Claude Steele, the I. James Quillen Dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, will be delivering the Commencement address to the Class of 2013 today. A well-known social psychologist, Steele has served as the 21st Provost of Columbia University for the past two years, previously having taught psychology and performed research for 18 years at the University of Utah, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan and Stanford. Steele's work has focused on stereotype threat and its effects on the academic performance of minority students - in 2010, he published "Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us," which addressed his comprehensive research on these issues. His work has also covered topics such as self-affirmation and addictive behaviors.
The Tufts Daily: Much of your research has focused on the stereotype threat. Can you summarize what the stereotype threat is, exactly what threat it poses and why it's important for people to know about it?
Claude Steele: It happens to everybody. It's a pretty frequent experience. [It occurs] any time you're in a situation where you're doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities ... your age, your race, your religion ... is applicable to what you're doing, and you know that you could be judged in terms of that stereotype.
If you care about what you're doing, the prospect of being reduced to a stereotype like that is upsetting, it's disturbing. The threat is that you as an individual could be seen in terms of that negative stereotype about one of your group identities and be treated in terms of that stereotype and judged in terms of that stereotype.
It's a kind of threat that can affect people in important situations. If you're a woman taking difficult math courses in college and you want to have a career in a quantitative-based field, you don't want to be in a field where you will be judged with negative stereotypes about women's math skills. It could be a field that is so uncomfortable that you drop that major or take a different path. Every time you open your mouth, you feel you could be judged. Knowing about this phenomenon helps you understand the nature of this discomfort. It's important to know about because it helps people handle situations better. In schools and workplaces, it helps them to do things to prevent it when they recognize it.
One place it could have an effect in college is women in math. If they experience frustration or if they stumble, they could be seen in negative stereotypes about their group's abilities. In universities and colleges, knowing that this is a possibility, they can do things to reduce that sense of stress. The purpose the work is to bring this psychological process to the public with the hope that where it is a problem, we could do things to reduce it.
There is a level of things that schools can do, like having a diversity of students. Diversity sends a signal - in this situation, there are lots of different identities, so no one is special. The idea of having different types of people in a setting will make people feel less vulnerable ... If I know that people value diversity like this and they don't see it as competing with excellence, then I know that who I am is of value on that campus, as opposed to who I am is seen as a threat to excellence.
TD: Could you tell us a little bit about the research that you've done on the topic?
CS: We had done some experiments [on] whether standardized testing can be a factor. We brought in males and women and gave them a really hard math test all alone in a room by themselves.
For women, this would be a different situation than for men. Women would have an extra worry about confirming stereotypes. They're in a room all by themselves and part of their thinking could be, "Maybe I'm confirming what they say about women's math abilities," which would undermine their performance. The men and the women who had the same math skills took the test, but the women performed worse than the men.
We did it again and took the stereotype threat out of the situation for women, so then hypothetically they should match the men. We said, "You may have heard that women don't do as well, but that's not true for the test you're taking today. Women always do as well as men. You may find out you're not as good as math as you thought you were, but it's not about women versus men."
With this instruction, women performed just as well as men ... In the first test, you don't have to give the threat. When you get to the difficult point of the test, when you start to worry and are frustrated, it naturally comes to mind. You don't have to do anything to supply it.
TD: What inspired you to get into the field of social psychology in general and, more specifically, what inspired your research on minority student academic performance?
CS: I always loved it. I took psychology. I liked psych in general. I took a number of social psych courses and really loved those and thought maybe I could go to graduate school in social psych. I liked it more than anything else.
I had always been interested in [minority student academic performance]. I'm a child of the civil rights generation and the idea of education being critical to mobility in society always got to me. When I moved to the University of Michigan, I got put on a committee for the recruitment and retention of minority students. I learned about the problem and saw some data that was interesting, and it really got me started thinking about this problem about inclusiveness in higher education. My research did not focus on this problem until I got on the committee.
TD: How did you come to be the Tufts Commencement speaker this year?
CS: I hold Tufts in the highest regard as a university. I am honored to be asked to do this. I hope I can get it all finished in time. It's a great honor to have an honorary degree conferred on oneself by a school as great as Tufts is. It was an easy decision ... I hope I do a good job.
TD: Can you give us a preview of what you'll be discussing in your Tufts Commencement address?
CS: I'm certainly giving a couple of ideas. Commencement speeches are in big part advice about how to undergo the journey of life. You get a chance to give advice like that. I'll try to start with that and draw lessons both personally and from my research. I hope to be as helpful and as thoughtful to the graduates as I possibly can. The day is about them, and my mission is in 10 minutes to say something as useful as I can.
I've given three or four [commencement speeches] over the years. I enjoy them [but] they are hard to do. You have to be brief, you have to a little sense of humor and you want to say something useful. It's a fun and challenging thing to give.
TD: What one piece of advice would you give to a college graduate entering the workforce?
CS: I'll tell you a story. I'm a male, and it was a long time in life before I learned that when you get lost - when you're trying to find a building or find a house or something of that sort - and you're out driving or walking, for a long time, as its true of many males, I would avoid asking for directions. I wanted to do it myself. Somewhere in mid-life, I started asking for directions, and I learned all kinds of things. You can learn about a whole new world; people tell you things you never imagined. Every time I asked for directions, it's turned out to be a positive experience, I've gotten a lot of information, [and] sometimes you even make friends. A whole world opens up to you when you ask for directions.
That's going to be a core piece of advice for how to live your life. There are a lot of things that are important in life - persistence, endurance, resilience and so on - but I want to remind people to keep asking for directions. I'll play that out in terms of my research. That principle has helped me be a good scientist, and develop ideas that I never would have come up with on my own. It's one of the personal strategies a person can use to reduce stereotype threat ... I'll explain how in my talk.
