Interventions to fight stereotype threat make a big difference

[A] psychological intervention that leaves minority students less susceptible to negative stereotypes about their group's abilities can significantly improve their performance in real schools for a long time.  

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 177

Feedback that works for black and white

[O]ne form of feedback did work, for both black and white students. I will call it the Tom Ostrom strategy. The feedback giver explained that he "used high standards" in evaluating the essays for publication in the teaching magazine. Still, he said, having read the student's essay, he believed the student could meet those standards. His criticism, this form of feedback implies, was offered to help the student meet the publication's high standards. Black students trusted this feedback as much as white students, and trusting it powerfully motivated them to improve their essay. For black students, the Ostrom style of feedback was like water on parched land—something they rarely seemed to get, but that, once they got it, renewed their trust and ability to be motivated by the criticism. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), pp. 162-63

A positive way to fight stereotype threat

The racial segregation of friendship networks in college life means that when it comes to personal conversations, blacks talk mainly to blacks and whites to whites. Black students, then, might not be able to see that white students have problems similar to their own. And not seeing this, along with being more racially vigilant in light of the broader cites in the setting, they might see race as playing a bigger role in their experience—as something that would sustain greater vigilance toward the racial aspects of their experience. The talk sessions corrected this. They revealed that the stresses of college life—a lower test grade than expected, an unreturned call to a teaching assistant or classmate, an unfriendly interaction with another students a chronic shortage of cash, and so on—happen to everyone regardless of face, This fact changes black students' narrative; it makes racial identity less central to interpreting experience and increases trust in the university environment. Having a narrative that requires less vigilance leaves more mental energy and motivation available for academic work and thus improved the grades of black students in the program. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 167

Stereotype threat shapes identities

Being threatened because we have a given characteristic is what makes us most aware of being a particular kind of person.

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 73

What raises a characteristic we have to a social identity we have are the contingencies that go with the characteristic, most often threatening contingencies.

Id. at 74

Stereotype threat around the world, in lots of contexts

In the nearly fifteen years since its first demonstration was published, research on stereotype threat effects has blossomed throughout the world. The effect has been observed in women, African Americans, white males, Latino Americans, third-grade American schoolgirls, Asian American students, European males aspiring to be clinical psychologists (under the threat of negative stereotypes about men's ability to understand feelings), French college students, German grade school girls, U.S.soldiers on army based in Italy, women business school students, white and black athletes, older Americans, and so on. It has been shown to affect many performances: math, verbal, analytic, and IQ test performance, golf putting, reaction time performance, language usage, aggressiveness in negotiations, memory performance, the height of athletic jumping, and so on. no special susceptibility is required to experience this pressure. Research have found but one prerequisite: the person much care about the performance in question. That's what makes the prospect of confirming the negative stereotype upsetting enough to interfere with that performance. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), pp. 97-98

Stereotype threat's toll

[A] mind trying to defeat a stereotype leaves little mental capacity free for anything else we're doing.  

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 123

Trying hard isn't enough to overcome stereotype threat

[At Berkeley, math professor Philip Uri Treisman] saw black students—in an effort to succeed where their abilities are negatively stereotyped—following a strategy of intense, isolated effort, a strategy that often set them up for defeats and discouragements. They were trying hard, they were taking my father's advice (and probably their own father's advice), but they were trying to do it all by themselves, in a class where other people were working more happily and efficiently together, pooling their intellectual resources. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 103

People experiencing stereotype threat are already trying hard. They're identified with their performance. They have motivation. It's the extra ghost slashing that is in their way.

Id.,  p. 112

Stereotype threat like a loose snake

Identity threat is diffuse—as I've said, like a snake loose in the house. Our bipolar student has to remain vigilant to her social world, combing over it for evidence of how people feel about people who are bipolar. Where will the snake be? How bad is its bite? Will she lose a job or educational opportunities, be shunned, and so on? 

A diffuse threat is preoccupying. And it preoccupies one with the identity it threatens. . . . Identity threat, diffuse and Delphic though it may be, is nonetheless powerful enough to single out an identity and make it the center of a person's functioning, powerful enough to make it more important, for the duration of the threat at least, than any of the person's other identities—more important than her sex, her race, her religion, her being young, her being a Stanford graduate. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), pp. 70-71

Stereotype threat shapes everyone's world

The reality of stereotype threat also made the point that places like classrooms, university campuses, standardized-testing rooms, or competitive-running tracks, though seemingly the same for everybody, are, in fact, different places for different people. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 60

Why are people vulnerable to stereotype threat?

Here was the irony we had suspected. What made Mikel's vanguard black students susceptible to stereotype pressure was not weaker academic confidence and skills but stronger academic confidence and skills. Their strengths led them to be identified with school, to care about school and how well they did. But in school, when working in difficult material they understood to be ability diagnostic, they encountered the extra pressure of the stereotype. It wasn't low expectations that made them susceptible to the pressure, then; it was high expectations. 

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 58

Reducing stereotype is just a start

Reducing identity threat is not sufficient to overcome real skill and knowledge deficits in school. To do that, students have to have the opportunity to acquire the relevant skills and knowledge. They need good instruction and the chance to apply themselves to critical material, sometimes for long periods of time. but it's equally true that for ability-stereotyped students, reducing stereotype threat is just as important as skill and knowledge instruction. It may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. That is, no amount of instruction, no matter how good it is, can reduce these deficits if it doesn't also keep identity threat low. Without that, threat will always have first claim on students' attention and mental resources.  

Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 181

Understanding stereotype threat can help

The aim of this book is not to show that stereotype threat is so powerful and persistent that it can't be overcome. Quite the contrary. Its goal is to show how, as an unrecognized factor in our lives, it can contribute to some of our most vexing personal and societal problems, but that doing quite feasible things to reduce this threat can lead to improvements in these problems. 

 Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), p. 11