Whistling Vivaldi: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

The social psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron conducted an experiment in which they asked male students to walk across a narrow, rickety bridge. Then, each student completed a questionnaire with an attractive female interviewer, who then gave the student her phone number and invited him to call her if he had any questions. Aron and Dutton were trying to measure if the students would mistake their own anxiety while crossing the bridge for attraction to the interviewer. They found that students who’d just crossed the scary bridge were likelier to call the interviewer than students who took the questionnaire after crossing a lower, more stable bridge, or who were met by a male interviewer after crossing the scary bridge. This suggests that people can’t always make sense of their own emotions—they confuse one emotion for another.

Steele and his colleagues ran into a similar problem when measuring identity threats—people can’t always understand their own emotions. In their previous tests with black students and stereotype threats, the students didn’t report feeling anxiety—even though their actions (filling in words reflecting the negative stereotype, choosing "whiter" interests over "blacker" ones, etc.) suggested that they were indeed feeling anxiety. As Aron and Dutton’s research suggests, it might just be that they didn't know they were feeling anxiety.

Steele collaborated with a team of researchers from Santa Barbara to measure the physiological components of anxiety, such as blood pressure, in conjunction with stereotype threats. For this experiment, black and white students’ heart rate and blood pressure were recorded, and then they took a test—with half of them receiving cues designed to evoke stereotypes. Then the students were examined once again. The experiment concluded that black students’ blood pressure dropped when they were told that their test was “race fair.” White students’ blood pressure dropped when they were told that the test measured intelligence. Thus part of the impact of a stereotype threat was physical: it changed people’s blood pressure and heart rate. Another study showed that this physiological proof of anxiety could be created simply by the anticipation of a stereotype threat—by showing that women did worse on handwriting exercises if they knew that a difficult math test would follow.

Steele’s next step was to study the impact that stereotype threats had on mental faculties. Already, Jean-Claude Croizet had conducted important experiments to measure this phenomenon. Croizet knew that there is a strong correlation between the regularity of the heartbeat and the “cognitive load.” In other words, when people think hard, the interval between their heartbeats tends to be more regular. With this in mind, Croizet administered tests that pitted psychology majors against “hard science” majors, referencing his university's stereotype that science majors were smarter than psychology majors. Croizet found that psychology majors scored lower than hard science majors when the test was presented as an IQ test, but not when the test was presented as “non-diagnostic of intelligence.” Interestingly, when psychology majors taking the “intelligence test” thought harder (as measured by the regularity of their heartbeats), they did worse—but when science majors thought harder, they did better. In other words, hard science majors, free from stereotyping pressure, were able to focus almost all of their hard thinking on the test. Psychology majors thought just as hard, but seemed to “waste” some of their concentration on the stereotype threat, rather than the test.

Steele interprets Croizet’s findings to suggest that stereotyping can impede mental faculties. When people face stereotyping, their minds race, and they can’t concentrate on cognitive challenges. Researchers at the University of Arizona have found that the stereotyped, “racing mind” has three qualities: 1) vigilance regarding the stereotype, 2) self-doubt, and 3) constant self-monitoring of one’s behavior. Later on, researchers used fMRI technology to scan the brains of female math students subjected to stereotype threats while they were taking a math test. The scans suggested that women’s mental activity in the part of the brain associated with mathematics was reduced as a consequence of the stereotype threat—but activity in the part of the brain associated with "vigilance to one's social context and to emotion" was heightened.

When people feel that they’re being stereotyped, or in danger of confirming a stereotype, their minds race, their blood pressure rises, and they perspire. Furthermore, they might not even be aware that they're experiencing this kind of anxiety. But in the mid-1990s, Steele still had another question: “Is there any evidence of what long-term exposure to identity threats does to people?”

Sherman James, an epidemiologist, grew up in South Carolina and received his Ph.D. from Washington University. He later taught at the University of North Carolina, where his research focused on racial disparities in health, especially the high rates of hypertension in the black community. James interviewed a black hypertension victim named John Henry Martin. Martin had grown up brutally poor and had gradually worked his way to success, but then suffered from hypertension and ulcers at an early age. Martin's name (and his life story) reminded James of the folk legend of John Henry, a railway worker who was challenged to drive railroad spikes faster than a new spike-driving machine, defeated the machine, and died from exhaustion as a result. James began to think of the John Henry legend as a metaphor for hypertension. Just as John Henry tried to defeat the machine, John Henry Martin, James now opined, had spent a lifetime trying to run away from black stereotypes—and though he had largely succeeded, his health had suffered as a result.

James began to test his hypothesis among black men in South Carolina. He found that there was a noticeable positive correlation in the black community between hypertension rates, ambition, and awareness of stereotypes. Ambitious black people were much more likely to suffer from hypertension than white people who reported the same level of ambition.

The implication of the research Steele has discussed in this chapter is disturbing: wanting to succeed and caring deeply about success has a heavy price. The pressure to succeed can cause health problems and impair mental faculties. If society is to reduce this problem, people first need to understand the scope of identity pressure—a topic that Steele will explore in the following chapter.