Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Churn: The Hidden Force Shaping How We See Each Other | Claude Steele - EP 749

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

What if one of the biggest barriers to connection, performance, and trust isn’t prejudice—but something more subtle, more pervasive, and harder to detect?In this powerful episode of the Passion Struck podcast, I sit down with renowned social psychologist Claude Steele to explore his groundbreaking new book, Churn.Claude introduces the concept of churn—the internal psychological state we experience in high-stakes situations when we worry about how we might be judged based on our identity. Whether in classrooms, workplaces, medical settings, or everyday interactions, churn silently shapes how we show up, how we perform, and how we relate to others.We explore how churn differs from bias, why it can be just as corrosive, and how even well-intentioned people can become trapped in cycles of hesitation, misinterpretation, and disconnection. Most importantly, Claude reveals a hopeful path forward—how trust, “wiseness,” and simple human behaviors like listening and belief can dramatically reduce churn and unlock human potential.This conversation will change how you see your interactions—and give you practical tools to build deeper trust in a divided world.Passion Struck is the #1 alternative health and personal growth podcast dedicated to human flourishing and the science of mattering. It is consistently ranked among the top health, mindset, and business podcasts worldwide.Check the full show notes here: Explore guided reflections and companion insights for this episode at: https://www.theignitedlife.netThank You to Our Sponsors[Insert sponsor copy here]Connect with JohnKeynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/In This Episode, You Will Learn:What “Churn” Really Is: Why high-stakes situations trigger a hidden psychological tension rooted in identity and perception—and how it differs from ordinary anxiety.The Power of Stereotype Threat: How decades of research, first introduced in Whistling Vivaldi, reveal the invisible forces shaping performance and behavior.Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough: How even well-meaning people can hesitate, withdraw, or miscommunicate—not because of bias, but because of churn.The Role of High-Stakes Environments: Why churn intensifies in moments that matter—job interviews, classrooms, medical settings, and leadership decisions.Trust as the Antidote: How simple signals—like belief in someone’s potential—can dissolve ambiguity and unlock performance and connection.“Wiseness” Explained: What it means to truly see the full humanity in others—and how this mindset transforms relationships across differences.Support the MovementEvery human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it. https://StartMattering.comDisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on Passion Struck. The concept that we call stereotype threat. And it's a very simple idea. I think people will recognize it when they hear it, that whenever you're in a situation or you're doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities, your age, your sex, your race, your religion, whenever a negative stereotype about one of those identities

is relevant to what you're doing, you know that you could be judged and treated in terms of, that stereotype. And if the situation is important to you, to your future, and that prospect of being seen and treated that way can be upsetting and distracting and can interfere with your performance right there in the immediate situation, and it can also deter you from walks of life where you feel that pressure. Welcome to Passionstruck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it. matters. Each week, I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes

to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 751 of Passionstruck. Over the past few weeks, we've been building something intentionally together. We launched this new April series, Purpose by Design, with Arthur Brooks, exploring the idea that what many people are experiencing today isn't just

a mental health crisis, it's a meaning crisis. Then, in our last episode, we were, we're going to with Corinne Lowe, we went one layer deeper. We examined how the systems around us, work, incentives, and expectations quietly shaped the lives we end up living. But today, we go even deeper still. Because even if you understand meaning, even if you begin redesigning your life, there's still something else at play in almost every important moment you experience. Other people. And more specifically, how you're seen by them, how you think you're seen, and how that perception shapes how you show up. Because whether it's a job interview, a difficult conversation,

a classroom, or even a moment with someone you care about, there's often an invisible tension present. A tension you may not even be able to name, and that's where today's guest comes in. My guest is Dr. Claude Steele, Stanford Social Psychologist, and one of the most influential thinkers on identity and human behavior.

You may know his groundbreaking work on stereo threat. But in his new book, Churn, he introduces a powerful and deeply human concept that in the moments that matter most, we experience a kind of internal friction, a mix of self-awareness, uncertainty, and concern about how we might be perceived. He calls this churn, and it doesn't just affect how we feel. It shapes how we perform, how we connect, and ultimately how our lives unfold. In this conversation, we explore what churn is and how it shows up in everyday interactions, how identity and perception influence behavior in high-stake moments. Cloud shares why even well-intentioned people struggle to connect across differences. We go into the difference between

prejudice and the tension of being perceived and how trust becomes the antidote that allows real connection to happen. At its core, this episode is about a powerful truth, that the quality of your life is deeply shaped by the quality of your interactions. And if we don't understand the hidden forces shaping those interactions, we can never fully design a life that feels meaningful. Before we dive in, a quick ask. If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who might need it. You can watch the full conversation on YouTube and leaving a rating or review helps more people discover these conversations. Now, let's dive into my conversation with Claude Steele. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me on your journey to creating an intentional life

that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am so honored today to welcome Claude Steele to Passion Struck. Claude, it is such an honor to have you on the show today. Well, it's a great pleasure to be here. I'm familiar with this show and it's a real pleasure. I'm glad you say that because I've been, as I told you before, we started immersed in your work for well over a decade. And you really introduced my knowledge base of stereotypes through your first book that came out about 15 years ago. And I thought that might be a good starting point because stereotypes are really the foundation that we build upon as we'll talk about your new book, Churn, today. But can you give the listeners a little bit of a deep dive into what you think of

stereotypes from your research? Sure. I'd be happy to. We stumbled on this. We were just trying to understand a certain phenomenon, the underperformance of groups whose abilities were negatively stereotyped in school. So there is this phenomenon of students from those groups, African-Americans, women in really advanced STEM fields, for example, who are very committed to their achievement and often have very great skills. But when they're in high-pressure situations and you experience this normal frustration of those situations, they can worry a bit. Oh, my goodness, I'm going to, am I confirming the stereotype about my group? And that worry can get in there and interfere with their performance.

And so that was the, we were looking at stereotypes. That's how we got into the whole issue of stereotypes. And that evolved into a concept that we call stereotype threat. And it's a very simple idea. I think people will recognize it when they hear it, that whenever you're in a situation or you're doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities, your age, your sex, your race, your religion, whenever a negative stereotype about one of those

identities is relevant to what you're doing, you know that you could be judged and treated in terms of that stereotype. And if the situation is important to you, to your future, and that prospect of being seen and treated that way can be upsetting and distracting and can interfere with your performance right there in the immediate situation. And it can also deter you from walks of life where you feel that pressure. Do I really want to try to become a physicist when I feel this pressure as intensely as I do in these advanced competitive situations? So that's the heart of what the stereotype threat is. It's feeling the stress of being possibly stereotyped in an area that's very important to you. And that's demanding where you're functioning at the very frontier of your

skills. This pressure can have an interfering effect. So most of the work on It has been looked at how stereotype threat can affect performance on standardized tests, on elite athletic performance, negotiating performance. Roughly 30 years of research have now gone into this in the field of social psychology. So we know a good deal about it at this point. I wanted to start here. And when I think about it, it's like a state of tension about how one might feel about being judged, is my summary for how I think of a stereotype threat.

When you describe churn, you describe it as the psychological and physical reaction to the stereotype threat, which leads me to, if I'm someone listening to this, how is churn different from like ordinary anxiety or social discomfort? I think it is similar. I think that is thinking of those states, ordinary anxiety and apprehension about something important. I think that gives you some insight into the emotion of churn, that churn is a worry, that again, in an important situation, oh, I could be seen in a way I don't want to be seen. And you start to, can I manage this? What should I do? Is there a way of saying things? How should I behave?

What can I not say? These kind of questions come to mind. And what struck me over the years, and this comes from both my research experience and also just being an academic administrator, is that diverse settings, when we have to come into settings, when we're with people with whom we share in identity, I'm having coffee with just older guys. I don't worry much about being seen as an older guy and being a target of ageist stereotypes or something. But when younger guys join the group, that is, the group gets to be diverse, a little thought. Maybe they're going to, do they think this idea is old-fashioned? Do they credit me with any technological savvy at all? You start to churn a bit.

And that is what turn refers to, is the experience of being in a diverse situation where you, at some level, sometimes quite distant, but sometimes very forcefully, you become aware that you could be seen. in terms of negative images of your identity, and that this is an important enough situation where that matters. If I'm just riding on the subway, who cares? But if I'm in a job interview, I'm interacting with a police officer who's pulled me over. I'm a patient listening to my doctor. There are all kinds of circumstances

where churn can be significant enough that it becomes important and affects important outcomes for you. One of those, just to give the listeners kind of an example of this, is you open up the book with this story of a seventh grade boy, and he's at a parent teacher conference with African-American parents with a white teacher. And both are entering the room vigilant about how their identities might be perceived. And this is really interesting to me because I've recently been doing a whole series on the podcast about Life Beyond the Script, which is really about our identities and the stereotypes around them.

But what does this scene reveal about how deep history and stereotypes shape even everyday interactions that we experience? Yeah, it came to me again as an administrator in just observing people and what made them nervous and what made them comfortable. And so I began to sketch it out in terms of stereotype threat and the like.

And you realize that when in that parent teacher conference, for example, the African-American parents, they know how their group is stereotyped, and they know their negative stereotypes about their abilities, and maybe a little about their aggressiveness. And they know that this is their opportunity in this parent-teacher conference. This is their opportunity to help the teacher not see their son that way, but to really invest in the development of his abilities. And this is an important meeting for them. They want to make sure that those stereotypes that they know are out there in this society don't affect how the teacher and the school relate to their child. So they're coming in in churn,

thinking how should we handle this meeting and what kind of teacher is this and what does she think? And is she comfortable with the realities of race in America or is she not want to be confronted with those issues and in churn? The teacher, you know, has an equally probably strong form of stereotyped threat she's dealing with that she's really committed to being a good teacher into being sensitive to minority students' needs and treating everybody as investing as much as she can in the development of all of her students. But how can she convey that directly to the parents?

And she's worried that if she were to say something maybe even slightly negative or critical, aimed at maybe helping the family, that she could be seen as racist. That's the stereotype about her identity in that situation that she's contending with there. And so here they come meeting each other, freighted by the stereotypes that exist in American society. This has nothing to do with prejudice and bias, really.

This pressure would happen whether they're prejudiced or not prejudiced. It's just knowing the social milieu in which they're meeting, the importance of it, how it could be seen, how they can anticipate how each party could see the other party. And so that's where the tension and the churn arises. And I wanted to make that clear because I think when we think about things like diversity, we tend to focus on prejudice. And the idea is that if we could just reduce people's prejudices, we would just get over this whole problem and be able to have diverse settings work just perfectly well.

And I began to see in my own life, and I think is supported by research, that it's not all about prejudice. There is this other form of tension that it may actually be more common as a factor in our comfort with each other, our ability to relate to each other and get to know each other. It's a worry, how I'm going to be seen.

And I know what the possibilities are because I know my society and views and images and stereotypes that are in it. And so that's what really drew me into thinking more seriously about this issue. As I was going to, through chapter two, I found it interesting because I always like to look at ancestral patterns. And you trace churn back to how societies have organized themselves around identity for millennia.

How do historical roles and stereotypes continue to shape the present-day interactions we have today, even though the laws and norms have changed? That's a very good question, because it acknowledges, I think, a fact of life that that needs to be more appreciated. That our society has been organized since its inception. As the old world met the new world, it's been organized around identities. Who would be in the social contract of the society, the nation, and who would not be, whose lands could be appropriated and whose lands would not be appropriated, and so on.

So it has structured the way our society is stratified. And it's been a central issue throughout American history. I think this is one of the distinctive things about the new world and the United States as a society is that we're finding a way to try to integrate very different groups who've had very different histories into a highly functioning democratic society. And I think we've done a pretty good job, I should say, over these centuries and the like. think we've pat ourselves enough on the back for that. But we have committed to having a fully integrated society at this point, the fruits of the American civil rights of movement. So it's a central American experiment. And even though the law has changed in that period of time, and we have committed to, I think, a colorblind society, that might be one term for putting it,

We're trying to fulfill it now. We're trying to figure out how to fulfill it. And sometimes down in the ground in our institutions, our schools, our workplaces, our boardrooms, our athletic teams, these issues come up. And one of other observations that came from thinking like that was that, well, this churn, what is it about? It really is about, can I trust these other people? Can I trust them? Can I be comfortable with them? them. And if we can trust them and we can be comfortable, churn goes away. And that that fact,

that sort of social psychological fact, opens a pathway toward having a more diverse, comfortable society than we have thought of. I think it opens up. That's what kind of got me excited. If we just focus on that, on building trust, perhaps this aspect of our society, We can make a lot of progress on it. We can be more comfortable with each other. And we can enjoy the fruits of the diversity that we have in a better way. So that's the kind of logic that stuck in my craw and got me to thinking more seriously about it. Claude, in this chapter, you reference a famous study that was done with 14 and 15-year-old boys around having them judge the number of dots and clusters of dots that flag.

in front of them. And in this, the boys were either told that they're an over dot estimator or an under dot estimator, and then they were put into groups as a result of that. What was the purpose of using this in the book, and what were you hoping to show through this example? Yes, it's a classic study in social psychology by Henri Tushfeld. And what he was showing with that is that he assigned them. They looked at these dots and they made an estimation of how many they were. And then he said, on a completely random basis, you are an overestimator and you are an underestimator. So he created two identities. And then he gave them an opportunity to rate each other on a series of traits and so on. And subsequent researches has also measured how people allocate

rewards between the two groups once the groups have been established like that. And what he found is that they almost immediately begin discriminating. They like their group. And they put down the out, and it has stood as a classic experiment because it shows just how fundamentally we do start to discriminate based on group identities like that and how tenacious it is. Here's a situation where the assignment to groups is completely arbitrary, has no meaning whatsoever, but it starts to, once I have that identity as an overestimator, I don't think as much of the underestimators as I do the overestimators, and I start to discriminate. So I wanted to anchor chapter in a, just in something that would demonstrate the real depth of this phenomenon in human life.

I want to go just one or two more questions deeper into this, and then, we're going to go into the antidote into it. But what I found interesting was that you note that churn intensifies in situations in life that we find ourselves in that matter. So things like an important negotiation, a medical situation that you might be having with a provider, a classroom situation like we discussed,

workplaces. What makes high stakes situations amplify identity? identity threat so dramatically? Well, I think just the importance of the situation to one's goals or needs or whatever fuels this churn. It makes the, I'm churning because this is now an important situation for me to adapt to, to figure out how to succeed in or to manage as well as I can manage it. If it's a less important situation, a passing situation, again, maybe sitting on a subway

or being in an arena crowd or something of that sort, the differences don't mean very much. And so I'm not going to really churn or worry about that because there's no stakes in it for me. But if I'm an African American and I'm pulled over by a police officer, the stakes, how he sees me and I see him, the stakes are very high there. And so I'm churning like crazy in a situation like that.

If a white academic is assigned to be in a diversity training group with his colleagues and so on, that's an important situation. And he's probably churning pretty vigorously about how to manage that situation. It's probably not a comfortable situation because he knows he could be seen like the teacher in terms of some very dark stereotypes. And he's not completely confident that he knows exactly how to manage that. So he's churning. And he's churning because it's an important situation in his life. That's what's fueling the energy put in churn.

Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment, because one of the ideas at the heart of today's conversation is this, that in many of the moments that matter most, we're not just reacting to what's happening around us. We're reacting to how we think we're being seen. And that subtle tension with Claude Steele calls churn can quietly shape how you show up in your life. What you say, what you hold back, and even the opportunities you choose to pursue or avoid. But here's the deeper question. How often do you actually stop to reflect on those moments to ask, where am I showing up fully, where am I holding back, and why?

That's exactly what the Ignited Life is designed to help you explore. On the ignitedlife.net, I'm sharing companion reflections for this entire Purpose by Design series to help you go beyond listening and start applying these ideas to your own life. Because awareness creates insight, but reflection creates change. And now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. And now, let's return to the conversation with Claude Steele. I wanted to read something from the book. You write, the common presumption is that biases like racism, sexism, and homophobia are the chief corrosives of diversity.

And they're bad for sure. What I'm arguing is that churn is a further corrosive in many common situations, as well, corrosive as prejudices themselves. And then you go on is the white teacher we talked about avoiding a needed conversation with black parents because she's prejudiced or because she's worried that a misstep in the conversation could get her seen as a racist. Is it prejudice or is it churn that makes her hesitate? And I think that this is an important point to bring up because whether it's this scenario or other ones that we've been in, I've been in thousands of scenarios like the one you're talking about in work environments where even the fact that I have to question things like this in my own head gives me reason to pause. So is the point that you're trying

to bring up here that reducing churn can sometimes be as important in diverse settings as reducing prejudice itself? I do. I do. And I think maybe that the teacher example is a good example of that. Here she is wanting probably very much to succeed with all of her students, including the African-American student we're talking about in this example. She wants to help him and really invest in his development and see him grow. But boy, the cost of being seen seen as a racist is so high. And it's in such an important situation for her that she might really hold back and not really want to come forward and say some of the things that she thinks probably he needs to know and might be very helpful to him and it's not coming from her prejudice

at all that's completely irrelevant here it's just coming from the social tension that she's feeling the pressure she's feeling and so she's full of churn she probably she could lose sleep over that i just the churn could follow her home and my god if i could but if i do say that how will i So that's the cost of churn. And we'll get to it in the, I'm sure, in more detail in a bit. But the excitement to me, situation as troubling as that is, the excitement to me is that that's maybe more remediable, more fixable than we think. It's very difficult to change people's prejudices and the like. That's as a psychologist and looking at almost 100 years of research on that.

It's very hard to do that. can happen. We should never give up on it. Education is really an important part of doing that. So I'm not dismissing that at all, but I think churn might be reducing that, making, enabling people to be more comfortable with each other, to develop a trust in each other. If that parent and that teacher had an opportunity to develop a trusting relationship with each other, then you feel more comfortable being honest and because that, well, they're not going to see you in the worst possible life. That's what the trust is about, that I've spent time with these parents, and they've spent

time with me, and they know what I am concerned about, and I know what they're concerned about. And I've done this in behalf of their concerns, and they've done this in behalf of my concerns. And a relationship gets built up. And in the context of that kind of trusting relationship, she's much freer to say, well, Billy ought to really, if you just had him read two more books this month, he would he'd be really well prepared for that test so she whereas in the context of that trust she can say that without that she could so that's what struck me is that a churn is something that

does have a corrosive effect it can have a very corrosive effect and yet it can be remediated by some of the simple human connections that we are all capable of making i'll give you another example of this is the other day I have a children's book that's just come out and I was doing a reading for a group of children and the book is on mattering and I asked all the children, did someone make you feel like you mattered today? And this African American girl in the front row starts tearing up. And as everyone else is saying yes, she is saying no. And her teacher is white. And here's a situation where this teacher probably should have a conversation with the parents because this, obviously there's something going on with the child that she took her to decide to have a conversation

about. But if you had this fear of churn, you might be afraid to bring this up to the parents because you could be thinking that they think you're signaling out their daughter or something like that. So my point for bringing this up is these things have consequences. They do have consequences. And I think one other ambition I would have for this kind of formulation is that my churn can give me some empathy for your churn. We're both in churn in this situation. It enables me to understand what you are going through in this situation and you to understand what I'm going through in this. We're both nervous and we both have these kind of stereotype images hanging over us that we're contending with in that situation.

And that's the other feature of it that I want to stress. That teacher can understand what those parents are going through. And that parent, those parents can understand what that teacher's going through. And that really helps build a sort of trust that we're talking about. Using trust as the antidote to turn, for someone who's listening, what specific signals communicate to someone that they will be judged fairly and that they're safe and valued in a situation. Yes, I think that's a great question in some ways the heart of the book.

And I think that I'll begin answering that by just giving an image of what trust is. So the listeners will have a clear sense of that. Trust is, again, thinking of the parents and the teacher, for example. Trust is a tension between remembering and forgetting. Do I remember how my group is seen in this society and in history and history? And do I remember that and use that to interpret what's happening to me now in this situation? Or do I just forget that? Do I just forget that and take the situation in its own terms?

That's what trust looks like. And you can also see how hard that could be to do. It's not easy to psychologically just say, I'm just going to forget all that. And trust this teacher or trust these parents. So I just wanted to give a good image of what trust is. And then I do think the heart of building it is the first step is really seeing the person and having an interest in them. You're interested in me and you're paying attention. You're listening to me. Already I start to, that's a good first step toward trust because I see you're trying to see past the stereotypes and all that stuff that you could just sum me up with.

And you actually have an interest in who I actually am. And so listening, asking questions, and then trying to address and help me with the things that you hear from me, that you learn about me in that mode. Those kind of things really do go a long way toward building trust. I think all of us can think of examples where that's the case, where we trusted somebody because they seem to pay attention to us. And they seem to have our best interest at heart. And maybe they couldn't do everything for us, but they really tried to help. us. Boom. That churn's gone or dramatically reduced and we're off on a very different foot than we would otherwise be. And recognizing that's in a diverse world where these identities

can get in there and cause churn, that something like that is important to do is another ambition of the work is to show that, hey, it's worth taking, it's worth doing that. I could give you an experiment on giving feedback as an example of... Yeah, that would be great. Okay, the colleagues and I, Jeff Cohen, Lee Ross and I, we did an experiment a number of years ago on how do you give feedback, critical feedback to how does a white professor give critical feedback to black students and have that feedback be trusted? Basic question that right at this point we're addressing here. And so we had a white and black Stanford students

come in, write an essay about their favorite teacher, and we told and if the essay was good, we would publish it in a new magazine. We were starting on campus on teaching. Come back in two days and we'll give you feedback on that essay. And so when they come back in two days, we do give them feedback. We vary how we give them the feedback. That's the important part of the experiment and we measure how much they trust it. And what we found was that when we gave the feedback just straightforwardly, here's the feedback on your essay. Or we said something really nice about them first. I really like the energy you bring to my class. Here's the feedback. The white students, they trusted it because they're not under a stereotype about their

abilities, a negative stereotype about their abilities. They're not thinking about that. So they just take the feedback straightforwardly. But the African-American students, they didn't trust it. They didn't trust it so much. And when you think about it, it seems strange because these are very strong students. They're at a university dedicated to their development and so on, and yet they're not trusting the feedback. But when you think about it, you can see it's an ambiguous situation for them in that remembering, forgetting attention. Do they just forget that feedback giver might have a negative view of their group's abilities, and that might have affected the feedback they got? Do they just forget that and trust that.

So with that ambiguity in there, is it due to my work, this feedback, or is it due to his views of my group's abilities, this feedback? Is there bias? That makes it difficult, just structurally more difficult for them to trust the feedback, and they don't trust it as much.

But the great news of that experiment is that there was a very simple way. Again, this is one of the facts that inspired me to get interested, in this set of issues, there was a way of giving feedback that they trusted immensely, deeply. And it was very simple. In that case, the experimenter said, look, we use high standards in evaluating these essays because we might publish them. And so we're using high standards. But I've read your essay, and I think you might be able to meet those standards. Here's the feedback.

Well, when that happened, the black students trusted the feedback more than any other group of participants in the experiment, those two things were using high standards, and I think you can meet those standards, that told them that they're not being seen in terms of those negative stereotypes about their group's abilities. They're not being seen that way. They're all of a sudden free of that. When they're free of that, they wanted desperately to trust that feedback and use it. But they couldn't because it was ambiguous, just a normal human thing. They're not even thinking about that, they wouldn't be able to describe what I'm describing here. Without those cues, those signals, it's ambiguous. That kind of illustrates what it takes to be effective in a diverse situation.

White professor giving critical feedback to black students, maybe even vice versa in a different situation. When we're in diverse situations, we need to pay more attention, see each other, Let's try to put ourselves in each other's shoes a little bit more, in these classic sort of biblical ways, and understand what people are dealing with there. And once we do that, it surmounts these identity differences that otherwise seem unsurmountable. And in important situations, like in classrooms, like in a doctor's office,

they can end in a traffic stop. That there's a certain approach. illustrated in that condition of that experiment, we're using high standards and I believe you can meet them. I'm giving you something when I say that. I'm saying there could be a difference between, there's a difference between us. I could see you stereotypically, but I'm not.

I'm seeing you as a human being, an equal human being. And with that, dramatically changes the course of things. And I could go on, but I think that may give people a sense of what, I'm talking about here. I'm going to go on just for the sake of time, but because I want to get to your concept of wise and you introduce the idea of wiseness. I'll let you give a broader definition, but my way of seeing it is it, wiseness is seeing full humanity and human difference.

Yes. And you illustrate this through the relationship between Gil Evans and Miles Davis. For the listener who doesn't know who those are, maybe you can explain. But what allowed Evans to be trusted in a community that had strong reasons for them to be weary of Evans? Gil Evans, Miles Davis, is most people do know who he is. Probably the greatest jazz musician of the 20th century. There would be some argument there, but he's certainly my favorite. But he's a tough, cool guy, had a great sense of propriety over jazz as an African-American

art form and was concerned about the employment of black jazz musicians and so on. So he's got a position in there. And Gil Evans is a tall, skinny white guy from Canada. It was a band leader, and he famously ate radishes out of brown paper bags in these New York City sophisticated jazz clubs. So he's a square guy. But they hit it off because perhaps almost out of his naivete, Gil Evans was just interested in Miles' music. And the experience. from which that music came. He saw it. And Miles could see that, that he had some,

a person here who was sympathetic with his experience and could see the connection between his experience and his art and so on. And so they became fast friends. And then they became collaborators. And they made some amazing music together. I think some of the most beautiful music. Miles Davis's melancholy horn and sweet archa

orchestral arrangements, four or five albums that were just, I think, stunning albums. And when Gil Evans died, Miles Davis died not long after that and just really said, acknowledged that Gil Evans was his closest friend in life. There's a bridging of identities that you might not think would be probable, but happened through an attitude really on the part of both of them, but perhaps especially Gil, that he could see Miles's full humanity. Miles is very different from him. But in that different he could see full, equal humanity. And Miles could see that he could see that.

And so he could put that question of remembering and forgetting, he could put that aside in that relationship and say, I can forget that in this relationship. He's a friend. I think many of us do have friends like that across identity divides. And I think that's the way I'm describing it is a helpful way of describing how it happens, is that they can't put aside this worry because they've got evidence that it's not valid here. I think we all have, or many others have relationships like that.

Our society still has enough segregation that perhaps not everybody has that. But I want to point out how possible it is, how big a difference can be bridged through this kind of wiseness. The term wise comes from an ethnography by Irving Goffman, a sociologist, 50s who interviewed gay men in San Francisco at that time. And he picked that term up from them. He interviewed gay men who were suffering. It was quite a stigma in the 50s. And the gay, those men had a certain term for straight people who saw their full humanity. And that term was wise. He's wise, man. You don't have to worry about him. He sees our full, he sees us as people. African Americans have tons of phrases like this. He's cool, man. He's down. He's down.

You can trust him. You can trust him. That he sees our humanity. That is what I love that term wise, because it has so many reverberating meanings. But it does capture this capacity to see the full humanity indifference. And I think this is one of the, in American society with the diversity that we have, it's such an opportunity in human history to be able to have that kind of diversity and see humanity in its different forms. And to understand that difference is usually our shared humanity contending with different circumstances, different situations. And that's how difference arises. But at base, it enables us that way of thinking about it to understand that full humanity can come in very different forms.

And it doesn't mean that we can't bridge those differences. We can bridge those differences. I want to take this concept of wise and now as you do in the book, start applying this to different scenarios. So in Chapter 5, you go into exploring how power differences complicate trust. And this is something that all of us experience. And an example of this is when one party controls outcomes. So this could be your Stanford professor who controls your grades. For me, it could be my boss who controls my personal. promotions or could be a judge who controls a legal decision. So how in these scenarios should trust

building be approached so it doesn't become an unrealistic burden on the less powerful group? I do think that it's wisest for the person in the more powerful position in a setting, in a classroom or in a doctor's office or in a police just pullover. It's important for that person to lead with wiseness. It's a lot to ask the person who is in the least powerful position, maybe from a traditionally disenfranchised group, it's a lot to ask them to be the first to trust, because that could make them very vulnerable to the ill-intended use of power by the more powerful person. And maybe there's a history of that there. To approach them and say, be wise and offer trust is asking a lot, I think. And so,

So I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it. And so the best sort of answer I could come up with is, generally speaking, the leader, the leadership, the people who are in the leader's seat in a setting should be the first to do this. And then it takes off as the norm. It begins to be normalized in a situation, seeing human, full humanity indifference. It starts to become the normative way that the whole setting sees it then. So there are advantages of that person in the power seat doing this first.

Now, having said all that, also in that chapter, I try to say, sometimes the least powerful offer themselves up. They offer trust. This was one of the powerful strategies of the civil rights movement. This is Martin Luther King's genius. Absolute genius. Not uniquely genius, Gandhi before him and other movements before both of them. Nonviolence, you present yourself.

I remember as a kid, going to demonstrations. Dress up, put on a tie. Trust the situation. What you're doing is in those demonstrations like in Birmingham or in Selma, we're going to live and act like free people would be able to live in act. So we're not going to ask for more than we're going to do that. And even though we know that trusting them or having faith in their capacity, as human beings could get us hurt, we're going to do that.

And so they did that. And those demonstrations, especially broadcast on television, transformed America. So it is possible that sometimes the least powerful, showing trust first, I trust you, even though you have the power to inflict considerable damage on me, my trust of you and my behaving, I trust you, you, orderly, dressed well, so on. Then if you treat me with violence, you respond with violence,

that becomes something that nobody else wants to be associated with. And that became, I think, one of the, that was one of the genius strategies of the American Civil Rights Movement in the late 50s and 60s was that approach. So it isn't always that the least powerful shouldn't go first. But I think when we're talking classrooms and offices and workplaces and so on, This approach, this strategy can be much more effective if the leadership do it first. One of the things you also talk about in this chapter is that trust doesn't only depend on warmth, but it also depends on perceived fairness and belief in one's potential.

So you go into experiments on feedback across racial lines illustrate the point. Black students were skeptical of criticism from white evaluators. unless the feedback included a clear message that high standards were being applied because the evaluator believed in the student's ability. Why did that wise feedback convey respect and expectation simultaneously? I think it conveys those things because from the student's standpoint, they're in that remembering and forgetting tension in the situation. And that's ambiguating the situation. It's making it ambiguous and hard to know who am I dealing with. What's it? I'm insured. And his behavior dispels that ambiguity, those remarks. That's what's

the heart of that recipe of building trust, is that that evaluator says, look, I'm going to grant you. I believe in you. You can think of a coach with an athlete. I believe in you. I'm going to give you that and that disambiguates the situation for the student or for the athlete. I don't have to worry anymore about him seeing me stereotypically. He's not, that doesn't make sense to interpret him that way. I'm very anxious to be in a world in a situation where I'm not seen that way. So I really rise to that occasion because it's an opportunity maybe I don't always have. And boy, that's very empowering and endearing and brings us close and motivation. me to do my best and so on. So I think that's the heart of what wiseness does, is to disambiguate that,

should I remember or should I forget? Can I really forget? I think some of the tensions in African-American intellectual life between more liberal and more conservative points of view are almost around precisely that issue. Can I forget that possibility of being discriminated against, or do I have to remember it? Yeah. and be vigilant to it all the time. That's a psychological weight that I think is at the root of some of my friends' disagreements over dinner. You expand upon this point in the next couple of chapters, and you start to argue how entire settings

or entire environments, if you want to look at it that way, can be structured to reduce churn and to become wise. And I want to ask, on what distinguishes is? like an institution or a community that reduces churn from one that unintentionally applies it. Yes. I'm maybe most fascinated about this, having been an administrator for a good number of years and a number of places. How should we as a, I was a provost, how should we as a university approach these these issues? And something I was, I think what I would done, I think what most universities do is are the very best of intentions, and we set up a committee of people that are here.

We need to improve our graduation rate, and we need to improve the graduation rate for minority students, and we need to have more women in STEM fields. And so what should we do? And maybe we'll get a program that will help them overcome deficits in preparation and the like. So we think very reasonably like that. But a couple of academic units, in one case, the entire university, they were led, approach this in a different way through a variety of reasons in particular, the arrival of a particular

faculty member who didn't see the students, didn't look at the students so much as an observer would and try to figure out what they would need. He actually tried to, he got to know students and he talked to them and he could see what they were concerned about and what they were worried about and what was affecting their ability to stay in college. And he designed. things to meet those needs, rather than impose his understanding of the situation, he let the students influence his understanding of the situation. And they're very different understandings. And what he found is that a lot of times it's not about ability at all, and even preparation. It's about that they don't know what a university is for. They don't know

the best, most effective ways of functioning in it. They don't know what it offered, what opportunities it offers. The bureaucracy is intense. They don't hand in a form at a, it, or right time and they're out and we never see them again and it's more of those things. So let's address those things. And when he did, he let the university, his university, this is Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia that I'm talking about. They tripled their graduation rate in a very reasonable number of years, five, six, seven years. It made a dramatic difference putting your ear to the experience of the students and addressing. those needs, as opposed to projecting what I think would be is their problem. I'm not a student. I'm an

observer of students, but I'm not dealing with that. So I think it's more ability, more preparation, may, skills, and it doesn't seem to always be that way. What excited me about that is, is that, well, that's a very different way to look at these issues. And I tried to come up with a frame, a quick term, the observer versus the actor's perspective. The observer is, I use the example of, let's say my colleague and I have a research team meeting, and my colleague's always late. Why is he always late? And I'm an observer of him. And when I'm an observer of him, he's in my line of sight. And so I come up with ideas about why he's late that are all about him. He doesn't care about our research. He's disorganized as a person.

I can't count on him. All those things make sense because he's in my mind's eye as to what is, and I'm using explanations that fit that. But my colleague, he's not, why are you late? My colleague, he's thinking very differently. He's not in his line of sight at all. The circumstances of his life are in his line of sight. So he's saying, I get out of a class just before this starts and it's hard to get across campus. That's why I'm late. Or I haven't been able to get a reliable nanny or the traffic is unpredictable or he has a variety of, he's looking at his circumstances. And so that difference, taking the observer's perspective, where we over-emphasize the person and the things about them that could be causing the problem, it should be

added in with the actor's perspective, who is going to look more at the circumstances that they're actually contending with as a source of the problem. So when you think about large institutions, for me, that would be universities and colleges, higher education, for other somebody else, it would be a corporation, for somebody else still, it would be a military division. I think the same principle holds that we can be more aware of the perspective we're taking and go, to the effort of, again, asking questions, seeing the person and their circumstances, and then responding with solutions. I think that's an effective, wise way to make entire institutions wise, not just as individuals, but it can help us an entire institution be much more effective

with handling diversity and all of our challenges. But that perspective difference, I think, is important. I do too. And I did want to come back. back to the individual that's in that institution. Like if you were someone who lives with chronic churn, what happens psychologically to you? Does it change how you see yourself and your own worth if you're in this constant churn state? Yes, it does.

I think it's very corrosive that I, let's say, I was an African-American student who went to college. And I used myself as an example in the book. I was a kid, I was a reader, but I don't know if I was that great a student. I was more interested in being an athlete. And I was a swimmer of all things. And it takes a lot of time. And when I went to college, I just had a good sense of what it was about.

I didn't know how to do it. I didn't have the right understanding of it and what was required to succeed at it. I took French and I thought if I studied for 10 minutes a night, that would be pretty good. So I just didn't know where the hell I was at what I was doing. So that gives me some sympathy with this whole problem. But I had a roommate who I described in the book who said, look, that's not going to do it. And so eventually was persuaded by him. And I decided, I'm just do everything he does.

And he didn't. And oh, I was just like one aha moment after the next. Well, you're supposed to go to class and you're supposed to read the book before you go to class. Things that seem very simple, but I went to a big urban high school and I just didn't learn those things in the south side of Chicago and it wasn't so clear to me. So when I got to college, I needed that kind of an experience. So that gives me personally a sort of connection to this set of concerns that we're talking about. Yeah, my mom is from Chicago, more the Glenview North side, and she went to New Trigger. My former in-laws lived in Glenview, so I know where that is.

Beautiful park system up there. Beautiful, beautiful. I wanted to ask one more thing on this personal level. What helps a person develop a sense of internal trust? And the way I would look at this from my work is the feeling that they matter, even when they're uncertain how others will judge them? Like, how does that manifest itself? You mean, how do I build somebody else's trust in me

or how do I build my own trust in me? I'm really getting after, can people rebuild self-trust after long periods of churn? And what conditions make that possible? Yes, I do think we're just talking about might be an example. I do think as soon as, you know, you start to realize that really people are on your side and they are interested in you. Some of the things that, you know, when you interview people and you ask them about,

why did you go into this career or that career, they very often, I say, well, somebody told me I was pretty good at this. And that is enough often for a person to go down a whole path of life, a whole career path, on that comment alone. Yeah. So I think that's how powerful it is when, somebody sees who you are and responds to you in a helpful, constructive way, it's incredibly powerful. That feedback and that experiment, and we're using high standards. I read your essay, and I think you can, I think you can meet those standards. Wow. If somebody told you that,

well, okay. And it'd really be transformed. You really give yourself to doing that. You'd be able to withstand a lot more frustration. Maybe you wouldn't make it in the end. I'm not. not saying every time that would prevail, but you'd get a lot farther down the road with having been launched with that kind of a feedback, that kind of a remark than you would without it. I think that's true for anybody, but I think it's especially true for people with identities that are negatively stereotyped because of the whole ambiguity we've been talking about. This ambiguates, oh, there are stereotypes out there about my group, and people could see me this way. And I might have to just deal with that. But this person didn't, doesn't seem to that way

and really sees some potential in me. Well, that's a very powerful kind of experience for a person. And it certainly was critical in my life. And I think it's probably true in many of our lives. I can name the people who said those things to me, things like that. And that did ever, that changed me completely. And it really did reorient me in some very powerful, immediate ways. And the last thing I wanted to ask you about just before we wrap up is if leaders, educators, doctors, families could adopt just one principle listening to us today to reduce churn and build trust across the differences, what would you want them to most understand? Yeah. I love that question because the answer I love so much. And I love the answer because it's something people can do.

it's not something that's hard to do because I think trust is a game that is played on the ground and is who shows up and who listens again and then who tries to respond to what they learn from that listening in a constructive, helping, supportive way.

So the end of the book tries to pull all this together in a general model, a general approach for how to do that. And the first step, and maybe the most important step is to take the time to actually try to see the other person, to try to understand the life that they have and what they are contending with. Not so much my own speculation about what they're dealing with, but talk to them, really try to figure out what are they dealing with, what's important here.

Georgia State, for example, they changed their financial aid system as opposed to giving students a block grant, so to speak, as a financial aid, a fellowship or a scholarship of some sort, they realize that students need money, especially low-income students, they need money to deal with crises with economic shocks to the family. And so you can, if you can't pay, if your car needs to be fixed, come in and make a, and we'll give you money for that. You can't pay your tuition bill. We'll give you money for that.

So that's how they use their financial aid to meet more urgent circumstances. Now, that's a very insightful thing. That's actually seeing past the, I'll just give you a block grant. And they also accompany that, I should point out, with financial literacy training so that students seems like, wow, why would you do that, get that in college? But that can be very helpful. Those are good examples. I offer them as examples of what you get when you see, when you listen closely and try

to see the circumstances that in that case, students were really dealing with. And then you try to meet those cert. Then those students really do trust you. They don't care whether you have the same identity or not. It's the least important thing to them. All that stuff, all that abstraction and emotion around identity goes out the window. This person cares about me and help me. And that's such a powerful human force and potential that it's so easy to do it.

That's what I easy to do it probably. It's a bit of an overstatement sometimes. Listening can be very hard. We know that. Taking the time to listen and to then respond constructively and healthfully can, I don't mean to diminish the effort involved in that. But it's accessible. It isn't mysterious.

And so I think in a society like ours, this magnificent, multiracial, multi-ethnic society that we have, These skills are especially important, and I think a lot of us have them. And it's just really pulling them together and trying to help them be more of a foundation in our society that this work aspires to do. I love that. It reminds me of the work of the late Emil Bernou and Josh Green's work at Harvard about seeing the other side. So I'm going to end here, Claude. In your Cota, you end on this note.

Trust building is a game, like you just mentioned, played largely on the ground. It's who listens. Listens again is genuinely welcoming and collaboratively gives people the help they need to succeed in a setting. It's who's wise. This is the heart of the matter. And anybody that is everybody can do it. I love how you ended the book.

And I would highly encourage my audience to pick up a copy of this great book, Jern. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was such a profound honor to have you here today. If someone wants to learn more about your work, Claude, where is the best place for them to go? Well, I think Chiron does cover a lot of the heart of it. Another book, Whistling Vivaldi, is an earlier book that kind of gives the history of the research on stereotype threat. That can sometimes be helpful to people that, too, has a lot of stress on how to use it in various circumstances. But I'm caught up in the, I think Churn is a more general statement.

And so I think it may be more useful to people in terms of using it in their lives and in the settings in which they function. Awesome. And I was also very happy to see you also had Greg Walton and Mary Murphy in the book, whose work I really appreciate as well. Yeah. So thank you so much, Claude, for joining me. It was really an honor.

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Claude Steele, what stood at most to me is this. So much of what shapes our lives happens in moments we barely notice. Not just in what we say, but in what we feel in the presence of others. That subtle tension, that hesitation, that question in the back of our minds. How am I being seen right now? Claude gives us a language for that experience. And once you see churn, you start to realize how often it's there, in conversations,

in workplaces, in relationships, even in moments where nothing is explicitly said. But what's powerful is this. The problem isn't just bias. It's the fear of being misunderstood, the fear of being reduced to something smaller than who you really are. And the solution isn't perfection. It's trust. It's the willingness to see someone fully to signal that they're safe, that they're valued, that they won't be judged by the worst possible interpretation. Because when that happens, the tension disappears. And what's left is something far more powerful. Connection, understanding, and the possibility of showing up as your full self. And that insight leads directly into our next On Thursday, I'm joined by Angela Myers. If today's episode was about how we're seen by others,

Angela takes us to something even more fundamental. Why it matters that we feel seen at all. Because at the core of so much that we've been exploring in this series, meaning connection, identity, is a deeper human need, the need to know that you matter. If Claude Steele helps us understand the tension and human interaction, Angela Myers helps us understand what's at stake. Because when people feel like they don't matter, everything else begins to break down. You won't want to miss it. I don't think we have a loneliness problem. I think we have a mattering problem. I don't believe we have a suicide problem. I believe we have a mattering problem. Mattering comes first period, biologically, sociologically, physiologically. And if we

guarantee those conditions, then those are consequences of either feeling like you do matter, feeling significant, or feeling insignificant. We treat the symptom of, of insignificance, but we don't treat the core of what it takes to feel significant. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it. Leave a five-star rating a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Watch the full conversations on our YouTube channels. And if you want to go deeper into this idea, my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect coming October 6th is available now for pre-order.

Until next time, remember, a meaningful life isn't just built by what you achieve. It's shaped by how you show up, how you connect, and how you make others feel seen. I'm John Miles and you've been passion struck.