When election hyperbole raises stereotypes, here’s an antidote

Virginia Immanuel, GHRI director of information technology emerita, reviews a book on stereotype threat — what it is and how to combat it.

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
by Claude M. Steele
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010

by Virginia Immanuel, MPH, Group Health Research Institute director of research information technology emerita

Last winter, Group Health Research Institute sponsored diversity workshops by Caprice Hollins, PsyD. Dr. Hollins is a mesmerizing speaker and when she recommended the book Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, I immediately added it to my reading list. A nod from such an esteemed speaker was a high endorsement, and at least as important, the title was charming! This was a good tip: the book is eminently readable and in our highly charged political season, the topic is as timely as ever.

The author, Claude M. Steele, PhD, is a researcher and professor of social psychology who has worked at several prominent universities. Likely because he is black, he has been invited to lead student minority affairs groups on campus and has found himself drawn into the question of the impact of stereotyping on academic performance. A problem that especially concerned him was why minority students with high college-admission test scores got lower grades at college than dominant-culture students with the same scores. Over the course of many experiments, he came to realize that there is a factor at play he called “stereotype threat”: the risk of confirming a negative stereotype. He experimented with this by giving frustration-level tests to various groups of students. When he found a way to frame a test that would remove the stereotype threat, students did equally well; when he simply gave the test — with all the societal stereotypes “in the air” — the threatened students underperformed.

Whistling Vivaldi — which is how an African-American friend of Dr. Steele’s deflects stereotypes as he walks down the street — is a must-read for all of us as we seek to understand our troubled social environment.

For example, when a math test was given to a group of men and women, and the test-takers were told that “on this particular test, women always do as well as men,” the women did do as well as the men. In contrast, when the math test was given without “framing,” women did worse than men. Presumably, the women brought to the test the societal belief that women don’t do well in math. The implication is that fear of confirming a negative group stereotype is distracting enough to significantly interfere with performance.

Once Dr. Steele was able to isolate this threat in a laboratory situation, he tested many variations on this theme to tease out the difference between expectation and threat, to control for differences in interest and motivation, to quantify physiological reactions, and to measure impacts of remediating interventions. He brought home the point that stereotype threat is strong enough to affect group behavior, even when all individuals in a group are essentially prejudice-free. He gives the example of a high school lunchroom, where students typically sit at “white tables” or “black tables.” If a student chooses to sit at the “wrong” table, s/he will feel threats from all sides: Will my group think I am being disloyal to them? Will this other group think I am trying to prove a point? Will I fit in? Even if everyone in both groups will behave admirably, it is very difficult to be in the shoes of the person testing this out.

Some reviewers of this book have complained that it is too repetitive, but I suspect that they are not researchers! While at first glance each observation seems the same as one described in a previous chapter, in fact, Dr. Steele is marching methodically through the process of building a cohesive body of scientific knowledge on this topic. He achieves a remarkable accomplishment in defining and explaining this pernicious aspect of society. Even better, he goes the next step and offers effective countermeasures (such as deliberately using the type of counterframing he used in his studies, when he told women they could do as well on a math test as men). Whistling Vivaldi — which is how an African-American friend of Dr. Steele’s deflects stereotypes as he walks down the street — is a must-read for all of us as we seek to understand our troubled social environment.

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