Discussion Questions

W h i s t l i n g V i v a l d i

Issues of Our Time

Ours has been called an information age, but, though information
has never been more plentiful, ideas are what shape and reshape our

world. “Issues of Our Time” is a series of books in which some of

today’s leading thinkers explore ideas that matter in the new millen-

nium. The authors—including the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah,

the sociologist William Julius Wilson, the social psychologist Claude

Steele, the legal scholars Charles Fried and Alan Dershowitz, the Pulit-

zer Prize–winning critic Louis Menand, and the Nobel Prize–winning

economist Amartya Sen—honor clarity without shying away from com-

plexity; these books are both genuinely engaged and genuinely engaging.

Each recognizes the importance not just of our values but also of the

way we resolve the conflicts among those values. , justice, identity,

morality, and freedom: concepts such as these are at once abstract and

utterly close to home. Our understanding of them helps define who we

are and who we hope to be; we are made by what we make of them.

These are books, accordingly, that invite the reader to reexamine hand-

me-down assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends. Whether you

are moved to reason together with these authors, or to argue with them,

they are sure to leave your views tested, if not changed. The perspectives

of the authors in this series are diverse, the voices

are distinctive, the issues are vital.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., series editor

W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities

Harvard University

Issues of Our Time

Other titles

K W A M E A N T H O N Y A P P I A H

Cosmopolitanism

A M A R T Y A S E N

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

A L A N D E R S H O W I T Z

Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways

C H A R L E S F R I E D

Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government

W I L L I A M J U L I U S W I L S O N

More Than Just Race

L O U I S M E N A N D

The Marketplace of Ideas

Forthcoming authors

A M Y G U T M A N N

N I C H O L A S L E M A N N

W H I S T L I N G
V I VA L D I

and other clues to how stereotypes affect us

C l a u d e M . S t e e l e

B
W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y

N E W Y O R K • L O N D O N

Copyright © 2010 by Claude M. Steele

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steele, Claude.
Whistling Vivaldi : and other clues to how stereotypes affect us /
Claude M. Steele.—1st ed.
p. cm. — (Issues of our time)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-06249-6 (hbk.)
1. Stereotypes (Social psychology) 2. Group identity. 3. Discrimination.
I. Title.
HM1096.S736 2010
303.3’85—dc22
2009052079

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

To Dorothy and, in order of their arrival in the clan,
Jory, Ben, Dayna, Sidney, Coleman, and Matthew

And to my parents, Ruth and Shelby Steele

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments xi

CHAPTER 1 An Introduction: At the Root of Identity 1

CHAPTER 2 A Mysterious Link Between Identity and Intel-

lectual Performance 16

CHAPTER 3 Stereotype Threat Comes to Light, and in More

than One Group 44

CHAPTER 4 A Broader View of Identity: In the Lives of

Anatole Broyard, Amin Maalouf, and the

Rest of Us 63

CHAPTER 5 The Many Experiences of Stereotype Threat 85

CHAPTER 6 Identity Threat and the Efforting Life 99

CHAPTER 7 The Mind on Stereotype Threat: Racing and

Overloaded 114

CHAPTER 8 The Strength of Stereotype Threat: The Role

of Cues 134

CHAPTER 9 Reducing Identity and Stereotype Threat:

A New Hope 152

x C O N T E N T S

CHAPTER 10 The Distance Between Us: The Role of Identity

Threat 191

CHAPTER 11 Conclusion: Identity as a Bridge Between

Us 211

References 220

Index 231

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Despite my protest that psychologists write articles not books, Skip Gates and Roby Harrington persisted in encouraging
me to write this book and for that I thank them. I also thank them
for the support and patience they showed me during the writing
of the book—and for the idea of this book series.

Social psychological research is a collaborative enterprise, and
the collaborations at the core of my research provide the narra-
tive structure of this book. Thus many collaborators are described
throughout its pages (many of whom were also commentators on
sections of this book). But some collaborators whose research did
not wind up in the book, but who nonetheless importantly influ-
enced my research and thinking, are Priyanka Carr, Emily Pronin,
Daryl Wout, Julie Garcia, and David Sherman.

I also want to extend special thanks to Hazel Markus and to
the late Robert Zajonc, whose friendship, support, and constant
willingness to engage the ideas of this work and add insight to
it made this book far better than it would otherwise have been.
Thanks go also to their daughter, Krysia Zajonc, whose forthcom-
ing and honest relaying of her experiences in college contributed
importantly to the book. It is also worth noting that scientists are
people too, and the support of friends and colleagues like Ewart
Thomas, Jennifer Eberhardt, Carol Dweck, Lee Ross, Mark Lep-
per, Dale Miller, Larry Bobo, Marcy Morgan, and my colleagues at
Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study in Race and Ethnicity

x i i A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

made this work, again, better than it would have been. Also, Keith
Wailoo and Richard Nisbett provided very useful comments on
early chapters of the book. I offer these appreciations but stress
that none of these good people have any responsibility for the errors
or errant judgments that you, the reader, may encounter.

I am also grateful to my editors at W. W. Norton—Mollie
Eisenberg, Jake Schindel, and, again, Roby Harrington—for their
thoughtful, often revealing comments that helped every aspect of
this book and that gently pushed and guided me to make it better.
Similar thanks go to several people who, as student research assis-
tants, helped me with various aspects of preparing the manuscript:
Hilary Bergsieker, Matthew Jackson, and especially April House,
who did such a thoughtful job collecting references in the final
stages of preparing the manuscript. Special thanks as well to my
agent, Tina Bennett, for making the whole process a smooth and
enjoyable one.

Research requires the beneficence of funders, and for the
beneficence that enabled my own research reported in this book I
will always be grateful to the National Institute of Mental Health
for several research grants, and especially to the Russell Sage
Foundation and its president, Eric Wanner, who early on was will-
ing to take a chance with this research and, by sticking with it,
allowed it to develop into a mature contribution.

Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, who
were blessedly tolerant of me neglecting my director’s duties long
enough to bring this book to a conclusion. Patience is the milk
of human kindness, and they are indeed a kind group of friends
and colleagues.

W h i s t l i n g V i v a l d i

1

C H A P T E R 1

An Introduction: At the Root of Identity

1.

I have a memory of the first time I realized I was black. It was when, at seven or eight, I was walking home from school with
neighborhood kids on the last day of the school year—the whole
summer in front of us—and I learned that we “black” kids couldn’t
swim at the pool in our area park, except on Wednesday afternoons.
And then on those summer Wednesdays, with our swimming suits
wrapped tightly in our towels, we filed, caravan-style, out of our
neighborhood toward the hallowed pool in the adjoining white
neighborhood. It was a strange weekly pilgrimage. It marked the
racial order of the time and place—Chicagoland, the 1950s and
early 1960s. For me it was what the psychologist William Cross
calls an “encounter”—with the very fact that there was a racial

2 W H I S T L I N G V I V A L D I

order. The implications of this order for my life seemed massive—a
life of swimming only on Wednesday afternoons? Why? Moreover,
it turned out to be a portent of things to come. I next found out
that we black kids—who, by the way, lived in my neighborhood
and who had been, until these encounters, just kids—couldn’t go
to the roller rink, except on Thursday nights. We could be regular
people but only in the middle of the week? These segregations were
hard to ignore. And mistakes were costly, as when, at thirteen,
after arriving at six in the morning, I waited all day to be hired as
a caddy at an area golf course, only to be told at the end of the day
that they didn’t hire Negroes. This is how I became aware I was
black. I didn’t know what being black meant, but I was getting the
idea that it was a big deal.

With decades of hindsight, I now think I know what was going
on. I was recognizing nothing less than a condition of life—most
important, a condition of life tied to my race, to my being black in
that time and place. The condition was simple enough: if I joined
the caravan and went to the pool on Wednesday afternoons then
I got in; if I went to the pool any other time, then I didn’t get in.
To my seven- or eight-year-old self, this was a bad condition of life.
But the condition itself wasn’t the worst of it. For example, had my
parents imposed it on me for not taking out the garbage, I wouldn’t
have been so upset. What got me was that it was imposed on me
because I was black. There was nothing I could do about that, and
if being black was reason enough to restrict my swimming, then
what else would happen because of it?

In an interview many years later, a college student, whom you
will meet later in this book, would describe for me an experience
that took a similar form. He was one of only two whites in an Afri-
can American political science class composed of mostly black and
other minority students. He, too, described a condition of life: if
he said something that revealed an ignorance of African American

At the Root of Identity 3

experience, or a confusion about how to think about it, then he
could well be seen as racially insensitive, or . . . worse; if he said
nothing in class, then he could largely escape the suspicion of his
fellow students. His condition, like my swimming pool condition,
made him feel his racial identity, his whiteness, in that time and
place—something he hadn’t thought much about before.

From experiences like these, troubling questions arise. Will
there be other conditions? How many? In how many areas of life?
Will they be about important things? Can you avoid them? Do you
have to stay on the lookout for them?

When I encountered my swimming pool restriction, it mystified
me. Where did it come from? Conditions of life tied to identity like
that still mystify me. But now I have a working idea about where
they come from. They come from the way a society, at a given
time, is organized around an identity like race. That organization
reflects the history of a place, as well as the ongoing individual
and group competition for opportunity and the good life. The way
Chicagoland was organized around race in the late 1950s and
early 1960s—the rigid housing segregation, the de facto school
segregation, the employment discrimination, and so on—meant
that black people in that time and place had many restrictive con-
ditions of life tied to their identity, perhaps the least of which was
the Wednesday afternoon swimming restriction that so worried
my seven- or eight-year-old self.

This book is about what my colleagues and I call identity con-
tingencies—the things you have to deal with in a situation because
you have a given social identity, because you are old, young, gay,
a white male, a woman, black, Latino, politically conservative or
liberal, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a cancer patient, and so
on. Generally speaking, contingencies are circumstances you have
to deal with in order to get what you want or need in a situation.
In the Chicagoland of my youth, in order to go swimming I had to

4 W H I S T L I N G V I V A L D I

restrict my pool going to Wednesday afternoons. That’s a contin-
gency. In his African American political science class, my inter-
viewee had the added pressure that his ignorance could cause him
serious disapproval. That, too, is a contingency. What makes both
of these contingencies identity contingencies is that the people
involved had to deal with them because they had a particular social
identity in the situation. Other people in the situation didn’t have
to deal with them, just the people who had the same identity he
had. This book examines the role these identity contingencies play
in our lives, in the broader society, and in some of society’s most
tenacious problems.

Now, of course, ours is an individualistic society. We don’t like
to think that conditions tied to our social identities have much say
in our lives, especially if we don’t want them to. We have a creed.
When barriers arise, we’re supposed to march through the storm,
picking ourselves up by our bootstraps. I have to count myself a
subscriber to this creed. But this book offers an important quali-
fication to this creed: that by imposing on us certain conditions of
life, our social identities can strongly affect things as important as
our performances in the classroom and on standardized tests, our
memory capacity, our athletic performance, the pressure we feel
to prove ourselves, even the comfort level we have with people of
different groups—all things we typically think of as being deter-
mined by individual talents, motivations, and preferences.

The purpose of this book is nothing less than to bring this
poorly understood part of social reality into view. I hope to con-
vince you that ignoring it—allowing our creed of individualism,
for example, to push it into the shadows—is costly, to our own
personal success and development, to the quality of life in an
identity-diverse society and world, and to our ability to fix some
of the bad ways that identity still influences the distribution of
outcomes in society.

At the Root of Identity 5

How do identity contingencies influence us? Some constrain
our behavior down on the ground, like restricted access to a pub-
lic swimming pool. Others, just as powerful, influence us more
subtly, not by constraining behavior on the ground but by putting
a threat in the air.

2.

At the center of this book is a particular kind of identity contin-
gency, that of stereotype threat. I believe stereotype threat is a
standard predicament of life. It springs from our human powers of
intersubjectivity—the fact that as members of society we have a
pretty good idea of what other members of our society think about
lots of things, including the major groups and identities in society.
We could all take out a piece of paper, write down the major ste-
reotypes of these identities, and show a high degree of agreement in
what we wrote. This means that whenever we’re in a situation where
a bad stereotype about one of our own identities could be applied
to us—such as those about being old, poor, rich, or female—we
know it. We know what “people could think.” We know that any-
thing we do that fits the stereotype could be taken as confirming it.
And we know that, for that reason, we could be judged and treated
accordingly. That’s why I think it’s a standard human predicament.
In one form or another—be it through the threat of a stereotype
about having lost memory capacity or being cold in relations with
others—it happens to us all, perhaps several times a day.

It is also a threat that, like the swimming pool restriction, is
tied to an identity. It is present in any situation to which the ste-
reotype is relevant. And this means that it follows members of the
stereotyped group into these situations like a balloon over their
heads. It can be very hard to shake.

6 W H I S T L I N G V I V A L D I

Consider the experience of Brent Staples, now a columnist for
the New York Times, but then a psychology graduate student at the
University of Chicago, a young African American male dressed in
informal student clothing walking down the streets of Chicago’s
Hyde Park neighborhood. In his own words:

I became an expert in the language of fear. Couples locked arms

or reached for each other’s hand when they saw me. Some crossed

to the other side of the street. People who were carrying on con-

versations went mute and stared straight ahead, as though avoid-

ing my eyes would save them. . . .

I’d been a fool. I’d been walking the streets grinning good evening

at people who were frightened to death of me. I did violence to

them by just being. How had I missed this . . .

I tried to be innocuous but didn’t know how. . . . I began to avoid

people. I turned out of my way into side streets to spare them

the sense that they were being stalked. . . . Out of nervousness

I began to whistle and discovered I was good at it. My whistle

was pure and sweet—and also in tune. On the street at night

I whistled popular tunes from the Beatles and Vivaldi’s Four

Seasons. The tension drained from people’s bodies when they

heard me. A few even smiled as they passed me in the dark.

(pp. 202–3)

Staples was dealing with a phantom, a bad stereotype about
his race that was in the air on the streets of Hyde Park—the ste-
reotype that young African American males in this neighborhood
are violence prone. People from other groups in other situations
might face very different stereotypes—about lacking math ability
rather than being violence prone for example—but their predica-
ments would be the same. When they were in situations where

At the Root of Identity 7

those stereotypes could apply to them, they understood that one
false move could cause them to be reduced to that stereotype,
to be seen and treated in terms of it. That’s stereotype threat, a
contingency of their identity in these situations.

Unless, as Staples discovered, they devised a way to deflect it.
Staples whistled Vivaldi, by his own account a very good version
of it. What would that do for him? Would it improve his atti-
tude toward others on the street, make him more understanding?
Probably not. What it did for sure was change the situation he
was dealing with. And how it did this illustrates nicely the nature
of stereotype threat. In a single stroke, he made the stereotype
about violence-prone African American males less applicable to
him personally. He displayed knowledge of white culture, even
“high white culture.” People on the street may not have recog-
nized the Vivaldi he was whistling, but they could tell he was
whistling classical music. This caused him to be seen differ-
ently, as an educated, refined person, not as a violence-prone
African American youth. Such youths don’t typically walk down
the street whistling classical music. While hardly being aware of
it, people drop the stereotype of violence-proneness as the lens
through which they see him. He seems less threatening. People
don’t know who he is; but they know he isn’t someone to fear.
Fear fades from their demeanor. Staples himself relaxes. The
stereotype in the air that threatened him is fended off. And the
change in the behavior of those on the street, and in his own
behavior, reveals the power that a mere stereotype—floating in
the air like a cloud gathering the nation’s history—was having
on everyone all along.

Whistling Vivaldi is about the experience of living under such a
cloud—an experience we all have—and the role such clouds play
in shaping our lives and society.

8 W H I S T L I N G V I V A L D I

3.

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

At the Root of Identity 9

the task could be seen as confirming the stereotype, as a charac-
terization 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 inter-
pretation of their golf frustration that it posed, is not a contin-
gency 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 confirm-
ing, 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

1 0 W H I S T L I N G V I V A L D I

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 inter-
fere 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 dra-
matically 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.

At the Root of Identity 1 1

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 interfer-
ing 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 con-
trary. 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.

1 2 W H I S T L I N G V I V A L D I

4.

Now suppose it wasn’t miniature golf that you were asked to per-
form 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 …