Book type: Sociology / Social Psychology
Summary: Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do is an explanation of social-psychological research into the field of “identity contingencies” and “stereotype threat.” Identity contingencies are characteristics of one’s identity that can result in reward or punishment depending upon the circumstance (68). These can be any characteristic about an individual: race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, mental health status, and so on. In some situations we may be rewarded for a characteristic and yet in others be punished for the same trait, and the knowledge we have about particular traits of ours that may be stereotyped can cause us to experience what Steele calls stereotype threat. In study after study mentioned in the book, one group would be subconsciously made aware of the negative stereotype about them before taking some sort of test and another, comparable group would be told that the test was not a measure of whatever the negative stereotype was about them. The results were consistent. They found that for women being told the upcoming math test was about math intelligence, for black students being told their verbal exam was a reflection of general intelligence, and so on and so on, those groups performed below their skill level, whereas the groups who were told the math test and verbal exams were not a reflection of intelligence, but simply a puzzle (or something similar) performed equally as well as their white male counterparts who felt no such threat. The primary finding of Whistling Vivaldi is that
Stereotype and identity threats–these contingencies of identity–increase vigilance toward possible threat and bad consequences in the social environment, which diverts attention and mental capacity away from the task at hand, which worsens performance and general functioning, all of which further exacerbates anxiety, which further intensifies the vigilance for threat and the diversion of attention. A full-scale vicious cycle ensues, with great cost to performance and general functioning (125-126).
And the worst part is that when this happens to you, you likely won’t even realize it’s going on. But it’s happening nonetheless, confirmed by studies of heart rate, blood pressure, and fMRI scans. There is hope, however, as Steele confirms in each example. We may not always be able to adjust these realities for ourselves at the time, but we may be able to help others, or at the very least perhaps we’ll be able to cut ourselves some slack here and there.
On a final note, the title Whistling Vivaldi comes from a story about a black male college student who frequently walked through Hyde Park in Chicago on his way to and from class and noticed that white people would cross the street when they saw him coming, or avert their eyes from him, ostensibly out of fear because of these features of his identity. Then one day while he walked he whistled classical music–Vivaldi, Bach, and others–and found that the white people who probably would’ve crossed the street otherwise, now smiled at him and said hello. He had disarmed a stereotype about young black men in that neighborhood being dangerous by doing something unexpected, showing knowledge of classical music. This example in the book is not meant to say that if people are stereotyping you, you should change yourself in some way, but it does illustrate that identity contingencies can be flexible, which is some good news.
Lessons:
- Everyone is stereotyped, and pretty much all the time. “There exists no group on earth that is not negatively stereotyped in some way–the old, the young, northerners, southerners, WASPs, computer whiz kids, Californians, and so forth. And when people with these identities are doing something, or are in a situation for which a negative stereotype about their group is relevant, they can feel stereotype threat; they can feel under pressure not to confirm the stereotype for fear that they will be judged or treated in terms of it. Identity threats like this–contingencies of identity–are part of everyone’s life” (88). This means that if you’re a woman doing a math test, a black man doing an IQ test, a white man running a 100-meter dash, and so on, you’re experiencing stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is not restricted by gender or minority status, it applies to everyone, albeit in different contexts. This unifying factor of stereotypes should serve to make us more aware of the fact that we should be more understanding of all groups and not assume that certain groups are never stereotyped; they may just not be negatively stereotyped in the same ways we are, or perhaps not as often as we are, but they are stereotyped nonetheless.
- We as humans really like separating ourselves from one another. In the book, Steele provides an example of a study with young boys from Oxford in England. A bunch of these young chaps were put in a classroom and told to estimate the number of dots pictured on the board. They were then randomly told whether they were an “over estimator” or an “under estimator” of how many dots there were. They found that after this minor–and arbitrary–distinction was made, the boys favored other boys who were over or under estimators like they were, and punished boys from the other group in subsequent activities within the study. As Steele notes, “How easy it is to ignite human bias. Nothing special about either the perpetrator or the victim is required. Ordinary human functioning–maintaining one’s self-esteem–is enough. This was a revelation about the human psyche” (78-79). Think back to when you were in school. Were you ever put in groups for a classroom game and found yourself calling other kids cheaters and feeling like the people on your team were so much better than those on the other team (with whom you’d been gleefully passing notes not ten minutes before)? I have, especially in language classes where we played lots of games. My friends turned into enemies as soon as we were put on separate teams. I was like Brick from Anchorman, except my IQ isn’t comparable to a toaster.
- Americans are serious segregators. This doesn’t always mean we’re segregators in a racial sense (although census data bears this out as well), but it does mean that we like to be around people like ourselves. One example given in the book comes from another source by David Brooks called On Paradise Drive in which Brooks describes how we increasingly live in “cultural zones” that contain people who are like us. Further, Steele paraphrases that because Americans move a lot (more than people in other societies), this “gives us lots of chances to choose where we live, which gives us lots of chances to seek our own cultural zone, which, over time, makes these zones even more like themselves, and ever more isolated from each other. In these ways, we’re a nation of segregators” (194). Even when we don’t do this along racial lines, we do it along political lines among other things and end up living in places where we aren’t confronted with people who are different from us.
- Teach your kids to trust. Steele makes note that there is an obvious concern one can raise after hearing the results of these various studies, namely, what do we tell our kids? Should we tell our kids about the discrimination they may face due to their identity so they can look out for it and try to ward off its effects? Or should we keep them in the dark and possibly set them up for a big letdown if they’re discriminated against? Well, the author’s argument is that because their research has shown that people aware of the potential stereotype threat regarding their group tend to underperform in those situations where their identity is a factor (women and math tests, for example), then, “If one has to err, in light of our research over the years, I would thus err in the direction of urging greater trust, rather than greater vigilance” (164). Better to be unaware that people might judge you, and thus feel free to perform as best as you can, than to believe someone will likely judge you and thus get nervous and mess up.
- We can shape other people’s expectations and performance, for good or ill. There are numerous examples in Whistling Vivaldi where a group is exposed to a stereotype before completing the test and then perform poorly. In one study, two groups of women were shown six commercials as part of a “media study” and then taken across the hall to help with a seemingly unrelated study where they were allowed to choose math or word problems to solve. For group 1, two of the commercials contained female gender stereotypes like a “coed extolling the party life at her university” whereas group 2 viewed all gender-neutral commercials. “The results were clear. The women who had seen the stereotypical images of women in the earlier commercials chose fewer math problems to work on, performed worse on the ones they did choose, and reported being less interested in math-related college majors and careers than women who had not seen these commercials” (144). And if you think that’s bad, try this one: a similar study was done with two groups of girls, age five to seven, in which group 1 colored in a picture of a girl holding a doll before they took their math test, whereas group 2 colored in a picture of a landscape or kids eating rice with chopsticks. Guess which group didn’t do that well on the math test. The doll group. This means that already by the age of five, six, and seven, girls, when reminded of the fact that they’re girls before they take a math test, feel like they’re not expected to do that well, and then end up underperforming because they can’t focus all their energy just on answering the questions.
“You think my doll is sick? I’m the one who’s sick! I’m damn good at math and if it weren’t for all you bastards making me think I can’t be that good, I’d have aced that test last week!”
- Sometimes when white people avoid black people it’s because they’re afraid of being seen as racist, not because they are racist. Now, I know this doesn’t seem like it makes any sense, but according to Steele this is exactly what happened in a study he and his colleagues conducted. They told white male Stanford students they’d be talking to some peers about either a) love and relationships, or b) racial profiling and gave them pictures of the students they’d be chatting with (two black students) and before the researcher left the room to go get the other two participants, the white student was asked to gather the chairs together for the conversation. They found that the white male students who were going to be talking about love and relationships positioned the chairs fairly close to one another, but when the white male students expected to discuss racial profiling with two black participants, they gave much more distance between the chairs. And this happened regardless of their level of prejudice, which the researchers tested before conducting the study (see my previous entry on Blink regarding the Harvard IAT, which was used for this study). “It wasn’t prejudice that caused them to sit farther from their black partners conversation. It was fear of being seen as racist–pure and simple. It was stereotype threat, a contingency of their white identities in that situation” (205). If however, the researcher made a short remark before leaving the room that the conversation was to be a “learning experience for all parties,” the white male students no longer positioned the chairs at a distance from one another (209). Just that simple assurance from the researcher was enough to remove the stereotype threat the white males felt in the study and thus open up a more fluid dialogue, even about a difficult topic.
A final review/recommendation:
This is an excellent book if you’re like I am and love reading about one social psych study after another. It reads pretty quickly, but the studies are definitely repetitive, as they’re formulated to really drive the point home that these findings have been replicated 158,293,648 times, so if you don’t like repetition, you might just read the first couple chapters and then the last few, though you’ll be missing out on a lot of good data. I highly recommend this to anyone who is considering becoming an educator (or who already is), and to anyone who’s interested in real-life applications of stereotypes and how they can affect us. Steele does a great job at making his points and at leaving the reader with hope that we can reduce the effects of stereotype threat, and the lesson that we can start by recognizing that not all of our actions or thoughts are completely known or understood by us at any given moment, so we should judge ourselves and other people less harshly than we probably do.
Photo/video credits:
Book cover: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GM%2BSknvjL.jpg
Anchorman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHpMJJP7v_s
Girls & Dolls: https://ccriderwrites.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/a053c-nurse2520taking2520temperature2520of2520girl2527s2520doll.jpg
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