Reprinted from WHISTLING VIVALDI: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. Copyright © 2010 by Claude M. Steele with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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. Generally speaking, contingencies are circumstances you have to deal with in order to get what you want or need in a situation. In the Chicagoland of my youth, in order to go swimming at the public pool I had to restrict my pool going to Wednesday afternoons. That’s a contingency. What makes this an identity contingency is that the people involved had to deal with it because they had a particular social identity in the situation. Other people didn’t have to deal with it, just the people who had the same identity I had.

How do identity contingencies influence us? Some constrain our behavior down on the ground, like restricted access to a public swimming pool. Others, just as powerful, influence us more subtly, not by constraining behavior on the ground but by putting a threat in the air.

Consider the experience of Brent Staples, now a columnist for The New York Times, but then a psychology graduate student at the University of Chicago, a young African-American male dressed in informal student clothing walking down the streets of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. In his own words:

I became an expert in the language of fear. Couples locked arms or reached for each other’s hand when they saw me. Some crossed to the other side of the street. People who were carrying on conversations went mute and stared straight ahead, as though avoiding my eyes would save them … I’d been a fool. I’d been walking the streets grinning good evening at people who were frightened to death of me. I did violence to them by just being. How had I missed this … I tried to be innocuous but didn’t know how … I began to avoid people. I turned out of my way into side streets to spare them the sense that they were being stalked … Out of nervousness I began to whistle and discovered I was good at it. My whistle was pure and sweet—and also in tune. On the street at night I whistled popular tunes from the Beatles and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The tension drained from people’s bodies when they heard me. A few even smiled as they passed me in the dark.

Staples was dealing with a phantom, a bad stereotype about his race that was in the air on the streets of Hyde Park—the stereotype that young African-American males in this neighborhood are violence prone. People from other groups in other situations might face very different stereotypes—about lacking math ability rather than being violence prone, for example—but their predicaments would be the same. When they were in situations where those stereotypes could apply to them, they understood that one false move could cause them to be reduced to that stereotype, to be seen and treated in terms of it. That’s stereotype threat, a contingency of their identity in these situations.

Evidence of the Strength of Stereotype Threat

We aren’t islands: Our life-shaping choices and critical performances can be affected by incidental features of our environments, even as we have little awareness of those features.

We had evidence that these cues, and the threat they caused, could impair performance and even make a person less interested in a career path. But we lacked direct evidence that incidental cues make people feel they don’t belong in an actual setting, or that they can’t trust the setting.

My colleague, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, and I came up with a simple experiment to find out. We gave samples of Black and white respondents a lifelike newsletter ostensibly from a Silicon Valley company and asked them, after they’d read it thoroughly, to rate how much they felt they would belong in a company like that, and how much they would trust it. To see whether incidental features of the company, presumably by signaling possible identity contingencies in this workplace, would affect people’s sense of belonging and trust there, we made up different newsletters—newsletters that included different company features—and then compared their effect on people’s sense of belonging and trust.

Some of the newsletters included photographs of daily life that depicted a small number of minorities (Blacks, Latinos and Asians) in the company. In other newsletters, these photographs depicted a larger number of minorities in the company. We wanted to learn the effect of another cue as well: the company’s stated policy toward diversity. Some of the newsletters therefore included a prominent article stating that the company was strongly committed to “color-blindness”— defined as treating people, and trying to foster their welfare, as individuals. And some of the newsletters included a prominent article stating that the company was strongly committed to “valuing diversity”—defined as valuing the different perspectives and resources that people from different backgrounds bring to the workplace.

It was a simple procedure, and portable, too. We could hand out the newsletters to different samples of Black and white respondents—to college students in the laboratory for sure, but also to business-school students in a cafeteria, to an organization of Black professionals at a TGIF mixer and to perfectly innocent people riding the commuter train between Palo Alto and San Francisco. We used all of these different samples, and for all of them we examined the effect of the same two cues—critical mass of minorities and diversity policy—on how much they felt they would belong in the company and trust it.

The results were strong for virtually every sample we studied. White respondents (depicted as the majority group in our newsletters) felt they would belong in the company and trusted the company no matter what cues the newsletter contained—regardless of whether it depicted a small or moderate number of minorities in the company (the highest percentage of minorities we depicted was 33 percent) and of whether the company had a color-blind or valuing diversity policy. Majority status, inside and outside the company, allowed a sense of belonging.

Black respondents, however, counted. When the company was depicted as having a moderate number of minorities, they trusted it and felt they would belong in it as much as white respondents did. And they felt this way regardless of the company’s diversity policy. Critical mass laid their vigilance to rest.

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 colorblindness 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.

The findings also reveal something more general: When people are appraising identity threat, one cue can shape the interpretation of another. A policy that explicitly valued diversity led Black respondents to overlook the low number of minorities in the company, a cue that otherwise bothered them considerably. And depicting a larger number of minorities in the company led them to overlook concerns they would otherwise have had about a color-blind diversity policy. The meaning of one cue, then, depended on what other cues were also present.

Herein may lie a principle of remedy: If enough cues in a setting can lead members of a group to feel “identity safe,” it might also neutralize the impact of other cues in a setting that could otherwise threaten them.

The studies Valerie and I did opened a possibility: to make a setting identity safe, perhaps you don’t need to change everything, eradicate every possible identity threatening cue, for example. Perhaps you could do it with a few critical changes, which by assuring a critical degree of identity safety could reduce the threatening meaning of other cues.

WHISTLING VIVALDI: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us by Claude M. Steele was published in May by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. It is available at Amazon.com or wherever books are sold for $25.95.

The post Challenges in Diversity Management: How Do Stereotypes Affect Us? appeared first on DiversityInc.

For acclaimed social psychologist Dr. Claude Steele, the numbers just didn’t make sense. Why, he wondered, was the national college dropout rate for Black students 20 to 25 percent higher than that for whites even when those students were just as well-prepared for college, had no socioeconomic disadvantages and managed to get excellent SAT scores? And among those Black students who did finish college, why was their grade-point average consistently lower than white students?

Drawing from his new book, “Whistling Vivaldi,” Steele offered corporate leaders and diversity executives attending DiversityInc’s global diversity event in Washington, D.C, this week an insider’s look at his groundbreaking research on stereotypes and identity and the role they play in academic achievement and underachievement among Blacks and women. 

“You must read this book,” Luke Visconti, CEO of DiversityInc, told the audience. “You will end up buying boxes of it for your corporation. Make sure your white men get a copy of it. Why do you think the educational resources aren’t there in the inner-city schools? Society believes those children are not capable of learning. Now we are aware of this. Think about mentoring. Think about employee-resource groups and the role [this information] can play in getting people to perform and eliminating bias.”

According to Steele, one of the major barriers holding back the achievement of Blacks, women and other underrepresented groups is a phenomenon he calls “stereotype threat,” the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype. Call it subconscious self-handicapping.

In his insightful and engaging lecture, Steele, who at the time of the event was the provost at Columbia University, said that overcoming stereotype threats is key to removing barriers to achievement that currently hinder Blacks, women and other underrepresented groups in school and the workplace. Steele is now the dean at Stanford University School of Education.

“Over the years, studying this problem of underperformance has morphed into solving the diversity problem,” said Steele, who taught at Stanford University as a professor in social psychology before joining Columbia last year. “It’s one thing to numerically integrate a setting. It’s another thing to make that place a place where everyone feels comfortable and can flourish.”

Steele’s theory starts with the concept of social identity, which he defined as group membership in categories such as age, gender, religion and ethnicity. Blacks constantly face the threat of being considered racially inferior, a stereotype that has long been entrenched in American society. As such, Black students quickly learn that their acceptance will be difficult to win.

Steele said anxiety about being judged stereotypically as a woman, Black, even a white male—particularly when that stereotype is negative—can seriously hinder performance on important tests like the SAT. For example, Steele noted that when Black students are told that they are taking a test to measure their intelligence, it can bring to mind rather forcefully ugly, untrue stereotypes about Black intelligence as it compares to whites.

Systemic Underperformance

Steele became interested in the topic shortly after he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1987 and was tapped to join a committee to study the university’s student recruitment and retention. The data he saw was baffling: high dropout rates for Black students and lower grades across the board when compared with whites, regardless of how high their SAT scores were or whether they came from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds.

He said Black students earning lower grades than white students wouldn’t have surprised him in and of itself. “The differences in educational opportunities tied to race lead one to expect that kind of difference,” he said. But what he saw was far more systemic.

“What I saw was this slide at every level of SAT scores and regardless of preparation for college work,” he said. “Someone coming in with a 1,500 SAT score was getting lower grades than other students, and I wondered what could be causing that. Why would students that good underperform? Why were they underperforming in an environment like Michigan, which had a set of programs in place to welcome them and support available to them? That was the puzzle that got us started.”

Over the past 20 years, Steele has conducted numerous studies to test his theory of stereotype threat. In one study, he asked two groups of Black and white college students to take a 30-minute test made up of questions from the verbal section of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). The test was designed to be difficult and the results were shocking.

When one group was told the test would measure their intellectual ability, Black students underperformed dramatically. But when another group was told the test could not measure intellectual ability, Blacks and whites performed at virtually the same level.

“When you get ride of the stereotype threat and tell the students this is not a test of cognitive ability, it’s just a puzzle, have fun—that small instruction makes the stereotype irrelevant,” Steele said. “When you create that situation, their performance goes up to match that of white students.”

Feeling Threatened

The same effect also holds true when women take a math test that supposedly measures cognitive differences between the genders, or even when white males are exposed to stereotypes about the academic superiority of, say, Asians, Steele said.

“When you feel under threat, you know that based on an identity you have, something bad could happen. You don’t know whether in fact it will happen. You don’t know precisely what could happen or when or where it could happen,” he said. “It’s like having a snake loose in the house. It’s a terrible feeling. When you are in this situation, most of your cognitive resources are devoted to vigilance.”

Steele said this anxiety often manifests itself in psychological and physiological ways, including distraction, increased body temperature and increased heart rate, all of which diminish performance levels.

“If you care about what you are doing, the prospect of being judged is upsetting and distressing and disturbing,” he said. “In a situation like this, it takes cognitive resources away from a relaxed engagement with the task at hand and that undermines your performance.”

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