In Chapter 4, “A Broader View of Identity: In the Lives of Anatole Broyard, Amin Maalouf, and the Rest of Us,” discusses that fact that most people hold multiple identities, and tend to identify most strongly with the one that feels like the group that is most threatened, or the way in which they most stand out. Thus, stereotype threat is based on the conditions you live under. In recent years, the stereotype has changed to say that women are just bad at math, not necessarily other subjects, so Steele and colleagues were able to design experiments that showed stereotype threat impacted women’s performance on math tests in a way it did not on history or English tests. He talks about how women, similarly to African-Americans, have historically been stereotyped as less intelligent. In Chapter 3,” Stereotype Threat Comes to Light, and in More than One Group,” Steele examines how stereotype threat affects women taking college-level math courses. He details his experiences as a professor, both in studying stereotypes from an experimental, psychological standpoint, and from his position as a potential mentor to young Black students. In Chapter 2, “A Mysterious Link between Identity and Intellectual Performance,” Steele explains several more of his and his colleagues’ experiments, and what inspired them to perform them.

He describes a study he performed that lead to the development of the term “stereotype threat,” because in it, he was able to impact black and white students’ performance on a golf exercise just by changing how he described it. He then describes the concept of stereotypes, and how they can affect people in less tangible, but still just as harmful, ways. He talks about his childhood in mid-1900s Chicago, and how he first became aware of discrimination because black families were only allowed to use the pool on Wednesdays.

In Chapter 1, “An Introduction, At the Root of Identity,” Steele introduces the readers to the main ideas of the book, as well as to himself.

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Steele, Claude M.

Whistling vivaldi