![]() ![]() But that additional pressure is a drain on resources. When there exists a negative stereotype about some aspect of a person’s identity, that person feels pressured by it – they want to prove people wrong and show that it doesn’t apply. Steele’s insight is that we are all part of a larger society which has widely held stereotypes. This is what Steele means by a stereotype threat. Vastly different results depending on whether the instructions tapped into a negative stereotype that the students felt applied to them. Whites had no variation in their scores whether told or not. The results were the exact opposite of the earlier experiment – blacks who were told that scored 4 strokes worse compared to blacks who weren’t. ![]() This added pressure might hurt their golfing.” So they told the next batch of students that the golfing was a test of “sports strategic intelligence”. Then, as black participants golfed, they’d have to fend off, like whites in the earlier experiment, the bad stereotype about their group. All they’d have to do was represent the golfing task as measuring something related to a bad stereotype of blacks. The researchers then tried to figure out how to reverse the situation, with the idea that “it should be possible to set up a stereotype threat that would interfere with black students’ golfing as well. And this, in turn, might be upsetting and distracting enough to add an average of three strokes to their scores.” ![]() The researchers hypothesized that students were putting more pressure on themselves because of the societal stereotype that whites have less athletic ability such that “their frustration on the task could be seen as confirming the stereotype, as a characterization both of themselves and of their group. Black students had no variation in their scores whether they were told or not. White students who were told it was a test of “natural athletic ability” did 3 strokes worse over 10 holes than did white students who were told nothing. Other students were told in advance that it was a test of “natural athletic ability”. In one experiment, Princeton students were asked to play a round of miniature golf in the laboratory. I didn’t know what being black meant, but I was getting the idea that it was a big deal.” He became a social psychologist, and this book recounts his work and the work of others in trying to understand what impedes the performance of certain groups in stereotyped situations.įirst, he explains the idea of stereotype threat via experiments. As he puts it, “This is how I became aware I was black. He had not previously been aware of being black, but this restriction on what he could do illuminated it. He cites his first experience of “race” as a construct – when he was a kid, he was told that he could only go to the local public swimming pool in Chicago on Wednesday afternoons. Steele does not discount the existence of outright prejudice as being an issue that minorities face. And armed with that knowledge, Steele goes on to make specific recommendations how to address that issue. Whistling Vivaldi shares decades’ worth of experiments that pinpoint a primary issue that minorities face in such situations. Diversity issues are everywhere these days, and they seem hopeless to overcome – when looking at a problem like why so few women are in technology, people argue about whether it’s a pipeline issue (not enough girls and women being interested in tech), a retainment issue (doing a better job of supporting women once in the tech world), or pure prejudice (outright sexism by men in the tech world), but all of these require sweeping changes to improve. Subtitled “How stereotypes affect us and what we can do”, this is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in a while. ![]()
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