Whistling Vivaldi

"This book is again written by a psychologist, a black academic from the United States who studied why bright black students did less well than would be expected when they went to university. He demonstrated that a lot of people underperform because they expect to underperform – because of “stereotype threat”, a phrase he coined. That view of things has been tested out in a lot of different situations, including girls doing maths tests. And if you take away the threat, you can see a noticeable difference in the way the underperforming group does. So if you tell girls doing a maths test, “this is a maths test, we’re testing your maths ability,” they will do significantly worse than if you say, “this is a test to look at how you set about problem solving,” which takes away the girls-are-bad-at-maths message. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Steele also demonstrates something I find completely incomprehensible, that very small interventions – which he calls “self-affirmations” – really improve performance. There have been studies published recently about self-affirmation before girls do physics tests, which show that the girls’ performance goes up. I think this is something that, in terms of how we approach teaching, is very important – how we subtly portray things to enable people to perform to the best of their ability. If women are systematically underperforming in tests, even though they may enjoy the subject, then they are not going to choose to do it at a higher level. So it does affect choices, at whatever level you’re being tested, if you’re doing less well than your peers. Even if it happens to be not because of your innate ability but because of a subtle, completely unconscious fear, then you’re going to choose not to continue. I suspect that is true. Because the author discovered as a young man that if he was walking through a white neighbourhood, and they saw this young black man coming towards them, the whites would react badly. But if he whistled Vivaldi it showed he was a nice, middle-class kid and one of them, and that made it all right."