Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time)

This book by social psychologist and Columbia University provost, Claude Steele, is a splendid example of how psychologists can make valuable contributions to society. In the book, Steele writes about the work he and his colleagues have done on a phenomenon called stereotype threat, the tendency to expect, perceive, and be influenced by negative stereotypes about one's social category, such as one's age, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, profession, nationality, political affiliation, mental health status, and so on.Experiments demonstrating the impact of stereotype threatWhen trying to understand certain performance gaps between groups, Steele and his colleagues did not focus on internal psychological factors.. Instead, they tried to understand the possible causal role of identity contingencies, the things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity. Over the years they carried out a series of creative experiments* in which there was a control condition in which a task was given under normal conditions life. In the experimental condition, the identity contingency was either cleverly removed or it was deliberately induced. Here are three examples of experiments to clarify how they worked.Experiment 1: Steele and Aronson (1995)In this experiment the researchers had African American and white college students take a very challenging standardized test. In the control condition, the test was presented as these tests are always presented - as a measure of intellectual ability. This condition contained the stereotype that African Americans would be less intelligent. In the experimental condition the test was presented in a non-evaluative way. The test takers were told that the researchers were not interested in measuring their ability with the test but that they just wanted to use the test to examine the psychology of verbal problem solving. In the control condition, the African American test takers, on average, scored much lower than the white test takers. For the white test takers there was no difference in their scores between the control condition and the experimental condition. For the African American test takers there was a big difference between the control condition and the experimental condition. They solved about twice as many problems on the test in the experimental condition. Moreover, there was no difference between the performance of the black test takers and the white test takers.Experiment 2: Aronson, Lustina, Good, Keough, Steele & Brown (1999)In this experiment, the researchers asked highly competent white males to take a difficult math test. In the control condition the test was taken normally. In the experimental condition, the researchers told the test takers that one of their reasons for doing the research was to understand why Asians seemed to perform better on these tests. Thus, they artificially created a stereotype threat. In the experimental condition, the test takers solved significantly fewer of the problems on the test and felt less confident about their performance.Experiment 3: Shih, Pittinsky & Ambady (1999)In this experiment, a difficult math test was given to Asian women under three conditions. In condition one, they were subtly reminded of their Asian identity, in condition 2 they were subtly reminded of their female identity. In the control condition they were not reminded of their identity. The women reminded of their Asianness performed better than the control group, whereas those reminded of their female identity performed worse than the control group.How does stereotype threat harm performance?Today, research on stereotype threat effects is done throughout the world by many researchers. Much insight has been gained into what it is and how it works. Briefly, you know your group identity and you know how society views it. You are aware that you are doing a task for which that view is relevant. You know, at some level, that you are in a predicament: your performance could confirm a bad view of your group and of yourself as a member of that group. You may not consciously feel anxious but your blood pressure rises and you begin to sweat. Your thinking changes. Your mind starts to race: you become vigilant to all things relevant to the threat and to what your chances of avoiding it are. The book title comes from an observed behavior: an African American whistling Vivaldi to make clear that certain stereotypes attached to the group don't apply. You get some self-doubts and start to worry about how warranted the stereotype may be. You start to constantly monitor how well you are doing. You try hard to suppress threatening thoughts about not doing well or about the negative consequences of possibly failing. While you are having all of these thoughts you are distracted from the task at hand and your concentration and working memory suffer.Does it always happen? No. There is only one prerequisite for stereotype threat to happen: the person in question must care about the performance in question. The fear of confirming the negative stereotype then becomes upsetting enough to interfere with performance. It is now known that stereotype has the strongest negative impact when people are highly motivated and performing at the frontier of their skills.Solutions: bridging performance gaps through small interventionsCan something be done about it? Yes. The promising news is that there are some rather small interventions which can help a lot. Experiments have shown that subtly removing or preventing stereotype threats can completely or largely eliminate performance gaps between stereotyped groups and non-stereotyped groups.Examples of helpful interventions are:- Make it clear in the way you give critical feedback that you use high standards and let the person know that you expect him or her to be able to eventually succeed.- Improve the number of people from the social category in the setting so that a critical mass is reached.- Make it clear that you value diversity.- Foster inter-group conversations and frame these as a learning experience.- Allow the stereotyped individuals to use self-affirmations.- Help the stereotyped individuals to develop a narrative about the setting that explains their frustrations while projecting positive engagement and success in the setting.ConclusionThe tone of the book is informal, friendly, and personal, and the content is profound. The topic is highly relevant both to the development of social psychology and to the development of our educational systems and societies at large. Of course it also can inspire positive psychology research: how have certain individuals managed to overcome stereotype threat, how do certain organizations manage to bridge performance gaps, how do societies manage to do the same?This review was published on Positive Psychology News Daily

Author: Claude M. Steele, PhD. What he published are the American Psychologist, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. No award. Genre: While this is a book of social science, it is somewhat of an autobiography of psychologist. This book is intended for stereotype people and how people react to them (especially black and white). The purpose of the work is Steele, a social psychologist and professor at Stanford University, summarizes a year of research on stereotype threat and its effect on minority student academic performance in “Whistling Vivaldi,” named for a social experiment conducted by Brent Staples, an African-American New York Times journalist. Title: Title comes from an African-American guy named Staples noticed that people who saw him on the street at night seemed to regard him as a potential threat. But when he whistled classical music, their apprehension seemed to diminish. It is very interesting book because the story is coming from a real-life situation. Title encapsulates the topic of the book. Preface/Introduction/Table of Contents: There is an introduction which provides revealing information about the text in the introduction. Henry Louis Gates introduces the book. Guest author provides some books and Whistling Vivaldi is just one of them. This book is a part of Issues of Our Time. The book has chapters. Book Jacket/Cover/Printing: The book has book jackets are like mini-reviews. It provides a summary of the book and there is also a quote. It gives us outstanding information about the book. When you read book jacket, it catches your attention to the book. There is a picture of the author. It contributes the work.Summary and Evaluation: The title of the book comes from the author’s experience. Steele describes of Brent Staples, who was a graduate student in Chicago. He is an African-American, observed white people and couples reacting to him with fear when they walked past him in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Staples noticed that when he whistled the tunes of musician Vivaldi, white people seemed like to relax and some of them even smiled at him. He was a stereotype of a potentially violence- African-American person. Staples overcame this threat for himself and the people who passed him with fear. The book talks about the identity threat that occurs when faced with a negative stereotype. The author gives us some remedies to reduce stereotype threat. There are some researches he has done on the students from different backgrounds. There are some strategies to apply them to the classroom. There will be positive environment. The most fascinating parts were on how identity threat could be reduced or eliminated. He made outstanding points obviously, but I can't help but feel that it was repetitive and that its facts were supported with evidence. I think that he spent too much time spending on exploring what identity threat was, while he was not exploring why personal identities or stereotypes are formed. On the other hand, sometimes he refers to people as things, but as a human being. This book separates everyone in a certain stereotype. The author writes in broad terms like "black" "white" "man" "woman" that he doesn't mention the fact that we are all just people after all. Also, there was a huge bias towards certain groups of people in this book. Steele and his colleagues think of stereotype threat, because of “the pressure of group stereotypes”; a pressure that comes into play when people’s “performance confirm a bad view of their group and of themselves, as members of that group” (p. 59). When we experience stereotype threat, we try to protect ourselves because of our instinct. Our brains are trying to disobey the stereotype and protect our image. Our performance might hurt. I certainly suggest this book to my colleagues because the book has experiments and researches about identity. This book is very interesting because it comes from a real-life story.

A really illuminating book which suggests that stereotyping is a universal human characteristic, practised by and affecting us all. It considers particularly the negative stereotypes perceived by women, older people, and African Americans. Through the use of numerous examples of psychological experiments, it demonstrates that the anxiety caused by the perception of negative stereotypes, and the energy involved in trying to overcome them, affects performance, particularly amongst those most invested in success, when faced with a very challenging task. It suggests ways in which the perception of negative stereotypes can be mitigated by institutions and society as a whole, and demonstrates that such changes remove the deficit in performance. The writing is lively and humane but somewhat repetitive in structure.

Recommend to me by a friend, this book has become life altering. As a black man currently a PhD(c), I see myself and an explanation of so many of my own life experiences, both past and current, aptly explained. I am grateful for the new knowledge imparted to me and will pay this forward to the students in my College classes where I teach and to anyone else who will listen to me. Thank you.

Un libro muy útil y que todo el mundo debería leer. Es un buen análisis de cómo los prejuicios permean nuestras actitudes y nuestra afectividad de maneras insospechadas e inconscientes. Además es ameno, con muchos ejemplos y bien escrito.

This book opened my eyes to all the racism we see nowadays and how we can stereotype without even noticing. It also shows how even "good cliches" might not be that good at all. Great read!

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