InterViews

Claude Steele
social psychology
(recorded 2004)

Listen to the interview (mp3, 62mb)
(1 hour, 7 minutes)

Growing up just outside of Chicago during the civil rights era, Claude Steele was raised with an awareness of the importance of education for black Americans. His interest in literature nearly led him to become a writer, but he found that social psychology was more to his liking. Steele’s pioneering research in social psychology has focused on self-evaluation and the impact of stereotypes. Other areas of research include compliance behavior and its mediation through self-affirming processes, and psychological aspects of alcohol and drug addiction. At Stanford, in addition to being a professor of social sciences in the department of psychology, Steele is also the director at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

Listen to the Interview using RealPlayer(requires free RealPlayer software):

 TRACK 1: Finding Out More Than He Thought
Steele’s life was strongly shaped by growing up in a working class African-American family during the civil rights era. In college, he developed an intense interest in psychology. Steele views his love of novels and his interest in “the science of everyday life” as most closely aligned with the field of social psychology, which piqued his interest. He discusses those who influenced him, such as educational psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, and his love of research. (12 minutes)

 TRACK 2: The Basic Mission of a Scientist
Steele discusses group dialect pressures, such as students who are accused of “acting white” or “acting black” because of the way they speak. This subject became central to Steele’s own research. He explains the difficulties and controversies he encountered when researching areas of race. Steele hopes his research will help form the knowledge base society uses to think about issues of race in a more informed way. He also discusses his work on psychosocial addiction to alcohol, and the politicization of science. (9 minutes)

 TRACK 3: An Interesting Ascendance
After graduate school, Steele moved around, both in his research interests and his physical location. He then started pursuing some ideas that led to work on self-affirmation and on addictive behaviors. Steele’s growing interest in cognitive dissonance -- the idea that the mind dislikes psychological inconsistencies -- led to the self-affirmation theory and the insight that the need for consistency drives our mental lives. (11 minutes)

 TRACK 4: Alcohol, Bar Brawls, and Legal Prose
Some of Steele’s research on addiction has been related to his ideas about individuals’ attempts at attaining consistency; some may use drinking as a means of regulating the self. Steele has also looked at alcohol’s relationship to aggressiveness and complacency. He explains that alcohol impairs cognitive ability and the ability to judge consequences, but that someone drinking can still process outside stimulation. (10 minutes)

 TRACK 5: Addiction Theories and SAT Scores
Steele explains how alcohol narrows the mind’s window of perception and thought. While keeping busy with another activity can freeze out distracting and disturbing thoughts, using alcohol alone can cause an individual to focus on these thoughts. After finishing his addiction research, Steele returned to his earlier work and began to think of new questions, such as why there are gaps in SAT scores between black students and white students. (12 minutes)

 TRACK 6: The Weight of Stereotypes
A threat to self-image can cause underperformance, Steele explains. Though an individual may not necessarily identify with stereotypes about his or her group, the realization that the stereotype is there can be distracting enough to cause underperformance. This has been studied in African-American students and in women. In particular, studies of women in mathematics showed that different stereotypes yield different outcomes in situations. Researchers are able to remove the stereotype threat in experimental situations, but the question remains how to remove them from real-world situations like the classroom. (10 minutes)

Last Updated: 06-08-2009

The audio files linked above are part of the National Academy of Sciences InterViews series. Opinions and statements included in these audio files are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences.