Radiolab - The Obama Effect, Perhaps.

Episode Date: January 28, 2009

When Jad and Robert saw this article about a study that found a link between President Obama's election, and the test scores of African Americans, it made them think about an earlier study by Claude Steele,about a psychological effect called "stereotype threat."

I should quite. You're listening to Radio Lab. The podcast from WNYC. And NPR. Hello everyone, this is Radio Lab, the podcast. I'm Chad Abumrod. And I'm Robert Quilwich and Jad Sick. Yes.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't explain to you the situation to you, the podcast listener, are in. There's been some confusion here among our podcast. There's exactly what's going on. In the last five podcasts, you've listened to completely produced hour-long programs. Yes, that's why we began Radio Lab as a radio show, hour-long programs, which we work very, very hard on. Yeah, I mean, I think of us as having two, we have radio labs for the radio, which are hour-long programs, and you've just heard a bunch of those. Then we have radio labs just for you, the person who signed up. Those are called the podcast.

And we could do stuff on the podcast that are a little less formal. Yeah. And not that we're terribly formal on the radio. But it's just a looser form. So we can come a different length. Shorter. Or longer. Or longer.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. We've ran conversations between you and various smarty pants that have run pretty long. Really long. And have been great. Yes. Or close to forever. But the point is, this is now the beginning of a podcast.

So this is not a... And if you're wondering where to find us on the radio, the issue there is that we're on the radio at different times all over America. So you have to ask your local station when they run radio lab. Sometimes it's in the morning. there's an evening, but the podcast is any time you choose. That's right. And starting with this podcast, this post-season 5 podcast, I want us to read to you, Mr. Krall,

the second paragraph of an article that was recently in the New York Times. Okay. Have you heard about this fellow Barack Obama? I know about the New York Times. Oh, yes, I heard him too. Well, new researchers have documented, I'm quoting here, what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African Americans and whites

on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination, all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election. So to back up, that means, translating it into normal English. Yes, go ahead. That some researchers decided to give a 20-question test to a bunch of people. They were young people and older people, too. You're going to take a test that's a GRI test.

verbal test that you take to go to a graduate school. But before they take the test, they have to list their race. Yes, they do. So you put down your race, and then you take the test. Now, the first time they administered the test was sometime last year before Barack Obama was a big deal. Yes. And blacks performed poorer, poorer than whites.

Yes. So whites on average at that point answered 12 questions out of 20 correct, and black subjects answered only 8.5 on average out of 20. So that's a significant difference. So that was a small sample. Then they gave the exact same 20-question test, again, GREs, again the verbal, to a group of people after Barack Obama had become the nominee of the Democratic Party had given an acceptance speech in Denver, Colorado, and was a pretty famous and important guy. Yes. And then they gave it yet again after Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States.

So there's these multiple test takings, and what they noticed was after Barack Obama had become fabulous, blacks taking the test. past scored about the same as whites. Before Barack Obama had been fabulous, blacks performed more poorly. And there's a longstanding reason for the previous performance, but the new performance, that's very interesting. Pretty stunning. But, I mean, we should say, by way of caveats, that this is a really preliminary study. It's not been peer reviews. The other guys haven't looked it over. Not a huge number of subjects in the study. But nevertheless, very intriguing. Yes, and there is actually precedent for this way of thinking. The precedence goes back to a psychology professor named Claude Steele.

I got a job offer. This is in the 80s at the University of Michigan, and it was part psychology and part to administer a minority student program there. And in the process, I saw data that surprised me. What he saw was a troubling trend. Two kids would enter Michigan. One was black, one was white. come in at the exact same levels. Same skills, same SAT score. So theoretically they should do the same when they get to Michigan. But without fail, or almost without fail, after one semester... The black kid was winding up with lower grades.

How much lower? Pretty dramatic. At least two-thirds of a letter grades. Meaning if the white kid got an A, the black kid who should be getting an A-2 is instead getting a B or a B-plus. That's significant. That's significant. And he also, by the way, saw this performance.

difference gap between women and men, when it came to math. To the same degree? The same degree in advanced math courses? It was comparable. I learned this is a national phenomenon. If I was to walk into almost any college class in the United States, I'd have a very high probability of finding exactly that. What could explain these differences?

There was something there that people didn't understand and that we certainly didn't understand. So he figured he would start with the woman in math issue. He brought a bunch of women in and a bunch of women. men, sophomores. Brought them into the laboratory one at a time, gave them a half an hour section of the graduate record exam you take if you're a math major. Very, very difficult math. And sure enough, the women who had all the same credentials coming into that situation

performed dramatically worse than the men. Worse as in... It would be a couple hundred points on an SAT test. Big difference. So, this is a big effect. So Claude Steele thought, all right, step one complete. I've got a lab situation that resembles the real world. Good.

But now the next step is to tweak things a little bit, see if I can mess around with it. Now, normally in these situations... The test giver has got a white lab coat on, and he brings in a big stack of cellophane-wrap tests. And he puts a clock on the table. It's all... It's all... You know, it's like, that's going to intimidate almost anybody. Maybe that's what's happening, he thought.

What if I took away the clock, took away the coat, And most importantly, right before the test, I had the test giver, instead of saying the normal, I'm going to give you a test, pre-test thing. Maybe instead, say something like this. Look, you may have heard that women don't do as well as men on difficult standardized math test. You may have heard that. But that is not true for this particular test. This particular test does not show gender differences, never has, never will. He wondered if maybe saying that simple sentence before giving the test,

would have an effect. And sure enough, I wouldn't be here if their performance didn't go up and go up to match that of the equally skilled men. That performance gap totally vanished. She, look at this thing. So we raced and did it very quickly

the same kind of an experiment with African Americans. There, the pre-test disclaimer went like this. This is an instrument that we use to study problem solving. And it is not diagnostic of individual's intellectual ability. In other words, this is not a test of your intelligence.

I repeat, not an IQ test. So just do the best you can. With that simple disclaimer at the start, same kind of an effect. The black students and the white students were now equal. Just recently, Ryan Brown and Eric Day did an even cleverer treatment.

There is an IQ test, which is nonverbal. It's called the advanced progressive matrices. It has figures. Very abstract. They got lines crossing. That you have to match and so on. It's essentially pattern. diamonds with dots in them. Totally visual.

And so they could represent that test as it is, as an IQ test. It's in fact seen as the gold standard of IQ test because it's, quote, culture-free. There's no math. There's no reading. Because it doesn't involve language. Or you could represent the exact same test as a puzzle. Puzzles. Meaning, you can give an IQ test to a bunch of kids and the blacks will perform worse.

But if you give that same test, lose the word test, lose the word IQ, and just call it a puzzle? The black participants suddenly jump up in their performance. Basically, we got a reversal. When you represented as a puzzle, blacks perform as well as whites. They did, yeah. That's all it takes. Just change a few words. In fact, there's even better research on this by a guy named Jeff Stone at University of Arizona,

who's shown this with golfing tasks where he's had black and white golfers just putt. Wait, putting? We're talking about putting about what it takes to putt effectively. Are you a golfer? No. Ryan's not either, so he doesn't know what he's talking about. Right, so I'm going to make this up. What we did was we got a miniature golf situation where each hole changed and people had to work around obstacles.

This is Jeff Stone. He runs the social psychology of sports lab at the University of Arizona. And here's what he did. He tested his black and white putters in two scenarios. Scenario one, using the word intelligence. When we told him it was a measure of sports intelligence, black participants did about four strokes worse than white participants. But when he changed it, took out the word intelligence and framed it instead as a test, of your natural athletic ability. There, the results totally flipped. Flipped, and we had now White's performing significantly worse

than blacks by about four strokes. If you look at the recent U.S. Open that was played in San Diego, Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate went four days, 18 holes. They went to an 18-hole playoff on Monday. Yes! And we're still tied. Sudden death, we go. And Tiger finally won it on the first playoff hole.

Tiger wins a third. U.S. Open Championship. By one stroke. So when you talk about four strokes, that's a huge difference. All right, so here's my question. Stereotypes are powerful. Okay, that makes sense. But in terms of understanding how this works,

can you make this tactile from you? Like if the stereotype that's having all these effects is like a thing, like a little gremlin that bites? Like, when in the test-taking process does it actually, like, do its damage? That's going to be way open to debate. What does seem to be clear from the data, according to Eric Day and Ryan Brown and Claude Steele, is that the gremlin only seems to appear when the test is sufficiently hard. If the test is easy, it's important to point out these effects don't happen.

It's not that the gremlin is not there. Well, he walks in with you, but he doesn't speak necessarily until things get challenging. As soon as the test gets difficult. That's where the voices kick in. Which means that for most of the tests, everybody's doing about the same. It's only at problem number 17, the one about cosines and factorials and whatever, where things start to go wrong. And at least that's the theory. At that problem, the black student starts to stiffen up a little bit.

That's right. And Claude Steele has measured this. Their blood pressure is elevated. Their short-term memory is impaired. It's that flicker of frustration through their body that wakes up the gremlin who starts to whisper in their ear. I don't know if you can do this. Oh, shit. is what they say about us true?

They don't think you can do it. All the usual stuff. And even if the student doesn't believe it, which is likely. See, you don't have to believe it. That's the kind of insidious thing here. Just the fact that he has now this extra bit of mental chatter. That little guy whispering... Well, it's a distraction.

And that makes their performance go down. Just a little bit. All of this dialogue is keeping you from being 100% focused on the task at hand, which is solving these problems. So the real subtle power of a stereotype isn't that it prevents you from doing the thing you want to do, it distracts you for just a beat from doing the thing you want to do, and that may be all the difference. Okay, so we're almost done with this particular podcast,

but before we go, I think we should have the letters section, which I'll do like this. Letters, they get letters. So we have this letter, Jed, Abramrod. Yes. A number of people have wondered who had listened to our diagnosis show For those of you haven't listened to the diagnosis show, you'll have to listen to it to understand this question. But they're very curious, what happened to patient X, who had pancreatic cancer in the show?

We never quite explained his fate, what is the outcome? Yeah, yeah, that's actually a really good question. Patient X had his entire pancreas removed. And many years later is doing fine. He's still alive. Although the pancreas being a very important organ when he was removed, he became a diabetic. So it's a pretty radical, radical surgery,

but it's, you know, arguably saved his life. Okay, the next question. This comes from your father and your mother, Chad. What is wrong with you is essentially what they're saying? And I like to join them in that. For those of you who remembered the show, was a choice when you did this? Suddenly in the middle of the show,

and for no reason, at the end of a segment, And Jed used a term of opprobrium to... He used the name that is normally associated with female dogs and just simply called the audience, bitches. That's why you just called... Okay, bitches. And then, like, all hell broke loose. Yeah.

And I thought at the time, what? It's true. You should... It's true. You should go on record as being a dissenter from the beginning. Yeah, I thought, like, why did you do that? Okay, so here's the thing. Some people found...

Many people found it funny? Many people did not find it funny, and I sincerely apologize to people who didn't. You look, I'm in my 30s, okay? I grew up watching MTV. It's, you know, you go out with your friends, and you're like, all right, bitches, you're ready to go out to dinner? Do you actually say that? Yeah, it's a term of endearment. It just popped out during one of the sessions.

You remember this. It was really late. I do. I thought it was, like, really insulting and stupid. No, you didn't find that. But then you did this generation card thing on me, so, like, I get, like, I get scared. I believe. Yeah, right. So, well, I see, that's what all the young people are doing.

But you know what? I got so many people coming and say, what's wrong with him? Why did you do that? And a lot of them were your age. Or, dare I say it, like 19, 20, 21. Yeah, I think you're exaggerating. I think it's generational, but it doesn't even matter. Honestly, if I could do it again, I would take it back.

You would? No offense meant. I mean, where it came from from me, and I think people who are my age, you know, It wasn't an attempt to be hip. It's just something that happened in the booth. It was funny. And so we left it in. We probably shouldn't have.

Yeah. Because my parents will not let me forget it. They're always like at dinner. They're like, can you pass the salt, bitch? What do you think of the chicken roast, bitch? I'm like, all right, mom, I get it. I get it. They're such a good parent.

Anyhow, I guess we should go. All right. So Radio Lab. is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Also by Nurse Nestle, who will try to get Chad back to bed and tucked into sleep as soon as possible. Right. I'm Chad Aboumer.

Nurse Nestle, is that what I said? I don't know why I said that. You never know what you're going to say. No, I don't. I really don't. I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollwitz. We'll, I guess, catch up with you in two weeks.