaping our lives, from the way we perform in certain situations to the careers and friends we choose. As

identity threats—and the damage they can do to our functioning—play an important role in some of society’s most important social problems.

general process—involving the allocation of mental resources and even a precise pattern of brain activation—by which these threats impair a broad range of human functioning.

set of things we can do as individuals to reduce the impact of these threats in our own lives, as well as what we as a society can do to reduce their impact in important places like schools and workplaces, has come to light.

example—there is a big difference between the “observer’s perspective”—the perspective of a person observing the behavior—and the “actor’s perspective”—the perspective of a person doing the behavior. As observers,

At every level of entering SATs, even the highest level, black students got lower grades than other students. If

Over 85 percent of Americans, for example, get their jobs through acquaintance contacts.

especially of black students very likely reared with the value of trying “twice as hard” in the face of racial adversity?

The environment, and their status in it, seemed to be an actual component of their

Among participants who were told the test did show gender differences, where the women could still feel the threat of stigma confirmation, women did worse than equally skilled men, just as in the earlier experiment. But among participants who were told the test did not show gender differences, where the women were free of confirming anything about being a woman, woman

performed at the same high level as equally skilled men. Their underperformance was gone.

was also unusual because it suggested this could happen without bad intentions, without the agency of prejudiced people, for example. Our

Player deficiencies couldn’t have been the sole cause of the team’s losing. The sportswriters, of course, hadn’t been all wrong.

But winning showed that these deficiencies weren’t the sole cause. Something else was involved, something that Wilkens had figured out.

I needed to know whether the effect of stigma pressure that Steve and I had observed in our experiments with women and math would generalize to other groups.

They found it hard to believe that stigma pressure of the sort we had described could seriously disrupt the intellectual performance of strong, motivated black students at the nation’s most prestigious universities.

But when the company was depicted as having a low number of minorities, blacks’ trust and sense of belonging were more conditional. Diversity policy became critical. Interestingly, the color-blind policy—perhaps America’s dominant approach to these matters—didn’t work. It engendered less trust and belonging. It was as if blacks couldn’t take color-blindness at face value when the number of minorities in the company was small. But importantly, and just as interestingly, blacks did not mistrust the company when it espoused a valuing-diversity policy. With that policy in place, they trusted the company and believed they could belong in it, even when it had few minorities. The practical lesson here is that both critical mass and an approach that values what diversity can bring to a setting may go some distance in making minority identities feel more comfortable there.

Bowen and Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, reported in The Shape of the River that students admitted to those schools under affirmative action, even when they struggled “upriver” in college, often made stronger than average contributions “downriver,” later in their lives—thus the title of their book. During

Is the feedback based on the quality of their work or on negative stereotypes about their group’s abilities? This ambiguity is often a contingency of black students’

Apparently the late-night talk sessions gave black students information they needed to have a more accurate and trusting narrative of their experience.

But it’s equally true that for ability-stereotyped students, reducing identity threat is just as important as skill and knowledge instruction.

But within two years of Brown, another Supreme Court decision granted school districts a more lenient standard of compliance. In the place of hard deadlines, it allowed “all deliberate speed.”

As Loury puts it, “Opportunity travels along the synapses of these social networks” (chapter 6). A fair amount of evidence supports him.

DiTomaso’s respondents were largely unaware of their advantages:

the everyday associational preferences that contribute to racially organized networks and locations in American life—that is, racially organized residential patterns, schooling, friendship networks, and so on—may now be more important causes of racial inequality than direct discrimination against blacks. He’s

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. Paranoid, yes, but it is not entirely irrational in a psychology experiment, or in a diversity workshop, for that matter, where one can feel at risk of being judged.

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

central policy implication of the research discussed here is that unless you make people feel safe from the risk of these identity predicaments in identity-integrated settings, you won’t succeed in reducing group achievement gaps or in enabling people from different backgrounds to work comfortably and well together.

In this passage Obama is not hiding his racial identities but embracing them, not advocating a color-blind or postracial society but pointing to the many colors that make up this society and himself. He is putting identity and his multiple identities forward, using them as a bridge. In

his example, identity wasn’t a source of balkanization and threat; it was a source of wisdom about the challenges of a complex and diverse society that ultimately made him the most suitable person to lead such a society.