Stereothreat

Oh, wait, you're listening to Radiolab. From WNYC. Do you, can I ask you, do you just want to, like, lay out for us the chronology of your obsession? I think I feel comfortable saying, has it become an obsession or just a dalliance?

I mean, or maybe you just noticed a crumbling building and ran over to stick your pen. I mean, I am, uh, I'm a contrarian. I'm interested in alternative facts about science, let's say. Hey, I'm Chad Boomrod.

I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. And a little while back, our editor, Sean Wheeler, and I, we talked to a science journal named Dan Inger, who got us kind of tangled up about something that we thought we knew about the world, about ourselves. Something beautiful, as I recall.

Yeah, that we talked about at great length on the show. Okay. Hello? Hello?

And to set that conversation up, we're going to start with this guy. Hi, is this Claude Steele? Yes. Professor Claude Steele.

I'm Lucy Stearns, emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University. We actually had him on the show a number of years ago. Sometime ago, I can't remember how many years ago. Yeah, it's been a long time.

I'm looking at the sheet here, and it says 2009. Whoa, that blows my mind. Yeah, that was a lot younger man then. And the reason we had him on the show back then was because he had done a study in the mid-90s that just completely changed the way that we thought about the power of stereotypes.

Well, my mother was white, my father was African-American, and they were very active in the civil rights movement, so you can imagine that race was no distant or passing thing in our life and family. For Claude, growing up, that was just everyday dinner tabletop. Yes, exactly. So the topic is a sort of family birthright.

Then, years and years later, midway through his career as a psychology professor, Claude ran into a demonstration of the power of race that really surprised him. I got a job offer. This was in the 80s at the University of Michigan, and it was part psychology and part to administer a minority student program there. This is Claude Steele, the original program we ran back in 2009.

And in the process, I saw a data that surprised me. What he saw was a troubling trend. Two kids would enter Michigan. One was black, one was white.

They come in at the exact same levels. Same skills, same SAT scores. So theoretically, they should do the same when they get to Michigan, but without fail, or almost without fail. After one semester, the black kid was winding up with lower grades.

How much lower? Pretty dramatic. At least two-thirds of the lower grades. Meaning if the white kid got an A, the black kid, who should be getting an A2, is instead getting a B or a B+.

That's significant. And he also, by the way, saw this performance gap between women and men when it came to math to the same degree. The same degree in advanced math courses. It was comparable.

I learned this is a national phenomenon. If I was to walk into any college class in the United States, I'd have a very high probability of finding exactly that. So I think it's important to put it in context of what was going on at the time. This is Dan Engberg again, and he says that that gap in achievement between black and white students that Claude had noticed, that was actually a huge topic of conversation at the time.

There's a lot of discussion of what to do about the achievement gap. And the familiar argument is, well, this has to do with systemic racism and systemic differences and opportunities that play out through an individual lifespan. Now that seems, right, it's also daunting, because how are we ever going to, like, cure all of the socioeconomic disparities in this country? But then, in 1994, a different and in many ways very dangerous idea was being tossed into this debate.

Charles Murray, co-author of the book The Bell Curve. When The Bell Curve came out. The Bell Curve. The intelligence and class structure in American life.

The Bell Curve argued that one explanation for the achievement gap, among others, was genetic and IQ-based. Now, of course, it's not. But even though there's no scientific backing at all for the idea of genetic differences like this, The Bell Curve was still significant just because of the kinds of conversations it was creating at the time, and the effect that it had on researchers in this field. Well, The Bell Curve is one point in a long history of that kind of argument, that the difference between groups really is rooted in genetic differences.

Let's just be frank and honest, and if you really can't admit that, then you don't have the courage needed to be a real scientist. That's a thumbnail way of describing this experience that I've had, being confronted with that notion. And this was obviously disturbing to Claude, well, first on a personal level. In order to be a scientist, are you supposed to actually be open to the possibility that you and your family and your whole race have some genetic limitation?

But also because it was so weak, you know, scientifically. It's been very difficult, impossible, to produce anything like definitive data, that the differences in test scores between groups is genetic. But while the differences between these students that Claude was seeing in Michigan clearly wouldn't be explained by genetic differences, it also didn't seem to him like it could be explained simply by their backgrounds or their opportunities. Because you take, let's say, a black kid and a white kid in Michigan, they both have extraordinary scores, like, you know, they're in the 98th percentile in their SATs.

So the background between the two kids, whatever it is, has not resulted in a difference to that moment in time. So if going forward and taking a test, the black kid gets a lower score or a lower performance in a course of some sort, then something must be happening right there. Right there. Something must be happening in the moment.

There was something there that people didn't understand and that we certainly didn't understand. So he figured he would start with a woman in math issue. He brought a bunch of women in and a bunch of men. He brought them into the laboratory one at a time.

Gave them a half an hour section of the graduate record exam you take if you're a math major. Very, very difficult math. And sure enough, the women who had all the same credentials coming into that situation performed dramatically worse than the men. Worse, as in?

It would be a couple hundred points on an SAT test. It was a big effect. So Claude Steele thought, all right, step one complete. I've got a lab situation that resembles the real world.

Good. Now the next step is to tweak things a little bit. See if I can mess around with it. Now, normally in these situations, the test giver's got a white lab coat on and he brings in a big stack of cellophane wrapped tests and he puts a clock on the table.

It's all, you know, like, that's going to intimidate almost anybody. Maybe that's what's happening, he thought. What if I took away the clock, took away the coat, and most importantly, right before the test, I had the test giver. Instead of saying the normal, I'm going to give you a test, pre-test thing.

Maybe instead, say something like this. Look, you may have heard that women don't do as well as men on difficult standardized math tests. You may have heard that. But that's not true for this particular test.

This particular test does not show gender differences, never has, never will. He wondered if maybe saying that simple sentence before giving the test would have an effect. And sure enough, I wouldn't be here if their performance didn't go up and go up to match that of the equally skilled men. That performance gap vanished.

She, look at this thing. So we raced and did it very quickly, the same kind of experiment with African-Americans. There, the pre-test disclaimer went like this. This is an instrument that we use to study problem solving, and it is not diagnostic of individuals' intellectual ability.

In other words, this is not a test of your intelligence. I repeat, not an IQ test. So just do the best you can. And with that simple disclaimer at the start, same kind of an effect.

Black students and white students were now equal. Just recently, Ryan Brown and Eric Day did an even cleverer treatment. There is an IQ test which is nonverbal. It's called the Advanced Progressive Matrices.

It has figures. Very abstract. They got lines crossing. That you have to match and so on.

Checks. It's essentially pattern matching. Diamonds with dots in them. Totally visual.

And so they could represent that test as it is as an IQ test. In fact, seen as the gold standard of IQ test because it's, quote, culture-free. There's no math. There's no reading.

Because it doesn't involve language. Or you could represent the exact same test as a puzzle. Puzzles. Meaning you can give an IQ test to a bunch of kids, and black students will perform worse.

But if you give that same test, lose the word test, lose the word IQ, and just call it a puzzle, the black participants suddenly jump up in their performance. Basically, we got a reversal. When you're represented as a puzzle, blacks perform as well as whites. They did, yeah.

That's all it takes. Just change a few words. Stereotypes are powerful. Okay, that makes sense.

But in terms of understanding how this works, can you make this tactile for me? Like, if the stereotype that's having all these effects is like a thing, like a little gremlin that bites, when in the test-taking process does it actually do its family? That's going to be way open to debate. What does seem to be clear from the data, according to Eric Day and Ryan Brown and Claude Steele, is that the gremlin only seems to appear when the test is sufficiently hard.

If the test is easy, this important point out, these effects don't happen. It's not that the gremlin is not there. Well, he walks in with you, but he doesn't speak necessarily until things get challenging. As soon as the test gets difficult.

That's where the voices kick in. Which means that for most of the tests, everybody's doing about the same. It's only at problem number 17, the one about cosines and factorials and whatever, where things start to go wrong, at least that's the theory. At that problem, the black student starts to stiffen up a little bit.

That's right. And Claude Steele's measured this. Their blood pressure's elevated there. Short-term memory is impaired.

It's that flicker of frustration through their body that wakes up the gremlin who starts to whisper in their ear. I don't know if you can do this. Oh shit, is what they say about us true? They don't think you can do it.

All the usual stuff. Even if the student doesn't believe it, which is likely. So you don't have to believe it. That's the kind of insidious thing here.

Just the fact that he has now this extra bit of mental chatter. That little guy whispering. Well, it's a distraction. And that makes their performance go down.

Just a little bit. All this dialogue is keeping you from being 100% focused on the task at hand, which is solving these problems. So the real subtle power of a stereotype isn't that it prevents you from doing the thing you want to do. It distracts you for just a beat from doing the thing you want to do.

And that may be all the difference. So that's how we ended the piece that we did back in 2009. But in the years after Claude did that original study, the effect which he called stereotype threat, became one of the biggest and most important ideas in all of social psychology. But now some psychologists say stereotypes can become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Claude Steele. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my great pleasure to present Claude Steele. He became a sort of academic rock star. Professor Claude Steele.

Dr. Claude Steele. Speaking to overflowing audiences at places like Columbia and Cornell. Welcome, Dr.

Steele. And this idea of a stereotype threat was shown to be relevant in cases that had to do with age and socioeconomic status. There were studies about women playing chess, men being tested on social sensitivity. I mean, Claude's work ended up inspiring sort of a whole generation of social psychologists.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that. The original stereotype threat paper by Steele and Aronson blew me away. Just spoke to me and it was beautiful and it seemed to offer answers to questions that troubled me. So this is Michael Inslee.

And I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. So when did you begin, if you could give us sort of the cliff notes version of your history with stereotype threat in particular. I mean, I think I was certainly attracted to that part of social psychology that dealt with prejudice and discrimination. So I'm Jewish.

I went to Jewish day school and high school and kind of perhaps baked into me was a desire to prefer social justice. And you know, seeing, you know, the evils of prejudice and, you know, how those evils taking their logical extreme, what could happen. So I was passionate about the topic. So it seemed to be a very hopeful sort of explanation that also offered relatively easy solutions to fix.

Sounds like you really came into it with a very social, political sort of bent to it. Yes, that's right. I wanted my work to have an impact. I wanted it to change the world.

Coming up after the break, Michael tries to change the world. The world kind of changes. Yeah. Yeah.

Hi, this is Vincent Rojas from Norman, Oklahoma. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

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Why are groceries so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts, and start seeing how the economy really works. He even signed a brief kind of explaining stereotype threat to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Supreme Court heard the oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. As it applied to the question of affirmative action, the court will decide whether race used in university and college admission policies is constitutional. So I put my name to this.

But then, he moved to Toronto. I started my current job at the University of Toronto in 2005. And while he was there, he was running a lot of his stereotype threat research on women in math. You know, giving women a test, and then doing some intervention to reduce the stereotype, and seeing if there'd be a difference in their test force.

And simply put, for the first time, I was not able to consistently show any effect of stereotype threat. In other words, the women who had received this stereotype threat-reducing intervention performed just about the same as the women who hadn't. So I think, when I first got here, I, you know, failed to replicate some of these effects. And then, you know, go back to the drawing board, let me think about, you know, how is my population different?

And his first thought was, maybe it has something to do with Toronto. So Toronto, incredibly diverse place. Like, take the freshman psych classes he was teaching. We're talking about, you know, a third East Asian, a third South Asian, and only about 15% Caucasian or European, Canadian, and then a lot of everything else.

So, he started wondering, Do I say, do our students even, are they aware of these stereotypes about, you know, women in math? And remarkably, when I would ask, you know, our students this. Like, he'd ask, you know, who here has heard of this stereotype that women are bad at math? I would say, no more than, like, a quarter to a third had, you know, a strong awareness of this stereotype.

So, yeah. started running the experiments again but i'd only pick those women and men who actually had awareness but even then i still then couldn't get the effect um so it's like okay well maybe i'm doing something wrong like maybe the interventions he was designing weren't reducing the threat or with these students maybe the threat just wasn't that much of a threat in the first place but by this time michael had already done a ton of research on stereotype threat and you know i'm a person who gets bored rather quickly um i just you know started i started losing interest but just a couple years later well so um things changed on october 17th 2011 this one paper was published there's a paper called false positive psychology and this paper detailed how just by doing some very standard practices in psychology research using techniques some of which you're taught explicitly in grad school you could sometimes end up with these sort of ludicrous conclusions yeah so you're saying there were this paper was showing ways in which experimenters could subtly unknowingly juice their results is that essentially what it was yeah essentially um so the paper was pointing out that it becomes sort of standard practice you know when you're researching for some effect like oh how happy people were well you don't attest that you would measure that thing in a couple different ways which is a good practice right you want to no one measure captures your construct perfectly so you should measure that thing in as many you know ways as possible um but now what if you find that it works your hypothesis is confirmed with one of those measures but it's not confirmed with three or four of the other ones and it was not uncommon practice at that point to just you know report the one place where you got an effect and report the one that worked you could even argue that you were just dialing in exactly where this effect happens but the paper this false psychology paper pointed out that if you ignore the places where it didn't work that's not really a full picture of what that actually looked like the data as a whole if you look at all of it might not actually support your conclusion i remember reading that um my jaw dropped i sent this this paper i circulated it to the other faculty in my department and all of us or many of us saw the the importance of this paper and we called it an emergency meeting yeah i'll never forget it i mean what does an emergency meeting look like the faculty and of the graduate students just discuss the content of the paper um to see what it meant what the implications were and as they talked it over they realized that in some ways probably some of their own work um had fallen prey to the problems that this paper was pointing out i did see myself in some of this um and i thought you know wow like you know what has been implicated what papers are mine what papers more generally uh have been located in the fields in a bit large and in fact meetings like the one that michael found himself in started happening at universities and conferences all over the world yeah people looked at that paper and everyone thought oh this is dan ingberg you know this is this is what we're all doing this stuff and now we know from this one paper that it's very very easy to turn up spurious findings this way yeah it changed everything in part because a group of scientists started thinking wow maybe we really need to go back and reinvestigate some of the key findings in our field they call them high power replication so you're just kind of doing the same thing but just with more people so they start doing these studies with bigger sample sizes and with strict rules about what data you were looking at they say ahead of time exactly what they're going to do and how they're going to analyze so you know there's no possibility of monkeying around to get the answer you want and these attempts to replicate or reproduce you know major findings in social psychology and the sort of panic that went along with it came to be known as the replication crisis replication is the cornerstone of science news articles this week are talking about the reproducibility crisis in science it's like oh man what you know what is going on here because as they re-examined some of these studies the facial feedback effect studies that got lots of coverage in newspapers and magazines some of these replications were failing so specifically what got me really into covering the replication crisis was news about ego depletion so this is a whole literature of studies that were all about um how we sort of use up our willpower the original study is you go into a lab and you're presented with a um a dish of delicious fresh baked chocolate chip cookies i love the method section of that paper they described baking cookies in the lab so that the smell would be around the subject when they come in and they put these cookies out and they say you can't have any cookies and then they leave you alone with the cookies and what they found was that you know someone has to sit there um resisting a cookie with it right in front of them and the smell is wafting up their nose as they sit there um if they have to go through that it'll actually be much harder for them to complete certain kinds of logic puzzles and the argument was you use willpower on you know task a then you try to do task b and you just won't have a store of willpower unless later study span you drink some lemonade in the meantime because sugar the argument goes repunishes your willpower so there were sort of increasingly bizarre elaborations of this original theory it ended up working with m&ms ended up working with cookies over the years dan says this idea that you use up willpower in one place and have less in another just started entering all different corners of our lives the insight of that original study was replicated again and again and again for decades but then this group of scientists did this massive effort to replicate the original study they had over 2 000 um subjects they followed these rigorous rules about like what data they were going to look at this is as rigorous a replication as you can get and they just found like no effect basically no effect but i guess i don't understand like how is it that they're finding nothing now but before they had a study that was then replicated a bunch of times in a bunch of different labs but what i still don't get what's going on well so so you have that original cookie study yeah i think it's notable that no other studies that i know of use cookies now i found studies where m&ms were used so that just makes me wonder i have no idea how that lab did their study but it makes me wonder what would happen if i ran a lab and i wanted to reproduce this cookie finding and extend it in a new direction and i kept trying it with cookies and it just never worked let me try it with charleston chews doesn't work because it's not hard to resist charleston chews yeah maybe charleston chews are not good candy and i end up i'm like i do it with m&ms and it works boom there's my dissertation i publish a paper out of it so now that's in literature and so now ego depletion seems like an even stronger more valid thing because it's not just about cookies now it's about cookies or m&ms my point is that you don't really know how many things were tried in each individual lab do you think that might be what's happening in these labs is that there's a lot of trial and error and the error sort of swept aside and the successes are offered up and then suddenly you have one more success that bolsters the idea is that what you think might be happening i think that's that is the heart of it but whatever the problems are not with those follow-up studies the big thing was that scientists were continuing to fail at replicating these big and fairly well-known studies like the the idea that when you smile it changes your mood or the idea presented in one of the most watched ted talks ever that the way you sort of hold yourself or stand the idea that that could have a measurable impact on your behavior or even your hormone levels that one also failed to replicate and that kept happening with study after study and of course you know other people come back and say oh the replication effort wasn't done right or you didn't really design it well you're seeing a lot of the researchers who have made their careers studying certain effects they're just not budging a few of them are but most of them are not budging so you just have a split forming one researcher described to me it's like a civil war within social psychology is stereotype threat now itself under threat is it one of these bodies of research being rethought well no one has yet done a big multi-site pre-registered replication that they did for you at least one that like really woke me up to this but then says there have been sort of smaller scale here and there kind of attempts to replicate some of the studies and you know some of those have failed some studies came out that found that you know what i tried to redo i tried to do the stereotype threat thing on a big group of students and i found that sometimes the opposite happened when i tried to induce stereotype threat the students did better it's a f*** you effect yeah exactly i'll show you well let me let me say this maybe this will help there because this is something you know i thought a lot about from the very beginning so when we talked to claude steele about all this um he had a couple of things to say first of all this research has been dramatically well replicated the stereotype of threat effect has been demonstrated you know way more times in way more different contexts than really any of those other social psychology studies i don't know there's another there's another phenomenon that has produced so many demonstrations and uh if you can't replicate one of them or six of them i don't know i wouldn't i wouldn't that doesn't surprise me and he says you know you can see the failures as just information about um where the effect really applies and where it doesn't this is science gradually getting sophisticated enough to help apply it in appropriate places for example he says he would only expect the effect to appear at times when the person is really invested in what they're trying to do and thus the negative stereotype you know really is threatening on top of that he says the kinds of stereotypes that are actually threatening to a given group might change over time if you just exactly replicated what we did 25 years ago i'm not sure that the stimuli and the procedures would have the same meaning with today's college students that they had then the social psychology is the meanings come from the contemporary moment the way the state of the culture at that time yeah i mean that is interesting actually that i mean if what this research is doing is studying like an individual's relationship to like threat and like that's going to be different depending on who you are because you're going to find different things threatening where you are or even when you are yeah i i don't have i don't think i know enough about quote the culture of black students today versus the culture of black students 25 years ago but it wouldn't surprise me that there are some real differences so i don't put as much stock in the exact replication of experiment a or b as i do in the conceptual replication is it possible i mean you mentioned there's hundreds of studies that kind of circle around the same idea in different ways that is on its face very compelling evidence that uh you know this is a robust phenomenon but at the same time you know there's people who gather all the data together and they say look you know maybe there's some kind of bias that slips in when people are doing this research they just keep trying different versions until they get something that looks like the result does that seem plausible to you well that's a deeply um i guess cynical account of uh of scientific literature this big it doesn't seem highly probable to me it doesn't seem highly likely to me it's clearly real and replicable under these circumstances just because they're not everything doesn't mean they're not incredibly important to to the progress of the society and in fact claude points out that the stereotype threat is pretty unique in the fact that many of the studies in this literature are not just in the lab they've been taken out into the streets with real people that's really where the you know the tire meets the road is can you actually move the educational performance of real people in real uh school situations and claude actually sent us a list of several dozen studies showing that that interventions designed to reduce stereotype threat can have dramatic and long-lasting effects on achievement now we should say there was at least one case there was a study done in 2006 that a researcher tried to replicate in 2011 this is much smaller than the original 2006 effect and then just last year he did it again with more students this time and he got pretty much nothing this is the same guy in the same school system trying to do the same study with you know hundreds and hundreds of kids and he came up with i'm curious to know i mean given that replication has become a conversation that you have to unfortunately contend with i'm just curious if it's changed your opinion of the work no i mean i don't think there's anything that could make me go oh this whole thing is not true i mean i want the truth out there more than i want anything else this is steve spencer he was an early collaborator with claude steel especially on those studies involving women and math tests i did recognize in some of the critiques real issues that we need to deal with but steve light claude is very confident in the results of his studies in the effect of the stereotype threat in general so much so that i'm writing right now an article where i'm going to disclose every single study i've ever done what the results are and put the data up for everybody to look at um i will admit to the questionable research practices that i've done um and be as forthcoming and honest with everything in my own lab in addition to doing that i've entered into an adversarial collaboration it's called which just means he's going to do a big scale reproduction study with people who have serious doubts about whether stereotype threat is real you know i can't say ahead of time what my reaction will be i think what i can promise is that i will take the findings very seriously and i will do my utmost not to be defensive about them are you nervous about this i mean it's the stakes are pretty high no no i mean you know what you mean the stakes are high i mean i'm a full professor i have tenure what are the real stakes for me in this not really much but well not everyone in the field is handling these kinds of niggling doubts um so well there are so many pieces of evidence that things are not all right this again is michael inslick the professor from toronto to be faced with the probability the likelihood that all this might have been for naught or much of it might have been for naught it's unsettling right it's it's a loss of meaning you know was i was i doing the work was i contributing to knowledge um was i part of the problem was i tasting you know single was i tasting noise i mean i think the effect is you know it might be there but it might be so small to not be not be meaningfully important that's interesting it's hard to know where to stand on this well one thing that you know should make clear is the stereotypes can be really damaging i mean having someone tell you you suck at something when you're under the gun to do it um that's always gonna you know that's gonna have an effect i guess the question is you know how you know what effect exactly and when and how and what can you do about it and and those things feel like maybe i guess it feels like the part of me that wanted this to be a kind of very simple fix that would work everywhere and sort of save the world you know that part is you know feeling a little bit of a lot like worrying that this whole thing is shrinking on me a bit but yeah totally it does feel really like we're all growing up a little bit because you kind of just have to walk away from those big simple promises you know maybe that's exactly what you need in order to be able to find the smaller places where you can have an effect you know right here right now with this person trying to do this particular thing producer editor soren wheeler thanks to him thanks to dan amber this piece was produced by Simon adler and amanda aronchek okay so we should go yeah i'm jad umrod and i'm a brooch thanks for listening oh hey lisa here on a monday morning with staff credits on a strong couple joe radio lab was created by jad abhorad and is produced by zarin wheeler gill and keith is our director of sound design maria mckee's rpdi is our managing director our staff includes adam and adler with help from amanda arachek shima oliai david fox nagar vitale pbway and gaby ferguson our fact checker is michelle harris