 | Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time) by Claude M. Steele
Link: http://amzn.com/0393339726
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The book is written by a social psychologist, who began research on why women and minorities underperformed in universities. He describes all of these experiments that ultimately showed how negative stereotypes can make people perform worse. His theory is that people who have a negative stereotype associated with themselves spend too much brain power worrying about proving that negative stereotype true, and therefore perform worse on a task.
For example, he describes an experiment where they asked men and women to take a difficult math test. The negative stereotype that women face is that women aren't good at math. Half the people who took the test were told that the math test was designed to evaluate their math ability. This was enough to trigger the fear of confirming the negative stereotype in women, and so the women performed much worse on the test than the men did. However, the other half who took the test were told that the test had previously been shown to be fair to both men and women. Somehow those words were enough to remove the sterotype threat--and the women performed equally as well as the men.
It was an incredibly interesting book to read. I couldn't help but think about myself and whether I ever felt the stereotype threat. One thing Steele also talks about is how people will often count the number of people who are similar to them in a group. I do this often. For example, Elie is starting co-op preschool. And I couldn't help counting, when I was in the parent meeting, how many people of color were in attendance. I was definitely in the minority.
Then again, perhaps the 2 men in the room were also counting--and felt out of place.
Anyway, I thought it was a really interesting book. I highly recommend it if you're interested in how stereotypes can affect people.
1 comment:
I count, too.
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