As Steele himself acknowledges, some social psychologists continue to deny that stereotype threats really exert such a powerful influence on people. It’s not surprising that Steele’s findings have faced a lot of criticism, both from laypeople and other social psychologists. In short, Steele’s research suggests that the fear of confirming a stereotype exerts a powerful, measurable influence on people’s behavior-and, furthermore, that this fear can be curbed or provoked through a variety of environmental factors. For example, studies suggest that white students will underperform on an exam if they’re informed that Asian Americans generally do better on the exam-even if the white students haven’t ever devoted a lot of time to thinking about the stereotype that Asian Americans are good at math. Perhaps most surprisingly, Steele’s experiments suggest that identity groups may experience a stereotype threat even if they haven’t previously experienced that stereotype threat in their life. Other studies have found physiological evidence for the stereotype threat, including higher blood pressure and an elevated heart rate. Steele’s findings have been replicated among many different identity groups, including women, Asian Americans, and the elderly. The peculiar thing about Steele’s research is that his subjects weren’t responding to any overt display of racism-simply the announcement that their test measured intelligence was enough to trigger a “stereotype threat.” The extra stress and anxiety of thinking about the stereotype distracted them, and resulted in lower average test scores. Steele interprets his experiments to suggest that black students’ fear of confirming a stereotype-namely, that black people are less intelligent than white people-acted as an obstacle to their success on the test. However, black students who’d been told the exam didn’t measure intelligence performed at the same level as their white counterparts. Steele found that black students who’d been told that the exam measured intelligence did worse than white students who’d received the same information. Half of the students were told that the exam measured intelligence, while the other half were told that the exam was a diagnostic test, and that black and white students did equally well on it. For example, Steele and his colleagues organized experiments in which black and white Stanford students were asked to take a difficult test. Much of Steele’s research is centered around the fear of being stereotyped-or, put another way, of living up to a stereotype, particularly in a university setting. Steele shows how stereotyping, and the threat of being stereotyped, can exert a huge influence on different people’s behavior.Īrguably Steele’s most important insight about stereotyping is that the awareness of stereotypes (and particularly the fear of being stereotyped) can be more powerful than an explicit case of stereotyping. For example, a math professor who assumes that a female student isn’t going to be able to understand the material is using a sexist stereotype-that women aren’t good at math-to judge the student’s behavior. Stereotyping is, of course, a common form of bigotry. Furthermore, Steele argues that every unique identity has a related stereotype-a kind of short-hand for perceiving how people with that identity will behave. One of the premises of his research is that human beings will inevitably judge each other on the basis of their identity. During his decades of research into social psychology, Claude Steele has studied many different forms of identity, including, race, gender, ethnicity, social orientation, class, and age. The central theme of Whistling Vivaldi is identity, and, furthermore, the different ways people respond to each other’s identities.
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