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Thank you Claude Steele comes to us to us tonight from a Columbia University where he is the provost and a professor of psychology. He's also a friend and a colleague of longstanding and I should I should say where he's temporarily the provost before he finally sees the light and accepts our offer and moves Cambridge. Would that be a great thing given up for that idea. And everybody applaud it can collect a dollar at the at the door. Claude Steele is a leader in the field of social psychology He's been recognized for his work with numerous prizes from the American Psychological Association the American Psycho Psychological Society and the Society for the psychological study of social issues. And he's been elected to the National Academy of Sciences the National Academy of education. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society after earning his Ph.D. at Ohio State 1971 Claude taught at the University of Utah at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan for arriving at Stanford where he enjoyed a remarkable tenure as a Lucy Stern professor in the social

sciences as director for the Center for Comparative Studies in race and ethnicity. And as a director for the center of Advanced Study in the havior of Sciences his term is the 21st provost of Columbia. Began this past September. His most recent book which I love and which he's here to talk about tonight isn't titled Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. And of course as you know Claude is a pioneer in the field of research a stereotype threat. So please give it up for my good friend Claude Steele. Thank you. It's a real great pleasure to be here. I'm going to actually begin tonight by reading from the book I'm a psychologist and normally we have lots of slides with data and all that sort of thing but since since Skip made me write this book I'll get it started by reading a little bit.

This is really right from where the book begins and then I'll start I'll go into the description of the story and give you some image of the research that's behind it and some of the conclusions we are going to draw from it and then I'd love to have time for it we'll have time for questions. But I'll begin by reading. I have a memory of the first time I realized that I was black. It was one. It was when at 7 or 8 I was walking home from school with neighborhood kids on the last day of the school year. The whole summer in front of us and I learned that we quote black kids couldn't swim at the pool in our area park except on Wednesday afternoons and then on those Wednesdays with our swimming suits wrapped tightly in our towels. We filed caravan style out of our neighborhood toward the hallowed pool in the adjoining white neighborhood. It was a strange we'll weekly pilgrimage. It marked the racial order of the time and place Chicago land in 1950s early 1960s. For me it was what the psychologist William cross was later to call an

encounter with the very fact that there was a racial order. The implication of this order from my life seem massive. A life of swimming only on Wednesday afternoons. Why. Moreover it turned out to be a portent of things to come. I next found out that we black kids who by the way lived in my neighborhood and who had been until these encounters just kids couldn't go to the roller rink except on Thursday night. We could be regular people but only in the middle of the week. Segregation is were hard to ignore and mistakes were costly as when at 13 after arriving at 6:00 in the morning I waited all day to be hired as a caddy at an area golf course only to be told at the end of the day that they didn't hire Negroes. This is how I became aware I was black. I didn't know what being black meant but I was getting the idea that it was a big deal. With decades of hindsight I now think I know what was going on. I was recognizing nothing less than a condition of life. Most important a

condition of life tied to my race to my being black in that time and place to my seven or eight year old self. This was a bad condition of life but the condition itself wasn't the worst of it. For example had my parents imposed on me for not taking out the garbage I would have been so upset. What got me was that it was imposed on me because I was black. There was nothing I could do about that and if being black was reason enough to restrict my swimming then what else would happen because of it. In an interview many years later a college student whom you will meet later in this book would describe for me an experience that took a similar form. He was one of only two whites and an African-American political science class composed of mostly black and other minority students. He too described a condition of life. Yes he said something to that revealed an ignorance of African-American experience or confusion about how to think about it. Then he could be seen as racially insensitive or worse if

he said nothing in class then he could largely escape the suspicion of his fellow students. 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. From experiences like these troubling questions arise will there be other conditions how many in how many areas of life will they be about important things can you will avoid them. Do you have to stay on the lookout for them. What. When I encountered when I encountered my swimming pool restriction it mystified me. Where did it come from. Conditions of life tied to identity like that still mystify me. But now I have a working idea about where they come from. They come from the way a society at a given time is organized around and identity like race. That organization that organization reflects the history of a place as well as the ongoing individual and group competition for opportunity in the good life. The way Chicago land was organized around race in the late 1950s and 60s the rigid

housing segregation the defacto school segregation the employment discrimination and so on meant that black people in that time and place had many restrictive conditions of life tied to their identity perhaps the least of which was that Wednesday afternoon swimming restriction that so worried my seven or eight year old self. This book is about what my colleagues and I call a density 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 a bipolar disorder a cancer patient and so on. So I wonder with that kind of introduction so to make the idea that social identities are. I want to first illustrate that there are a lot of social identity is our age our race our political persuasion and so on. And I want to make the case that what makes them important to us

are the things that we actually have to deal with in life because we've got to identity. And I implicitly sort of countering I think a more common understanding of a density which is that we can choose to take it seriously or not take it seriously that our social identity these are things which are more a matter of choice than they are a matter of having to deal with them that there's that there's no coersion in identity. We're a very individualistic society and we like to think of ourselves that way and I and way up on the list of people who like to do that. But over the course of years of doing this research this other image of social identity has come come it has sort of come vividly an interview that if you have to deal with things because you have a particular danity in a particular place that's what makes the identity real. If you don't have to deal with something in a particular time and place because you you have a given characteristic then it's not likely to become a very social very important social identity. So

that's that's sort of the logic on which the book is predicated is this sort of rooting of identity in in the real world the kind of black identity I had when I was a kid back in those days is not the same kind I have today it's a different world. The things I have to deal with because I'm black are very very different. It's not like they're gone. Like there are no contingencies tied to that. That's not the case but they're they're very different. I'm grateful for the changes that have happened to those contingencies over time. And I think that's one good way to understand how identity changes over over over time is that the society that spawns them change. Well another. Center focus of the book is on a particular contingency of identity and that is the contingency of stereotype threat. And by that I mean something very very

simple You'll see. I hope very quickly that it is a contingency of identity as subtle as it is. It is one and it can be very powerful. And that's what I'll try to show and research. But first what is it. Stereotype Threat is simply the experience of being in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities is relevant. If you're just doing something behaving in a situation where a negative stereotype about one of your identities your political persuasion your age your race your body weight your whatever negative stereotype is relevant to that then you know at some level or another that you could be judged or treated in terms of that stereotype. And if you care about the situation and you care about what you're doing the prospect of being reduced to a negative stereotype like that can be upsetting and disruptive can make you.

You don't confused as you described later on all kinds of physiological reactions can begin to occur even allocations of of brain activity can be can be affected by it. So that's what I mean by stereotype threat. The title story gives the story from which the title of the book comes gets a sort of simple everyday expression or example of what stereotype threat is this is Brant Staples as a African American college students walking down the street in Hyde Park in Chicago and realizing that he's making people a little nervous that they're seeing him through the lens of a racial stereotype as a potentially threatening guy menacing guy and they start to avoid him. And there's tension and there's tension he has tension. And as time goes on he learns district district which is the title of the book to whistle Vivaldi. And when he whistles Vivaldi it's a it's a behavior which which disperses does which punctures the

stereotype in the environment around him. Now nobody's looking at him that way they relax and he relaxes and and life sort of goes on in that situation. I encourage you to read his book because there's a lot more to that story than that but I took that part of it because it really does capture this experience of stereotype threat. He's in a situation it's important to him being able to walk down the streets of his home of the city he's living in and he doesn't want to be seen this way all the time it's a problem. It's something he's got to deal with. It's a contingency of his density in that pic to killer place in time. And he figures out a strategy for for coping with it. Well the question we ask in our research is could this contingency of identity like stereotype threat. Could that affect really some things that are important things that affect people's futures like their performance on standardized tests their performance in the classroom and so on. So we began

by doing research looking at women's in math women's performance in math and some of the very first experiment we ever did a simple experiment. Our reasoning was if we brought women in and men who were really good at math and dedicated to math we brought them into the laboratory one at a time. It gave them a difficult math exam. All alone in a room that this would be a fundamentally different experience for women and it would be for men and it would be fundamentally different because those contingencies of a density would be different. The stereotype threat that they would be under would be different for men. They would care about how well they do they're good at math they're invested in it if they don't do well maybe it suggests they don't have a critical ability they need for their future so they there's there are stakes there for them. But for women there's an extra threat in that situation which is that in this particular society there is a foot a broadly held stereotype that women are just that good at math that there's a limit

there of some sort. And so for them as they experience this frustration they could be confirming that stereotype. Or they could be worried that they're going to be seen to be confirming that stereotype. And since they're invested in math the prospect of being reduced to a stereotype and seen as limited in something you're invested in could be upsetting and they would be double their efforts to try to disprove it. They would start to ruminate about what it means and so on and so forth and with all that going on inside their our brains their performance would go down compared to men. And that's exactly what happened. Men and women we picked carefully for having the same skills in the frontier of their of those skills giving them a really difficult test. Women perform dramatically worse than men I mean very dramatically worse. However if our explanation is correct we should be able to do something

which would take the stereotype threat out of the situation. Take the contingency away and see their performance go up after a long time. We came up with a simple way of doing that which was simply to tell both the men and women before they took the test that look you may have heard that women aren't as good as men on complicated difficult math as you may have heard that. But that's not true for this particular test on this particular test. Women always do as well as men they always have they always will in a sense you're telling them there's nothing that happened to you on this test will prove anything about your being a woman. You could prove that you as an individual don't have the best math skills or something but you can't buy your frustration here prove anything about your being a woman on this particular test and under that simple instruction. Women's performance goes up to match that of equally skilled men. Do the same thing with race and IQ. Give give them an IQ

test. A hard frustrating IQ test the Raven's Progressive Matrices which gets very hard as it goes as you go up as you do more and more of them. It's a it's a matrix you see a design a big square and then you have to pick among 5 designs and little squares. Which of those five designs is a continuation of the design in the big square. It's a non-verbal tests. It's seen as the gold standard of of IQ tests. You give it to blacks and whites just. University of Oklahoma students and tell them it's an IQ test or tell me it's a test of cognitive abilities and lo and behold black students perform a full standard deviation worse than white students on this on this test which is exactly the size of the gap in the IQ performance in the broader population standard deviation 15 points on a standard IQ test. You tell them however that this test is not a test of cognitive abilities and can't begin to measure cognitive abilities it's just a puzzle.

It's just the POS black performance goes up to match the performance. What did you do when you told him it was a puzzle. Well you made the whole thing not about intelligence and that's what the stereotype in this society is all about is that this group you know there's all this stuff this is cheap and Gap all these things are in the nose they're just haunt American society like a ghost almost. So you can't be black and not know that stereotype about your group and you can't when you're in a test like that and it's an IQ test and it's getting really hard. You can probably help but think about that a little bit even though you won't admit to yourself that you're thinking about that that attempt not to think about it suppressing the stereotype is what turns out to be one of the biggest mediators is actually taking attention cognitive resources away from the IQ test itself and allocating them to this effort to save your. Your view of yourself and your performance is going down. So you take all that Mish you got your way by telling them that this is just a puzzle.

It's just a puzzlement It's got nothing to do with measuring your intelligence. And then their performance goes up. So you can get this all over the place the book describes all kinds of examples you get white males to sports golfing task the book starts out with this an example of you tell black and white athletes elite athletes at the University of Arizona that this 10 hole golf task is a test of natural athletic ability. So that's a stereotype which clearly puts the white guys under a disadvantage and they go in and sure enough they kind of flub their way around this course and get a significantly lower score dramatically lower score than the black athletes do because natural being a natural that's that's that's our thing as that's the way that stereotype works right. You can hear it in the in the in just the descriptions of the NBA finals all you have to do is turn it on you start to hear that kind of stereotype stereotype driven

logic emerge. But you can so that's what happens when you have when you present the test that way as a test of natural athletic ability. But you can flip it completely you can get the white athletes to outperform the black athletes on the sane test by telling them that it's a test of sports strategic intelligence. Then it flips. Now if you don't care about being an athlete you will make any difference what you say. This is a poignantly phenomenon focused on the vanguard of the group the people that are really a den of FIDE with this performance area I really care about doing well in it. It's there that you care about being read seen stereotypically. If you're a woman and you don't care about math and well it's really unfortunate that that stereotype exists but it's not. It's not going to affect me. But if you have devoted your life to it and you're invested in it then the prospect of being reduced to a stereotype has some real impact. And we know over the years what happens inside there

is this acceleration of heart rate that is theirs. You start to sweat galvanic skin response goes up blood pressure goes up. The part of the brain that you recruit to solve problems on tests the prefrontal cortex is quieted down. The part of the brain that keeps you vigilant to threat is much more activated when a person is under stereotype threat. And interestingly no one or very few people seem to have any insight into what's happening to them. It's a phenomenon that happens by and large beneath awareness beneath consciousness so you can go in the room I remember this when we first did these experiments and you talk to somebody who you you know was under stereotype threat and you could look at their test performance and it really they tanked out on this test and you'd ask them about it and they thought they'd done they'd done well they had that well I you know this is tough. I when the going gets tough I get more and more motivated I try really hard

and they had a sense that they had risen to the occasion. But you can see on the performance that they hadn't. That's the phenomenon that you have a sense when you're when you're trying to defeat a stereotype one way to think about it is that you're multitasking you're doing two things at the same time you may not realize it but in addition to just paying attention to the items on the test without unselfconsciously without thinking about it and just doing it. You were also ruminating at some level about I'm going to beat this I'm going to do this this is how you this when you're in this kind of situation is what you do this is is this important to me. Did I choose the right path in life. There are all kinds of thoughts that are there taking up capacity. OK. So that's the basic. It's a good deal those are good sort of illustrations of stereotypes but I want to remind you that one of the poignant things about them is that they are contingencies of a density. There are things that go with identity in particular situations.

One form we looked at eventually was the kind of stereotype threat that whites can feel in interracial interactions. It's a simple kind of threat. But if so here's an experiment. It's the easiest way to describe the thing we brought. White males into the lab one in time and they found out they were going to have a conversation with either two black guys or two white guys and they knew this by seeing two photographs of the people that they were going to have a conversation with two white guys two black guys. Then they find out what they're going to talk about. They're going to talk about either love or relationships which people are kind of easy to talk about not too threatening. Or are they going to talk about racial profiling. So you get the experiment. White guys are going to talk to two black guys or two white guys either about racial profiling or loving relationships. And then we say look. Would you set I'm going to go down the hall and get your conversation partners with you to bring

them in here. Would you would you arrange the chairs for this conversation would you. Would you do this for us and they do arrange the chairs and as you can probably guess that's that's the end of the experiment that's that's that's what we're we're looking at is is how does this a conversation the anticipation of this conversation how does this affect how they arrange the chairs and as you can predict when they're going to talk these with the white participant is going to talk to two white guys about anything love relationships or racial profiling the three chairs are very close together when they're going to talk to two black guys about love and relationships the three chairs are pretty close together. But we're going to talk to the two black guys about racial profiling the two black guys who are down here and their chairs over here. There's also interesting finding here which which is worth noting. We also measured prejudice and we psychologists are getting pretty sophisticated at that we can measure it without people having an ability to monitor what you're measuring very very very well.

So we use those measures the implicit measures of prejudice and we use explicit measures of prejudice. And Stanford students are very prejudice as most college student populations aren't but you do get a range of how they came up on that. And interestingly the Who do you think put their chairs farthest away in that critical conversation between the white guy and two black guys about racial profiling. Was it the people who were the least prejudiced or was it the people who the most prejudices put their chairs farthest away. It was the people who were the least prejudiced because just like the women who were the most dedicated to math being most upset by the prospect of being stereotyped in it the whites who were in a sense the most committed to having a conversation like that go successfully are the most anxious about having that conversation with two strangers. And so they put their chairs a little

farther a little more protectively away. Well and now again think about this in terms of its being not something that is a passing feature of life but something that's a contingency of an advantage that comes up in certain circumstances in particular places at particular times where the stereotype that's out there in the in the in the air about about our various The densities becomes relevant. That's where it comes down to fit. I for a long time struggled with the idea of people thinking that when when we when I talk about Stereotype Threat I'm talking about people internalizing stereotypes and believing the stereotype as something as a person as a as their own belief. That that happens I wouldn't deny that but but but look at the pattern of evidence here. The people who are showing this effect are always the vanguard of the group of the groups involved. They're always the African-American students who are the strongest students the women who are the strongest at Mass the whites in this

situation were the most liberal in the most interested in having a successful interaction there. So it doesn't make sense to say that this effect is happening because people have internalized it. Once you internalize it I think you know you you give up you a dissident to fight with the domain once I really believe that women are not good at math. As a woman I just forget about that domain I put my I make my career and my life somewhere else in another domain and then it doesn't hurt me so much a dissident if I would the whole thing. But the rub here the difficulty is that it happens to people who are the most invested in the domain. And it isn't plausible to see this as something as that is just an internalization. The psychic damage hypothesis is one of the oldest psychological hypotheses and existence and it's told about every oppressed group over the centuries. Women Jews you name it are supposed to have at some point or another internalized the negative

stereotypes about them and that can happen that can happen. But this is something that is different from that in that it may be an early stage of that. After a while a person gives in. But this is showing where the where the action is the action is in. Is it people who are resisting it. What makes it strong or weak then if it isn't made strong or weak by something internal to a person then what makes it strong or weak. The simple answer is the seed is the features of the environment that suggest that identity a given a density will have contingencies in the situation. The women in math experiment for example women's performance will on this difficult test at the frontier of their skills keep that in mind they their performance will go down. The more men you add to the testing room. So as you add men to the testing room it begins to go down. So why would that possibly be if you start if you put if you put a signs of

men up in the room. You'll start to see the performance go down in third rate great kids this was a study actually done here in the great schools in Cambridge the rooms where there were there was a lot of what teachers surely thought was inspiring homage to great people in math but it wound up that all the pictures on the walls were pictures of men and the and the girls and that the girls in that situation did far worse than than they did in situations where those pictures were not there cues cues just cues in a situation incidental cues I'll give you another a personal example I'm going to go to a Silicon Valley startup firm to pick up a former student of mine who's who works there. I'm feeling perfectly fine about myself not thinking very much I walk into this firm the quote The CEO is twenty six years old and everybody else in there is younger than he is. And I say I feel really old. I didn't feel old at all back in my psychology department. I'm a

normative age there so you don't think about age in that context. There are no cues there that suggest that in that context your age could be a factor but in a start up for if I were to for example try to get employment there. Think about that. Think about if I if I had to work then I had to convince those kids that somebody is old is me born that much before the digital age could ever write software like they could write software. I would you know I just know I experience profound stereotype threat every little raise of their eyebrows I'd be worried though is does that mean they don't believe I'm any good to this does that mean that you know they think I don't belong in here and then I hear the music that they play which I've never heard of before and I think my God maybe they're right I don't know me because I do I really don't fit into this case and why aren't they sitting next to me in the cafeteria and you know they had a they had a party this weekend and nobody told me about it and. So the whole world lights up with regard to that identity and that

that that particular identity which over in the psych department was completely quiet and thought about in this situation now that I've got to make a living in a software firm everything is lit up there and all of my. And you could you could easily do brain studies which we've done and show that those parts of the brain which are which where we become vigilant to what's going on in a situation those parts of the brain they're very lit up and the parts that normally do the cognitive sort of frontal work there they're kind of repressed. We're allocating attention quite without knowing it in a way that is the most adaptive in this. In this situation we're trying to pick up threat. And can we cope with the threat and the like. So you know this is kind of the heavy contingency of identity I think everybody has this kind of contingency of these kinds of contingencies of identity in some situation or a next. I try to give a range of examples of the important to people where where this kind of thing might

exist. How do you how do you fix it. Well one thing I'm gratified about is that the phenomenon does seem to be something that is situationally now uble. You don't have to lay somebody down on a couch and psychoanalyze them into a pot more positive image about themselves. These are people who have pretty positive images about themselves and laying them down on a couch to create one would be very difficult timely work. Think about Woody Allen how long it took him to. Be remotely self accepting. That's hard work. Changing the inside but changing the outside getting the cues so that they don't threaten. That's something that's at least more malleable. That's that's that's more possible. And I think that's one route to thinking about a solution to these problems or reducing these problems in third grade math rooms. You can make sure that there are images of successful women who do math and who do

science. And you can make sure that that's there and then that takes that away anyway. We did a kind of anthropological ethnographic all assessment of the math department which was right next to the psych department at Stanford and what a woman would have to do to suit to survive there and I don't have the overhead it's a cute little overhead but what you see for a woman to get into her office she has to go down this long hallway with all these men who are the famous mathematicians of the world if you if you just subconsciously takeing then you think a woman could never be good at math this good at math because there isn't one up here. Then she gets to her office and the only one bathroom in the whole math department is way down in the basement because there haven't been women in the math department for a long time so they may just to go down to fours to get into this small bathroom that's been jimmied underneath the stairway. And she takes the course and all the examples are in terms of baseball. And.

So. So the cues begin to add up which begin to have an effect on people in that situation. And women leave math for no good reason. When men leave math at the college level we leave because we're bad at it. When women leave math there's no relationship to how well they're doing and whether they're going to stay or go you can't predict it from there. Their performance they're leaving for other reasons I'm not saying this pressure is the only reason there are obviously other things I think involved but this is a biggie because it makes people feel uncomfortable. And just to put think that you're going to live a life choose to put yourself in a situation where you're in this kind of situation for a lot for a prolonged indefinite period of time that makes That's a big choice that's hard to commit to. So changing some of those kids is a big thing. There's a lot of research though that tries to stop back back up a second and say Well in principle I think it's critical to make this situation better.

I'll give an example of myself being in graduate school when I went to graduate school in psychology at Ohio State in 19. I was the only African-American you know anywhere around graduate programs in in the social sciences and it was painful this was before there was any significant affirmative action that the numbers were were tiny. And so you know I can remember being in a seminar at one point and just seeing my hands and. Not knowing necessarily what to make of it but just you know they're brown. Nobody else is nobody in this field who's been any good at this field is is African-American nobody here all the values all the images of who is smart are like European and how will I ever be like that. They are just so many incidental features and cues in the situation added up to make that a difficult situation that it was very stressful I felt some pain.

However as time went by I had an advisor who only had had me as his only graduate student and he was coming up for tenure and he needed to get research out and so like he had to believe in me. I was as you know I was his only horse to ride and I could tell that he did believe in me and it was a simple It was a simple thing he like cared about getting the work done and he was like all over that. I mean you know you wouldn't he worked at night you had this odd thing that ruined his marriage eventually but he worked all night long and he kind of slept until about 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. So so you have these long sessions over data and he light a big candle in the room and and we'd like to pray that the data would work well and and this made me think well he takes this really seriously this work and he takes me seriously as a partner in this work. So I didn't I didn't have that as an explicit idea but the fact that that

relationship existed and he seemed to think that I could could could succeed here gave me a sense that I had space in this world right down the hall. There was a guy who used the N-word in his lectures and down the other hall there was a guy who was absolutely convinced that black people had that their lower eye school's IQ scores were due to genetic difference racial genetic differences. That that was just where that came from and the quicker we accepted that the better. So there was just this tenor in the place that had plenty of cues. But even in that situation this relationship gave me a narrative about it a larger understanding that there would be room for me here especially if I really worked at it. And since he he had a very demanding approach to this. Later on we actually did an experiment to test this idea we gave white and black Stanford students. We had them write essays about their favorite teacher and we said we're going to grade them and come back in two in two days and you get

how well you did on that essay. They came back in two days. And what we were and they got feedback. I'll tell you no second of different the different ways we gave it. But what we were interested in is did they believe the feedback did they trust the feedback and did it motivate them to improve their work. And the way we gave the feedback that didn't work the ways we gave it it didn't work. Our one we just gave them the feedback. Here's the feedback. And another condition we said first this is what all of us professors do. We said well I really really I really like you a lot man I knew your I knew your sister and I really like you I like the whole family man but here's the feedback. When you do that black students at Stanford do not believe the feedback and not as much and not trusting it. They aren't as motivated by it. And why why would that be the case well you can see that their race is actually and the stereotypes about it are and Biggie weighting the feedback is the feedback coming from. Is it coming from my work or is it coming from a stereotype about

my work. And with that kind of ambiguity you kind of it doesn't mean the same thing to you. But what did work was what my advisor did for me which was we gave the feedback in the following way. We said look I read your essay I read your essay. I've got some real serious criticisms of your essay but I think you can meet them. I think you can write a great essay. And that was like transformative to me and it was transformative to the subjects that the participants in the research 75 percent of them took the essays home to to improve them and this was just an experiment. So there are these kinds of things I think what they have in common is building a narrative of trust in the situation that there is room for some. Some researchers have just injected it directly into some freshman at Yale for example and one experiment white and black X.. Freshman at Yale see a 20 minute video of a black guy who's

18 months ahead of them in school and the black guy says When I first came to Yale It was horrible I hated it I went home on the weekends all the time I never thought I could fit in here it was just. I sed. I did that. My father finally got sick of me coming home on the weekends he said look you got to go back you've got to make a life in jail I went back my roommate and I started a singing group. We started singing around departments I went to a biology lecture and man at that like she was really fascinating. And then I I went to another one in sociology and that was really fascinating and and you know I decided to major in biology and that I just love that and Yale is like a fantastic place there's so many resources here there's so much I can get out of it and I just I'm so fortunate to be here in the video. Next semester their grades the black students who see this video go up a third of a letter grade two years later two years later their grades are a half a letter grade higher than black students who did not see that

video at Yale. Well why would that be. Why would that be. Well they've got what the same thing that my advisor gave me. They've got they've been given in this kind of way that you could take it in. If somebody like me walked in and gave him that lecture about Yale that wouldn't work but if they see somebody who's their same age and who's just a little bit ahead of them they just take it in like that's the way things are. And with that narrative in mind that understanding of Yale the cues that would otherwise and were previously threatening and off putting no longer have that meaning that they don't mean you don't belong here and you can't make it here. I mean they're just there and you can you can get on with it here. It kind of changes the degree to which that threat that contingency is is powerful. Well I can go on listing these experiments until the cows come home but I'd love to spend some time answering your questions so I'll stop them here. There are some individual differences that seem to moderated or you know affect the strength of it.

One of them is what's called stigma consciousness I'm remembering from the literature which is the degree to which people have an elaborated view that their group could be stigmatized in settings. So if you already have that view that can make that increases your readiness with which to see this see cues as threatening in this way. But but for the most part and you can tell what my stress has been my stress has been to to to make a point that and this is really just following the path of this research over over the years my might my stress has been to to show what's been most amazing to me which is that many of the things we think of as insulating us from stereotype threat and the need to whistle leval they actually make it more likely to happen make us more vulnerable to it so. So the first part of your comment yes indeed the more committed you are to doing well in the domain in some circumstances. Now you know I hasten to add that I don't want to paint such a picture here that and

that's what I love to spend more time talking about solutions that that stereotype just completely for cream closing because it isn't in particular situations we do get past it. One thing that that is true about. The use of stereotypes is that the more we know about a person the less likely we use stereotypes and broader categories to judge them or understand them so the more people know me and my idiosyncrasies and so on the less likely they are to see me in terms of those stereotypes. And at some level or another I know that so and in environments where I'm very familiar in my psych department that I used to be very familiar they know a lot about me good and bad and I'm pretty confident that they're most of the time not really using race to interpret interpret me. So I feel pretty comfortable in that situation.

But I could walk across the hall to the history department and be somewhat wondering maybe at some level I think this is I do think I'm an affirmative action baby or something. I mean no. So that's kind of how it works. I can't help but suspect that they would although you know talking to black parents they're often surprised that their kids are having trouble because they think they have had generations of middle class family but now they're in a kind of particularly elite and competitive situation and this kind of think there can be this kind of surprising under-performance there. But I do think I've seen on the other hand that families that are very sophisticated about these things can give kids tools which help them deal with that or just just understanding's of stereotypes and and that they are going to meet them but if they meet them here's how to think about them and

and they can give them narratives of a situation where they can trust more. You're going into a situation where maybe these things there but you can still make it. And so they're giving them a framework for looking out at us at a situation which doesn't foreclose they are succeeding there. Whereas if you come from a family without that experience without that background the kid might get in that situation and not know that might take the first cues as something a really this is bad man. And I don't know how I'm going to deal with it. They have to learn that that they can that they that experience I had with my adviser they have to learn that there is going to be room for you in this field even though there are all these cues there. So I can see family preparation having that kind of an effect. Well you know I can say I can say one simple thing that if when you look across this the research literature on this and other related literature says diversity of

the situation is huge. We all count. You know if I'm the only white person in a group and. I said I count I see how many other people. So we all count. And what do we do while we counting. Well there's some part of us which is which is calculating you know how how comfortable or whether there's a density I've got is going to be a problem here or not. So so one big thing that you know has done the very troubled but I think ultimately successful idea in American society. I mean it's going to the Supreme Court and back again it's diversity it in. We see it in experiments. It wipes out everything. For example we did an experiment once where we were looking at how much do you trust. They're coming they're coming into a graduate business school program and they see a newsletter about this business school and we vary the diversity of the people who are pictured in the in the newsletter. And we diverge. We vary a variety of other

things for example the diversity ideology that the Business School says it has we value difference or no we're completely colorblind and these are things which which you could you could argue would make a difference as far as the participants were concerned it was always counting. It didn't have to be your own group interesting Lee. It just had to be a variety of different kind of people. Then I take the message that my particular identity is not going to be a deal here because a lot of different kind of people here. And that trumped whether you. The difference is in idea diversity ideology that graduate school expressed in his newsletter. So so that's a big fat one. I do think the demanding but ability affirming strategies of instruction are really good and underutilized I think it's transformative for all of us to be told that you know I've looked at your work. It needs some work but I think you can

do it. When you hear that it's like wow well. And that can change the direction of your life. To hear it to hear that and in an area. So I think that kind of thing which isn't in some cases closer to the truth. Another thing is the way ability is represent. We tend to represent. And here I'm taking from my former colleague and still good friend Carol Dweck. Whether you view ability as a fixed quantity that you've got so much of or whether you view it as an incremental thing that can be forever expanded. If if if it's incremental and can be ever expanded and I just blew this test well then the obvious thing for me to do is get busy and I can get better and better at this thing and I'll organize myself to do if I if it's a fixed thing. This math ability for example and I just blew this test and they didn't do so well in that other quiz then it's a clue that I don't belong here. I better find

something else to to do so that's another thing that can buffer the impact of this stereotype threat as a contingency of a density in a situation. I m fund of the idea of the work that the idea of a density contingency buys because I struggle for a long time to sch to explain how something can be connected to your Dennehy and not be internalized and held as a personal belief. And it's just given the organ you know like thank you. Not going to the swimming pool it was it was an internalized that I didn't belong in the swimming pool. It was just a contingency I had to deal with because of the way that society I found myself in was organized around that identity. At that particular time. And that's how these things sort of stay with us in one critical situation to another. So when you look at women in math the it's a big deal in math and and they're and it's

this contingency is a big deal in science based fields. They go across the hall to the English department it's not there there's nothing there that's comparable. I do think it's important I mean and here I am just warming over some pretty well worked ideas but there is you know racism which we know a great deal about now. I mean it's amazing the last 10 years or so I think we've gotten a lot more insight about how that works and how automatic it can be and how much of a mental habit it can be so that almost nobody is immune to being racist. And that's one kind of thing. Another kind of thing though is how our society is organized around race and the. Inferences people implicitly without realizing it draw from that. I'll give you an example in terms of gender when we first did that

experiment I described the first one on women in math you know we told the test. That this test didn't didn't show gender differences. We went to Poland and we did the same thing I just happen to know somebody and we went to Poland and we did the experiments there. Nothing no stereotype threat effect. In Poland half of the mathematicians half of the engineers half the physicians are women. It's it's a legacy from communism. And so in the end in the environment the way the environment is organized the credibility of that stereotype doesn't have any traction doesn't it doesn't connect in that in that stereotype. So that's how the organization of a society can can have can fuel or or dampen away a stereotype if we want to Largo's Nigeria. Race is not a meaningful Konst construct there and in the same way that it is in the United States.

Well yes. Oh my goodness. That's right. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. I gotta think fast because I'm not sure I know. What.

Oh now I got some traction here. Michael Jackson live what charge should we talk about this surgery is the drug you want you. Oh that's a great question to end this on because if there's anybody that whistle Vivaldi it will be Michael Jackson. All right. How many surgeries could you go. I mean he did a lot more of the whistle he should learn how to whistle of all the you could've saved himself a lot of money and and health. But yes I do think Michael Jackson is you know is kind of a poignant example of that. I don't want to I don't want to again make Whistling Vivaldi seem like two to deep thing.

I remember one time I was talking a lot about this who's actually there and she said you going to name that book Whistling Vivaldi I don't know if you remember this but it worried me because whistling of all these things like a negative thing to do it so you're putting you're putting the process in a negative light that Whistling Vivaldi here. But I couldn't think of a better title. Ultimately we stuck with that but. But I do think everybody does it. We do it in relation to our age all the time we will have all the idol. I'd love to see this just be a piece of the vocabulary because you know there are so many circumstances where we we all whistle the ball that we perform something that we think will deflect the stereotype. You know and I remember talking to our good friend Bill Wilson and he and he was saying yeah man when I go on an airplane I wear a you know a suit and a tie and he wears I've hardly ever seen him without that. But and he says not in the ordinary course of events that makes a difference

but if something goes wrong there's confusion then having that tie on gets me perceived differently than it would if I didn't have that tie on. And it it's a form of Whistling Vivaldi to deflect the stereotype and in a way. So yes Michael Jackson did indeed whistle Vivaldi.