The harder someone thinks about the stereotype they want to overcome and how they must do well on the task in front of them to overcome it, the fewer mental resources they have left to complete the task. In Chapter 6, “Identity Threat and the Efforting Life,” Steele addresses the idea of “just working harder” to overcome stereotypes, and how that actually plays into stereotype threat. He then details how he and his graduate students tested for outside factors, like stereotype pressure, that can affect a person’s performance on a task regardless of their other skills and motivations. Steele talks more about the “observer-actor” effect and how people tend to try to focus on the individual actors when determining the reasons behind their performance. In Chapter 5, “The Many Experiences of Stereotype Threat,” expands upon the ideas introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. He draws on the work of Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf, and gives the example of a young woman with bipolar disorder who attended one of his talks, to discuss the factors that make one’s identity feel under threat. He tells the story of an African-American man who managed to start his life over in a new city where he passed as a white man and found much greater opportunity. ![]() ![]() In Chapter 4, “A Broader View of Identity: In the Lives of Anatole Broyard, Amin Maalouf, and the Rest of Us,” discusses that fact that most people hold multiple identities, and tend to identify most strongly with the one that feels like the group that is most threatened, or the way in which they most stand out. Thus, stereotype threat is based on the conditions you live under. In recent years, the stereotype has changed to say that women are just bad at math, not necessarily other subjects, so Steele and colleagues were able to design experiments that showed stereotype threat impacted women’s performance on math tests in a way it did not on history or English tests. He talks about how women, similarly to African-Americans, have historically been stereotyped as less intelligent. In Chapter 3,” Stereotype Threat Comes to Light, and in More than One Group,” Steele examines how stereotype threat affects women taking college-level math courses. He details his experiences as a professor, both in studying stereotypes from an experimental, psychological standpoint, and from his position as a potential mentor to young Black students. In Chapter 2, “A Mysterious Link between Identity and Intellectual Performance,” Steele explains several more of his and his colleagues’ experiments, and what inspired them to perform them. He describes a study he performed that lead to the development of the term “stereotype threat,” because in it, he was able to impact black and white students’ performance on a golf exercise just by changing how he described it. He then describes the concept of stereotypes, and how they can affect people in less tangible, but still just as harmful, ways. He talks about his childhood in mid-1900s Chicago, and how he first became aware of discrimination because black families were only allowed to use the pool on Wednesdays. In Chapter 1, “An Introduction, At the Root of Identity,” Steele introduces the readers to the main ideas of the book, as well as to himself. ![]() Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. Stereotype threat in the book, from my understanding can thus be defined as when a person finds himself/herself in situation or circumstance where his or her performance/behavior consciously or unconsciously is affected usually by negative stereotypes.Ī typical example was the Golf experiment in the book where Jeff stone and his team using typical stereotypes about whites been less naturally athletic than blacks and blacks been less intelligent than whites as the experimental variables was able to prove how the performance of the white students at Princeton University was reduced when they were told they were been tested or their natural athletic ability and how the same thing happened to the black students when they were told they were been tested for their sports strategic intelligence.The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Steele, Claude M. Identity contingencies are the things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity. Staples who knew he had a social identity because he was black used the whistling to steer through that part of his daily life. The book gets its title from a story a black New York Times writer, Brent Staples, told Steele about how he ad to whistle Vivaldi anytime he walked on the streets of Hyde Park a suburb of Chicago so he wouldn't look violent to the dominantly white people who lived on that part.
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