321. The Respect Effect: What Stereotype Threat Teaches Us About Communication

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: One of the benefits of communication is it allows us to demonstrate that we truly see other people. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I look forward to speaking with Claude Steele. Claude is the Lucie Stern Professor and Social Scientist Emeritus at Stanford University. He's held several academic leadership roles, including Dean of Stanford's Graduate School of Education and Provost at both UC Berkeley and Columbia. He is widely recognized for his groundbreaking research on stereotype threat, and he is the author of Whistling Vivaldi and his latest book, Churn: The Tension that Divides Us and How to Overcome It. Well, welcome, Claude. I have been a long admirer of your work, and I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. 

[00:00:50] Claude Steele: Uh, I couldn't be happier to be here. It's been something I've been really looking forward to. 

[00:00:54] Matt Abrahams: Thank you. Are you ready to get started? 

[00:00:56] Claude Steele: I'm ready to go. 

[00:00:57] Matt Abrahams: All right. Well, I'd like to start with how I came to first know of you and your work. As an undergraduate here at Stanford studying psychology, I learned about stereotype threat and found it not only interesting, but really important. And I'd love for you to take a moment just to share with everybody what that is and the impact it can have on people. 

[00:01:14] Claude Steele: Yeah. It's a kind of social predicament that one can find oneself in. You're in a situation where there are negative stereotypes about one or another of your identity, your age, your race, your religion, and the stereotypes apply to what you're doing in that situation, you know then that you could be judged or treated in terms of that negative stereotype. And if the situation is important to you, that prospect is threatening, and that's what stereotype threat is. It's just finding yourself in a circumstance where, "Boy, I'm the oldest guy here. Are they going to think all my ideas are dated and I have no technological competence at all?"

[00:01:53] And those are stereotypes I know out there about age, and when I'm in a situation where they're applicable, and if it's an important situation, I can worry about that, and that worry can affect my behavior right there in the immediate situation, if I'm trying to perform something, a standardized test where a lot of the research has been done, or an athletic activity or, uh, any kind of intellectual activity where the stereotype applies, it can have a pretty serious effect. It could motivate you to avoid that situation. So it can have real, pretty profound effects on our choices as well as our behaviors, who our friends are, where we want to live, what schools we want our children to go to, where we feel comfortable, where we don't feel comfortable. A lot of that would take the form of stereotype threat. 

[00:02:39] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. It can impact us in the moment, but also long term. I'm curious, how does social media impact and influence this kind of stereotype and stereotype threat? 

[00:02:49] Claude Steele: Well, I think its effectiveness, its dramatic effectiveness at purveying stereotypes and images of groups and images of different identities, I think it can amplify the number of situations that people feel this kind of threat in because its currency is in big part summary, quick images of identities, and people have no tolerance for any elaboration or exception, so it can be very generative of this kind of threat.

[00:03:17] I do think, though, it can sometimes purvey things that would reduce the threat, images that would reduce the threat. So it can cut both ways, but so much of the tenor of social media seems to be more of a negative sort, and that makes us all the more, in a diverse society like the one in which we live, it makes us all the more conscious of our identities and what people might think of us. So the whole phenomenon can be amplified by social media. 

[00:03:44] Matt Abrahams: So it can absolutely amplify, and I think it necessitates that as we consume social media, that we at least think about what are the stereotypes being communicated and how does that have impact on us. And by bringing that to consciousness might impact how we feel about it. Which leads me to the next question. I'm very curious to know what are some of the most effective and lasting interventions that can help mitigate stereotype threat and the negative impact from it? 

[00:04:11] Claude Steele: There's been an important evolution over the last couple of decades of research on that, probably for the most part in academic settings, but increasingly in business settings. In academic settings, you know, you have minority kids, let's say African American kid, he's in a, an integrated classroom, which we think of as a very desirable thing, but he does know at some level, and his parents know, that there are these negative stereotypes about African Americans' abilities and the like. It can nag at a person, and they can be particularly vigilant as to how they're being perceived, and that can, as we just mentioned, interfere with performance right there in the immediate situation. Or it can, even if they feel that pressure is persistent, they can disidentify with the whole enterprise.

[00:04:57] You know, every time I raise my hand and I have this extra worry that if I get it wrong, I'm gonna be seen in terms of those stereotypes and confirm, that pressure every day in an important situation like schooling can be very daunting. You could see in a analogous situation, a white guy who's really good at basketball trying to make a career at that, he's gonna be seen in terms of, or could be seen. He doesn't know for sure if that decision by the coach had anything to do with stereotypes about his group's abilities in basketball or not. So a lot of the work has looked at its impact in schooling, and there is where I think progress has been made. One thing that helps is even knowing about stereotypes.

[00:05:38] It's just that this is a pressure coming from the social context that we're in, and let's understand it as such, and that can lower its impact. So that knowledge has been subject to considerable research and pretty well established. I think affirmations, I'll give you an example where students are asked in some of the early research, these were seventh graders in integrated classroom, and the teacher asked them to just take 15 minutes and write to me a little essay about the things that are most important to you and the people that are most important in your life. So students do that, and for the white students in the classroom, you know, it doesn't hurt, doesn't particularly help them.

[00:06:16] But for the African American students in the classroom, it has a dramatic effect 'cause it gives that student a chance to tell the teacher that they're more than that stereotype. It sounds like a funny, easy thing to do, but it has a very transformative effects on their grades. The student who gets to write this essay, their grades go up a bit. And then because their grades go up a bit, they feel a little less vulnerable to that stereotype. And feeling a little less vulnerable to that stereotype, their grades go up even more. So there's a, a kind of recursive chain of events, relief of this pressure. They come to understand themselves in relation to the setting they're in in a different way, and it sets them on a different trajectory, which gives us both a sense of, you know, how powerful this thing can be and when it's unattended to how powerful it is. 

[00:07:07] Matt Abrahams: What's amazing about that intervention is that it is quite simple.

[00:07:11] Claude Steele: It's simple. 

[00:07:12] Matt Abrahams: And that it has such a profound in the moment, but long tail impact. 

[00:07:17] Claude Steele: Yeah. 

[00:07:18] Matt Abrahams: I wonder if the advice is, if you are somebody who feels different in some way, either based on who you are, your gender, your race, maybe you have an accent, maybe you're newer to the team, you're an older person, it might make sense to share in ways that you feel comfortable about yourself with those around you to help them see you outside of those stereotypes 

[00:07:43] Claude Steele: Yeah, no, I think it is. I think another strategy is building relationships and focusing on building personal connections with each other, because once you get a bond like that, the beginnings of a friendship bond, it's less likely that person is going to see you in terms of stereotypes. It can not completely wipe out that concern altogether, but it's going to substantially reduce it and enable the person in a situation like schooling to allocate their attention a lot more to the work at hand than to these anxieties, so it can start to have an effect.

[00:08:13] Matt Abrahams: I appreciate you sharing that. So let's talk about your new book, Churn. Can you define for us what you mean by churn, and how can it help us better understand relationships and intergroup relationships? 

[00:08:26] Claude Steele: Yeah, churn is really that. It's sort of that concern in a diverse setting where there are different kinds of people from different kinds of backgrounds, different identities, and the like. The concern in that setting that somehow or another I could be devalued based on my identity, devalued, treated differently, seen with different expectations. I could worry about those things, whereas if I were in a situation that was more homogeneous identity-wise, if, if it's just us old guys at Pete's early in the morning talking about things, I feel, you know, pretty comfortable. The diversity itself, when the situation is important, if you're just riding a bus or in a basketball game crowd or something, no, it's not an issue.

[00:09:08] But when you're in a situation where it's important to you and it's important to your life outcomes, then diversity can have this, by raising this possibility that you could be seen in terms of sort of out-group stereotypes about your group, it can be tense. And so churn is just the term I came up with to capture that sort of psychological state of anxiety and vigilance to, you know, like, I have to stay alert. It's a tension between remembering and forgetting. Should I remember how my group can be seen and use that to interpret what's happening to me in this situation? Or can I just forget that and relax and trust this situation? 

[00:09:46] Matt Abrahams: I really like that definition of the tension between anxiety and forgetting. And the churn is really what's going on in your head, the anxiety, it's, it's vigilance, and it's rumination, too. It's all of that together. I want to dive deeper onto ways to reduce the stress that churn has, and you've alluded to the fact that trust-building plays a factor in that. Can you give us an example, a real-world example that some of our listeners in their workplaces might encounter that could help reduce some of the churn for some of the people in those groups? 

[00:10:20] Claude Steele: Yeah, I can illustrate it best with an experimental finding led by Geoff Cohen, and Lee Ross and I did this together, and we were just interested in a basic question, how does a professor give critical feedback to, say, an African American student and have that feedback be trusted? How do you do that? And so we had them write an essay about their favorite teacher. We brought Stanford students, Black and White, into the laboratory and asked them to write this essay about their favorite teacher. And if it was good, we'd publish it in a new magazine we were starting on teaching. That was the ruse. And we told them if they come back in two days, we're going to give them the feedback on that essay.

[00:10:58] And they do come back in two days, and we give them the feedback, and our big question is how much do they trust this feedback? And what we vary is how we give the feedback. And what we found was expected, but nonetheless unsettling in the first two conditions of this experiment. When we gave the feedback straightforwardly, "Here's the feedback on your essay," or we gave it with a real positive bromide kind of compliment up front, "Gee, you bring a lot of great energy to my class, and here's the feedback," White students trusted it and Black students were very mistrusting of that. And you'd wonder, well, look, they're Stanford students, they're privileged.

[00:11:33] Why wouldn't they trust this feedback in this institution that's, seems so committed to their welfare and so on? But from their standpoint, this ambiguity comes up again. If you put yourself in their shoes, you don't know whether the feedback for sure is based on your essay or from the feedback giver's opinions, views, stereotypes about your group's abilities. You don't know for sure. And you have to, have to remain a bit in churn. So the third condition gets to the question you asked, which is a demonstration of how you can get rid of it. In that condition, uh, very heartening, the feedback giver says, "Look, we use high standards here because we only publish these essays, and I've looked at your essay, and I think you can meet those standards."

[00:12:19] When it was put that way, Black students' motivations just went off the chart. Three times more of them in that condition took the essay home to improve it, used the feedback to improve the essay as participants in any other condition of the experiment. So they trusted it wildly. And you know, when you think about it, that kind of feedback from an authority who says, uh, you know, "We use high standards, and I think you can meet them," that kind of feedback can be very powerful, transformative to most of us. It can launch us on a career path if we get that at the right time. But I think that illustrates one of the critical dimensions of cutting through this churn and this sense of threat that diversity can pose to us. It says basically, there may be a stereotype out there about your group's abilities, okay?

[00:13:06] It doesn't say this explicitly, but the implication is, that may be true, but I respect your abilities. I respect you, and I respect your abilities, and it's conveyed to you by me having high expectations for you and having looked at your work and having, you know, see some promise, some potential in it. That is a central strategy. When we deal with people from different backgrounds and the like, it's critical to signal respect. One phrase I use in the book is to be able to see full humanity and full potential in difference, if we can adjust our perception, if we can just give a little signal, then it's very powerful, and it can be transformative in the sense of enabling a relationship and reducing the pressure that person might feel.

[00:13:54] Matt Abrahams: The ability to establish that there are criteria on which you are making, in this case, decisions, giving feedback, I think is good hygiene for any communication, let alone the situation you're describing. Well, this has been a great conversation, Claude. Thank you so much. And before we end, as you well know, I ask three questions. One I'm gonna make up just for you, and two I've been asking people for a long time. Are you up for that? 

[00:14:20] Claude Steele: I'm up for it. 

[00:14:21] Matt Abrahams: You have held several leadership positions in very large organizations. What are one or two skills that you have found have been most helpful for you in those leadership roles to be successful?

[00:14:33] Claude Steele: I do think to the extent that I've been able to do it, it is understanding that everybody you interact with needs that signal of respect. If we make a mistake in society, it's that we think we don't have to deal with that, that we can just assume that trust. And I think the realities of our society and life suggest the contrary, that no, you have to respect that, and you have to build that trust and understand that that's kind of what people need at some level.

[00:15:04] And so in ministering, I think maybe guided in bit by, or more than just a little bit by this research, and just watching really effective leaders, they had a knack at that. And the beloved leader is a leader that people trust, even though that, you know, they're gonna disagree with that person, or they're gonna not like what they have to do as directed by that person. But if they have a sense that that person respects their humanity and their potential, they roll with things, and you get a very different climate. 

[00:15:36] Matt Abrahams: A lot of what you have shared with us is about demonstrating that we see other people and that we're there for them. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:15:48] Claude Steele: I have to say Barack Obama, because for a guy named Barack Hussein Obama to be elected President of the United States, he's got to have that ability to give people a sense that he respects them, that he's not gonna be polarized against them in some way or reflexively against them or with resentment toward them and all the things that they could be churning about. His style and language is a remedy to. So as a figure, I wish we would take his style much more seriously and understand that the significance of it, that it has the capacity to get to people and make them feel seen and connected to each other in terms of their humanity first and their identity second. And that's a really nice knack that he has. 

[00:16:37] Matt Abrahams: I like that, humanity first, identity second. Our final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:16:47] Claude Steele: The first thing is recognizing that all people have this need. In the book, I talk about, uh, power differences, is that the teacher is more powerful than the student. So who should go first in terms of being wise? Well, probably the teacher. It's gonna be harder for the student to expose themselves like that with trusting them without some evidence that it, it's safe to do that. So I do think that tone is to me in communication, both as a, within academic life, but as an administrator, that tone is important in a diverse society in a way a lot of people need some evidence that you're gonna be sensitive to, that you're gonna see them and see their needs.

[00:17:26] That's why they need some, as a first ingredient, some indication that you're aware of what's at stake here and, and you care about that. And I'm a big fanatic about clarity. I pay a lot of attention to the way sentences are written and so on, and how things are conveyed, 'cause when they're not or they're frustrating, it can really defeat a valuable message. So clarity, just simple clarity. Try to be really direct and clear about things. And then third, I personally appreciate some warmth and evidence of beneficence. I think people need to know that you're a human being in order to trust you.

[00:18:03] And so I think of that as a really important thing to convey, too, that you can disappoint people with decisions that you have to make, and you have to do that if you're in an administrative position, obviously, all the time. But they would like to have some evidence that you're a good person and that you, in general, would wanna be as helpful as you possibly can under these circumstances. So evidence of beneficence and real beneficence, really being concerned about people, I think, is a, a third thing I'd point to. 

[00:18:31] Matt Abrahams: Those listening know I like alliteration a lot, so I'm gonna take a little liberty with what you said, but it's about connection, that tone, recognizing there's a connection. It's about clarity, and then it's about caring and demonstrating concern. And when you do those things, you can really see somebody, and you can demonstrate trust and respect. Claude, this was a wonderful conversation. Thank you. You shed light on some things that I think are really important for us to talk about and had some direct, very specific ways that we can address some of these issues around churn and stereotype threat. Thank you for your time. 

[00:19:06] Claude Steele: Uh, well, thanks for the opportunity. I much enjoyed it. 

[00:19:10] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, The Podcast. It was great learning from Claude. Really understanding the stereotype threat implications and about churn can help all of us to trust and respect others, and this can really help us if we take the time to think about how we give feedback and how we orient people to our organizations and to our teams. To learn more about how to set expectations and how they shape our world, check out episode 40 with Alia Crum. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Alex McCarthy, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please check out our monthly newsletter to gain additional useful knowledge. You can subscribe at fastersmarter.io under Resources, or you can subscribe on LinkedIn.