Claude Steele
A social psychologist known for identifying stereotype threat, the effect where fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group can affect performanc...
“If you took a magic wand and just waved it and got rid of all prejudice in this society, you'd still have this particular tension.”
Behavioral Grooves Podcast · August 2026
Steele had just walked through a parent-teacher conference in which both sides are worried about how their identity will be read by the other. His argument is that the discomfort belongs to diverse settings themselves rather than to prejudice. Remove the prejudice, he says, and the tension survives, only attached to different identities in a different society.
Transcript
…to interfere with how well they functioned in that meeting. And also, interestingly, it really isn't coming from prejudice, they're prejudices. It has nothing to do with that. If you were prejudiced or unprejudiced, you'd feel this churn in this society to the same degree. Talk about that. Why
is that the
…I've just seen so much of this in both my own experiences and also coming from my research on stereotype threat. Just the sense of being under the threat of being seen and treated stereotypically. I've seen it. I've seen it in the laboratory. I've seen it in real life. And so it occurred to me somewhere along the way that so it really, the tension between us isn't really all about prejudice. If you took a magic wand and just waved it and got rid of all prejudice in this society, you'd still have this particular tension. In another society, they'd have it too, but it'd be around different issues, different stereotypes, different identity threats. But in our society, this racial one or this gender one or this social class one or this sexual orientation one, these identities have this kind of significance when we bring people together, when we try to diversify or to integrate a setting as we used to call it.
Yeah, thank you. Well said. That was just beautifully said. You were talking, you mentioned a couple of words. You talked about situations and predicaments. And we talk a lot in behavioral science about how context matters, the importance of context in our behaviors and how our behavior changes…
Yeah, yes. I think that the thing that the flame underneath churn that makes it intense, makes it burn, so to speak, is the importance of the situation. So if it's not important to the person, you know, we're just sitting next to each other in a basketball game, and I'm never going to see that…
Yeah. And you're not posing a sort of a pollyannish. We can just ameliorate all this
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