My light-hearted post about "imposter syndrome"
elicited more than the usual number of comments, perhaps not surprisingly. In the same passage of the student review
document where I encountered that faux
term for the first time was a reference
to stereotype threat, which is
in fact a very serious phenomenon that
has been the subject of a great deal of fascinating research. It occurred to me that I ought to say a bit
about stereotype threat, for those of you who are not familiar with the
subject. [One caveat: I read up on this a
long time ago and am writing from memory, so I may get some of the details
wrong.]
It has long been known that African-American students
underperform on standardized tests of the sort that have become ubiquitous in
American elementary, secondary, and tertiary education. When I say they "underperform," I
mean not merely that their test scores are, on average, markedly lower than
those of White students from the same socio-economic backgrounds, but also that
their test scores do not comport with the quality of their minds and of their
academic work, as observed and evaluated by experienced teachers. This underperformance occurs at every level,
even among Black students who have done quite well in earlier stages of their
education.
Let me give one example from my personal experience. In 1995, the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of
Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, of which I
was then a member, received the first applications for our ground-breaking doctoral
program, which would welcome its first class of doctoral students the next
Fall. I was scheduled to be the
inaugural Graduate Program Director, a position I held for the best twelve
years of my long career. We received twenty-seven applications that
first year, and the Graduate Record Examination scores were uniformly abysmally
low. Applicants with fine undergraduate
records and interesting credentials appeared, if these scores were to be
trusted, to be incapable of putting together coherent English sentences. We had designed an unusually demanding first
year program, the centerpiece of which was [and still is] a two semester double
seminar, meeting five hours a week, in which the students would read fifty
major works of Afro-American history, politics, literature, and sociology, and
write a paper on each of the fifty works.
I was extremely apprehensive, fearful that our program would be far
beyond the capabilities of the seven students we had admitted, but my colleagues
assured me everything would be just fine.
Well, the students showed up, and they were not illiterate at all! They indeed did just fine, and a number of
them went on to earn doctorates, get tenure track jobs, and publish first-rate
scholarly books. I like to think that I
am capable of learning from experience, even though I am a philosopher who is
expected to view things sub specie
aeternitatis, so as Graduate Program Director I deleted the Graduate Record
Exam from the requirements for admission and substituted a requirement of a substantial
sample of written work. The program
flourished, graduating a higher percentage of its doctoral students than
almost any other doctoral program in the
Humanities, nation-wide. The UMass
Afro-Am doctoral students dominate the annual conventions and have assembled a
brilliant record of publication. The
applicants, most of whom apply to several doctoral programs, still have
appallingly low GRE scores.
What's up?
A good many years ago, a brilliant African-American psychologist
named Claude Steele asked the same question, and launched a fascinating series
of experiments to find out. [When I had
dinner with Steele in Amherst, MA many years ago, he was the Chair of the Stanford
Psychology Department. He is currently
the Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost of UC Berkeley.] Steele formulated the hypothesis that Black
students are well aware of the widely-held view that they are dumber than
White students, and this awareness, which Steele labeled "stereotype
threat," undermines their ability to do well on the sorts of "intelligence
tests" that the White world expects them to do badly on. Steele devised a variety of experimental
protocols to test this hypothesis, and again and again, the data proved him
correct. For example, Steele would put
together a multiple-choice test, and give it to two groups of college students
[mixed White and Black.] The first group
would be told that they were being tested for intelligence; the second group, given the identical test in
identical testing circumstances, would be told that they were being tested on
their general knowledge. Sure enough,
the first group of Black students did markedly worse than the second.
Steele then broadened his investigation to other
stereotypes. Women are commonly thought
not to be able to do math, so Steele tested two groups of women on the same math
exam. Each group was asked to fill out a
little personal data form before taking the test -- name, address, age, college class,
etc. The last question on the first
form, answered just before taking the test, was "gender." The second form omitted that item. Lo and behold, the women who were called on
to identify themselves as women just before taking the test did worse than
those who were not so asked! Steele was
even able to replicate the result by putting the gender question first on the
form in one case and last in the other.
Some of Steele's associates tried the idea out on Black and White
college athletes. Two mixed groups of
quite physically fit young men were run through a miniature golf course. One group were told that they were being tested
on their golfing ability [golf was a White sport back when the test was run, before
Tiger Woods.] The other group were told
they were being tested on their innate athletic ability [which, according to a
different stereotype, is an area of Black male superiority.] Sure enough, the results confirmed the effect
of the stereotypes on the subjects.
By the way, here is a truly weird fact. Claude Steele is a man of the left whose work
has done a great deal to counteract the baleful effects of the negative stereotypes
of African-Americans and other non-White populations. Steele has a twin brother, named Shelby
Steele, who also has had a distinguished academic career. Shelby Steele describes himself as a Black
Conservative who opposes affirmative action and wrote a book describing Obama
as a child of a mixed marriage [as are Claude and Shelby] who has a life-long
need to "be black." Shelby
Steele is a fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Go figure.
2 comments:
Prof.
I was already wondering about your silence...
An excellent post (thank you for it).
I particularly enjoyed learning about these experiments, because I had no idea about them; and the Claude-Shelby Steele case as illustration really was superb.
Can you provide more details on the experiments? Next time I stumble upon a Bell Curve believer I'd love to show them the references.
I am not sure I can conjure more details out of my memory banks, but Google should give you a bunch. I think this work is very well known. I will take a look and see what I can find.
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