Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 22, 2001 — Claude Steele, a preeminent psychologist in the field of race and education will present a lecture titled, “How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Academic Performance” on Friday, April 27, at 7 p.m. in Room 231 of Lawrence Hall on the Williams College campus. A reception will follow.
Steele, professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department at Stanford University, is well known for his research on “stereotype threat” and “disidentification,” especially in the arena of academic performance among African Americans.
Stereotype threat is the idea that, regardless of a person’s actual abilities, when that person is in a situation that evokes negative stereotypes about any group to which that person belongs, the person actually underperforms on the task at hand because he becomes so worried about it.
According to Steele’s theory, what happens next is disidentification. To escape the pressure of the stereotype threat, the person convinces himself that he does not care about the task at hand. Thus devalued, the fear of confirming the stereotype dissipates, but so does the effort the person puts into his performance.
Most of Steele’s research focuses on academic performance and African Americans. He has found that because the stereotype that African Americans do poorly in school exists, African Americans who may care about doing well in school are haunted by the fear of “proving” that African Americans in fact do poorly. This fear is especially salient when taking school exams or the SATs. The student spends so much time second-guessing himself or rereading questions and answers, he winds up scoring poorly on whatever the assessment at hand is. In the face of this threat, Steele says many African Americans may unconsciously devalue the importance of doing well academically, and thus remove themselves from academically-oriented situations.
What Steele has found is that if he gives African American students a frustrating standardized test to take with no special instructions they will perform significantly worse than African American students given the same test but told that the test is racially neutral. The “racially neutral” instructions state explicitly that the test has been shown to be unable to predict race, so that the student taking the test knows that his performance cannot confirm any stereotypes. Fears allayed, he scores much better on this racially neutral test.
As a result of these data, Steele has also developed a program known as “wise schooling,” in which educational institutions recognize the stereotypes that may stand in the way of its students and develop ways to combat those stereotype threats. The institutions create secure environments for their students to learn in; that is, environments where students can trust that they are not being judged by any stereotypes. This can be done by being sure to challenge students, a sign that one thinks the student is capable of handling a challenge, and by having people of various backgrounds in leadership positions.
Steele has also seen similar results, when using women and quantitative studies. Other research focuses is on alcohol addiction and the ways in which the social aspects of drinking are tied to diminished cognitive functioning during alcohol use.
Steele received a number of prestigious fellowships and awards in recognition of his research, including a Cattell Faculty Fellowship from the Cattell Foundation and the 1996 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize. His work has been published in a number of journals including American Psychologist and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Steele received his B.A. from Hiram College and his Ph.D. in social psychology from Ohio State University.
The lecture is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.
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Published April 22, 2001
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