social psychologist; educator
Personal Information
Born January 1, 1946, in Chicago, IL; married Dorothy Munson; children: Jory, Claire, Claude, Benjamin.
Education: Hiram College (Hiram, OH), B.A., 1967; Ohio State University, M.A., 1969; Ph.D., 1971.
Memberships: American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society (board of directors member), Association of Black Psychologists, Society of Experimental Social Psychology.
Career
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, assistant professor of psychology, 1971-73; University of Washington, Seattle, WA, assistant professor to professor psychology, 1973-85, became assistant professor of psychology, 1985-87; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, professor of psychology, 1987-91; Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, research scientist, 1989-91; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, professor of psychology, 1991--. Consulting editor to Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Motivation and Emotion, 1987--, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Attitudes and Social Cognition, and Psychological Review, 1990--.
Life's Work
For more than 20 years, social psychologist Claude Steele has labored over his research, which deals primarily with three topics: addictive behaviors--especially alcohol addiction; how people cope with negative self-images; and the effects of group stereotypes. Steele's theory of "stereotype vulnerability," the idea that the perception of a negative stereotype of one's own group can have a disruptive effect, stirred up the academic community and attracted attention in the popular press. Robert B. Zajonc, director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, described Steele to Denise K. Magner of the Chronicle of Higher Education: "He is one of the very few people I know who can perform abstract analyses of a problem without losing a sense of compassion for the social aspects."
Claude Steele and his identical twin brother, Shelby, whose parents are an interracial couple who met because of their involvement in the civil rights movement, grew up in Phoenix, Illinois--a working- class suburb of Chicago. The Steele children were immersed in the social issues of the day. "Our household was like a graduate school in race relations," Claude recollected to New York Times Magazine writer Ethan Watters. "My mother was a social worker and my father was a truck driver, but they were both very intellectual people."
Little did the Steele sons know that their paths would later cross repeatedly in their choices of careers and academic interests. Claude studied psychology, earning a doctorate from Ohio State University in 1971. After a short stint at the University of Utah, he hired on at the University of Washington Seattle. During his 14- year tenure, Steele and his colleagues won half a dozen grants from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a federal organization, to study various aspects of alcohol abuse. Their research topics included the role of personal and media attacks in alcohol abuse, drinking and anxiety, and drinking and stress.
Shortly after joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1987, Steele was asked to take part in a committee studying the university's student recruitment and retention efforts. He was surprised to find high dropout rates for African Americans despite their excellent preparation and SAT test scores. While the dropout rate for white students was 42 percent, for African American students it soared to 70 percent. Of the African American students who stayed in school, their marks averaged half a letter grade lower than their white counterparts.
"When I realized that the smartest black students were having these terrible troubles, I figured something else was going on," Steele recalled to Watters. Intrigued, he began a series of studies to discern the causes of this gap. He talked with students--they obviously wanted to succeed--and he determined that the lower grades were not a systematic form of racism on the part of the faculty. Then he began to theorize a new cause and test his hypothesis.
After publishing his findings in scholarly journals, in the April 1992 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Steele explained them to the general public. Steele determined that high dropout rates for African American college students occurred even among the well- prepared students who had no major financial disadvantages. Moreover, something depressed achievement at all levels of schooling, from elementary school to graduate school. According to Steele, for any student to do well in school, he or she must believe "that school achievement can be a promising basis of self- esteem, and that belief needs constant re-affirmation even for advantaged students."
Much of American society, whether overtly racist or not, maintained Steele, devalues the accomplishments of African Americans, even though in many areas of endeavor African Americans have made significant contributions. If they want to succeed, African Americans are forced to assimilate into white society, which means that they must change styles of appearance, speech, and values in mainstream settings. "The offer of acceptance in return for assimilation carries a primal insult: it asks them to join in something that has made them invisible."
In addition, African Americans must constantly face the threat of being considered racially inferior, a stereotype that has long been entrenched in American society. African American students quickly learn that their acceptance will be difficult to win and will require re-earning at each level of schooling. "Our idea was that whenever black students concentrate on an explicitly scholastic task, they risk confirming their group's negative stereotype," Steele explained to Watters. "This extra burden, in situations with certain characteristics, can be enough to drag down their performance. We call this burden stereotype vulnerability." Whether or not a student consciously accepts the negative stereotype, he or she must deal with the stereotype. At inopportune times, such as in the middle of taking a test, the mental energy used to combat the stereotype distract from the matter at hand.
For some African American students the goal of educational achievement becomes so daunting that they de-emphasize the importance of schooling and measure their success in different arenas, such as through their relationships with peers. Steele calls this phenomenon "disidentification" with education. "To make matters worse," Steele wrote in the Atlantic, "once disidentification occurs in a school, it can spread like the common cold." Peer pressure to disidentify can become fierce.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Steele has conducted many studies to test his concept of stereotype vulnerability. For example, with Joshua Aronson, he asked two groups of African American and white college students to take a 30-minute test made up of questions from the verbal section of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) that were sufficiently difficult to test the limits of the participants' skills. One group was told that the test would measure their intellectual ability, while the other group was told the test was simply a problem-solving laboratory and could not measure intellectual ability. The study results showed that the African American students in the first group performed lower than their white counterparts, though in the second group the whites and African Americans performed at the same level. Steele argued that the first group felt the pressure of the negative stereotype of lack of intellectual ability and fulfilled the expectation of lower performance.
Stereotype vulnerability, Steele found in later studies conducted with Steve Spencer, can be a barrier to achievement of other social groups. For example, Hispanics, or women in academic fields traditionally dominated by men--such as mathematics and science-- may have to combat the stereotype of incompetence. White men may have to deal with the stereotype that Asian men outperform whites on certain math exams. And the elderly often have to deal with the negative image of forgetfulness as a product of age.
According to Steele, the concept of stereotype vulnerability even applies to race relations. "I think much of what is mistaken for racial animosity in America today is really stereotype vulnerability," he told Watters. When African Americans and whites interact, they each have to deal with negative stereotypes of their own groups. The whites do not want to be taken for racists, while the African Americans want to deny negative stereotypes of their race. With so much happening at the self-image level, interactions may be uncomfortable and be misunderstood as hostility. The groups may decide the interaction is not worth the effort and give up.
For decades special programs have been in place at learning institutions nationwide to improve the academic performance of African Americans. However, Steele's research points to the faulty basis of many such programs--instead of challenging students to succeed, they expect them to fail. Steele believes that he has pinpointed the changes necessary to make the American school system better serve its students. "If what is meaningful and important to a teacher is to become meaningful and important to a student, the student must feel valued by the teacher for his or her potential as a person," Steele argued in the Atlantic.
Furthermore, students must be challenged: their skill level should be considered and the students moved along at a pace that is demanding, but not defeating. Schools must be racially integrated, and African American literature, art, music, and political and social perspectives must be an integral part of the curriculum, not just relegated to a few special times of the school year or to special topics courses. By taking these actions, Steele told Magner, "you're telling black students in a profound way you believe they have ability."
At the University of Michigan, incoming African American students had been labeled "at risk" and given special mentoring and other programs, to no avail. Based on the results of Steele's studies, in 1991--the year Steele left the University of Michigan for Stanford University--the University of Michigan began a different kind of trial project. In the 21st Century Program, incoming students were randomly selected and, as freshmen, were housed in the same dormitory. They were required to take a certain number of the same classes with other students from the dormitory and attend workshops and group study. Instead of remediating the students, all were expected to excel, and instead of self-segregating, the students remained an integrated unit. In three of four years of the pilot project, the grade gap between African American and white students decreased significantly.
Steele has supported affirmative action, though he admitted to Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Higher Education that it "has so many meandering excesses that it makes it difficult for anyone to defend it." He has realized that although minority programs can contribute to stereotype vulnerability, many African Americans who are given the opportunity to attend universities can excel under conditions that eliminate the vulnerability, as seen with the 21st Century Program. Claude's brother, Shelby, a professor of English at San Jose State University, is one of Claude's harshest critics on this subject.
In his best-selling collection of essays, Content of Our Character (1990), Shelby described his concept of "racial vulnerability," which is similar to Claude's theory of stereotype vulnerability. Shelby further maintained that African Americans who underperform are suffering from their own "internalized" inferiority complex and should throw off the status of victims. Claude has disagreed wholeheartedly. "These kids want to make it," he told Watters. "These kids are in their dorm rooms confronting the beast of their deepest fears. Instead of telling them that it is their responsibility to overcome the psychology that they are feeling in their gut, let's get rid of the beast."
Relations between the Steele brothers have long been strained. At one point, Shelby accused Claude of stealing his ideas, particularly concerning vulnerability to racial stereotypes. Claude denied the accusation and explained how their similar concepts differ. About Shelby, Claude told Watters, "He blew a hole open in the debate about the black student's experience on campus, which has allowed a lot of people, including myself, to walk into the discussion. I think of it as almost an unfortunate detail that we wound up following similar terrain and coming down on an issue like affirmative action on different sides. It suggests a bigger difference than there really is," he added. The brothers have agreed not to publicly discuss each other's work.
Claude Steele's concept of stereotype vulnerability is likely to elicit debate for some time to come. Many scholars believe that stereotyping can affect academic performance, but they maintain that it is only one of numerous factors that work together. Charles Murray, in his controversial book The Bell Curve, co-authored with Richard J. Herrnstein, maintains that genetic factors explain the difference in intellectual performance between ethnic groups. Murray challenged Claude Steele to conduct studies that measure intelligence quotient and cognitive ability, not just verbal or mathematical ability. Steele had planned to do just that.
Steele would like to see the fruit of his research put to practical use and has begun to write a book discussing his recommendations for school reform. About narrowing the gap in academic achievement among various minority groups, Steele told Gose, "If I could wave a wand and change the schools tomorrow, I don't think it would take that long."
Awards
Dissertation Year fellowship, Ohio State University Graduate School, 1970-71; Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellowship, 1994-95; Cattell Faculty fellowship, James McKeen Cattell Fund.
Works
Writings
- (With R. A. Josephs and S. J. Spencer) "Low self-esteem: The Uphill Struggle for Self-Integrity." In Self-Esteem and the Puzzle of Low Self-Regard, edited by R. F. Baumeister. Wiley, 1993.
- (With Joshua Aronson) "Stereotype Vulnerability and African- American Intellectual Performance." In Readings About the Social Animal, edited by E. Aronson. Freeman and Co., 1994.
Further Reading
Sources
- Atlantic Monthly, April 1992, pp. 68-78.
- Boston Globe, November 18, 1994, p. 23.
- Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 1992, p. A5; August 18, 1995, p. A31.
- Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1995, pp. A1, A14.
- Newsweek, November 6, 1995, pp. 82-83.
- New York Times, August 31, 1995, p. A25.
- New York Times Magazine, September 17, 1995, pp. 45-47.
- San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 1994, p. A23; August 12, 1995, p. A15.
— Jeanne M. Lesinski
