Whistling Vivaldi: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

In 1967, Steele began graduate school in social psychology at Ohio State University. Like every other graduate student, he was very intimidated. He was also the only black student in his program, and as a result, he had an “extra layer of concern.” He sometimes felt as if he didn’t belong in the program at all—a thought that occurs to almost every graduate student, sooner or later, but one that Steel believes he had particularly often because of his racial isolation. Steele liked and respected his classmates and professors in graduate school, and felt that his peers were being very supportive. But he continued to feel a strong sense that he didn’t belong.

Before Steele talks about what can be done to fix the problem of stigmatization at schools, he wants to show how pervasive this problem really is. In 1988, a man named Bill Bowen became the president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and launched a study that examined groups of students from elite schools, including many students admitted through affirmative action programs. Bowen also presided over another study, conducted by the sociologists Elinor Barber and Stephen Cole, designed to measure how students’ identities shaped their college experiences. Students’ grades were measured, along with their race and class, and they were interviewed every spring through their junior year. The study provided evidence that identity threats acted as a barrier to success for many different minorities.

While Steele was in graduate school, his adviser was a man named Thomas Ostrom. While Steele faced a lot of identity cues—such as constant mentions of who in his program was “smart,” and a professor who used the “N” word in class, his relationship with Ostrom was an important factor in neutralizing these negative cues. Ostrom treated Steele like an equal partner in their work, and held him to high standards.

Years later, a graduate student named Geoffrey Cohen tested the effectiveness of mentors working with minority students. Cohen was interested in answering the question, “How does a white teacher give critical feedback to a black student so that the feedback is trusted and motivating?” Cohen organized an experiment that involved black and white Stanford students writing an essay about their favorite teacher. The students were invited back, two days later, to receive feedback on their writing. A white professor offered each student feedback in one of three ways: 1) starting with praise and then providing feedback, 2) trying to be fair and neutral, or 3) using high standards to judge the essay, but stressing that the essay could meet those standards with extra work. Black students were most receptive to the third style. This was the kind of feedback that Ostrom gave Steele years ago—making him feel like he belonged in a demanding environment.

Why was the third form of feedback so effective for black students? It emphasized that the professor didn’t think the student was stupid, because the professor was using high standards. It also showed respect for the student, since the professor stressed that he believed the student was capable of meeting high standards. Steele now wanted to test the strength of the third form of feedback in other settings.

Steele began to study the experiments of a young professor named Greg Walton, who studied under Geoffrey Cohen. Walton wanted to study ways of helping minority students feel more positively about their college experiences. In the experiment he ran, the results suggested that black freshmen who were given a “narrative intervention” did measurably better in their next semester than black freshmen who didn’t. By “narrative intervention,” Walton meant showing the students survey results from past black students at the college. The surveys emphasized that the frustration and anxiety the black freshmen were feeling was natural for all freshmen, and would gradually vanish over the next three years—as previous black students had felt similar frustrations, but went on to find a sense of belonging.

Steele later ran a similar experiment in which freshmen were asked to participate in late-night “bull sessions” with other students—just sitting and talking about personal topics. Black students who participated in these sessions were found to achieve higher grades than those who didn’t. Steele hypothesizes that the black students who participated in the sessions did better because they came to realize that their problems weren’t unique, and therefore that they weren’t inferior to their peers.

Recently, Joshua Aronson, Carrie Fried, and Catherine Good conducted a study in which black and white Stanford students were asked to write letters to minority elementary school students in nearby schools. The Stanford students were given information about the flexibility of intelligence, and then instructed to write an encouraging “narrative” about intelligence in their letters, arguing that the elementary school students could expand their intelligence with hard work and perseverance. On average, white students who wrote these letters experienced no change in their GPAs in the following semester, but black students on average improved their grades by a third of a letter.

Aronson, Fried, and Good’s experiment had been conducted on excellent students, studying at one of the country’s elite universities. Steele wanted to study the impact of education narratives on less intellectually gifted people, and also on younger people. He studied psychology experiments suggesting that environmental cues could impair the abilities of children as young as five years old. This would suggest that stereotyping could have a cumulative impact: in other words, if children grow up surrounded by stereotypes about their own identities, then they may alter their behavior in increasingly large ways.

Geoffrey Cohen, Joshua Aronson, Catherine Good, and a professor named Julio Garcia worked together to design a new experiment. Garcia had studied self-affirmation theory—the theory that people want to perceive themselves as being good and competent, and that when anything happens to interfere with their self-image, they struggle to repair it. Garcia hypothesized that giving ability-stereotyped students “a chance to develop a self-affirming narrative” would reduce the threat they felt in school.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the psychologists introduced an experiment in seventh-grade classes. They asked teachers to give half of their students envelopes with their names written on them, and to ask the students to write down important values in their lives (for example, religion or family), along with an explanation of why these values were important. The other students in the class were asked to write down their least important values, and why other people might find them important. This second group of students thus never got the chance to develop a self-affirming narrative. The exercise—which only happened once at the beginning of the year—seems to have caused a noticeable improvement in the grades of black students who wrote about their values, with the exception of black students who were already academically successful.

Many other psychologists were skeptical of the results of the experiment—it seemed almost impossible that one fifteen-minute exercise could so greatly improve academic success. But Garcia, Aronson, Good, and Cohen argued that this was exactly what had happened. They argued that 1) self-affirmation (in this case, writing a letter about one’s values) is a powerful way to reduce the impact of identity cues, and 2) a simple fifteen-minute exercise causes a chain reaction: self-affirmation causes more success early on, which in turn inspires the students to continue ignoring negative identity cues and succeeding in class throughout the year.

Shortly afterwards, Catherine Good and Joshua Aronson tested whether certain forms of coaching could improve ability-stereotyped students’ performances. They took a group of minority junior high school students living in Texas and assigned them mentors, some of whom stressed that intelligence could be expanded with hard work, and the rest of whom stressed the importance of avoiding drug use. The study found that students who’d received the former kind of mentoring performed noticeably better on their statewide tests for the year—particularly girls in math.

There are various techniques that reduce the influence of stereotyping cues: these techniques include affirmation narratives and incremental mindsets. Steele now wanted to study the techniques used by teachers who were said to be particularly good with minority students. Steele's wife, Dr. Dorothy Steele, organized an ambitious, open-ended study: researchers would observe teachers in their classrooms and try to learn as much as possible about their “classroom culture.” Observers sat in on classrooms in almost a hundred different elementary schools in Virginia. The observers noted that often, the most successful teachers used “skill, warmth, and availability,” and made a point of acknowledging the students’ diversity and constructing lessons around that diversity, instead of using a “color-blind” approach.

The research that Steele has talked about in this chapter points to optimistic conclusions. It suggests that simple measures can help students overcome identity cues in the classroom. It’s important to understand that not all of minority students’ learning deficits can be solved with affirmation exercises. Students without the educational background of their peers need extra education—not just affirmation. Nevertheless, Steele and his colleagues’ research suggests that, even if concrete socioeconomic differences can’t be corrected in the classroom, they can be minimized in practice. Steele makes an analogy: even if long-term causes of heart disease, such as overeating, can’t be averted overnight, doctors can help patients by treating the immediate symptoms of heart disease, such as blocked arteries. The same is true of racial and socioeconomic prejudices: teachers can’t remove these differences, but they can neutralize the most immediate symptoms of these differences.

Greg Walton and Steve Spencer returned to Steele's original question of why minorities underperform academically, and synthesized all this research into a choice between two hypothetical scenarios: both involving a black student taking the SAT, applying for college, and going through college. In both scenarios the student underperforms on the SAT but still gets into college, but then goes on to further underperform in college—the difference is that the cause of the first scenario is lack of motivation or work ethic, and the second is caused by compounding identity threats. Walton and Spencer hypothesized that the second scenario was the correct one. Their extensive study measured minority students’ SAT scores, put some of these students through an intervention program designed to reduce the influence of stereotypes, and then measured the students’ college grades. They found that stereotyped students who went through the program went on to get better grades than non-stereotyped students with equal test scores. In other words, the second scenario was proved resoundingly correct.

Walton and Spencer’s findings suggested that even a modest stereotype intervention could exert a major impact on a student’s grades—further suggesting that stereotyping exerts an equally major negative influence. While it was too soon to conclude that stereotyping was responsible for all, or even most, of minorities’ academic underperformance, the two psychologists had found evidence suggesting that the influence of stereotyping on performance was greater than almost anyone had supposed.

There’s still a lot of stereotyping research left to be done, Steele concludes, but what research has been done suggests that people can reduce the effects of stereotyping—not just by improving education for everyone, but by reducing identity cues for minorities.