Claude Steele

Claude Mason Steele (born January 1, 1946) is an American social psychologist and currently the I. James Quillen Dean for the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University,^[1] as well as Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Stanford.^[2] Previously, he served as the 21st Provost of Columbia University for two years, and before that, as a professor of psychology at various institutions for almost 40 years. He is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to minority student academic performance.^[3] His earlier work dealt with research on the self (e.g., self-image, self-affirmation)^[4][5] as well as the role of self-regulation in addictive behaviors.^[6] In 2010, he released his book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, summarizing years of research on stereotype threat and the underperformance of minority students in higher education.^[7]

Education and early life

Steele was born on January 1, 1946, to parents Ruth (social worker) and Shelby (truck driver) just outside of Chicago in Phoenix, Illinois, during the Civil Rights movement. Claude recalls his African-American family^[8] (including his twin brother, Shelby and two other siblings) as being deeply interested in social issues and the civil rights movement, as these were very much on American minds at the time.^[9] Steele even remembers his father taking him and his brother to marches and rallies whenever possible.^[10] His father pushed him to achieve security in the context of securing employment, but Claude construed achievement as success in education.^[8] He enrolled at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, where he earned a B.A. in psychology in 1967.

At Hiram, Claude’s passion for reading novels naturally led to an interest in how the individual faces the social world.^[8] After being fully immersed in the Civil Rights movement and the issues of racial equality, rights, and the nature of prejudice as a child, Steele formed a desire to study these topics in a scientific manner; and was especially keen to discover their effects on social relationships and quality of life.^[11] Claude was inspired by African-American social psychologist Kenneth Clark’s TV appearance discussing the psychological implications of the 1964 race riots in Harlem, New York,^[9] which led to an excitement for doing behavioral research. Claude conducted early experimental research at Hiram College in physiological psychology (looking at behavioral motives in Siamese fighting fish) and social psychology (studying how African-American dialect among kids maintains ethnic/racial identity),^[8] where he worked under the mentorship of social psychologist, Ralph Cebulla. He then continued on to graduate school to study social psychology, earning an M.A. in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 1971 from the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, with a minor in statistical psychology. His dissertation work with faculty adviser Thomas Ostrom at Ohio State focused on attitude measurement and attitude change.

Academic career

After receiving his PhD in 1971, Claude Steele got his first job as an Assistant Professor of Psychology for two years at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, and then moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington for 14 years, receiving tenure in 1985. In 1987, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was Professor of Psychology for four years, during the latter two of which he simultaneously held the position of Research Scientist in Univ. of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. In 1991, he moved to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he was Professor of Psychology for 18 years, receiving the title of Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences in 1997. During his 18 years at Stanford, he also served as Chair of the Department of Psychology for three years (1997–2000), Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity for three years (2002–2005), and Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for four years (2005–2009), among various other positions (see Teaching and Administrative Appointments, below). In 2009, he left Stanford to become the 21st Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Columbia University in Manhattan, New York for two years, where he was responsible for faculty appointments and tenure recommendations, along with overseeing financial planning and budgeting.^[12] In 2011, he left Columbia and returned to Stanford, where he is currently the I. James Quillen Dean for the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Research

Throughout his academic career, Claude Steele’s work fell into 3 main domains of research under the broad subject area of social psychology: stereotype threat, self-affirmation, and addictive behaviors. Although separate and distinct, these three lines of research are linked together by their shared focus on self-evaluation and how people cope with threats to their self-image and self-identities.^[9]

Addictive behaviors

Although many people primarily associate Claude Steele with his significant contributions in the development of stereotype threat research, the 14 years of his post-doctoral academic career that he spent at the University of Washington were focused on addictive behaviors and the social psychology behind alcohol use and addiction. He was interested in the role of alcohol and drug use in self-regulation processes and social behavior. Among his major findings are that alcohol myopia, or the cognitive impairment due to alcohol use, reduces cognitive dissonance,^[13] leads to more extreme social responses,^[14] increases helping behavior,^[15] reduces anxiety when combined with a distracting activity,^[16] and enhances important self-evaluations.^[6]

Self-affirmation

While studying the effects of alcohol use on social behavior, Claude Steele was simultaneously formulating a theory about the effects of self-affirmation.^[9] Developed in the 1980s, self-affirmational processes referred to the ability to reduce threats to our self-image by stepping back and affirming a value that is important to our self-concept.^[5] Steele often uses the example of smokers who are told that smoking will lead to significant negative health outcomes. The perception that they may be evaluated negatively due to their willingness to engage in negative behaviors threatens their self-image. However, affirming a value in a domain completely unrelated to smoking but important to one’s self-concept, e.g., joining a valued cause, or accomplishing more at work, will counter the negative effects of the self-image threat and re-establish self-integrity.^[5] Self-affirmation theory was originally formulated as an alternative motivational explanation for cognitive dissonance theory, namely, that threats to the self led to a change in attitudes, rather than psychologically inconsistent ideas, and that self-affirmational strategies can reduce dissonance as effectively as attitude change.^[17]

Steele’s research on self-affirmation and its effects demonstrated the power of self-affirmation to reduce biased attitudes,^[18] lead to positive health behaviors,^[19] and even improve the academic performance of minority students.^[20]

Stereotype threat

Claude Steele is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to explain real-world problems, such as the underperformance of female students in math and science classes^[21] as well as African-American students in academic contexts.^[3] Steele first began to explore the issues surrounding stereotype threat at the University of Michigan, when his membership on a university committee called for him to tackle the problem of academic underachievement of minority students at the university.^[7] He discovered that the dropout rate for African American students was much higher than for their White peers, even though they were good students and had received excellent SAT scores. This led him to form a hypothesis involving stereotype threat.^[22] Stereotype threat refers to the threat felt in particular situations in which stereotypes relevant to one’s group identity exist, and the mere knowledge of the stereotypes can be distracting enough to negatively affect one’s performance in a domain related to the stereotype.^[3] Steele has demonstrated the far-reaching implications of stereotype threat by showing that it is more likely to undermine the performance of individuals who are highly invested in the domain being threatened,^[23] and that stereotype threat can even lead to significant negative health outcomes among African Americans.^[24] These theories of stereotype threat can be applied to better understand group differences in performance not only in intellectual situations, but in athletics as well.^[25]

Steele has spearheaded many successful interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of stereotype threat, including how to provide critical feedback effectively to a student under the effects of stereotype threat,^[26] inspired by his graduate school adviser, Tom Ostrom’s, motivating style of feedback,^[7] as well as how teacher practices can foster a feeling of identity safety and, as a result, better performance outcomes among elementary school minority students.^[27]

Whistling Vivaldi

In 2010, Claude Steele published his first book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us,^[7] as part of the Issues of Our Time series of books^[28] exploring timely issues from the voices of modern intellectuals. Whistling Vivaldi focuses on the phenomenon of stereotype threat as it explains the trend of minority underperformance in higher education. In his book, Steele discusses how identity contingencies, or those cues in an environment that signal particular stereotypes attached to an aspect of one’s identity, can have a drastic negative effect on a person’s functioning, and how these effects can explain racial and gender performance gaps in academic performance. Steele also offers a host of strategies for reducing stereotype threat and enhancing minority student performance, as well as the hope that the societal knowledge of stereotype threat will lead to an understanding and acceptance of diverse group differences.

Personal life

Claude Steele currently lives with his wife, Dorothy Munson Steele, and children in California. Claude and Dorothy have been known to collaborate on projects dedicated to prejudice in American society^[29] and minority student achievement.^[27] His twin brother, Shelby Steele is a conservative writer and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.^[30]

Teaching and administrative appointments

• 1971-1973 Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Utah
• 1973-1987 Assistant Professor to Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Washington
• 1987-1991 Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan
• 1989-1991 Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
• 1991-2009 Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
• 1996-1997 President, Western Psychological Association
• 1997-2000 Chair, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
• 1997-2009 Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Stanford University
• 2002-2005 Director, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University
• 2002-2003 President, Society for Personality and Social Psychology
• 2009-2011 Provost of Columbia University
• 2011- Dean, Stanford Graduate School of Education

Awards and honors

• 1994-1995 Cattell Faculty Fellowship, The James McKeen Cattell Fund
• 1995 Dean’s Teaching Award, Stanford University
• 1996 Elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1997 Gordon Allport Prize in Social Psychology, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
• 1998 Elected to The National Academy of Education
• 2000 William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Scientific Career Contribution, American Psychological Society
• 2001 Donald Campbell Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology
• 2002 Kurt Lewin Memorial Award, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
• 2002 Senior Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest, American Psychological Association
• 2003 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association
• 2003 Elected to The National Academy of Sciences
• 2004 Columbia Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service
• 2007 Distinguished Scientific Impact Award, The Society of Experimental Social Psychology. (For “Threat in the Air”^[31])
• 2007 Presidential Citation, American Psychological Association
• 2008 Elected to the American Philosophical Society
• Received honorary doctorates from: University of Chicago, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Michigan, and University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Memberships

• American Academy of Education
• National Academy of Sciences
• American Philosophical Society
• Board, Social Science Research Council
• Board of Directors, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• National Science Board

Article

• http://irasilver.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Reading-Stereotype-threat-Steele.pdf *

References