Breaking free of stereotype threat with Claude Steele | Re:Thinking with Adam Grant

[Music] Claude Steele what an honor to finally meet you well it's a great pleasure to be here and right back at you with that sense of being honored pleasure to meet you even electronically same I've I've been a big fan of your work since I was an undergrad studying psychology and I remember first reading about stereotype threat and finding it intellectually fascinating and just extremely practically important and I I remember that being a defining moment where I first started thinking about maybe I could become a psychologist this work really matters and it's endlessly interesting so

thank you for the enormous impact you've had on my life and I have never gotten to hear the backstory of how you discovered it was there an experience in your life that paid paved the way or a moment that opened your eyes uh it was in in contrast to that it was a long grueling process uh but we were it was anchored the effort by uh a finding that um that that was just an interesting puzzle and the and the puzzle was that at the University of Michigan where you two were were a graduate student

well anyway when were you there I was there from 2003 to 07. okay we missed each other by by a decade but um I saw a chart which uh graphed out students grades as a function of the SAT scores they had when they entered and the Intriguing thing about the chart was that at every level of SAT score that a student had when they entered African-American students were doing worse than other students in Michigan and the puzzle was if you told me that they weren't on average doing as well as other students I might have

found that plausible in that you know there were differences in preparation level and prior schooling and educational opportunity and so that could explain such a thing but here you have them roughly equated by their SAT scores to the extent that that equates people in terms of preparation for for college but at each level of preparation as measured that way black students were doing worse than other students and why would that be that that was the puzzle so we we started doing um I had a lot of conversations with dick Nisbet and Steve Spencer and we

went around and around and we tried experiments and we got a research Grant and we did some studies and maybe four years later uh Steve Spencer and I had a clear finding that later became a stereotype threat so stereotype threat was no flashing Insight it was the product of sort of a grinding pursuit of what could be causing this underperformance as the term was and that's the origin fascinating this is a rare case where data actually led to a discovery as opposed to something happened to you and then you went to go and study it

exactly every preconception that I had about what could be causing that underperformance was was proven Wrong by the data so every idea we had none of those seemed to work but eventually we we got a clear evidence in that uh this was with women in in math uh women who were really good at math and committed and advanced math we give them a very difficult test and if we just gave it to them as a as a standardized test of math skills women did worse than than men we selected them for having roughly equal backgrounds

and skill levels in in math but when you give them a really difficult test at the frontier of their skills uh women were doing worse than men of the classic underperformance that we'd observed in the in the grades and college grade data we had um but we could eliminate that by making the stereotype about women's math ability irrelevant to taking that test so we did that Steve and I by just saying well you may have heard women don't do as well at stand on standardized math tests as men do but that's not true for this

test the test you're taking today is a test in which women have always done just as well as men and with that simple instruction their scores went up to match that of equally skilled men so that was the day we we had something count for this mystery of of the underperformance it's remarkable that on the exact same test right just randomly assigning them to decouple their their ability or their performance on that test from stereotypes about their group was enough to elevate their their ultimate results yeah we know now you know 20 plus years maybe

25 years later uh you know we know a lot of of moderators of that effect and and conditions but that if if you when you when you look at a group that feels the performance is very important these these are not women that are casually taking introductory math courses these are women that are that are really dedicated to it's going to be part of their career path they they assume so they're invested in it by when they're when they get frustrated on that test they're distracted by the possibility that they're confirming the stereotype or will

be seen to confirm The Stereotype and that distraction seems to interfere with performance that's one of the things that I found so fascinating about your work is you wrote about this threat in the air right that I I might be confirming a negative assumption about my group and that that actually disrupts you know not only in my emotions but also my cognitive processing um I was I was done to discover that you know just the threat of you know of confirming a stereotype is enough to interfere with working memory executive function and also shift attention

away from actually doing the task and toward worrying about well how well am I doing the task and I love the way that you talked about this as um as having kind of constant background processing going on can you can you talk a little bit about the psychology of what happens inside the mind when people are experiencing stereotype threat yeah I think a turn a term that I'm using these days to explain exactly that centurions is churn you you're just in churn you know what does this mean how am I doing and uh what does

this frustrate this sense of frustration I have mean does this mean that that's true or just mean I'm going to confirm this a lot of worrying fretting uh is is going on uh it does interfere with short-term I mean these days there's a pretty substantial literature as you may know on on what precisely the mediating processes are interference with short-term memory patterns of brain activation prefrontal cortex is sort of suppress the amygdala which is more sensitive to threat is activated and so it puts a a person in in quite a uh a bit of distress

in the midst of writing another book which tries to use the concept to explain a broader phenomenon in in society this this idea of being in churned interracial conversations both parties there are stereotypes that are relevant to how well the conversation goes how they connect this kind of thing I've been using this example of of a conversation between a set of African-American parents and a white school teacher at a typical parent-teacher conference about a young seventh grade kid and the African-American couple they're dealing with stereotypes about their group they want you know boy we want

them to really invest in in developing the ability of our son and this is our opportunity to to get that to happen to make that case and and the teacher for her part she's white she she's worried well yeah I really am dedicated to this student's uh us developing his skills but I know if I say something critical here I I could be seen as racist that's that's the stereotype of my about my group that is relevant uh in this situation so both parties enter the conversation with a good deal of churn and and the

worry that that you were just uh pointing to how am I doing how am I how will my identity here play out how will it be interpreted am I going to survive this situation I think in a situation like that a lot of people will say well let's let's make sure that both parties come really caring about that conversation going well and I think your research shows us that it's not enough to care and sometimes caring might even backfire because the more invested you are in that situation going well the more likely you are then

to be distracted by the very stereotype that you're trying to disconfirm that's a an ironic uh dimension of this interestingly uh the parties who are the least prejudiced often have the most churn because they don't want the conversation to go badly they're invested in the conversation going well and smoothly in in a normal kind of uh Rhythm to it so uh when it doesn't do that when there's any trouble then they start to worry oh my goodness I've got something to worry about here because I care about this all stereotype threat effects assume the person

is really committed to the Activity one way you can protect yourself against feeling stereotypes right is to not care about the activity involved and you can can disidentify with the performance and then the fact that your group is stereotyped there it's maybe something you don't approve of but it's not personally relevant because it's not something that you take on as a part of your own self and and your personal accountability so that's one way to defend against it but when you do care and you are invested then the prospect of being negatively stereotyped is upsetting

and distracting well I want to talk about how we fix this because you've studied a lot of Remedies before we go there I I think one of the things that that often gets underestimated when people learn about stereotype threat is because so much of the research has been about intellectual stereotypes of women in stem or racial minorities on tests we often forget that this can apply to any group that you know can be stereotyped I I remember in one of your early papers you showed that even white men who were good at math and knew

it you were able to activate stereotype thread by comparing them to Asians who they thought in relative terms were much better at math and all of a sudden they're like oh no I'm not going to be good at math talk to me a little bit about the just how stereotype threat can affect all of us even if we're not members of groups that we think of as traditionally marginalized or stereotyped as individuals we have a host of social identities I'm an African-American I'm a male I'm of a certain age or vintage shall we say there

are stereotypes about people of that vintage that say for example we're not good at technology or we're behind in technology so I can feel as I try to turn my television on in in front of my much younger son-in-law that I'm kind of on the spot and as I experience frustration I wonder well you know is how's he going to see me that's a form of stereotypes we had a pretty mild one because I'm not so deeply identified with being able to turn my television on but as human beings we're incredibly sensitive to how other

people see us we we like to have the the um the idea let's put it that way that we're very independent and you know we are our true selves but when we're doing things that are important to us and we're under the prospect or possibility of being seen in terms of some bad image of one of our identities it's it gets our attention in a way and that that's a real fundamental mechanism of you know social regulation I suppose I definitely want to make sure we talk about systemic and cultural solutions for schools for workplaces

for other domains where stereotype threat is known to interfere with with group performance but I want to start at the individual level since we're all grappling with this in one moment or another and you've already given us one technique that is appealing in principle but as you noted it's hard to practice which is I'm just gonna choose not to care I don't care how my future goes uh I don't you know what I don't care at all if I confirm people's stereotypes of a shy introvert and bomb on stage my whole career will be over

but I'm good with it how do you do that how do you de-identify it's usually a pretty painful process let's take women in math I mean you know women goes to college and she's been a good math student in high school where often women do quite as much as well as as men do she takes introductory courses in college and she does pretty well then as she gets keeps going in that area there are fewer and fewer women around the the work is really difficult and challenging increasingly so and The Stereotype is starts to emerge

as a consideration is part of her churn in her everyday churn about her experience so I I think tragically at that point a lot of women do disidentify you start to look around for maybe I really like history maybe I'll major in history and become a lawyer this this whole stem field I look ahead I don't see many women there I'm not sure I'm going to be comfortable in those environments and so the the weight of that pressure can push a person into disidentifying dropping out of their aspirations and goals something that they've for a

long time been committed to so I don't think it's it's something that you can just turn on and off like a switch in an area like that maybe in another more casual area of life that isn't as important well I'm not good at turning on my television but I'm really really good at managing my Spotify you know I So you you're disidentifying there might not be such a dramatic thing but when it's something that that you have cared about and and invested in uh the very principal ingredient of stereotypes right then I think it is

a pretty distressing experience it seems like the the psychology of attributions is useful here right the mistake a lot of us make in stereotype threat situations is we think okay if this performance goes poorly it's creating a permanent and pervasive signal about my lack of ability and you know that that's bad I'm never going to be good and I'm never going to be good at anything and if people learn to make more you know more specific and local attributions and say okay this performance or this test is not diagnostic of my ability it's not diagnostic

with my ability today and it's also not diagnostic of my ability tomorrow it's just a snapshot of my performance in one particular moment which happened to be a very stressful high anxiety experience it's a little bit easier than to not just identify with the domain but not overreact to the performance in that moment as representative of the domain what do you think of that that's really well put because I I do think in in that in that experience of churn that state of of churn if if one it can be reduced by exactly the line

of thinking that you you've described that okay this isn't this isn't my whole soul here uh my whole being on the line it's just a particular test now the culture and the The Stereotype is often has in it as current journal the allegation that it is a deep and essential part of who you are that's what's upsetting about it so the threat is that you're about to confirm some real essential part of you but the defense as you describe uh is to particularize the experience and and see it it's just you know this is just

a test so I think the the more we can demystify tests and get it get them seen outside of the essentially what should I say almost Eugenics tradition of capturing an essential ability about somebody I I think we're we would reduce the the stereotype threat effects in around testing and intellectual ability and and the like and I think gradually as a society I'd like to believe we're moving in that direction that we're getting more realistic about these things I mean it's okay to think in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and an IQ

test captured some essential dimension of who you are that was totally encompassing your abilities and that you could be reduced to your IQ number but I think now we're just much more sophisticated about human cognition and human intellectual life and so uh hopefully we're moving in a direction where exactly what you describe is is available to people as a defense part of the problem is this is a big and infrequent experience right you you take a midterm or a final it's a huge portion of your grade it's something you know you get really worked up

on because the stakes are so high you don't have a lot of practice dealing with that level of anxiety and it makes me wonder if more free frequent lower Stakes testing would be helpful we know already empirically it's better for learning right that when students are quiz more frequently they have better retention better recall but your work is leading me to wonder whether more frequent testing is also a way of lowering the anxiety that comes with stereotype threat and and making each test less diagnostic of who I am or what I'm capable of brilliant I

couldn't agree more yeah the idea that part of the the whole threat of a standardized test you know you you go all the way through high school at the end your whole life is going to be summed up by those two and a half hours of taking the SAT if if you told a Martian theft we have a test that we can give you that only takes two and a half hours or so and it will give a score that will so accurately measure a person's capacities to do intellectual work that we can use it

to henceforth allocate opportunity to people on the very general and you can just give it to anybody and it will give us that same score that would be kind of implausible to somebody who hasn't been acculturated to think about tests in the way we think about them so I I couldn't agree more that that is where the threat is is in part in the conception of the test and its allegation that what it's measuring is something essential about you and then a way around it is to just treat tests as the useful things they can

be which is feedback on how you're doing as you learn an area of of work like like mathematics or stem fields frequent low stakes tests to give you real feedback about where you need to improve and how you can improve that's that's an incredibly useful regime it's this use in this other conception that makes tests more problematic well okay if that's the case I want to have you put on your University leadership hat for a second uh you you have been the dean of the Stanford ed school you've been the Provost at Berkeley and Colombia

you've been department chair in Psychology at Stanford you've led a lot of University departments and groups um is what is the intervention here uh are we proposing that you get a mini sat every week and we just keep your highest score or what does the overhaul of this look like that's almost precisely what I would point to is Is frequent uh low stakes uh test and and developing some using those in in the admissions process at colleges let's say part of what keeps the sat in play is that people say well what else are we

going to do you know we gotta we gotta have some kind of quote Fair measure here so what else are we going to do well I this is something else to do it takes a reconception maybe some years of transition uh but it it I don't think it's that it's it's it's not technically not that hard the difficulty would be infusing it into the education systems that that we have well ETS if you're listening we have a proposal for you and I I do think this might be a window of opportunity because we've some of

my best friends are there but nonetheless here's a message for them I think this moment is is Meaningful because we've seen for the first time in my memory a bunch of top universities allow students to waive their standardized test scores as part of Admissions and so this may be a moment when testing organizations are are more open to experimenting than they were before and universities are more receptive to it too I think so what you know what one one thing that isn't broadly known is that they don't predict that that well so they don't really

help that much um and that is I think one of the reasons a lot of universities uh and University Systems like the University of California we're not going to do that the other downside of the SAT since we're on that uh is that uh it it discriminates pretty pretty powerfully SAT scores correlate with your income just about as well as they correlate with another taking of the SAT that is there they're very sensitive to the kind of educational experiences you've had in in the past so if you've been benefited by being you know able to

go to a strong K-12 you're going to get higher scores that's tied to income so if you use them in the admissions process you're going to it's going to be harder for people with low-income minority backgrounds to get in so that and at the same time they don't predict that well so when you have a big Public University System supposed to serve the broad public like University of California that's a that's a real downside as that as those facts become known while we're waiting for an overhaul of the testing system yeah let's come back to

the the individual level um some of the the work that you've done has you know has really changed my thinking about how we can prepare ourselves for stereotype threat situations and of course I'm thinking about your your path breaking work on on self-affirmation you know let's say I'm I'm nervous about math and I belong to a group that you know has negative stereotypes lingering around Math instead of trying to care less about math or the math test I affirm some other aspect of my identity and I you know think about how I'm really creative or

I'm an excellent writer and that allows me to feel a little bit more secure in that domain and then I'm I'm less on edge about math please correct my interpretation of self-affirmation theory that's perfect you no correction needed okay elaborate it then for me the affirmation gives you a chance to gain a little perspective uh there are other things about me that you know I can rely on and that I believe in and that I'm good at and and so this particular testing situation or this particular course my whole soul doesn't ride on this it

gives you a little comfort and it lowers the churn the interfering churn that you're experiencing you're just a little calmer now and you probably pay attention to the test a little more clearly clear-eyedly and and do better now I think the the power of self-affirmation is you know it just seems so much more palatable instead of saying I'm going to care less about this domain I'm going to care more about other domains yeah and that helps me put it in perspective I think there are people who will hear about self-affirmation and think of Stuart Smalley

um on SNL yeah I'm good enough I'm smart enough for 30 years now oh doggone it people like me right what is different about how you study self-affirmation from kind of the parody of daily affirmation of looking in the mirror and trying to build up your own self-esteem the kind of general self-bromides that Stuart Smalley gave to himself funny as they are are not going to work that's not going to affirm themselves they could even backfire uh it's it's it's it's affirming something that you really know about yourself that isn't it is a real dimension

of who you are uh reflects commitments achievements in the past you know let's let's say when I was a kid uh I was a swimmer of all uh odd things um most swimmers are not African-Americans but I swam for the YMCA and I never really thought about that when I was 10 years old anyway so I was pretty good at it so that was something that I was a part of me that gave me that I could rest my sense of self on there that's something good about me uh and so raising that up as

I dealt with other things just keeps the self in perspective yeah so it actually sounds like then there there are two key distinctions there one is that it has to be accurate what you're referring and two it needs to be more specific it can't be you know I'm good or I'm likable it means to be I have this particular skill if you say I'm good and people like me really well do you really know that and I mean I suppose maybe for some rare person that might be true but for most of us it's other

things that are very specific you know relationships with the family you know my I'm I'm valued in my family uh I you know I my parents love me those things become affirmations which put particular threats in in context that uh you know sort of takes the punch out of them one of the things that I love about self-affirmation theory is how far reaching the implications are even Beyond stereotype threat so I've found myself you know reading the evidence on how it's an effective way to give narcissists critical feedback and you know if you're about to

tell let's say a politician who has a big ego uh or you know a boss that they made a terrible decision you could start by raising their imagination or you know or their curiosity or some other aspect of their you know of their identity and then empirically they do become more open to the criticism this I think this leads to an important modification of the the ever popular ever terrible feedback sandwich idea uh or as it was called on Family Guy compliment sandwich but I think what what one of the things that I learned from

reading your work on self-affirmation is you have to be really careful if you're going to lead with a compliment before you criticize to separate the domains and say you know I want to talk about your string strengthen this area and then I want to give you some suggestions for improvement in a separate area and then I don't need to go back to the affirmation at the end right yeah you've kind of positioned the critique in a way that it doesn't indict the whole person in their whole soul once you've done that you don't have to

do it again good so we can we only need one slice of bread not two it's an Open Face Sandwich yeah exactly you study this in a way that I think is is applicable to all of us uh and what you and some colleagues have called the mentors dilemma and I I have quoted this research more times than I can count where yeah I think what you've essentially taught people to do is to deliver tough feedback in a way that still conveys support and essentially saying look you know I'm I'm giving you these comments because

I have very high expectations and I'm confident you can reach them talk to me a little bit about how that works you know it kind of pulls a variety of ideas together from from this body of research but uh you know giving critical feedback by saying something like well we use high standards but I think you have the potential you don't have to say the ability I think you have the potential to meet those standards that's explosively effective with most people I mean most many of us can look back on our own autobiographies and see

when somebody especially an adult said something to us like that it could you know set your whole career path or path in life the person's really saying I trust you I trust you here so it's a very powerful message when it when it it comes but it's something we don't typically think we need to do or we don't think to do it typically we give feedback well here's the feedback or we or we say we do the steward Smalley thing we say some very big positive bromide first you know you know you bring such wonderful

energy to my class here's the here's the feedback those don't carry the same meaning uh as saying you know I I we use high standards and I think you've got the potential to meet them it's surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success yeah I will never forget the first time I I taught your research in this in this area to my students I was teaching feedback people do become more open to criticism if you just say roughly these 19 words I'm giving you these

comments because I have very high expectations and I'm confident you can reach them a couple weeks later I gave mid-course feedback forms out and three different students had written at the top I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations it's like no you don't have to recite the words about verbatim the the point is to deliver the message right that my standards are high and I believe in your potential yeah yeah and now I guess they're thinking what's good for the goose is good for the gander I don't know I got a

literal taste in my own medicine there yeah yeah we do like to insert a lightning round in these conversations so are you up for one sure excellent all right Claude is there a stereotype that you personally had a hard time letting go of um yes a lot of them I'm a person of my of my society and my time and there's there are a lot of stereotypes uh stereotypes about athletes I was an athlete I felt the threat of being seen as an athlete uh but still sometimes that that was one that oh that's a

stereotype I shouldn't perhaps I should see beyond that yes it's comforting to know that even a world expert on stereotypes is not immune to them yeah nope what about is there a self-affirmation strategy that you're particularly fond of in your own life I can think of relying on them throughout my life as an African-American there's always available the possibility that you were being discriminated against and that's what gives you that's part of the weight the psychological weight of being a minority is that you know the stereotypes and you know how you could be seen and

you know it could have played a role in this outcome or that outcome so my turn my trying to work through that situation I try to be as thoughtful and evidentially based as I can be in making coming to those conclusions you can't rule it out all together that this didn't happen because of that or you so you you can't but but I wouldn't just fall into it easily I I try to really be careful about that that kind of attribution so when I look at my own life my own career uh and and so

on there there's an area where uh I I see myself doing what I've theorized about I probably the theory is probably stolen entirely from that habit that psychic habit of dealing with that ambiguity is there a favorite depiction in pop culture that you have of challenging stereotypes I'm thinking maybe a movie a TV show a song a book there is that movie of the three black women who were really tremendous who were really amazing mathematicians who worked in the NASA program I'm forgetting what the name of that of the movie was hidden figures yeah yeah

I was greatly affected by it because I've seen that uh that there there's a lot of intellectual Force and and power within a community of people who are seen as not having that that is always something you know I and African-Americans live with you you see you part of the tragedy is that you actually see the the competence and the genius but it's got no Outlet uh so that that that's a a a movie that I think really helped bring to light a reality that undermines some stereotypes is there a lesson you learned as a

swimmer that applies to your life today still oh I learned so much as a swimmer I learned how to admit and you you'll probably understand this as a diver how you can work really really hard at something that most people don't care about that was good that was good training for being an academic transcended that training I can I can remember the cheerleaders in my high school you know kind of drawing straws about who had to go to the swim meets we we didn't we didn't have any cheerleaders cared about it I cared about that

sport that was good training you're dedicated to it but you're not dedicated to it because you're going to get a lot of of accolades and public recognition for it so that there there's there's something that helped no it's uh it's a lot like uh when I hit the treadmill later today and I'm gonna push myself to try to beat my personal best for no apparent reason for no apparent reason nobody cares you tell your wife that well whatever why won't your home one time from all your expertise is there a piece of terrible advice you've

gotten or a piece of advice that's often given that you think is wrong this will sound controversial uh a bit I think we over stress the power of the individual against the circumstances of Life the contingencies that one has to contend with and that if we when we want to see change happen we should pay a lot more attention to the contingencies and the things that a person has to deal with based on the identity they have based on the family they come from we over we over interpret the import the the power of the

individual as they move through their life against circumstance we do fall in love with the idea of grit I fall in love with the idea of grid I love it it's been a Bible it's it's something that's essential to my uh to my motive personal motivation throughout throughout my life but you you be resilient and so you you have to have that but but we over love it we love it because it gives us psychologically a sense of control over things that I I I've got control the the most conservative that most people people who

I've interviewed in my life who had the greatest commitment to to uh grit were when I interviewed a number with David Sherman a student at the time now a professor we interviewed for six weeks a group of homeless mothers on welfare uh they they would say you know life is what you make it I just never forget that the irony of that here they are in those circumstances and they they had that as their Bible Well they have that because that's the only thing they can depend on is themselves and they need to believe that

that's true I I would advise them to hang on to that idea that's an idea I hang on to but as a society I think we need to get more mature we can't rely on that to have us completely to have a fair Society we need to to be much more sensitive to the the circumstances the conditions the kind of threats people are under if we're going to move forward and I I see that as something I'd like to see as a bigger part of our future as a society maybe even as a civilization it's

hard to disagree with that one I think we yeah we we could all I think probably be I mean this is a version of the fundamental attribution error still alive and well attributing people's actions and their experiences too much to their own personal traits and too little to the conditions around them yeah yeah exactly so another application of self-affirmation that I I think is just fascinating And Timely is uh the work that that you did with Cohen and Aaronson on opening people's minds to evidence that challenges their beliefs um talk to me a little bit

about how self-affirmation can help someone rethink a conviction or maybe you know confront some evidence that they were not receptive to you know I think it it basic kind of a manipulation of attention or expansion of of what we're attending to in the situation I I feel this with regard to certain psychopathologies um even suicide let's just the person is tunneled in uh on on something that's very distressing to them and and it's it's so they're so captured by the emotion in that situation that they don't see anything else about themselves they people we're capable

of getting lost in a rabbit hole having the whole world view colored by the the thing we're worried about and the thing we're distressed about at some level it colors everything and what we need at this point is something that expands our what we're able to attend to and it starts to include you know other good things about ourselves other good things about other people important things brings in more of the world into that into that whole so you get out of it and with a little perspective the threatening thing isn't as threatening that's the

basic story of of of of affirmation and that's kind of what it does that's why people think they go repeatedly to church on Sunday they're looking for that uh on a weekly basis ah the things that I'm worried about are they are they are bad but there's the whole you look at the whole picture here uh and it enables people to accept that more uh and and that's true as you were just mentioning about any kind of threatening information you expand the perspective you bring you take the person back up to thirty thousand feet so

to speak they're down at about 2 000 feet completely absorbed bring them up to 30 they see a lot more and that 2 000 foot problem isn't isn't so bad it's more manageable it isn't you aren't totally reducible to that problem uh it gives us a little latitude excellent so something we haven't talked about yet and I've been very curious to hear your take on is uh the small but intriguing literature on stereotype reactants I think I first read the the Laura cray at all paper uh when it came out showing that that sometimes when

people face a stereotype instead of being threatened by it they actually become motivated to disprove it what's your your perspective on you know how how common is that and how can we activate that response you know one thing that's really important to point out about really almost all of The Stereotype throughout data that where it's been looked at with regard to testing or maybe even athletic performance it isn't that people when they're under that pressure are just giving up and you know what the stereotype says it's the opposite they're trying hard to defeat The Stereotype

when you double down and you'd really try to in the middle of that time test uh feet to stereo I'm going to just prove this thing stereotype reactants I'm going to just prove this thing now you're doing two things now you're taking the test and you're monitoring how well you're doing and whether you really are defeating that stereotype and that all becomes part of the Churn it ironically increases the churn which ironically increases the underperformance most of the performance interfering effects of stereotypes are actually mediated by stereotype reactants of that sort where you're trying too

hard and it can be a condition of life we looked at this with regard to women in in professional women I I think I use the term over efforting that you know I'm going to show that I because I'm a women woman and I have a family and a household of man I'm going to show I can really uh do all these things and just kind of taking on almost too much to in stereotype reactants to disprove the stereotype so it becomes a weight of its own in a person's life and and on their performances

what else can we do collectively if we think about this at work for example to try to mitigate against that reaction the the context of of Our Lives the work context the people in it the our our families can play really important roles in reducing stereotypes if people feel accepted uh in a in a deep way then they then the particular threat isn't as as powerful and it's disruptive because what they're really after acceptance is kind of a short and a pretty pretty stable situation but when that's all when all of that is on the

line then the particular threats are powerful and really disruptive I think your emphasis on acceptance and belonging is is important because one of the mistakes that I see made in a lot of workplaces is I think well-intentioned people trying to counter stereotypes and inadvertently replacing them with what you might think of as a positive stereotype right so uh somebody asked me the other day I was on stage and in the Q a somebody said you know talk to me about the latest evidence about women as Leaders you know a lot of people thought that women

couldn't lead there's some new evidence suggesting that women might be better at leadership than men yes empirically um you know meta-analysis uh what 95 studies over a hundred thousand leaders by Palestine underdollen colleagues yes men are more self-confident in their leadership but when you look at other people's ratings of their abilities women do score higher do I believe though that women are biologically wired to be better leaders than men well at this point maybe in this state of the world but no in general of course not of course not do I believe that women have

had to be that much better to break through glass ceilings and you know get through bottlenecks in the middle and clear sticky floors absolutely but I don't think it helps people to say women are better leaders than men any more than it you know it helps to you know to to say women are worse leaders than men it seems like the message is anyone has the potential to lead and this is not a skill that should be tied to your gender or any other demographic group that you belong to yeah I could I couldn't agree

more I mean I think that's so important to point out positive stereotypes can be intimidating too and just creating them is not the answer elucidating what may maybe women because of all the things you just described have had to experiences tied to their identity as women uh they've had to contend with things that gave them skills that that transfer well to leadership positions but the real message there is that being good at leadership is rooted in a set of skills you can learn and anybody can learn them that makes so much sense it brings me

to a I guess a fundamental question which in some ways is a career question rather than a you know an individual study question but is there hope for eliminating stereotyping altogether I understand that we're we're categorizing and pattern recognizing creatures but the whole idea has never fully made sense to me why would you make assumptions about an individual based on properties of a group wouldn't you want to find out what is that individual like and it just seems absurd to me that that people are so quick to draw conclusions about a complex human being with

different motives and personality traits and values and life experiences from you know one one category that they happen to belong to and probably didn't even choose and I guess I'd love to know this is very core to your expertise what what hope is there can we can we reduce stereotyping or do we just need to learn how to live with it and challenge it at the moment I do think we can I think it happens every day uh there's there's this very little attended to uh research that dick Nisbet did years ago on the dilution

of stereotypes they would give people um a label this person is is uh Latino and then that's all the information they would give and then they would find that people tended to respond to that person in experimental settings uh stereotypically but if they put in a lot of seemingly irrelevant information about that person that the person's father owned a yellow Packard that the person uh went to a community college before he went to a you know just that his his mother-in-law played the piano I mean all kinds of irrelevant information the it melted away the

use of The Stereotype it individualized the person and I think in that finding is an important lessons that the more we know about people the less likely we are to stereotypes I mean stereotype just becomes less useful to us in trying to understand people when we have a lot of information so in friendships we often can get past that pretty quickly when I'm thinking about the stereotypes at all we're not thinking about our friends in terms of group identities or stereotypes at all stereotypes come into play more when we don't have other information about people

the policeman approaches a a a a driver they don't know each other not a thing about them that's where stereotypes are gonna be in dangerous play in a situation like that they don't have anything else to use to interpret what's happening what's unfolding in front of them and that stereotype starts to shape how they interpret uh all of that and you've got an incendiary situation driven in big part by stereotypes but if the policeman found his brother-in-law behind the wheel he knows so much else about them it The Stereotype isn't isn't as relevant there so

I I think that's one way I think also I'm I'm really fascinated now now by the notion of trust and the effort to build trust that once we do come to trust people stereotypes and these things tend to fade away as as there's just not as relevant you know part of me wants to start a little earlier and say you know before we get to the point of being able to individuate someone or learn personal information about them could we attack the very idea of stereotyping as exercising poor reasoning um you know you're making a

big leap from you know maybe a a questionable group average to a member of that group is that a logical thing to do is is that a conversation worth having I think a question a lot of us have as we learn about these things like we learned about stereotypes and the impact they can have well why can't we just undo that unwire that somehow in our socialization of people just you know when when we think that way uh a red flag goes up and we we reel that back in it is possible especially when you're

in a situation where you can you've got a little time to think about it stereotypes I think have their greatest uh impact and danger when we're tired we're in a hurry we're information overloaded then they pop out as a shortcut here I am stopping a citizen as a police officer in a in a car there's a lot of threat going on there there's a high emotion in that situation that's where they're particularly dangerous in that or at the end of the day I'm really tired and uh I'm exhausted by all kinds of things and I'm

in a situation where the stereotype arises about how I'm perceiving someone I'm going to be less able I just don't have the energy to uh unravel it at that that point and I bam before I know it I've seen that person and judge them now my colleague Jennifer Everhart has got a uh and and really a a a a number of social psychologists but she has a particularly compelling uh anecdote to the kind of kind of speed the kind of when I'm in a hurry or a pressured use of stereotypes with policing for example as

a police officer gets out of the car after having stopped somebody she tries to put a lot of things in into their routine that that slows them down and then a few a few uh linguistic suggestions about how to approach the person that de-escalates the situation don't go in and immediately try to establish Authority but use use you know polite language and slow the situation down then you kind of to diffuse the the role of The Stereotype in that situation so I I think we're getting more and more sophisticated about that that approach to it

putting things in that that frustrate the use of stereotypes um but if we don't um and we are tired and we are in a hurry uh people who would be appalled at themselves for stereotyping can wind up doing it without really a second thought that's what's um that's kind of the frontier uh if you will in ritualized situations like policemen stopping drivers you can begin to develop a systematic way of doing that in organizations when we're around hiring uh and promoting and there are systematic ways of helping us uh do that in doctors with patients

lawyers with clients I I think there are there are these these ways that we can use that will undermine the use of stereotypes in these important situations I find that really encouraging and occasionally when I talk about some of these systemic solutions to you know to trying to root out stereotypes and bias I hear I understand but we don't have time and the way the way that I end up getting through to people in some of those moments is to say so you're saying you don't have time to make a good decision or an accurate

judgment instead of a bad one because if this decision doesn't matter by all means wing it do it quickly yeah but get it out of the way yeah if this counts if there are real Stakes then isn't it important to try to do it as thoroughly as possible and to to try to make sure that the the process is as systematic and rigorous as possible and it's kind of hard to argue with that one right yeah I mean that's a that's a good hook try it at your own risk right yeah that I hope is

effective because in in many of these situations people do want to do a better job they don't really know how they don't know that this would be important that to slow the thing down um you know they're classic ways uh but if you select the the next horn player for the symphony with a blind test as opposed to having the the musician be visible there there are a host of things that I think as a society uh we're going to get better at my hope there because I do think people want to get better at

it and our our society aches for these kinds of things at some level that you know it's not that everybody enjoys anti-bias training or anything of that support because there I think the part of the problem is offering of the training carries with it the allegation that you need to train and there may be something about you and I I think that puts up a real stereotype threat resist react reaction that can undermine things but I think as we get a little a little beyond that and and recognize that we can use the context we

can partner with the context of our organizations in in undermining this it isn't just something that you know individuals have to control themselves there are things that that that organizations can do that will systematically reduce the the the play of stereotypes well Cloud this has been wonderful thank you for taking the time my my great pleasure I'm a real podcast devotee so uh I don't know if I need to say more about uh how much I've I've heard you over the years and it's been a real pleasure to talk to you well thank you we

need to get you in the audio Universe more often thank you Adam real pleasure foreign [Music]