Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - That Background Hum of Worry in Every Important Conversation — Here's What It Is and How to Quiet It | Claude M. Steele

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Why talking to your boss, your doctor, or anyone with power puts your brain on high alert — and what a Stanford psychologist says to do about it.  Claude M. Steele is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of a new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It.  In this episode we talk about: Why talking across difference is so stressful, even when nobody's being bigoted What's actually happening in your brain during an awkward cross-cultural moment The surprisingly simple thing that makes critical feedback land or fall flat How to reduce tension when you're the one with power (and what to do when you're not) A three-part framework for building trust across any divide Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris This episode is sponsored by: Function Health: Join at functionhealth.com/happier or use the gift code HAPPIER25 for a $25 credit toward your membership. BetterHelp: Online therapy, matched to your needs. Get 10% off your first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/happier Wix: Build a fully functional website with AI in minutes at https://www.wix.com/harmony Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/oh9jnxlq  #CashAppPod  Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card.  Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. IQBAR:   To get twenty percent off all IQBAR products, including the ultimate sampler pack, plus free shipping, text DAN to 64000. Gusto:  Try Gusto today at gusto.com/happier and get three months free when you run your first payroll.

Hey everybody, it's Dan Harris. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. Today we're talking about social anxiety. Whether you consider yourself to be socially anxious or not, we all interact with people pretty much every day who are different from us. The difference could be gender, it could be age, it could be position on the power hierarchy at work, it could be race, it could be political persuasion on and on. And so these differences, according to my guest today,

create, stress, and even physical agitation. The term that my guest uses is churn. Said guest is Claude M. Steele, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of a new book, Chern. We're going to talk about how to deal with churn and much more. After this quick break, we'll see you soon.

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Claude M. Steele, welcome to the show. Great pleasure to be here. Let me start with a very basic question. What is churn? Yeah, churn is, you did a great job in the introduction. It's the tension we have in diverse settings of the sort that you described where you're bringing people of different backgrounds and identities together in important settings. It's the tension we might have about, you know, what should we say, how should we say it, what should we do, how should we do it? A general

concern about how our identity is going to affect our experience in the setting, whether we'll be accepted, whether it will be valued, whether we'll be better be on the lookout. Churn is that thought, I think it's experienced, the everyday word for it, is just plain worry and trying to figure out how to cope with this situation and the ambiguity it presents. That's what churn is. It is a tension of that sort. The more important to situation, it's important to stress, the more intense the churn can be. If we're just sitting on a subway car, churn would be pretty light.

There's no consequences for us. There are no stakes involved. But if we're in an employment situation or we're in a classroom or we're in a traffic stop, the churn can be a pretty intense emotional experience. And that's what the book refers to is that emotional experience. Somebody like me who I have all the privileges, straight, white male, born into an upper middle class family, on and on, all the advantages that one can have in this society. Does somebody like me experience less churn than somebody who's from a marginalized group? You can probably live comfortably and meet your needs without having to be in many situations that are.

diverse where you have to, in order to get your needs met, deal with people from different backgrounds and different identities. So just given the organization of society, the privilege that you describe may keep you from having to do that as much as other people might have to do. That is, let's say, an African American. In order to meet their one's needs, they have to transact with the mainstream society on a regular basis to buy clothes, get full. food to go to school. Because of that organizational fact, they may more often in their daily lives encounter the experience of churn. What about in interactions with anybody who works for me, or if I'm at a party and I'm talking to somebody who's from a different generation,

or if I'm interacting with a barista who's a different race, like if it strikes me that talking across any of these forms of difference, it doesn't have to be race, it can be age, it can be hierarchical, there's always the fear of fucking it up, you know, like of saying the Republicans, Democrats. Yes, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I, absolutely, you could experience it in all those situations, you won't experience it very much if the stakes are low in the case of the barista, for example. You know, it doesn't make too much difference to your life how that interaction goes as long as you get your coffee. But if the interaction is with coworkers in your, you know, in your office and in your workplace, or if it's with, you know, your doctor or your lawyer

or with the police officer who pulls you over, then churn could get to be a much more intense. I would imagine one of the big theaters for churn that everybody, no matter what your age, race, gender is, would be dealing with your boss. There's no doubt about that. For most of us who have bosses or colleagues that have some authority over us, depending on how you put it, churn can be significant there because you don't want to, you know, you're worried. Is my identity? Is my identity? Is my political orientation, is my gender, is my sexual orientation? Is that going to be a factor in my relationship with this person who has the authority over me? And you don't know for sure, you don't know that it will. It's not like you're jumping to conclusions, but the question is open. There's ambiguity there. And that's what Cherne is trying to wrestle with, is trying to get a sense of of how can I feel in this? How much can I trust this situation? How comfortable can I be in this

situation? I have a great example of a, in the book, I opened the book with a story about a parent teacher conference. It's, imagine a parent teacher conference. The student is the seventh grader and he's African American. His parents are African American. And the teacher is white. And this is, as the, as the parents get ready to go to the conference, this is, this is, is important to them. It's not a passing thing. This is their son's important school experience and they know how their group can be stereotyped in society. They know how people might look at. They don't know for sure that they will, but they know that they might see, you know, not see him as having the greatest, strongest abilities, or maybe take a small transgression on his part as

something indicative of an underlying, you know, aggressiveness problem. And this is such an important opportunity for them to talk to the teacher and thus the school and make sure that they don't see. These people are trying not to see their son through the lens of these stereotypes. So as they get in the car together to go to the meeting, they're talking, you know, let's don't jump to race right away. It may have nothing to do with that. But what kind of teacher is this?

And do you think these stereotypes would play a role for her? Do you think that she's colorblind? Do you think she's comfortable with the realities of race in the United States? Or what do you think? So as they arrive at the meeting, they're in full churn. They're sitting on the edge of their seats. This is an important meeting. And they're ready to sort of deal with the ghosts of history, so to speak, in this situation,

to make sure, to ensure as best they can. can that their son is given the benefit of the doubt. The teacher, on her part, has probably an equally strong form of a churn going on as she prepares for the meeting. She knows the stereotype of her identity, in this case her racial identity. And she knows that she tries really hard to serve the interest of her students and to be sensitive to the needs of minority students. But how can she convey that directly to the parents? And so she worries that even a slightly negative comment about the young man that may be intended to really foster his development could be mistaken as racist, given the stereotypes about her identity that are relevant in that

situation, that it raises that possibility. She doesn't know that she will be seen that way, but she knows she could be seen that way. And so the ambiguity, the tension that she faces getting ready for this meeting is that. Oh, my goodness, I don't want to be seen that way. It would be so painful to have them see me that way. So here's a, she too is in churn, an intense form of churn. This is the analysis of what can be uncomfortable about being in diverse, settings is our vulnerability to being seen through the lens of negative stereotypes about one

or another of our identities. When we come together in a diverse way, as in this teacher, parent-teacher conference, that can happen. One thing I want to stress right at the outset, I'm going into the darkest part of the analyses here, but I want the listeners to know that the analysis gets very helpful in just a bit, because there is a remedy for churn. And I would like to feel that the remedy for churn is manageable by all of us, available to all of us, much more so than we think, and has been an underappreciated pathway to low-churn interactions to trusting in a situation. It's something we haven't thought about as much, but it's something that I think can be very powerful in these kind of situations. I want to emphasize your point about how we're going to get to churn mitigation strategies forthwith, but let's stay on the level of the problem for a while.

When we're in churn, what is happening to us psychologically and physiologically? That's a very good question. What's happening to us psychologically is that we've got, you know, kind of another motor running in the background of our thinking and processing a motor that affects both our emotions. reactions, the intensity of those reactions, blood pressure, skin conductances, would be how we psychologists would measure that kind of thing. And cognitively, at the level of thinking, it's like we're multitasking. We're doing two things. We're, in addition to doing the task in

front of us, talking about in that example, the performance and the promise and so on of the the young student, we're also monitoring how we're seeing and whether we are confirming stereotypes about our identity. And we're busy kind of worrying about that. So it's as if you have a worry tape going on in the back of your thinking that's absorbing some of your mental energies and focus and can probably interfere right there in the immediate situation with how well you perform in it, how well you do, how natural you feel, how how comfortable and authentic you feel in this situation.

I like to think about this on the level of the brain as well. And let me tell you the way I think about it and understand it, and then please fact check me. I've been very interested in the research around what's called psychological safety. I know you're familiar with this, but just for the audience, psychological safety is essentially in an organization. And it could be a professional organization or any group of humans, a family, a sports team, a volunteer organization. how comfortable do the people on the lowest end of the hierarchy feel speaking up and speaking their minds and telling the truth?

And there's been some research that shows that organizations that have the, and even teams within organizations that have the highest level of psychological safety perform the best. And I think about this through the way what we know about the brain. And again, I'm looking for you, Cloud to eventually fact check me here. if I've run a foul of the facts. But what you want in an effective conversation and an effective interaction is for the rational, logical, creative part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the newest part of the human brain, to stay online and the amygdala, the fear center, the lizard brain, the oldest part of our brain, to stay offline.

because when we're scared, when we're stressed, it, it, the prefrontal cortex cannot fully flower and flourish. And so I think a lot, but to the best of my ability, about keeping people's prefrontal cortex online and not activating the amygdala. It obviously is going to happen and sometimes, you know, you just can't prevent it. But to the best of my ability, that's what I'm thinking about. So how does all of that land with you?

Yeah, that is. a perfect description of what can happen when a person is under this kind of in churn, under the kind of threat of being seen through stereotypes, stereotype threat. In fact, there's research which shows exactly that pattern of brain reaction for participants when they're under stereotype threat. Women performing very difficult math, they're very committed to being good at it. They are very good at it. But they're in a high-stakes situation and they're performing at the front air of their skills compared to the men in exactly that same situation. Women, because of the stereotypes out there about their math abilities, their STEM abilities, they have a pattern, just as you describe it.

There's a suppression of activity in the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain. they need to do well on the on the task in front of them and there's an increase in activation in the amygdala which is sensitive to threat in in the in the situation so there there is precisely that pattern of of brain reaction when people are under this kind of identity threat and are in churn turn looks like that why does this happen why does interacting across lines of difference. Why is it so fraught? That's a very central question in our work. I think the dominant feeling is that these kind of tensions reflect prejudices and biases and the like. Again, while not diminishing the importance of those phenomena, prejudices and biases, I'm pretty convinced at any rate

that this is something different than that. I think what's threatening about it is, is that I just don't want to be seen in terms of, and treated in terms of those stereotypes in situations that are important to me. I just don't want that to happen. And I'm trying to cope with that as a threat in a situation that's important. It could be a classroom, a workplace, and so on. It could be a doctor's office, a traffic stop. I'm trying to cope with the possibility that I could be seen and treated that way.

And how do I respond to it? So I think that's what initiates, it, triggers it. And I think it's often misinterpreted. We don't know how to interpret it. Does this reflect me being prejudiced and biased? No, I'm arguing it reflects a pretty rational reaction to a threat in this situation, a perceived threat in a situation, based on my identity. I'm a bit older, and, you know, that's an identity.

And there are circumstances where I'm with younger people, and they might have views about older people. Maybe they think of older people as not being as up to date on issues and the like, or maybe not being as tech savvy as other people. And in situations where those things are important, the possibility of being seen that way and treated that way. is threatening. And I'm insured trying to cope with it. Well, how do I cope with this? How do I convince them I'm not this way?

What's the best way for me to proceed in this situation? When I'm with just older people, I'm a lot less worried about that because we're all older and, you know, and we're not going to, I'm pretty confident. We're not going to see each other in terms of these ages stereotypes. So I can relax a little bit more. But when the situation becomes diverse, that's what we're not. the threat enters the picture. And part of my brain races into churn while I'm trying to deal with the task at hand. I really resonate with what you said about going into churn around age.

I'm a little bit younger than you. I don't know your exact age. I'm 54 and I interact. I'm considerably older than you. Okay. You should feel no threat. Okay. Well, I do feel threat because I work with and sometimes work out with a lot of younger people. And as soon as we get, you know, into a technical discussion or somebody's trying to show me how to do something on my phone or I need to share screen on Zoom. And then I'm screwing it up.

And then I'm in my mind's like, oh, everybody's thinking I'm old. I'm the unc who can't, you know, function in this setting. And then I, I lose my ability to like hold it together. Yeah, to pay attention to what's right in front of you. Whereas if you were younger and that wasn't an issue, you know, you just automatically without a second thought, so to speak, without any churn. You just pay attention to what they're telling. Oh, you should, you do it this way, huh?

Oh, okay, all right. But when we older people are, this triggers a worry in us that, oh, my goodness, they're going to think the worst of me here based on those stereotypes I know that are out there about older people. And it puts us in churn and that interferes with our functioning in that in that situation. This episode is brought to you by IQ bar, our exclusive snack sponsor. IQ bars are better for you, clean plant protein bars packed with fiber and brain boosting nutrients with zero added sugar. You no longer have to choose between healthy or delicious snacks. IQ bars, plant protein bars are packed with high quality ingredients to help keep you physically.

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One more time, gusto.com slash happier. We've talked about the problem. Yeah. I think we've given the problem a good airing. So let's pivot to what do we do about it. And I know you've written a whole book about that, but I'll start with a very broad question. What do we do about it? It's an approach that we can all take in our lives as individuals and even in larger situations, even in institutions, corporations, an approach we can take that reduces this chair.

and gives us a way of responding. That's where the hopefulness comes in, is that there is a pathway to coping with it that can reduce our stress, our churn. And that pathway is trust-building. That's the proposed answer in this line of thinking, is that what that churn between the parents and the teacher, for example,

is reflecting a kind of difficulty in trusting each other. Can I really trust that I won't be mis-referrefer, mistreated in this situation. That's something I don't think we've appreciated as much as we should should, is that it is fundamentally an issue of trust. It's one way of putting it, as I try to in the book, is it's conflict between remembering and forgetting. Both the parents and the teacher have this mental conflict. Do I remember how my group can be seen in society and perhaps in this situation because that's relevant here? Or do I just forget that and trust that I won't be seen that way? I can just relax here in this situation. That's a kind of way of capturing the kind

of trust that I'm talking about. If I can decide, if the teacher and the parents can decide, oh, I'm going to be safe here. I know this person. I've seen her do this. There's sort of a reservoir of trust that has been built up between these parties. Then the conversation can go forward without all that churn. And it can, the information can be, and the thinking between them can be unobstructed. It can be quite calm and constructivist, I say. That's the pathway to the, to the hopefulness here, is that there is an antidote to churn, and that antidote is trust. And the ability to build trust. And that's what the book marches us through is look at this at the, but just between individuals, how trust building can reduce churn. How do we operationalize this

beyond that very specific example? There are so many other situations in which we're giving feedback that are not teacher-student and maybe not over a racial divide. It could be, I'm giving a feedback to anybody on my team and they're going to be on the lookout for, you know, am I safe in my job? And how can I deliver feedback in that situation? Or to my son who might feel like he's got a localized stereotype of not working hard enough on his homework and I'm not seeing him clearly because I'm looking at him through that lens. So how do we broaden what you call the wise feedback formula? A bit of a story about where the term wise comes from. It's a, it's a, there was an ethnography done by a very famous sociologist, Irving Goffman, of, of gay life in San Francisco in the 1950s when that identity was heavily stigmatized, not just stereotype, but deeply stigmatized.

Gay men of that era had a term for straight people who they knew, uh, they could trust. And they called them wise. Oh man, he's wise. You don't have to worry about him. He sees our full humanity despite the stigma that we have to deal with in this society at this time. So that's where I come up with the term wise. It is behaving in some way that people understand that you see their full humanity, even though they're different and even though there are stereotypes about that difference. if I can manage somehow to convey that. So that becomes kind of the operational question

that the book tries to develop. Well, how can I be wise with people? Well, I think the focus should be on building trust. And there, I think, we humans have some good intuitions. And we probably do it maybe without being aware of it as such, we probably do it quite commonly in our lives. We know how to build that trust. And I think that is a mode of functioning,

as a way of behaving in our important settings. That is a general strategy for being wise that allays this identity threat, enables churn to go very low and to make our interactions with each other more constructive. There are many examples in my life where I've experienced friendship like that across identities divide where people really just got to know me

and figured out what I needed and tried to help me get it. I trust that person then. I trust them. I don't worry that my identity's a problem in that situation. Some of the closest relationships I've ever had are from friendships like that where people help me cope with a real life situation.

We were colleagues together or we're students. together. The book is full of examples of that, where, you know, people in the same situation I'm in, you know, paid attention and tried to get to know me and figure out how to help me. And they, when they, as that process unfolded, it was very easy for me to trust them and feel real, real, unobstructed human affection for them. I considered myself pretty lucky for many reasons, but one of them is that I have, to date, not fallen for one of these scams, these scammers who reach out to via your phone. When you get the cash app card, not only do you get access to a ton of perks and benefits like exclusive early access to nationwide concert pre-sales or discounts on popular brands, but you also have extra security with the power to instantly lock or unlock your card right from your phone and just one tap.

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credit toward your membership. The way you're talking about turn reduction thus far in the conversation really is from the side of the person who has power. what about if you're the employee or the student and you don't you're not the one with the positional power how can you reduce churn so you can perform more effectively no matter uh no matter how wise your counterparty is yeah uh this is something i thought a great deal is a whole chapter in the book is as you know focused on that that question Trust in the face of power. I think I summarized it.

I do think the person with the power has to go first with, I do think that's a reality. That it's a lot to expect somebody in the least, in the less power situation to initiate trust. Hmm. When the powerful person hasn't done anything to help you forget and not worry about how your identity is going to affect thing, they haven't made any. It's a lot to expect the least powerful person to make the first step in that kind of situation. So I just think that's a reality that needs to be, I need to be explicit about and have been. But having said that, I do think there is a force. of power that arises from the least powerfully situated person offering trust.

I think that's one of the most going to some detail. Always remembering, it's a lot to ask, but I think it is a form of power in its own right. And the big examples I can think of are some of the early civil rights movements where the marches in Birmingham or in Selma, for example, where the least powerful people dressed up in their Sunday best and took advantage and simply lived, behaved in a way that defeated the segregation that was normative in those situations.

That is, they violated the rules of segregation and just simply integrated. That's at the core of what those demonstrations. did. We're going to act like we are not, like we are full human beings, and we're going to present ourselves as if we trust that the system will treat us like full human beings. So put on your coat and tie, and let's march into this diner, and we're going to sit down at the restaurant and order food like it. So here's an example in these sit-ins, is what I'm referring to here. people just took their rights. They asserted them as the least powerful people in the situation. And, you know, they did suffer accordingly. I mean, people are throwing hot coffee on them and

sugar and all kinds of things. But their assertion of this transformed American society and really at least, you know, led to the changes in the laws that had been in place that enabled this kind of segregation that had dominated our society to that point. These kinds of assertions of trusting the ultimately having faith in or trusting the ultimate fairness of this society led to changes that really did make the society a fairer society, a more just society. I think there was no question but that you're correct that the onus should be on the people with power.

And we'll talk in a moment about some more strategies that any of us, can implement in in those situations where we do have the power to create trust. But let me just stay with the idea of like what can we do when we're, you know, on the least powerful end of the equation when we're sitting down with our boss, when we're interacting with a professor who's older and maybe of a different race or gender, et cetera, et cetera. One strategy that is just coming to mind for me, but I want to check it with you, comes from a pair of communications coaches that I've worked with for a while, and I really admire. Their names are

Mudita Nisker and Dan Clerman. And they often recommend that when you're struggling in an interaction, you trust that you can report to your conversation partner what's happening for you. You know, I'm struggling right now to speak coherently because I'm a little nervous. And I just want to tell you what's going on for me. And if you're, if you're seeing that I'm having trouble, giving you a straight answer, that's why. There's a high-stakes interaction for me, so can you give me a little grace? How does that land for you?

That's pretty good. It kind of disarms the threat in the situation. I see you when you say that to me. I'm the powerful person. You're the least powerful person. When you say that to me, I feel, oh, okay, he knows what's going on here. He's trusting me, allowing himself to be vulnerable to me.

And, you know, there are going to be, I want, lack of a better term, mean-spirited people for whom that wouldn't mean very much. I'm not denying that that exists in the world, but I think most, many people, that's where my faith lies, is that there are many people who want these interactions to be effective and who want to function well in diverse environments and enjoy. the diversity that is as opposed to be threatened by the diversity of our of our society. I think they would welcome that. That is a I think an effective way of disarming this this the dynamic behind churn. As you've said many times throughout

this conversation that the key antidote to churn is trust. In the book you lay out a framework for building trust and it has three aspects seeing, welcoming, and supporting Can you walk us through this? I tried as I was going along and then at the end to, you know, boil it down to some simple approaches. And those were the ones that came to mind. You know, another person might do this differently, but this captures sort of the intuitions that I have and the research that I know of as the best way forward. Seeing is the first step. And I think maybe the most important step.

I'll give you an example of what I actually mean by it. A simple everyday example. If I'm running a research lab with another colleague and that colleague is always late to that research meeting, I could get irritated. And I'm looking at them, I'm trying to understand why on earth are they late all the time? And in answering that question, things about them are going to dominate my thinking because there in my mind's eye, so to speak, that person. Let's call him Fred. And I could say things, well, Fred is just disorganized. Or maybe Fred doesn't really care about this research. And I'm

answering the question of what's wrong in terms of things about Fred, because I'm an observer looking at this problem, and I'm seeing, and Fred is the problem. So I start to explain things naturally in terms of things about Fred. Well, but if we ask Fred what he thinks, why he thinks he's late all the time, I might get a very different set of answers. He's not saying himself and things about himself. He's seeing the circumstances that he's dealing with in his life,

the fact that maybe a class he's teaching doesn't get out just as the research meeting is starting, and he doesn't have time to get across campus to get to it, or maybe he's having trouble getting reliable nannies to take care of his children and so on. He's going to see the, or traffic jams, he's going to see the particulars of his life as the cause of his lateness. So the two perspectives, the observer's perspective and the actor's perspective, Fred being the actor, me being the observer, those difference in perspectives lead to very different answers for the same thing, very different explanations for the same thing.

And seeing the first step, I think, in building trust, is to as best as possible. Try to take the actor's perspective. Try to see what the other person is contending with in that situation. What does it like to be your student? What does it like to be your friend? What does it like to be your colleague or in that situation? What is that person responding to?

That helps us understand how to help them, what they need in order to help them. My roommate in that college example had a good sense of what I was actually contending with. So he helped me deal with what I was contending with. He knew how to cope with college life and the academic side of it. And he could see that I didn't, and that's what I needed. He gave me those things. And in the process of that, I could, you know, I trusted him implicitly. And my churn slowed down.

And my outcomes in that situation improved dramatically. So what I'm stressing here, I guess I don't want to get too far away from this term, seeing. Seeing is trying to first really listen to what a person is telling you and what they, about themselves and as to what they need in a situation. That is the first step, I think, in being wise is to see. It's so easy as observers to project what we think is the problem, the answer to the problem. I'm asking for an extra step of discipline step here.

Try to see what the person you're dealing with. What are they dealing? What's the situation they're actually contending? So that's the first. step is try to take that perspective, the actor's perspective, as best as possible, as much as possible. Then I think welcoming is the second step. People need to know as they come into a diverse situation that they're welcome there and valued there. That's the question that their identity poses to them, is that, I know the stereotypes about my group and my identity. I know those

stereotypes, and that might mean I'm not so welcome here. So they really do need a signal that who they are is really just fine there and very welcome in that situation. If I'm a lower class, I can talk about this research which shows kids who come from low-income homes coming into an elite university, for example, they could, do I really, do I really belong here? Are people going to really see me as somebody that belongs here? So they need a signal that there are a lot of ways. of being successful in this university. And some of those ways your background would be helpful in you achieving. And as opposed to, I'm not sure about you,

maybe if you remediate your skills or something, maybe then you'd be welcome. That's a hard burden to assume as one takes on something like the college experience or the experience in a new workplace, workplaces, schools, classrooms, it's very helpful to be like that wise feet gap back giver in that experiment that I described, where you're given a signal that, you know, look, I believe you can do okay here.

I believe you can succeed here. You're welcome here. There are multiple ways of contributing here, and I think you can do that. that it's worth taking the time to do that. If we're in a completely homogeneous situation again, that might be extraneous. It might not be so important.

But what we do live in a diverse society, and we're committed to its being a fully, at least our opportunities, a fully integrated society. And so that's where I think this extra thinking comes into play. I think it's an evolution of our society to understand seeing and welcoming. And then the final one I think is maybe most powerful. I think I certainly can point to it.

It's being powerful for me and many phases of my life, help the person. You tend to trust the people that help you cope with the immediate situation you need help in. And, you know, I don't, it's, there's the fact that that person has a very different identity to me, let's say I'm African-American. let's say he's an older white guy from the south. Those are all factors, but if that person seems to be interested in helping me cope effectively in this situation and is taking the time to listen to me and to really give me the things I need to cope effectively there,

I don't care about that background. That's not something that people care as much about as whether they can trust the person. and his help for me, listening to me and welcoming me and giving me concrete help in coping with the situation is more important. It's more important. And it overrides, I think, that. I begin to forget when he behaves like that with me. I begin to forget that I could be seen stereotypically and so on.

I relax. The churn goes down to a low level, and I can function more effectively. in a less obstructed way in that situation. I share your optimism and I appreciate it and I appreciate your work and you've taken the time to come chat with me and by extension my listeners. I do want to remind everybody Claude's book is called Churn, The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It. Claude M. Steele, pleasure to meet you. Thank you for, thank you again for coming on.

Well, thank you. It's a great pleasure to me. I enjoy your podcast in general and hope this one is useful to people. Thank you. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer.

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Also one last thing before I let you go here, starting, Sunday, July 12th, at 4 p.m. Eastern, the summer Sunday Live series premieres. Join legendary teacher Sharon Salzberg for an eight-week deep dive into the Buddha's cookbook for human happiness, the eight-fold path. You'll experience live meditation and Q&A only on the 10% with Dan Harris app. Go to Danharis.com to start your free trial today.