Stereotypes Affect Us And What We Can Do By Claude M. Steele

Great Essays
Stereotypes threats affect everyone 's’ performance, whether if it’s positive or negative. Stereotypes are just means to label or categorized certain group or an individual. People start to have poor performance during a stereotype is announced. In the novel, Whistling Vivaldi How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele, Steele talks about stereotype threat as how a person reacts to the label they are given. There are many stereotype threats such as, asians being smart in math or Asians don’t know how to drive. In Steele’s book, Steel does experiments to see how well people do under a stereotype threat. Steele does different tasks with many different group, which are told different stereotype threats. Steele did gain many …show more content…
Being told that Asians are smart in math, gave me a negative outcome because the stereotype threat states that all Asians are smart in math. I try to confirm the stereotype threat to be real, but it seems like a high expectation for me to confirm Even though, that the stereotype threat seems positive for some people may take it has a high expectations for them to confirm if it is true or false. Hearing the stereotype threat affected my performance because it gave me pressure to try and confirm the stereotype threat. For an individual who 's not as smart as they thought they could be and having a stereotype threat gives a high standard for them to reach, but it is more difficult for them to confirm the stereotype to be true. People have a harder time trying to confirm the stereotype threat that has a high standard towards …show more content…
People can take those stereotype threats and choose to either, to confirm if it is true or false. Even if the stereotype threat seems to be positive towards a group or an individual, they have high expectations to confirm it. In order for an individual to overcome the stereotype threat they need to ignore it and just do their best. Stereotype threats are everywhere and can affect a person’s performance to underperform. People will continue to underperform under a comparison because they’ll think that they’re not as good as

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Claude Steele’s powerful book, Whistling Vivaldi analyzes how stereotypes affect human behavior and performance by bringing to light influences and conditioning that normally goes unnoticed by the average person. He not only presents numerous studies and experiments performed by himself, as well as other contemporary social psychologists, but he shows us the ways they interconnect and how the effects of one social phenomena amplify and reinforce the effects of other ones. A key to his thesis is the idea of stereotype contingencies, which are the conditions people have to face due to their social identity that comes from their race, gender, ethnicity, age, diseases, and so on. He also counteracts the problems that people face from stereotypes…

    • 1807 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In his book Whistling Vivaldi, Claude M. Steele illustrates how stereotypes and biases affect our personal successes and development. Imposed upon him as a child, Steele opens his book offering his personal experiences with segregation and discrimination merely for the color of his skin. These experiences served as a footing as Steele and his colleagues began a series of experiments to discovery and explain how when people find themselves in a situation that could potentially confirm negative stereotype(s) about their race or gender their performance is vastly effected. Steele calls this theory stereotype threat “a standard predicament of life” (5).…

    • 1210 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Stereotypes are a way of categorizing people. This concept is explained in Social Psychology as a way of “thinking about a person not as an individual, but as a member of a group, and projecting what (you think) you know about the group onto your expectations about that person” (Page…

    • 1341 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Even with that, it is still very prominent. Stereotyping can have a wide range of mental effects on those of a stereotype. This is seen in the psychological subject of stereotype threat. This arises…

    • 710 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Maybe there came a point in life where you had to quit categorizing whole groups of people by a few experiences.” (Lisa Wingate). Throughout the story of George and Lennie in John steinbeck’s Of Mice in Men there are several different stereotypes. In the book different stereotypes affect the outcomes of many events. In the story people are labeled in different ways.…

    • 504 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Critical Race Theory

    • 823 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Stereotype threat self-confirming belief that an individual can be prejudged by the negative stereotype. At the first, this analysis paper identified the limit on educational success imposed by disadvantages tools such as socioeconomics. Social and stereotypical structures are an important segment in the academic identification, meaning that it recognized the domains of schooling or education as self-defined by a student. For instances, there is a stigma that African American students represent the lower socioeconomic class. Long exposure to negative stereotypes will evolve as a sector of an identity and cause emotional stress.…

    • 823 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Moreover, I was guilty of stereotyping Americans. I should not have believed the stereotype about Americans that most of them are overweight. Before I came to America, someone told me that Americans are obese, and if I wanted to keep a good figure, I’d better cook Chinese food and eat as little American food as I could. After I came here, I noticed that a large amount of girls I saw on the downtown streets and campus own a thin and healthy figure. I realized that this stereotype mislead me, since just a few people are overweight.…

    • 751 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Immigrant Stereotypes

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages

    My personal experience with this stereotype made me work harder to prove everyone wrong. It made me change my attitude towards academics and activities such as sports and honor programs. Proving false the society that stereotyped people in this way allowed me to attain a great deal of accomplishments. All the…

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Reflection: The Danger of a Single Story As most people, my story consists of an abundance of struggle, trial and error, and also lessons. These challenges, in addition to the lessons, have brought upon stress, anxiety, and even depression into my life. They have made me question myself to the point of insanity, avoid meeting and accepting new people into my life, and even fail to uphold the bonds I had previously made with both relatives and peers. However, I cannot be defined and bound to the “single story” of my anxiety. There are many more complex stories that represent me even more adequately than the ones that correspond to the struggles I’ve faced; as there are many more stories significant to other various people, places and things…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Stereotype threat is defined as a predicament in which individuals are of feel themselves to be at risk of confirming negative stereotypes of their assigned group (). Stereotype threat is a term that was first coined by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson. These two researchers performed experiments showing that black college underclassmen scored poorly on standardized tests compared to their white peers when their race was emphasized; however, when race was not mentioned, the black students received scores equivalent to white peers. (). It is obvious that stereotypes have negative effects on individuals’ achievement and identities.…

    • 747 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Does identity contingencies negativity impact more than just one race or minority? Identities contingencies are circumstances which a person has to deal with according to his or her social identities. It play a huge roles in our lives and society. Stereotype threat is a contingency of identity threat that is either a threat or a restriction. Individual are under suspicion constantly having to prove themselves to society stereotypes.…

    • 1170 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    An example is the stereotype that Aboriginals are uneducated, the Aboriginal youth will see this and think well if we are all like this then I will end up being like this and as a result end up dropping out and not trying in school. This is a serious impact since this leads to an educational gap between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal students. An example of someone experiencing this serotypes is a Toronto lawyer Renee Pelletier. When she tells people she is an Aboriginal people have a strong reaction and say “wow” and are surprised by her being a lawyer. They think that this is a great achievement for her and think that she is uneducated and that her being a…

    • 2238 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Stereotypes have an enormous impact of how people feel. They can make people feel stressed, upset, anxious, and more. When people stereotype others all the time, they get tired of being criticized and will be afraid to talk because they don’t want to say something wrong and they are afraid of failure. Today, people are afraid to be themselves because they don’t want people to think something bad of them. Stereotypes hurt people, and they can be very harmful and unfair.…

    • 1419 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    We use of stereotypes all the time without knowing it. Stereotypes are learned through direct observation from the culture around us and enter our consciousness. In our society talks out loud about egalitarianism, equality and justice as our own values, but at the same time such equality exists only as an ideal. There is still a great unconscious level of prejudice in our society that effect of racial, gender micro-aggression. The overtly biased expresses through our expressions, stance, verbal and nonverbal communication, and eye contact we make.…

    • 739 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Essay On Stereotypes

    • 710 Words
    • 3 Pages

    We are all the objects of stereotypes at some point in our lives and they affect us in many ways. We are influenced by the world around us to be what everyone wants to see, not who we really…

    • 710 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays