Hidden Brain - How They See Us

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Stereotypes are all around us, shaping how we see the world – and how the world sees us. On the surface, the stereotypes that other people hold shouldn’t affect the way we think or act. But our concerns about other people’s perceptions have a way of burrowing deep into our minds. This week, social psychologist Claude Steele explains the psychology of “stereotype threat.”

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever walked into a school or workplace and found yourself wondering what the people there think of you? Are they judging you because you're a woman? Why are they staring at me? Or gay? Or an immigrant? I wonder if they'll think I have an accent when I speak.

Because you have a disability? Because you're poor? Is it because I'm old? Has this affected what you say? Whether you speak and how you act. I hope they don't think I'm boring. Is there something in my teeth? Maybe if I just sit over here and I don't say anything, maybe they won't notice me. On the surface, it would seem like the impressions other people have of us live only inside their minds. It shouldn't affect the way we think or feel or act. But our concerns about other

people's perceptions have a way of borrowing deep into our minds. Is it because I'm too tall? Do they think I'm fat? Do I even belong here? This week on Hidden Brain, how our worries about the stereotypes people hold of us can shape everything from parent-teacher conferences to police shootings. We all have memories of summers gone by, of long walks and lazy afternoons, relaxing by a pool, vacations with friends and family. Claude Steele has a less pleasant memory of one long ago summer. He was with a group of kids coming home from school. It was in 1950s and they were in Phoenix, a small town just out of Chicago. You know, we were just walking along each of us peeling off as we got closer to our houses.

Claude was six or seven years old. And we're coming home on the last day of school, schools out. The promise of a golden summer stretched out before them. Everyone was talking about how they would spend the coming months of vacation, boasting about their plans. And then one of the older kids said something that seared the moment into Claude's memory. We're talking about what we're going to do, just a sort of gang of kids coming home in the summer and somebody says I'm going to go swimming and somebody else says,

no you can't go swimming in that. You can't go swimming in a Harvey Park pool unless you go on Wednesday afternoon. That's the only time we're allowed there. Claude didn't fully understand what the older kid meant, but he knew there was an important subtext to the statement. That's the only time we're allowed there. This wasn't just another rule. The library closes at four. The restaurant opens at nine.

There was something about this particular rule that was frated with meaning. The rule was about them, these particular boys. It wasn't that the pool was only open on Wednesday afternoons. There was something about these kids that meant that they could only use the pool on Wednesday afternoons. Claude listened intently, the way kids do when they realize they have just found a portal into the grown-up world.

It emerged from somebody else that, no, we can't just go there anytime. You only time, only time black people, only time Negro people, I'm not even sure what term we used in those days. We can only go on Wednesday afternoons. And that was stunning to the group. we used in those days, we can only go on Wednesday afternoons. And that was stunning to the group.

I just think, first, it was a little mild resistance, but somehow we knew that it was true. It was a fact. I remember just kind of quieting. I could be constructing this memory, but I have a sense of just being puzzled and kind of stopped. Well, what does that mean? What it meant was that on Wednesday afternoons, kids from Phoenix, which was predominantly black, were troop over to the neighboring village of Harvey, which was predominantly white. There would be in Phoenix leading out of Phoenix and going toward the Harvey Park pool on Wednesday

afternoons, a kind of long line of black kids with their swimming trunks wrapped in a towel and going to swim in the swimming pool. And you know, you got used to it, but that made you aware of that there was something about you, something about your group that was different and that had some real significance. And I just remember feeling kind of a quiet anger about it, a resentment. A question was forming in Claude's mind. And it was a question that would come to animate the following decades of his life as he became a renowned psychologist. What did these people think of us? And it was a question that would come to animate the following decades of his life as he became

a renowned psychologist. What did these people think of us? As the white residents of Harvi looked out their windows on Wednesday afternoons, what did they make of the line of black children walking to the pool? What kind of attitudes did they have? Were they contemptuous and pathetic? indifferent? In time, Claude began to get answers to those questions. It wasn't like someone stopped and told him,

here's what we think of you. It was communicated like most everything else through how people acted toward him, toward his family. There was a white school and a black school. And the black schools usually had vastly different resources than the white school. You know, you learn that the roller skating ring is only open to African Americans on Thursday nights. I do, I remember that. You can buy clothes in the department stores, but you can't try them on. I remember my brother wanting to be on the baseball team and the baseball coach telling as they were loading themselves onto the bus in front of the YMCA building that not only

wasn't, he wasn't welcome, he couldn't play, couldn't play on that team. Soon, there were experiences involving our jobs and work. Claude's parents made it clear they expected him and his brother to start earning money. We were not a family with a lot of resources, so it was clear. Our parents also made this abundantly clear, make money. The boys had paper routes. They picked vegetables in a farm. They did lawn detail at the home of a doctor in Harvey. When they were teenagers, maybe 13 or so, Claude and his brother got a tip about work at a golf course.

We heard from some white friends of ours that they'd become caddies. They were caddies, so we thought, let's give it a try. Claudin is brother, decided to take the train out from Phoenix one morning. If you got there early, you got a good number, I remember that. The lower your number, the more likely you'd be called and the more work you'd get. So we went there, I don't know, five, six o'clock in the morning. Claudin is brother, we're pleased to see they were among the first to get to the golf course.

One! They were pretty sure they would get Cadi badges. Two! They were excited. Kids came in all day and they were given badges. Number 11. Each time another kid was given a Cadi badge, Claude and his brother thought brother thought okay it'll be our turn next. Number 29

they kept overlooking us. And this went on all day, I mean till late afternoon. Number 60. And then after everybody else, I mean dozens and dozens of kids have been given

caddy badges. One of the adults came out and looked at us and said, you, using the N word, are still here? When I given you a badge. Claren has brother felt humiliated. It was obvious what the people who ran the golf course thought of them. I do remember so as you know slouching back to the train and getting on it and taking it back home and talking to our parents about it. I have the sense it was a weekend night and we talked about it.

The boys were crushed as they shared what had happened. Their parents listened attentively and tried to comfort them. What do you tell teenagers who have experienced naked prejudice? How do you explain what happened? When I think about it, I do think of the warmth of my parents and the support, the intelligence of my parents, to kind of be real and explain this thing as best you could possibly explain it. It's an illness.

Claude's parents knew all about that illness. Claude's dad was black, his mother was white. They were both active in the civil rights movement. They were married in the 40s, 1942. And in those days, when that happened, the white person essentially was abandoned by her family and moved into the black world, black community. And that definitely is what happened in our family. We had very minimal contact with her family.

Her parents eventually came and met us. But I was old enough to remember that when that happened. When my grandparents finally came, but we never ever saw any of her siblings or cousins or anything on that side of the family. So that was how it worked. Around the family dinner table, conversations about race, how it worked, what it meant, how to deal with it,

were constant. For Claude's dad, who worked as a truck driver, these conversations and the anxiety that provoked them were an ever-present part of his work day. He was constantly worried that as he got older, you know, rather than give him all of the benefits, he might be due, due as his seniority increased, that they might try to fire him, because that's what he and his friends talked about. It's a constant pressure that they might plant something and put something in your coat

and say you tried to steal it and then fire you just at the point when you were going to get some increase in salary or increase in benefit of some sort. And that that happened to black people all the time. And you better be careful. So there's a lot of conversation like that going on. But even as they talk to the kids about the challenges of race, Claude's parents retained

a streak of optimism. Experiences like the one at the challenges of race, Claude's parents retained a streak of optimism. Experiences like the one at the golf course were not to be avoided, but to be sought out and confronted. The culture of the family was to resist this illness in society, make them turn you away. And that was probably a byproduct of being in the movement, which a lot of the black community was at that time. And so the idea was, you know, you're a soldier of integration in a sense.

You're out there not letting the world easily take opportunities away from you. I do think they shared, you know, a strong sense that the world really was ours, that we had every right to do what everybody else did, but that there was this evil in the world. There was racism, there was white supremacy in the world. Let us fight passionate men unrelenting, let us for the goal of justice in the world. And things could be changed and that there was a better way to live and the ethos of Martin Luther King is very important in that. I've been reading about the beloved community.

They were members of such a beloved community. The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. You know, I grew up as a pretty confident kid. I didn't grow up as a kid feeling hammered into place or subdued. And I think maybe it had us, it came from this framing of things. But Claude was to learn that even though his parents had prepared him to deal with rejection and fear, they had not prepared him for everything the world had in store for him.

You can confront some fears with righteous indignation, but others borrowed deeper into the mind, and many of them start with that old question. What do these people really think of us? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Claude Steele grew up in a time when black kids could be turned away from public pools, when an employer could openly discriminate against black teenagers and dismiss them with

a racial epithet. Despite these obstacles, Claude went out to college, graduated, and decided he was going to become a psychologist. He enrolled in graduate school at Ohio State University. And it was here that the question that had been forming in his mind since that summer afternoon when he was six or seven came to the fore again. What did they really think of us? He was one of only a couple of black students in graduate school. There were very few people of color who could serve as role models. Claude was surrounded by smart professors and grad students.

And although he projected confidence on the outside, he didn't feel it on the inside. That was maybe the time in my life when I felt most kind of shut down, so to speak. I mean, I didn't want to talk in class. I remember being very shy and measuring everything I said and then worrying about what I said afterwards. That's kind of what it felt like. Like I didn't feel unselfconscious. I felt burdened with self-consciousness.

It's just overwhelmed by it at some instances. Because the place of graduate school is all about how smart you were and it's exciting new field we were in, social psychology and, you know, how graduate schools get. And I was, you know, sort of exhibit A of a group that didn't seem to belong. So let me jump in for just a second because you said that growing up, you described yourself as being quite confident, despite the things that you encountered growing up in the Chicago area and the racism, the support of your parents and the community, left you being quite a confident kid. So what happened?

What was the transition? Why would you not be that same confident kid when you enter graduate school? Yeah, I think my confidence earlier in life was due to a strong conviction that I was on the right side of history, and that my family was on the right side of the history, and that I was doing the right thing, and you know when you were 13 or 14, you kind of take on that mission from the family. So it was all encompassing, and I felt righteous in it, and I felt that, you know, the people who ran the golf course were racist.

I felt that they were morally pathetic and misguided and I didn't admire them at all. In graduate school, it just was a very different situation. It was all about how intelligent you were. You know how your group is seen in society. And they're not seen as intelligent enough to belong in an elite graduate school. And you know that at the slightest instant, you could be seen in terms of that, right? And you might not be seen as promising and people might not want to invest in your your development in your future and

They they might tolerate you out of a sense of well, you know, we should but could they really believe in you? and you had that the worry that that was at stake with every interaction that if if you slipped into your South Side of Chicago dialect boy they would see you it's not belonging here. If you didn't know things in their culture you know that dry wine was better than sweet wine boy you could be seen as not belonging. And so the feel that you were in, the situation that you were in, had all these points that could light up in any minute and give you that feeling,

that you were going to be seen as not belonging there. So I think that was the nature of that. That was the nature of that. course. You didn't have to guess that someone was being racist to you because they used the N word they kicked you out, they basically made it very plain that their disdain for you was about race. When you were in graduate school, you're not sort of hearing the same thing, people are not calling you the N word presumably. There's no overt, mention, or discussion about race, but it's now all subtext and you're concerned about how people are hearing you and how people are hearing you and how people might think about you. And isn't it interesting that the overt form of racism, your response to that was, you

know, righteous indignation and a desire to fight, and your response to sort of the subtler form of the discrimination, was in some ways to shrink? I think you're a great social psychologist. That's really good analysis. That it is the uncertainty of whether you're being seen that way or not, that causes all that pressure and that churn inside your head as to what everything means. Because you don't know what everything means.

It's ambiguous. And I'm talking about the graduate school situation. You just, you don't know what everything means. It's ambiguous. And I'm talking about the graduate school situation. You just, you don't know. If you knew that they saw you that way, as you just pointed out, maybe you could adapt, and you could have a sense of a righteousness that would make it easy to put the blame on them, but in an ambiguous situation where you just didn't know, you

know that they could see you in terms of that stereotype. It's not promising and not so on and so on. But you don't know that they didn't fax you that way. Maybe they didn't. This was here I am just watching a football game with fellow graduate students and a few faculty and if I talked like I did growing up, what would they think of me? What would that mean? And maybe it would mean, maybe they'd be perfectly fine with it, but you don't know. And you worry that it wouldn't. You worry that they would come to see you as less promising.

The stakes were always high. So it's fascinating because you've used the word a couple of times that it was the uncertainty of what was happening that was actually disconcerting. And what's interesting is again, in contrast with the golf course experience, there's no uncertainty in the golf course experience. You know exactly where you stood with the people running the golf course. Whereas with the professors at graduate school, there's uncertainty. And what I'm taking away

from that is partly, you know, the uncertainty lives in your own mind. It's not just on the outside, it's actually in your own mind. So it's not just that the external world has to give you evidence that there's something that's wrong. Your internal world is now constantly telling you that something is wrong and your internal world is always with you. Yes, that's a good way to put it. I think it does come from the outside role, which is in the sense that you know that everybody around you knows the stereotype about your group, and that they could use it in seeing you and in how they treat you and invest in you, they could.

But you don't know that that's affecting every particular interaction or a circumstance situation. So it isn't inherently ambiguous situation. And that ambiguity forces a lot of churn on the internal psychological world of where you're kind of trying to interpret things all the time. What did that mean? What did that mean? I shouldn't be, I'm too touchy here. Let's forget about this. No, no, no, he really is. He does not believe in you, man. You are crazy to even think that. And you have to be, you know, you're kind of going back and forth as to what is the situation you're in.

These fears raised the stakes even during innocuous situations, like when he was hanging out with professors and his fellow students watching TV. The people in the situation were warmly inviting us over to see the football game and just watching a football game. I felt that if anything leaked out as to blackness, that it could lead to a negative judgment. Could I count on the fact that in the America of that time, given the life I had, the America I knew, could I just count on the fact that they'd never think that about me? When it got down to it, they just might not take me as seriously.

You would never be there, favorite son, was the worry kind of thing. And you didn't have that kind of opportunity in this situation. So, go back to the third-grade swimming pool situation. You just know how your group is seen. And this is an important situation, but it could be they're just not going to see you that promising. And they never, ever even have much personal awareness of it. They could downgrade you without any awareness that they were doing that. I think that happens all the time.

Claude graduated and became a psychology professor. Over the following 20 years, he studied the nature of alcohol addiction. But his experiences growing up and in graduate school stayed with him. He didn't yet have a conceptual framework to explain them. They just felt like personal experiences. And then, while he was at the University of Michigan, he noticed something about his students that prompted him to make a connection with his own life. African American students at the University of Michigan

who had the same SAT scores in prior grades as white students were still getting lower grades at Michigan than other students at Michigan. And I wonder, well, why, how could that be? Here they have the same preparation, the same skill levels as measured by traditional measures and so on. They should be performing the same.

If it's just preparation and ability and so on, and yet they're not. So why is that? And then we found the same thing was true for women in advanced STEM courses. Same preparation, same skills, test scores, but as the work got really difficult, challenging, sort of at the frontier of their skills,

you'd see this difference in performance. women not doing quite as well as men. So there was a phenomenon there and we were just trying to figure out what is that, what is causing that under performance. Claude and his colleagues came up with a study. The first step to a solution was to understand the problem. They wanted to see if they could generate underperformance of some students in a laboratory setting. The phenomenon kind of came out of experiments

where we would have, let's take women in math, those were the very first experiments that we did. Women and men who were really good at math, but we would give them a really hard test. A half hour section of a graduate record exam you would take if you were a math major, not the general quantitative section of the exam. So we knew it would cause them frustration, like the advance math courses that they were taking in college.

It would be frustrating. And we had the beginning idea that for women this would be a different experience than for the men. For the men, as they experienced that frustration, they'd worry, Jesus, am I in the right field? Am I as good as Mathes? I thought I was. You know, this is really hard and they have that level of worry. But for women, there'd be an extra worry. In addition to the worry the men have, they'd also worry, is it true what people say about women and their

math abilities? Am I going to be seen that way and treated that way? So into their minds at some level, conscious, semi-conscious, unconscious, comes this additional worry which takes up some cognitive resources to entertain and you just can't will it out of your mind, it's there. And so our sense was this is going to interfere with their performance. So even though they're just as good at math, they're going to not do as well on this difficult test and sure enough that's what happened.

It was like Claude's experience in grad school. As he worried whether his professors had negative stereotypes about him, that his blackness, leaking out, would make them take him less seriously, these worries imposed a cognitive tax on his performance. He wasn't able to fully focus on the intellectual challenge of graduate school because part of his mind was distracted by the worry that his professors held stereotypes about him. Claude and his colleagues came up with a term for the phenomenon, stereotype threat.

This threat affected the person who was the target of the stereotype. Unwittingly, this could actually make the stereotype appear true. If women underperformed at math because of stereotype threat, someone could look at their results and say, see, we knew it. The researchers had shown they could generate stereotype threat in the lab in the study with men and women taking the tough math test. But to prove they were right, they also wanted to show they could turn off stereotype threat and boost the performance of the students.

The logic of stereotype threat is demonstrated by showing that if you do the experiment over again or you do different conditions of the experiment, in which you somehow remove the stereotype threat from that math test, then the women should do as well as the men. They are equally skilled. They should do as well as the men without that pressure. If it's that pressure, that is suppressing their performance. So, after a long time, came up with an effective way

of eliminating the stereotype threat. They'd experienced while taking that test. And that way was simply to tell them, look, you may have heard that women don't do as well as men on difficult standardized tests. But that's not true for the test you're taking today. The test you're taking today is one on which women always do as well as

men. There's no difference here. So now as the women experience, take this test and begin to experience frustration on it, they don't, that extra worry about confirming or being seen to confirm the stereotype about women's having less math ability, that worry's not relevant to this test. We haven't defeated that as a stereotype, but we've made that stereotype about women's math ability irrelevant to interpreting the experience they're having on this test. So they can discard it and just take the test

with about the same level of anxiety as the men. And when you do that, the women's performance it, and just take the test with about the same level of anxiety as the men. And when you do that, the women's performance shot up to match that of equally skilled men. I should point you underline equally skilled. It doesn't mean it eliminates a gap between men and women altogether, but it eliminates this mysterious underperformance gap that happens among equally prepared men and women where they do have the same skills, but the women aren't doing as well.

That gap was entirely eliminated by this getting rid of the stereotype, it's right, pressure. And that was a big day for us, because we saw we had something there. And we could replicate that with almost at the level of, say, you used to say it like a parlor trick. You could get it. And so we had confidence in it. Stereotype threat was like an anchor that the women were dragging behind them as they took the math test. Remove the anchor and the women closed the gap between themselves and equally skilled men. and the women closed the gap between themselves and equally skilled men. Over time, claddenous colleagues conducted more studies to better understand how stereotype threat could affect different groups.

At Stanford University, they looked at the phenomenon in the context of race. We got white and black Stanford students to come into the lab and take again a half-hour section, difficult section, of the graduate record exam. And for half of them, we represented the exam as a measure of intellectual ability. And for the other half, we represented it as just a task that was not a measure of intellectual ability. Our reasoning was that, well, when I'm taking a test, it's a measure of intellectual

ability, how smart I am. Then that stereotype about my group is relevant. I can't ignore it in interpreting my experience of taking a test. This is a hard test. It's important to me. I'm going to be worried that as I experience frustration on it, that I'm confirming the stereotype or that I'm going to be seen to confirm the stereotype. That all that extra worry, take up cognitive resources, undermines performance, that's what happened. Black students equally skilled to white students didn't do as well

on the standardized test. In the other condition we represented the same task, same task it's important to point out, as a task that had nothing to do with intellectual ability. So now as I take the task and experience some frustration on it, it's kind of fun or interesting. Frustration, like if you're solving a puzzle, it's just kind of interesting. And under that condition, black students and white students adjusted for their preparation performed the same.

So it was that plank of early studies that gave us some confidence that we had a phenomenon here. It gave me a sense that this captures kind of what I experienced in graduate school and I've experienced it various times continuously throughout my life. That this pressure of being possibly seen through a stereotype in some important part of your life is distracting and upsetting,

and it can interfere with your functioning right there in the immediate situation. And if it continues in that situation, you might say, I don't want to spend my life in this walk of life. I want to go somewhere where I feel just more comfortable. You could imagine, you know, a white guy trying to make it in the NBA or trying to play really elite basketball. But is that, I don't know, it's a long shot, what you're doing.

That kid is in a intense stereotype track situation where any frustration he has could be seen as maybe confirming the stereotypes that whites don't have the same ability in this world. Or maybe he'd be treated like he doesn't have the same ability. Maybe he wouldn't get the same scholarship offers. Maybe he wouldn't get the same encouragement along the way. That people wouldn't invest in him as much because he's a white guy and white guys aren't just dancing and having the same talent in that domain. So that person would be under a very comparable form of stereotype threat that a black kid is going to be under any academic domain or that a woman is going to be under the advanced math domain. So by spelling it out as a stereotype threat, you could see that it's a general phenomenon,

not just something particular to a group. When we come back, the many ways that stereotype threat plays out in the world today. They see all the stuff on television, and murder after murder, after murder, after murder of them, people like them, and they just have to wonder, what do these people think of us? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Claude Steele has spent a quarter century studying the phenomenon of stereotype threat. Drawing on experiments and experiences from his own life, he started to see how the fear that people have of stereotypes about them can affect how they behave. Some people facing stereotype threat just perform worse. Others choose to drop out of their preferred fields, and some find ways to mask their own identity in order to disarm the stereotypes held by others. Claude calls this

Whistling Vivaldi. That is from the autobiography of Brent Staples, who is a columnist with the New York Times now and has a autobiography as parallel time and he describes situation very similar to mine. Going through the in-psychology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. And coming from a small town, the area is on the south side, walking down the streets of Hyde Park,

big guy dressed like a student, and he could see that he was, he made white people nervous, that, people avoided eye contact, they may have clutched their purses a little bit, walked to the other side of the street, and it threw these things, he could see he was being seen stereotypically, as possibly menacing African-American male in that situation. People were avoiding him. And for a variety of reasons, which he goes into interestingly in that autobiography, he was whistling, and he whistled Beatles tunes in Vivaldi, and when he walked down the streets doing that,

people really responded to him differently. They relaxed, there just wasn't the same avoidance of eye contact, and they clearly saw him not in terms of the stereotype of him being a possibly menacing African-American male, but they probably saw him, oh, he's just a student at the UC. So they could relax and say, hey, how are you doing? To be clear, Claude is not recommending that people facing stereotypes whistle-vivaldi. It's unfair to ask people who are the target of stereotypes

to compensate for the biases held against them by others. But the story reveals how many of us try to combat stereotype threat. If I was writing a book on the stereotype threat of aging, there would be so many more examples. And here I am getting older, more than getting older, I am older. And the kinds of things people do to deflect being seen as old would be whistling of all the everything from dying one's hair to pulling the gray out of one's eyelashes or eyebrows and presenting one's dressing in ways that you could just enumerate those things. That with every identity, religion, age,

race, ethnicity, there are negative stereotypes. And when you're in a situation where those stereotypes could be important, if you were seeing that way, they could be important to you, you, people tend to whistle with all the, tend to present themselves. I fit in as an American, might be an immigrant. I don't want those things, those signs from the old country. I want to fit in as an American. I'm going to use, speak Americanese. I'm going to get rid of that old dialect. I'm going to get rid of those styles of dress.

I'm going to, and especially in the second and third generation, you're going to see a lot of it. That's the phenomenon that I think is stereotype threat. The more Claude looks at the world, the more examples he sees of stereotype threat. Take for example an ordinary parent teacher conference. Ateacher conference in, let's say, grade school, and the parents are African-American. They're coming to talk to the teacher about their son who's in her class, and the teacher is white because of the stereotypes that exist here and that have come from our history. The African-American couple

it feels some pressure about stereotypes and they really worry that this school and this teacher is gonna see their child in terms of these stereotypes and maybe them too. And that seeing their child in terms of these stereotypes they're not gonna see his abilities and not want to invest in him and see him as the, again, the favorite son or they just

have a chance to be seen that way because of the stereotypes. So they're on edge as in this conversation. They begin it on edge that their job here is to deflect themselves and their son from being seen in terms of these stereotypes and and they're gonna make this point because this is their opportunity to straighten a school out on this. The white teacher, for her part, she's got an equally powerful form of stereotypes right. She's thinking, Jesus, you know,

anything I say here that I intend to be constructive criticism of this young man, is gonna be seen by these parrots as racist. They're going to see me as a racist So there they are on some, you know, Thursday afternoon at four o'clock with the weight of American history Sitting there between them making this of you know, very fraught kind of conversation the same conversation between parents and a teacher in another society would just be ordinary. Everything would be trusted and criticism was appreciated. It would be a very different conversation.

Maybe between two white people or between two black people, the conversation would be very different. But given our history of this society and the role race is played in it and the kind of stereotypes that have evolved in our society about the groups. This is a very fraught situation. Recent events have illustrated just how fraught the situation can be. Former officer Derek Chauvin is now accused of second-degree murder, which carries a stiffer penalty. Half an hour before a city-wide curfew was supposed to go into effect, police advanced,

and was seemingly little warning fired tear gas and smoke canisters into the crowd. I've seen the police be more aggressive for 40 people than they were for the thousands of white supremacists that were on the campus. The African-American community is dealing with the stereotype that police anything they do is going to be seen as aggressive and they could be shot through the window of the car. It's a terrifying form of a stereotype threat. And the police are dealing with stereotypes of their own, that this is an oppressive force. It's the thin blue line that protects white supremacy and that they are inherently racist. And their job is to just control this population of people. And anything they say would get them seen that way in terms of that stereotype about them. So it becomes an extremely fraught situation much like the parent teacher conference.

And again, it's American history. The white cop in the white neighborhood is going to be much more relaxed in terms of those kind of pressures. In a different society, with a different history, if we were in the West Indies, it's going to be different. But in America, given our history and the stereotypes about these groups, when you bring them together that way, Derek Shovon and George Floyd on that silly interaction over a possibly counterfeit $20 bill, it is just fraught with this history, shaping the interaction and the tension and the excess

between them. And that I think is, you know, we think we're all past our past. But as I guess Faulkner said, you know, the past isn't even past. It's with us. And these stereotype pressures are one of the ways that the past comes right into our daily lives and shapes our experiences with each other on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis. It isn't far away from any of us, really. The thing that I'm hearing as you're speaking about these interactions, and it's really

is poignant. I mean, the description of the parents sitting before the white teacher, the parent teacher, association meeting. And you almost didn't need to finish the thought experiment for us to basically see what was unfolding in that room, as you say on a Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. There really is sort of a poignancy to it. But there's also, I think, one of the things that's really interesting to me is I think there's a real compassion to this idea of stereotype threat, because it actually asks people to be compassionate, not just to the African-American man of the street, but

also potentially to the white police officer. And I'm wondering, do you ever get pushed back on that? Do people tell you, hang on, Claude, what are you doing? You're basically giving an out to the police officer who is who's just about to shoot or or strangle a black man? There are moments of George Floyd moment, for example, being one where there's just a huge moral convulsion that this is wrong and this society has to fix it. And in that moment, a moment like that, elaborating a psychological and pathic characterization of the police is beside the point, at best. And if it's offered in some way of discouraging that moment, the political significance of the moment,

it can be seen as a betrayal of the African-American community. So I don't offer it that way. I offer it as how are we going to go forward? And how is a society are we going to go forward? And it's just as important in that student teacher situation as it is in the policing situation. And that's where empathy is important. We have to, I believe, and maybe this goes all the way back

to my youth and the tenor of the civil rights movement in that era of a beloved community where we were going to have an integrated world. The aftermath of non-violence is a creation of the beloved community where we were going to have an integrated world. The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of non-violence is redemption. The aftermath of non-violence is reconciliation. The aftermath of non-violence is reconciliation. We were trying, for the first time in our American history,

to have a genuinely integrated society where everybody had opportunity and support. That's the effort here. That's the American experiment. It's in relation to that American experiment that I think the stereotype concept offers us a way of connecting to each other and trying to find a way forward so that both sides can see what they do to each other, what they mean to each other. And they can use their experience of stereotype to understand the other groups' experience of of stereotypes. Oh yeah, I see. It's just, it isn't just you black people or you women in math complaining about some phantom pressure. This is a pressure I've felt in a different context in a different way, but it's a pressure that I've felt.

I see what you mean. So it gives, I hope, a language to come together and be pragmatic about going forward. I, in recent years, maybe months, I've stressed a lot the need in the situations to build a context of trust that, in this effort to have an integrated society, the first and most important task is to recognize the challenge to trust that our history has bequeathed to us and try to build trust. First, train the police so that they understand the terrible circumstances of ghetto life in America.

The poor schools, the assignment of the worst teachers, the over-disciplinary reactions that happen to black kids in school, the intense policing and sentencing and incarceration rates, the lack of the huge unemployment that besets those communities, destabilization of family life that happens in those communities, the poor access to health care and to good food and so on. And if the police have some sense of what the people in those communities are dealing with, and the people in those communities begin to have some of the, some comparable sense of what the police are dealing with, then they can begin to approach each other a little more empathically. But this polarization into roles that just represent each other as opposing forces, each seeing each other as evil,

is kind of where things stand at this moment in our discourse. And there are things that are accomplished in a huge upheaval of the sort that are very important. I think one of which is that I think white Americans have come to see, it's a, we believe you moment for white Americans they're beginning to see, oh I see, there really are some things

that happen to you in this society because you're black. I see that. That's a big accomplishment of the moment. But in going forward and making our institutions work in our organizations, our schools, we need to have a language for coming together together and I think this is part of it, not all of it of course, but I think it's helpful in getting that set of parents and that teacher to be able to talk to each other and trust each other. Clot Steel is a psychologist at Stanford University.

Today's show is the first in a two-part series about the paradoxes of knowledge. Next week, if you could hear everything that people really thought about you, would you want to find out? Or is it better to remain in the dark? There are times where I feel as though naivete kept me safe. There are also times where I felt as though I was extremely vulnerable as a result. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Quarelle, Kristen Wong, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick.

Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Special thanks this week to our former producer, Raina Cohen, who played an important role in building this episode. Thanks also to all our voice actors this week, Julia Druckman, Lila Sales, Vintrin, Brian Shane, Scott Sally, Nancy Van Leidergraf, Jason Hass, and Bailey Lynn. Our Ronsang hero this week is the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. SPSP, as it's known, is an academic organization where many psychologists share their research. At a recent SBSB conference, I heard Claude Steele talk about how the weight of American

history continues to shape our lives. It led to the episode you just heard. For more hidden brain, you can subscribe to our newsletter at news.hiddenbrain.org. If you like today's story and want to help us build more stories like this, please go to hiddenbrain.org and click on support. I'm Shankar Vidantam. See you next week. you