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Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us

Book by Claude M. Steele · 1 quotes · Social Identity

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Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us Quotes

“The experiments that my colleagues and I were doing showed that something generally thought to emanate from an internal capacity associated with social identity - as the level of women's math performance might emanate from women's math ability - could be changed dramatically by changing contingencies of that identity, by changing, in this research, the degree to which test takers were at risk of confirming bad stereotypes about their group. And the phenomena of identity change - "passing" and expatriation - suggested that what we were seeing in the lab was the tip of an iceberg...They suggested that the degree to which a given social identity had any presence in a person's life depended on contingencies, realities down on the ground that the person had to deal with because they had the identity. Take these contingencies away by allowing the person to "pass," or change these contingencies by allowing the person to expatriate out of them, and the whole identity could fall to irrelevance. What did this say about social identity?...Two conclusions seemed unavoidable. First, our social identities are adaptations to the particular situations of our lives, what I am calling identity contingencies. If we didn't need them to help us cope with these circumstances, the perspectives, emotional tendencies, values, ambitions, and habits that make up the dispositional side of our social identities would just gradually leak out of our psyches and be gone. The second conclusion...If you want to change the behavior and outcomes associated with social identity...don't focus on changing the internal manifestations of the identity, such as values, and attitudes. Focus instead on changing the contingencies to which all of that internal stuff is an adaptation.”

Social Identity
Book:Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us
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