6.1

 

Suppose you are invited into a psychology laboratory and asked to play ten holes
of golf on a miniature course that has been set up in a small room. Suppose also

that you are a white college student, reasonably athletically inclined. Now
suppose that just as you are getting the feel of the golf clubs, you are told that the
golf task is part of a standardized sports psychology measure called the
Michigan Athletic Aptitude Test (MAAT), which measures “natural athletic
ability.” How well do you think you’d do? Would being told that the golf task
measures natural athletic ability make a difference?
A group of social psychologists at Princeton University led by Jeff Stone did
exactly this experiment several years ago. They found something very
interesting: white students who were told the golf task measured natural athletic
ability golfed a lot worse than white students who were told nothing about the
task. They tried just as hard. But it took them, on average, three strokes more to
get through the course.
What was it about thinking of the task as a measure of natural athletic ability
that so strikingly undermined their performance?
Jeff and his colleagues reasoned that it had something to do with their being
white. In the terms I have been using, it had to do with a contingency of white
identity that comes to bear in situations where natural athletic ability is being
evaluated. This contingency comes from a broadly known stereotype in this
society that, compared with blacks at least, whites may have less natural athletic
ability. Participants in Jeff’s experiment would know this stereotype simply by
being members of this society. They might not believe it. But being told that the
golfing task measured the very trait their group was stereotyped as lacking, just
before they began the task, could put them in a quandary: their frustration on the
task could be seen as confirming the stereotype, as a characterization both of
themselves and of their group. And this, in turn, might be upsetting and
distracting enough to add an average of three strokes to their scores.
The stereotype about their group, and the threatening interpretation of their
golf frustration that it posed, is not a contingency like the swimming pool
restriction of my youth that directly affected behavior. It imposed no extra
restrictions on their golfing, or any material impediments. But it was nonetheless
a contingency of their identity during the golf task. If they experienced
frustration at golf, then they could be confirming, or be seen to be confirming,
the unsavory stereotype. If they didn’t experience frustration at golf, then they
didn’t confirm the racial stereotype. This was an extra pressure they had to deal
with during the golfing task, for no other reason than that they were white. It
hung over them as a threat in the air, implying that one false move could get
them judged and treated as a white kid with no natural athletic ability. (You will
learn later in the book how my colleagues and I came to call this kind of threat in
the air simply stereotype threat.)

With this reasoning in tow, Jeff and colleagues started asking more
questions.
If the mere act of telling white Princeton students that their golfing measured
natural athletic ability had caused them to golf poorly by distracting them with
the risk of being stereotyped, then telling black Princeton students the same
thing should have no effect on their golfing, since their group isn’t stereotyped in
that way. And it didn’t. Jeff and his colleagues had put a group of black
Princeton students through the same procedure they’d put the white students
through. And, lo and behold, their golfing was unaffected. They golfed the same
whether or not they’d been told the task measured natural athletic ability.
Here was more evidence that what had interfered with white students’
golfing, when it was seen to measure natural athletic ability, was a distracting
sense of threat arising from how whites are stereotyped in the larger society.
But Jeff and his research team weren’t satisfied. They devised a still cleverer
way to make their argument.
They reasoned that if group stereotypes can really set up threats in the air
that are capable of interfering with actions as concrete as golfing for entire
groups of people—like the stereotype threat Staples had to contend with on the
streets of Hyde Park—then it should be possible to set up a stereotype threat that
would interfere with black students’ golfing as well. All they’d have to do was
represent the golfing task as measuring something related to a bad stereotype of
blacks. Then, as black participants golfed, they’d have to fend off, like whites in
the earlier experiment, the bad stereotype about their group. This added pressure
might hurt their golfing.
They tested this idea in a simple way. They told new groups of black and
white Princeton students that the golf task they were about to begin was a
measure of “sports strategic intelligence.” This simple change of phrase had a
powerful effect. It now put black students at risk, through their golfing, of
confirming or being seen to confirm the ancient and very bad stereotype of
blacks as less intelligent. Now, as they tried to sink their putts, any mistake could
make them feel vulnerable to being judged and treated like a less intelligent
black kid. That was a heavy contingency of identity in this situation indeed,
which might well cause enough distraction to interfere with their golfing.
Importantly, this same instruction freed white students of stereotype threat in this
situation, since whites aren’t stereotyped as less intelligent.
The results were dramatic. Now the black students, suffering their form of
stereotype threat during the golfing task, golfed dramatically worse than the
white students, for whom this instruction had lifted stereotype threat. They took,
on average, four strokes more to get through the course.

Neither whites, when the golfing task was represented as a test of natural
athletic ability, nor blacks, when it was represented as a test of sports strategic
intelligence, confronted a directly interfering contingency of identity in these
experiments—nothing that directly affected their behavior like a swimming pool
restriction. The contingencies they faced were threats in the air—the threat that
their golfing could confirm or be seen to confirm a bad group stereotype as a
characterization of their group and of themselves. Still, it was a threat with a big
effect. On a course that typically took between twenty-two and twenty-four
strokes to complete, it led whites to take three more strokes to complete it, and
blacks to take five more strokes to complete it.
At first glance, one might dismiss the importance of something “in the air”
like stereotype threat. At second glance, however, it’s clear that this threat can be
a tenacious force in our lives. Staples had to contend with it every time he
walked down the streets of his own neighborhood. White athletes have to
contend with it in each competition, especially against black athletes. Think of
the white athlete in a sport with heavy black competition. To reach a high level
of performance, say, to make it into the National Basketball Association, which
is dominated by black players, the white athlete would have to survive and
prosper against a lifelong gauntlet of performance situations loaded with this
extra race-linked threat. No single good athletic performance would put the
stereotype to rest. The effort to disprove it would be Sisyphean, reemergent at
each important new performance.
The aim of this book is not to show that stereotype threat is so powerful and
persistent that it can’t be overcome. Quite the contrary. Its goal is to show how,
as an unrecognized factor in our lives, it can contribute to some of our most
vexing personal and societal problems, but that doing quite feasible things to
reduce this threat can lead to dramatic improvements in these problems.
4.
Now suppose it wasn’t miniature golf that you were asked to perform when you
arrived at a psychology experiment, and suppose it wasn’t your group’s athletic
ability that was negatively stereotyped in the larger society. Suppose it was
difficult math problems that you were asked to solve on a timed standardized
test, and suppose that it was your group’s math ability that was negatively
stereotyped in the larger society. In other words, suppose you were an American
woman showing up for an experiment involving difficult math.
Would the stereotype threat that is a contingency of your gender identity in
math-related settings be enough to interfere with your performance on the test?
Would you be able to just push through this threat of being seen stereotypically
and perform well anyway? Or would the very effort to push hard on a timed test
be distracting enough to impair your performance despite the extra effort? Would
you experience this threat, this contingency of identity, every time you tried
difficult math in settings with males around? Would this contingency of identity
in math settings become frustrating enough to make you avoid math-related
college majors and careers? Would women living in a society where women’s
math ability is not negatively stereotyped experience this threat? Would their
scores be better?
Or suppose the test you were asked to take wasn’t the Michigan Athletic
Aptitude Test but was the SAT, and suppose the negative stereotype about your
group wasn’t about athletic ability, or even about math ability, alone, but about
scholastic ability in general. Again, would the stereotype threat you experience
as a contingency of your identity in scholastic settings be enough to interfere
with your performance on this test? Does the threat cause this interference by
diverting mental resources away from the test and onto your worries? Would the
stereotype threat you experience in scholastic settings affect other experiences as
well, such as your classroom performance and your comfort interacting with
teachers, professors, teaching assistants, and even other students not in your
group? Would this contingency of identity make these settings so frustrating for
you that you might try to avoid them in choosing a walk of life?
The purpose of this book is to describe the journey that my colleagues and I
have taken in formulating these and related questions and then in systematically
trying to answer them over the past twenty years. The experience has been like
trying to solve a mystery. And the approach of the book is to give you an over-
the-shoulder view of how that mystery has unfolded, of the progression of ideas
and revelations, often from the research itself, about the surprising ways that
stereotypes affect us—our intellectual functioning, our stress reactions, the
tension that can exist between people from different groups, and the sometimes
very surprising strategies that alleviate these effects and thereby help solve some
of society’s worst problems. And because science is rarely a solitary activity
anymore—something long true for me—the story also describes many of the
people who have done this research, as well as how they work. You will also
meet many interesting people who have experienced this threat—including a
famous journalist, an African American expatriate in Paris, a person who rose
from sharecropping to wealth in rural North Carolina, students at some of
America’s most elite universities, and students in some of America’s most
wanting K through 12 schools.
Although the book deals with issues that can have a political charge, neither
it nor the work it reports is propelled by an ideological orientation—to the best
of my and my colleagues’ ability. One of the first things one learns as a social
psychologist is that everyone is capable of bias. We simply are not, and cannot
be, all knowing and completely objective. Our understandings and views of the
world are partial, and reflect the circumstances of our particular lives. This is
where a discipline like science comes in. It doesn’t purge us of bias. But it
extends what we can see and understand, while constraining bias. That is where I
would stake my claim, at any rate. The constant back-and-forth between ideas
and research results hammers away at bias and, just as important, often reveals
aspects of reality that surpass our original ideas and insights. When that has
happened—and it has—that is the direction our research goes in. I would like to
see my strongest convictions as arising from that kind of revelation, not from
prior belief, and I hope you will get a view of that experience as you read along.
Arising this way, several general patterns of findings have persistently
emerged in this research. Seeing these patterns, more than any ideas or hunches I
began this research with, has convinced me of the importance of identity
contingencies and identity threat in our lives.
The first pattern is that despite the strong sense we have of ourselves as
autonomous individuals, evidence consistently shows that contingencies tied to
our social identities do make a difference in shaping our lives, from the way we
perform in certain situations to the careers and friends we choose. As the white
world-class sprinter takes the starting blocks in the 100-meter dash at the
Olympic trials, he is as autonomous an individual as the black sprinters next to
him. And they all face precisely the same 100 meters of free and open track.
Nonetheless, in order to do well in that situation, research suggests that he may
have to surmount a pressure tied to his racial identity that the black sprinters
don’t face.
The second dimension of reality, long evident in our research, is that identity
threats—and the damage they can do to our functioning—play an important role
in some of society’s most important social problems. These range from the
racial, social class, and gender achievement gaps that persistently plague and
distort our society to the equally persistent intergroup tensions that often trouble
our social relations.
Third, also coming to light in this research is a general process—involving
the allocation of mental resources and even a precise pattern of brain activation
—by which these threats impair a broad range of human functioning. Something
like a unifying understanding of how these threats have their effect is emerging.
Finally, a set of things we can do as individuals to reduce the impact of these
threats in our own lives, as well as what we as a society can do to reduce their
impact in important places like schools and workplaces, has come to light. There
is truly inspirational news here: evidence that often small, feasible things done to
reduce these threats in schools and classrooms can dramatically reduce the racial
and gender achievement gaps that so discouragingly characterize our society.
These findings have convinced me of the importance of understanding
identity threat to our personal progress, in areas of great concern like
achievement and better group relations, and to societal progress, in achieving the
identity-integrated civil life and equal opportunity that is a founding dream of
this society. This book presents the journey that my colleagues and I have taken
in getting to this conviction.