Whistling Vivaldi: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Ted McDougal was a white student at an excellent university, taking an African American political science class. He noticed that he was one of two white students in the class. He also noticed that black students in the class used the word “we” a lot when discussing history, clearly not including him. McDougal found that he was expending more energy trying not to say the “wrong thing” in class than he was studying the material.

Steele later spoke with McDougal. McDougal said that the class had taught him an important lesson: “smartness” is also the product of one’s environment, not just one’s cognitive abilities. Steele suggested that McDougal’s caution in class had reduced his performance, and further suggested that he was experiencing threatening identity contingencies.

Every group on the planet is stereotyped negatively in some way. In any situation in which that group feels the weight of a negative stereotype, their behavior is likely to change in measurable ways. However, in the early 1990s, Steele still lacked evidence that his findings for blacks and women could be generalized to apply to any identity group. He wanted to pursue two questions in particular: 1) would people who’d shown no previous signs of susceptibility to a stereotype be influenced by a stereotype threat?, and 2) could stereotype threat effects be measured in other groups, as well as blacks and women? Steele first decided to pursue the first question.

Steele collaborated with his colleagues and developed a measure for identity threats. High-performing, confident white math students would be pitted against Asian-American math students: white students would be given a test and told that Asian-Americans traditionally did better on the test. The beauty of the experiment was that it measured stereotype threats for people who’d rarely thought about that stereotype—in other words, it measured how white male students would perform when they were made aware of the stereotype that Asian-Americans were better at math. (While it could be objected that white students already knew about this stereotype, Steele reasons that positive stereotypes of another group wouldn’t have a big impact on the white students’ inferiority, especially since these were already confident, high-performing white male students.)

The experiment suggested that gifted white math students underperformed on the test when they were told that Asian-Americans generally did better on the test. Around the same time, a Harvard study concluded that Asian women underperformed on math tests when reminded of their gender but did better when reminded of their race. The two experiments suggested that identity contingencies exerted a major influence on different identity groups’ cognitive performance—even if the subjects hadn’t experienced a lifetime of identity contingencies.

Steele’s next step was to gather further evidence of “the breadth of stereotype threat effects.” By gathering this evidence, Steele was aiming to reinforce his position that behavior was as much a product of external social factors as it was a product of “internal susceptibility.”

The French social psychologist Jean-Claude Croizet has spent years conducting tests measuring the impact of stereotyping on the French working classes. His studies of French students mirror Steele’s findings: working-class students did significantly worse on their tests if they were primed to think about the stereotype that working-class French people aren’t as good at language ability. Other researchers in North Carolina in the early 1990s found similar results for elderly people and memory. In the years following Steele’s groundbreaking research, social psychologists have replicated his findings for many different identities, on tests measuring many different abilities—everything from athletic prowess and reaction time performance to verbal reasoning and memory. Steele says he will now go on to address a question often asked in frustration: "why can't a person just buckle down and overcome the damn stereotype?"