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

by Claude M. Steele

Interestingly, when black students expected to take a test of ability, they tended to spurn things black, reporting less interest in, for instance, basketball, jazz, and hip-hop than white students. But when the test was presented as unrelated to ability, black students strongly preferred things black. They seemed to be eschewing these things when preferring them would have encouraged a stereotypical view of themselves. It was the spotlight of the negative group stereotype they were avoiding.

Situational contingencies are what allows someone to feel awkward and outside even when someone includes them for the sake of diversity. But unless they are given an identity beyond their diversity they will be under the extra pressures of that identity.

identity threat is not the threat of prejudice alone; it’s the threat of contingencies.

It told them they weren’t being seen in terms of the bad stereotype about their group’s intellectual abilities, since the feedback giver used high intellectual standards and believed they could meet them.

www.implicit.harvard.edu.)

With a learning goal, mistakes become just mistakes, not signs of immutable racism.

The thrust of Whistling Vivaldi has been to offer a broadened view of what makes a social identity, like our race, important to us and to society. It isn’t just the prejudicial attitudes of others toward the identity but also the contingencies that go with it in key settings.

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; or why changing the definition of a golfing task from its being a measure of “natural athletic ability” to its being a measure of “sports strategic intelligence” completely reversed the performance ranking of white and black participants; 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; or why describing a conversation with two African American students as a learning opportunity could get white male students to move their chairs closer for a conversation on racial profiling.

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.