Whistling Vivaldi: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The mathematician Philip Uri Treisman has developed workshops designed to help students overcome stereotypes. Years before, Treisman studied the way different racial groups learn mathematics. He found that white students studied more independently, and focused less of their social lives on academics, than Asian students, who helped each other and studied together. Black students were the most independent in their study habits, however—they studied for longer and made a point of isolating themselves when they worked. They also didn’t talk as much about their academics, which made them less likely to realize that they weren’t the only ones struggling with the material, and more likely to question whether they belonged in the class (or even the college—one student whose story Steele shares dropped out of Berkeley altogether). In short, Treisman found that black students were trying very hard to succeed, but were “trying to do it all by themselves” in a field where “pooling intellectual resources” was key.

Steele’s close friend Carol Porter is a social psychologist at Princeton, and she’s studied the ways different kinds of students study organic chemistry, traditionally one of the most difficult courses at Princeton. Many Princeton students will sit through the class twice—the first time just to learn, the second time for a grade. Other students try to take the class in a less competitive summer school, and then get the credit transferred. Porter has found that even when they are advised to do so, black students are considerably less likely to use either strategy—instead they "push on" and sit through the class once, for a grade, thus often getting a lower grade and jeopardizing their chances of getting into medical school later on.

Steele collaborated with David Nussbaum, a graduate student, to study “over-effort” in a laboratory setting. Nussbaum and Steele developed an ingenious way to measure over-effort. Students would be asked to solve difficult anagram puzzles. Then they’d be asked to choose additional anagram problems to solve, and could pick how many they wanted to do. This was designed to measure students’ drive to succeed—their desire to continue challenging themselves with difficult material, even after they’d failed to do well. The experiment showed that black students performed as well as white students, and chose as many additional problems, when the test was framed as just another test. But when the test was framed as a test of cognitive ability, black students chose significantly more anagram puzzles than white students. Like hardworking black students trying to overcome prejudice, the black subjects were pushing themselves harder, exemplifying over-effort.

Minorities face many challenges in life, and often they’re encouraged to work extra hard to overcome society’s stereotypes—Jackie Robinson is the perfect example. This extra motivation for minorities—breaking the stereotype—isn’t necessarily good or bad, Steele claims. It can inspire people to work harder, but it can also interfere with their confidence and concentration.

Steele then asks a new question. The previous studies he's referenced have had to do with "work at the frontier of a person's skills"—but how do stereotype threats affect people when they're doing work that is at a lower level, or that they're very comfortable with? A study at the University of Kansas aimed to measure how the “breaking a stereotype” motive affected people’s performance at both upper and lower levels of work. Students were given two math tests, one easy and one difficult. One group took the tests under a stereotype threat about women, while others took the tests under a mitigated stereotype threat. The results showed that women did considerably worse on the difficult test while under a stereotype threat—but significantly better on the easier test. The stereotype threat was apparently enough to distract them slightly on the hard problems, but enough to drive them to greater success on the easier ones.

The motive to disprove a stereotype can turn people from a stereotyped group into overachievers—it gives them drive to succeed, where other groups of people feel no incentive to work hard. However, this extra drive to succeed isn’t always good. It may cause extra stress, for example, which can interfere with performance—and it's just exhausting to have to be constantly working to disprove a stereotype. This shouldn’t suggest that there’s no point in trying hard, Steele says, but it’s a fact that “ease of performance” is an important factor in succeeding in a great many fields—therefore, the attempt to break a stereotype can impede ease of performance, and therefore success.

Treisman’s workshops are designed to correct for black students’ tendencies to “commit to self-sufficiency”—he essentially has black students study more like the Asian students he researched, and do work in groups and help each other. His research, and that of other psychologists, has shown that the conventional wisdom may be wrong. Working extra hard to overcome a stereotype can be inspiring, but it may also be counterproductive, because it limits people’s success, and causes them to blame themselves for their failures.