Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect disappear with just a few simple changes in language. We were completely enamoured with this research when we first heard about it, but in the current roil of replications and self-examination in the field of social psychology, we have to wonder whether we can still cling to the hopes of our earlier selves, or if we might have to grow up just a little bit.
This piece was produced by Simon Adler and Amanda Aronczyk and reported by Dan Engber and Amanda Aronczyk.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.
Duration
40m
Broadcast on
23 Nov 2017
Audio Format
other
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect disappear with just a few simple changes in language. We were completely enamoured with this research when we first heard about it, but in the current roil of replications and self-examination in the field of social psychology, we have to wonder whether we can still cling to the hopes of our earlier selves, or if we might have to grow up just a little bit.
This piece was produced by Simon Adler and Amanda Aronczyk and reported by Dan Engber and Amanda Aronczyk.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
WNYC Studios is supported by WISE. WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a WISE account, you can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get WISE. Download the WISE app today. Terms and conditions apply. WNYC Studios is supported by Odo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odo at ODOO.com. That's O-D-O-O.com. Wait, you're listening to RadioLab from WNYC? Can I ask you, do you just want to lay out for us the chronology of your obsession? I think I feel comfortable saying it. Has it become an obsession or just a dalliance? Maybe you just noticed a crumbling building and ran over to stick your pen. I'm a contrarian. I'm interested in alternative facts about science, let's say. Hey, I'm Jada Boomerad. I'm Robert Kroll, which this is RadioLab. A little while back, our editor, Soren Wheeler, and I, we talked to a science journalist named Dan Engber 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 a great length on this 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 the Lucy Stern's Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. We actually had him on the show a number of years ago. Sometimes, 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, which that blows my mind. Yeah, that was a lot younger man then. I know. 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. But 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 is 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 in the original program we ran back in 2009. And in the process, I saw data that surprised me. What he saw was a troubling trend. Two kids would enter Michigan. One was black, one was white. They'd come in at the exact same level. 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 a letter grade. Meaning if the white kid got an A, the black kid, who should be getting an A too, is instead getting a B or a B plus. That's significant. That's significant. 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 as a national phenomenon. If I was to walk into almost 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 Angber 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
Transcription truncated.
Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect disappear with just a few simple changes in language. We were completely enamoured with this research when we first heard about it, but in the current roil of replications and self-examination in the field of social psychology, we have to wonder whether we can still cling to the hopes of our earlier selves, or if we might have to grow up just a little bit.
This piece was produced by Simon Adler and Amanda Aronczyk and reported by Dan Engber and Amanda Aronczyk.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.