Whistling Vivaldi: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In 1986, Claude Steele was a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. That spring, the University of Michigan offered him a job. He was asked to teach in the university’s social psychology department, but also to lead an academic-support program for minority students. Steele was worried that his duties with the academic-support program would interfere with his own research.

On a visit to the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Steele decided that he wasn’t going to take the job, because it would impede his research. But he was impressed by the university’s mission: it was actively trying to help students from underrepresented backgrounds. After his visit, Steele decided that his career was now headed “in a different direction.”

During his visit to Ann Arbor, Steele talked to several minority students about their experiences. These students were bright and had been successful in high school, but in college they were constantly being made aware of the fact that they were minorities. They also felt that black “styles, preferences, and interests” were ignored on campus. Also during his visit, Steele saw some provocative data about SAT scores. He read graphs showing the correlation between SAT scores and college grades, and was surprised to learn that black students were likely to receive lower grades than white students, even if they had the same SAT scores. Something, Steele realized, was “suppressing the yield” for black students. Steele resolved to study what, exactly, limited black students’ success.

In 1987, Steele accepted an offer from the University of Michigan, and moved to Ann Arbor with his wife and children. There, Steele collaborated with another social psychologist, Richard Nisbett, to understand black students’ underperformance. He learned that black underperformance was a nationwide phenomenon. Other minority students, such as Latinos and Native Americans, also underperformed in college based on their SATs. Based on his discussions with black students on campus, Steele began to suspect that underperformance was the result of students’ experiences—“something in the air on campus.”

A few years later, Steele delivered a talk on his research at another institution of higher learning. During his time there, he met with researchers who’d studied the progress of minority students, and learned that minorities at the college weren’t integrated into campus life and had “segregated friendship networks,” meaning that they largely stuck with other people of their same group. While Steele talked with the other academics, he could also feel a peculiar tension in the room—as if the professors were terrified that they were going to say something racist.

Steele also met with black students at the college. They told him about incidents in which professors expressed racist sentiments to them, sometimes seemingly accidentally. They also noted that they felt marginalized on campus, with the result that they spent most of their time with other black students. But Steele also encountered a problem: the reported incidents of racism didn’t seem common enough to explain the performance gap between black and white students. There had to be other factors causing the gap—perhaps even a “concentration of factors.”

Steele describes the experiences of a schoolteacher named Jane Elliott in the late 1960s. Elliot tried to teach her students, who were all white, about discrimination. She divided the class based on eye color—the brown-eyed students were identified and separated from the blue-eyed students, who were given first access to “lessons and materials.” The brown-eyed students were humiliated and made to wear collars—they didn’t speak up in class, and kept to themselves. The blue-eyed students, on the other hand, were relaxed and happy. But then Elliot switched the arrangements: this time, brown-eyed students were favored and blue-eyed students were treated as inferior. Now, brown-eyed students seemed happy, and blue-eyed students were quiet. Stigmatized students also didn’t learn as well in class—they seemed to pay less attention to Elliot, and they had trouble remembering instructions.

Steele came to realize that college students were stigmatized in much the same way as the students in Jane Elliott’s classroom. The difference was that Elliott stigmatized her students on purpose, whereas American colleges did so inadvertently. In spite of their best efforts, Steele hypothesized, colleges replicated the state of American society, meaning that black students felt stigmatized, and underperformed academically as a result.

Steele collaborated with a University of Michigan researcher named Steven Spencer to understand group underperformance in college. Steele hypothesized that stigmatization caused black underperformance—certainly, it was preferable to the hypothesis that black students underperformed because of biological inferiority. Steele and Spencer tested their ideas by studying students at their own university—specifically the performance of women in high-level math classes. Initially, they noticed that women tended to underperform in math classes, but not in English classes—possibly because of the stereotype that women weren’t good at math, which created a “chilly atmosphere” in the classes.

Steele and Spencer prepared a study recruiting men and women who’d done well on the math section of their SATs. One by one, they administered tests—half of them in math, half in English—for the students. Steele and Spencer hypothesized that women would underperform on the math test as a result of the strong social stigmatization against women and math, while performing equally to men on the English portion. This, as it turned out, is exactly what happened. However, Spencer and Steele knew that much more research was needed.

Why, exactly, had the women underperformed on the math test? Spencer and Steele hypothesized that they’d underperformed because they wanted to avoid the stigmatizing view of themselves. However, as scientists, Steele and Spencer also had to consider the biological explanation—i.e., that men were naturally better at math than women. In the 1980s, psychologists ran tests suggesting that women were genetically likely to be worse at math than men. Genetic explanations of behavior have been popular for a long time. Even Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, entertained the notion that women are biologically inferior to men. Summers later resigned from Harvard, partly because he proposed such a controversial hypothesis. Steele and Spencer didn’t take this hypothesis seriously, but they knew they had to test it.

Spencer and Steele had two hypotheses: 1) women underperformed because of stigmatization, or 2) women underperformed because of some biological inferiority. They needed to develop an experiment that could test the hypotheses. This was challenging, because, by definition, the stereotype of being bad at math was a part of women’s normal lives. The difficulty, then, wasn’t in facilitating women’s feelings of inferiority, but in eliminating them in a second group. In the end, Spencer and Steele decided to tell women, before they took the test, that women had always performed as well as men on this particular test.

The second challenge with developing the experiment was finding a way to pit two hypotheses against one another. Spencer and Steele decided that, if women performed as well as men when the “stigma pressure” was reduced, they could reasonably conclude that stigma pressure influenced on women’s performance on math tests. If not, they’d have evidence that women really were worse at math. Spencer and Steele found that, when women were told that their test didn’t show gender differences, they performed at the same level as men, and when they weren’t given this information, or were given information highlighting gender stereotypes, they underperformed. These findings changed Spencer and Steele’s professional lives.

Since their first experiments at the University of Michigan, Spencer and Steele have spent years studying the stigmatization of women. Women, they’ve found, are often confronted with the threat of “being seen to confirm society’s darker suspicions about their math ability,” a threat that impedes their performance. This is still a radical idea, because it suggests that stereotypes can be perpetuated even without people consciously perpetuating them.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when Steele and Spencer presented their findings, other academics misinterpreted them very slightly: they argued that Steele and Spencer’s findings just proved that women self-fulfill society’s lower performance expectations. This wasn’t quite what Spencer and Steele were arguing. Rather, they argued that there were very specific factors that could trigger women’s stigmatization, and that by removing these factors, they could improve performance. Nevertheless, they understood that they had more research to do.