Claude Steele on the Tension That Divides Us … and How to Overcome It

0:00Thank you for joining us for another podcast from the Commonwealth Club. Well, hello and welcome to tonight's Commonwealth Club World Affairs program. My name is Jeremy Adam Smith. I'm the editor of Greater Good Magazine, which is published by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and I'm going to be this evening's moderator with Claude Steele. He has been a huge influence on my own thinking when I read Whistling Love Aldi, which I just remembered. I brought and I want you to autograph, which really kind of pioneered and spread the idea of stereotype threat, which I'm going to ask you to talk about a little bit. And we're going to be talking about his new book, Churn, The Tension that divides us and how to overcome it. Dr. Steele is a social psychologist and Lucy Stern-Professor in the Social Sciences Emeritus at Stanford University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, which sounds very

1:03high-falutin. And I want to start by asking about your old book, Whistling Love Aldi, which was published way back in 2010. We were much younger men than all much younger than what was that about? That was the research journey that led to the concept of stereotypes threat. It was an attempt to give a down on the ground description of how science moves forward and how collaborative it is that work was done. I would count myself as a leader of the team, but I benefited tremendously from my students at the time, and Steve Spencer and Josh Aronson and a number of others. So I wanted to tell the story because I think sometimes you just see the end of a research program and you think it was all packaged and science unfolds in a more complex, but I think interesting way in that book was an attempt to convey that experience to people. So what is stereotype threat?

2:05It is whenever you are in a situation or you are doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities could be your age, your race, your religion is relevant to what you're doing. You know then that you could be judged or treated in terms of that stereotype in that situation. And if that situation is important to you, the prospect of being seen and treated stereotypically is upsetting and distracting and can interfere with your functioning right then and there. And if you suspect that that's going to be a regular experience in this walk of life, it might deter you from that whole walk of life, that discomfort of possibly being judged in terms of that stereotype about one of your identities or another. That's basically what stereotype threat is, the way it got looked at as something that might affect your performance. So I think what really galvanized that research and brought it to people's attention and

3:09sustained it as a research focus over the last 30 years really is that that kind of a pressure might affect something as important as standardized test performance, African Americans, students taking a difficult, very committed, African American students taking a difficult standardized test and interpreting there as you have inevitable frustration and like confirming that stereotype, well I'd be seen to confirm that stereotype and all of that, I better double down here and really that kind of interference that comes from that pressure can subvert your performance. So that's what the research has shown and it's shown this in many, with many outcome behaviors like for example, athletic performance or negotiation performance or a whole variety of things have been looked at. The work got so identified with performance that I began to think, you know, people aren't

4:10seeing the full significance of this idea that a lot of the tension that can exist between people of different identities has the same form. What I'm really tense about is the fact that I know I could be when I'm in a diverse gathering, a mixed gathering, so to speak, I could be seen in terms of outgroup stereotypes that are not so handsome and a part of my thinking goes to that problem and I start to is this, you start to get a little nervous and you're starting to be reading the cues in the situation and trying to understand how to, what can I say here and what can I not say here? You've likened it to multitasking. Yeah, multitasking. So the person under stereotype threat feels themselves under stereotype threat is multitasking when everybody else is just focused on the task. Exactly. So it could be a factor that explains, or at least part of, the tension we have when we're in diverse settings. When we're in settings, we're all have the same identity.

5:13I'm with the old guys, we're all old. I don't feel very nervous about that at all because we're all the same and I'm not going to be seen in terms of those stereotypes of those ages stereotypes. I feel pretty secure about that because we're all older. But as it gets diverse and younger people enter that, maybe I would be seen. Maybe I'd be seen as having dated ideas and maybe I would be seen as not being so technologically sophisticated and maybe I'd be seen as, so diversity itself brings people together who, in a sense, pose the possibility of stereotype threat to each other and that could be a factor in our diverse experiences. I can give an example. I start the book with an example, but I think help. In the book churn? In the book churn. Well, sure. Yeah. My next question is, what is churn, but go ahead with the example. Okay. I'll give you the example and then I'll answer the question, what churn is.

6:15This is made up example. Imagine a parent-teacher conference in the seventh grade and the parents and students involved are African-American and the teacher involved is white. So as the... I'm sure this has never happened. It's a totally made up example. Yeah. It's never... It wouldn't refer to me, I'm sure. So the African-American couple are getting in their car going to the conference and they're having a conversation like, well, you know, they know full well what the stereotypes, the racial stereotypes are in our society. That will those stereotypes prevent the school and the teacher from seeing the real abilities of their students, of their son and investing in those abilities. Well, that... Will he be seen that way? Is less promising? Will... You know, little... The transgressions be taken as evidence of aggressive tendencies and so they're worried about that because they know how their child in our society could be seen and this meeting

7:17is their opportunity to make sure the teacher doesn't do those things and they're concerned about that. So as they enter the room for the meeting, they're in turn. They're thinking about how their identity and their child's identity is going to play out in his experience in this school and with this teacher and they're worried about that and they're trying to address that and the teacher may not be thinking about that at all, but they're thinking about that. And interestingly and very importantly, the teacher has her form of stereotypes threat in that situation that's probably equally intense, which is that she's very committed to her students and tries to be sensitive to and responsive to the needs of her minority students as she can possibly be. She's dedicated to fairness and decency of that sort and but how can she... How can she just directly tell the parents that? And so she worries that if she says anything even maybe slightly negative about this young

8:22man, it could be intended to really foster his development and help him along, but it could be get her seen as a racist, which in that situation is the stereotype about her group that is relevant to her in that situation. And so the whole concept of stereotype... So here they come together, they're meeting in this and there's sort of a tension there. You could maybe cut it with a knife in some instances. And it's not really due to prejudice, to bias, that's a very important phenomenon, but this is different. This is a pressure that comes from in this society, the stereotypes that exist about these two identities and the relevance of those stereotypes in this conversation and the importance of that conversation to both parties creates a kind of a churn, puts both parties in a serious churn. So that's what I mean by churn.

9:25It's the kind of agitated, vigilant worry about how my identity in an important situation is going to affect me, how it will affect how I'm received, how I'm treated. Will I be treated fairly? Will I be invested in here? Do I have an equal chance here? Will I be given the benefit of the doubt if I make a slip? Will those concerns are, so the substance of what churn is? What does churn come from? I think it comes from the, this takes us a little bit off the immediate line of thinking here, but it comes from the way our society has been organized around identities. The stereotypes that have evolved around the different identities and the significance of them to the relevance of those stereotypes to the important situations, important settings like schooling, like the workplace, like doctors offices, boardrooms, churn is something

10:28that can be a factor in all of those particular settings. The book has a particular mission of focusing our thinking about these issues in particular concrete settings where we actually live our lives in classrooms and workplaces and, as I say, boardrooms and doctors offices and athletic teams. In real situations, I want to bring this phenomenon to light. Yeah, that's a distinction you make repeatedly in the book, like trying to get the reader to understand it's an important situation. I think a lot of people, when they hear about this idea, might be a little dismissive of it and say, well, I live and I have lots of different kinds of neighbors, and I never feel anxiety when I'm talking with them, but crucially, your idea is that it's like, okay, yeah, you can get along with your neighbors when you see them on the street or when you're borrowing a shovel from them, but what will happen if you are at a zoning meeting or

11:34if something legal occurs and you end up in a law office together with your neighbor, which happens, then the stakes might rise dramatically. Yeah, I don't think churn is present or much of a factor in low-stakes situations. I'm on a subway in a diverse situation. I'm in a arena crowd. It doesn't, not much of a factor in my life, but one of the situations is important, the stakes get high, the possibility of misunderstanding is present, you don't know the people like the story I told about the parent-teacher conference, a situation like that, churn can become a significant factor. I'm going to hopefully get a chance to explain, it's not all bad, it really reflects, I think, our concern about behaving well and decently in situations, I don't think it's not like, I think when we think about diversity and people getting settings like a classroom

12:36or a workplace to work smoothly, a diverse classroom or workplace to work, we think it's a question of prejudices and getting rid of prejudices. By all means, I'm for that in society, but churn is different than that, it's not so much about prejudices, it's what our identities mean to each other and this kind of threat they can put us under. I read a lot of 19th century English novels and those people are in constant churn. A lot of the anxiety is actually class-based, but a lot of it's gender-based, if you read Jane Austen, all about that, it's definitely something that has been present throughout human life where people, I think you used to phrase good manners, where people are constantly worried that they're showing the proper respect that they're showing, that they're behaving well. They're behaving well, they're hitting all the right notes so that they won't draw attention, negative attention to themselves and no social class, coming a poor kid goes to a very

13:42elite university, because it's going to have churn. How is my background going to fit in here, and I don't have quite the cash the other kids have. There are these important circumstances where churn is a natural, unnecessary experience, I think, and it's an adaptive experience. You really are trying to figure out how to adapt to the situation, but I think at basis, what makes it difficult to do when one is what the churn is about is that it's difficult for me to trust the situation. Trust is the bottom line here, churn problematized is that, makes it difficult, I just can't relax and trust the situation and I'm really safe here. One way of putting it, I think, helps me understand it is that it's the tension between remembering and forgetting. Do I remember how my group is seen and use that to interpret what's happening to me in

14:46this situation, or do I just forget that? I just assume I'm safe here, and I don't have to churn, I don't have to worry about that. Well, another way of putting it maybe is that it blocks the achieving a state of flow. Yes. When you sort of lock into the situation, you're completely on self-conscious. It can have, here's an experiment, which I think illustrates some of the significance it can have in real and important situations. This was an experiment that Jeff Cohen and Lee Ross and I did, or colleagues of mine, a number of years ago, and we asked a straightforward question of, how does a white professor give critical feedback to a black student and have that feedback be trusted and used? How do you do that? First, maybe there's no issue there whatsoever. We set up a simple experiment to get at this, though. We had white and black Stanford students come in, write an essay about their favorite

15:49teacher, and we told them if the essay was good, we might publish it in a new magazine, Campus Magazine, we were going to put out on teaching. Put their best foot forward, come back in two days, and we would give them feedback on this essay, and we would vary how we gave the feedback, and we would measure how much they trusted the feedback. It's a simple experiment, and what we found was maybe expected, but a little disconcerting. When we gave the feedback straight forwardly, here's the feedback on your essay, or we said something really positive about them just before we gave them the feedback, you bring so much energy to my class, here's the feedback. Given either of those ways, the white students trusted that feedback. They're not under a negative stereotype about their abilities in this society. They're not aware of that idea, even. But for the black students, they didn't trust that feedback.

16:51They're Stanford students, they're really strong, they're in a university that has committed to their progress and welfare, but they didn't trust that feedback. It can seem strange that they wouldn't, but when you think about it from their standpoint, you see the difficulty. They don't know whether the feedback is coming from their essay, or whether it's coming from the essay, the evaluators' opinions or stereotypes about their group's abilities, which is it? Can I just completely forget how my group is seen and not use that idea and interpreting this feedback here? Being in dealing with that ambiguity, they don't trust it as much and therefore they don't use it as much. They're in a sense isolated from any contribution it might make to improving their writing. That's not a situation that just happens once it happens throughout their schooling.

17:56The good news is, and this is where the trust issue enters the picture, there's a third condition, third way of giving the feedback that worked marvelously well, and I think reveal something very important, and that way of giving the feedback was the feedback giver says, look, we're using high standards and evaluating his essays, but I've looked at your essay and I believe you can meet those standards. Here's the feedback to help you. Wow. When black students heard that, they trusted the feedback more than any other group of participants in the experiment, and the three times more of them took the essays home to use the feedback to improve the essays. Why does that work and the other two, the straightforward way, not work? I think it gets at this churn issue and its relationship to trust. In the first two ways of giving the feedback, they're not sure they can trust it.

18:56It comes from our society and the way it's organized and the way groups are seen, and they can't forget how their group is seen, and they can't ignore it in interpreting the feedback. But in the third condition, we use high standards, I believe you can meet them, we're essentially saying, well, I don't see you in terms of, I'm making it really clear, I don't see you in terms of those negative stereotypes about your group's abilities, I really, I'm granting to you, my trust in your abilities here. Well, and also it sounds as though the standards were made transparent to the students, like these are the standards. Yeah, that's right, and if you were saying me stereotypically, you wouldn't use high standards. If you were saying me stereotypically, you wouldn't say, I think you can meet those high standards. So that way of feedback opens the door to a way of getting around this tension that

19:57can be inherent part of diversity. It opens the door to a new pathway of remediating that tension, that can be useful again in the specific important situations of our lives, in classrooms, in workplaces, in boardrooms, where the notion is, churn has an antidote, and the antidote is trust, and that one strategy for moving forward as a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-class society, where it's important for us to function well in these important settings of society, it's important for us to do that, that one way for those settings to move forward is to focus on building trust and responsiveness to people's real needs. So most of the book is about how to do that, how to do that between, how can I be better at that as an individual, how can I design settings that would be better at that, how can

21:00whole institutions function as a way of being better at that? Well, I mean, as I think everybody knows, building trust in human life, in your marriage, in your family, at work, I mean, that's tough, and that's tough, and even once you've established trust, it can be broken in a second, so how do you do that, and maybe we could start at the individual level. Yeah, well, I think at the individual level that third condition is a good example of what the debt person do there, and I think what, if I'm the black student getting the feedback, what I feel in that condition is that he saw me, who I actually am, and he believes in me. That's the main thing. So I know now that he's not seeing me in terms of the stereotype, I'm starting to feel safe with him, even though he may come from a different background, have a different race, he's given me some signal.

22:06There's a term I use in the book and is used in this literature, pretty broadly, called Wise, and it comes from an ethnography done by a Berkeley sociologist in the 50s of gay life, and in that ethnography, he found that gay gentleman of that era used the term Wise to refer to straight people who saw their full humanity. He's wise, man. He knows we're gay, but he doesn't see us in terms of that stigma. He sees us as full people, as people, and African Americans have a ton of terms like that. He's cool, man. He's hip. He's town, meaning that's kind of what we want to do as individuals, and I think the way to do it is that you do take the time to try to see and grant before it's, you don't

23:10ask for it to be proven, the person's full humanity. How do you know when somebody's seeing your full humanity? Yeah, I think you know when they, as in that feedback condition, they treat you that way. They grant you that. They take the time to recognize who you are and listen to you, just plain listening. Just plain listening, just being interested in the person, that those things are very powerful in this kind of a situation that we're talking about. If somebody takes the time to be actually interested in my experience and what my life is like, they're not busy trying to prove that they're not prejudice and that all those agents, they've calmed down and they're just asking me questions and open to my answers

24:12to those questions and they engage me and they push me. Then I recognize this person really does see my full humanity and is acting accordingly. If people don't do that, if we skip over that step, if we're in a homogeneous group, that's probably okay because nobody then in a homogeneous group is that worried about whether their humanity is being recognized, but in a diverse group in a situation, they probably need some evidence that that's the case. Right. What do you say to people who say that sounds like a lot of work? It's a lot less work than dealing with the consequences of not doing it. I mean, I'm skipping ahead a little bit and maybe getting a, that's possible I'm really getting too far ahead here, but I mean, I feel like this is a moment where there's a tremendous amount of hostility towards curiosity for people who are different from you.

25:18I think a lot of people are struggling with that right now, a lot of different ways. I still detour people being curious. Well, I mean, so on a macro level, I feel like the federal government has become stone-cold hostile to fostering any of the things that you're talking about, and I think on an individual sort of base level, I think a lot of people might feel like they're just tired. They've got their own struggles in their own life, and that kind of struggle makes you very egocentric, and I think people are feeling an enormous amount of social stress right now. I understand that when you, because I've read a lot of research and I've thought about this stuff for a lot of years, that if you take a moment to kind of open your heart, it often you'll feel better, but that's actually a way of addressing the fatigue that you feel.

26:19But a lot of people, you know, they don't understand that, or maybe they really are authentically in a place where they just can't participate socially at the level that you're talking about. And it makes me realize in some ways, I mean, I'm sort of curious what you have to say about this, but you know, it strikes me that we're in a lot of ways in a society right now that is encouraging churn, that is like actually fostering it, and encouraging people to sort of keep it inside themselves and not talk about it, not disclose that they're feeling this kind of churn, because that's a very vulnerable thing to admit that I feel anxious talking to you in this setting. What do you say to all of that? Well, first, I mean, I do definitely acknowledge what you're the moment that we are in as a society, is full of this kind of tension. I mean, I suppose that's one reason I got interested in it, is that I see it, especially

27:19in my experience as a university administrator, you see, you bring the topic up and of say diversity and people run for the hills, what's the, what's the, and why would I think of going to that kind of a session and listening, because all I'm going to be, all I'm going to experience there as people yelling at me or telling me I'm a bad person, I mean, it has gotten to be a very fraught aspect of life, but I have the feeling, and this is coming from the research literature, and I suppose my own personal experience over time, there is a solution, and that's what the book is trying to offer, is how do you manage that situation? And I think it's easier than we think, and I think part of why we think it seems so difficult is that to change that, I have to change people's attitudes and their purchases and their beliefs, and no, I think building trust is something people have a good intuitive feeling

28:21about, and I think a lot of us do it on a daily basis, that what I'm describing is something that is part of most of our lives, and what I'm doing is saying, let's pull that up, focus on that, and use it in the situations that are particularly important, I'm not talking about the whole of society, I'm not talking about the administration, I'm talking about my classroom, my workspace, this board that I'm a part of, in that world, there are a few simple things that can be done, that signal and build trust in a situation, and then people can enjoy this diversity that we claim, it's so important in our life, they can enjoy it, once I'm relaxed that you're not going to see me in the menacing way I'm worried about, you're not going to see me that way, then I can really get to know

29:22you, it becomes an attraction, a positive aspect of my life, I have a lot of relationships like that, where it's one of the greatest gifts I have, that I can have a broad range of relationships with people from very different backgrounds, different races, different ethnicities, different religions, by taking that kind of an approach, so I think I couldn't agree with you more that we're in a sort of diversity fatigue era of life, but often one of the things that helps us overcome that, it's just knowing how to handle it, how to deal with it, knowing what it is, and having a strategy and approach to dealing with, I'll give you an experiment which illustrates that if you give me a few seconds to describe it, we brought white guys into the laboratory at Stanford, this study I did with Phil Goff some years ago,

30:24and they thought you're going to have a conversation with two other students, and they look at it on the table in front of them, and they're two photographs of the two people are going to have a conversation with, and in one for half of them, it's two black guys, and for the other half it's two white guys, they're going to have a conversation with, and then they're told that they're going to either have the conversation about love and relationship, something that's easy to talk to among college students to talk about, or they're going to talk about racial profiling, so they're either going to talk to two black guys or two white guys, I love in relationship, and then the experimenter says, look I'm going to go down the hall and get the conversation partners, bring them back to the conversation, well I'm going to want you to arrange the chairs for the conversation, and what we're interested in is how much distance they put between themselves, as a function of those conditions I described, how much distance they put between themselves and their conversation partners, and you can probably predict the results, that when they're going to talk to two white guys about anything,

31:26or two black guys about love and relationship, they don't think about it, they put the three chairs close together, but when they're going to talk to two black guys, they don't really know, they put it in a different room, they really put some distance there, and we have measures that show what they're worried about is that they're going to be seen as they can make a mistake, as you've seen as a racist, and that's what they're worried about. They're not prejudice, there's no correlation here, no relationship between how prejudiced they are as the participants were, and how much distance they put, it was all about this worry about being seen in terms of the stereotypes, so here's the answer, so we tried a lot of things that some of which come from standard diversity training, they didn't work, we came eventually to something which said, look, you're going to have this conversation, nobody really knows how to have these conversations, in the United States they can be fraught, so mainly just relax and take it as an opportunity to learn, have a learning mindset here, just

32:32explore, ask questions, don't be rude, don't try to convince anybody of anything, don't try to sell yourself or convince anybody of anything, just learn, and boom, with that they move their chairs, really close together for that tense conversation, so there's something that gives me hope, that simple things can cut through some of this complexity and fatiguing stress that we're living in, especially in our life spaces where we live and work with the people we live in and work with, there's opportunity there to be closer and to benefit more from each other with just slightly different approach to the thing. Do you think most, I'm going to say diversity programs, but that's an umbrella that encompasses a lot of different workshops, seminars, programs, do you think most of them put an emphasis on building that trust?

33:38I don't want to, you know, some of my best friends and me myself have advocated for those kind of programs, but they do have a real challenge and then as they can worsen these processes, if it's just going to be, you know, you telling me all about your identity and your background and yeah, I've sounded plenty of those. That's not going to build trust, that's going to build mistrust. So it has to be done in a way where we have compassion for each other, and that's kind of what a name of this book, there's something fresh about this book here, that's its aim, it's trying to, it can seem like just a very good Sunday school lesson, but sometimes that's what really connects people. I think there's a great deal more capacity to connect than we recognize, I can talk about Obama in a minute, you had a question about that, that if you can sense that I

34:46trust you, we can build a very positive thing with a very slight adjustment that would otherwise go south and stay south. I'd never get to know you. Let's talk about President Obama for a moment, you talk about him in the book. I do, I'm fascinated by this, and I'm piggybacking on Tony Hishikot's interview with Obama, and his analysis in the end is, how does this guy with this, you know, Barack Hussein Obama get, when the trust, enough to be elected President of the United States twice, and his theory is that Obama, given because of his background, which I'll describe in a minute, because of his special background, is able to trust white people, offer them that, listen to them, he could do what I was just describing, being done, he could ask questions, they could understand that he was actually hearing them, and that they could,

35:50when he behaved, that when they knew that he heard them, not just about his own background in the experience, his racial experiences and so on, that isn't going to convince them, but if he heard them, they could begin to trust him, it feel very differently about him as a person, then they might somebody who didn't take the time to do that. He goes into southern Illinois, parts of which are like northern Mississippi, and he puts his feet on their table, and he says, in the kitchen table, he says, you know, look, I want to hear what's up, what are you dealing with? And because, you know, my parents, I was raised by white people, I was my mother's white, my grandparents were, so they started to trust this guy. That's a powerful story, maybe this is so exceptional, I'm not sure it can be seen as a general rule, but it does illustrate the principle. Yeah, and you mentioned like the fact that you largely grew up in Hawaii as being like Hawaii

36:54itself is a kind of laboratory for diversity, which I thought was quite interesting. I mean, whenever I spend a lot of time there, well, my own experience of Hawaii is like complex, I would say, but part of that complexity is negotiating like so much difference. And you know, one of the outstanding qualities of the local culture there to me is that slack of pretension. It is like very anti-pretentious, and I actually think that has a lot to do with how people they're addressed churn. I think that there's a kind of disabling quality, you know, where, you know, I mean, I suppose it has a negative side in a way, you know, where people who seem to be pretentious will get cut down to size, I think, in various ways. But it's very much a part of like how people think about things, and I think that there's a kind of, there's an attitude there that is very different from the mainland that, you know, Obama probably

37:56did take with him. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, he's quoted, and I do it in the, he quoted in the quote's article by saying, you know, I just didn't have the same worry that I would be seen and treated in terms of racial stereotypes that, say, Michelle has. I was raised in a world where I just didn't have that worry as much. And he's trying to explain, coats is trying to explain how Obama gets himself psychologically in a situation where he can trust white whites, where that's so difficult for so many other African-Americans to do that. They're not prepared to really do that because the costs are so dramatically bad and have historically been so difficult. So it's hard to do something, but for Obama given his specific circumstances, he was able to do it, and it had a transformative effect. Yeah. And yet, I mean, we're talking here about President Obama being this kind of exemplar of, you know, how you navigate a world of churn.

39:03Yeah. But there's another narrative about President Obama. But let me before that just so I don't forget this point about that. Yeah. Because I want to leave the audience with some real simple thing that when you start to feel yourself in churn, that should trigger this other idea, this other mindset, that this is an opportunity to learn something. Right. Relax. Yes. Fall back. I'm nervous. What is my nervousness telling you? What is my nervous? What is my, it tells me to, when in doubt, ask questions. Explore, let your curiosity open you up. Yeah. And that other, the other person you're talking to will see that. And that, that will gain some trust. Right. They'll see that. If I see you're genuinely interested, that's, that's transformative. So now, now we're off on a very different path. Right. So I don't want to, I didn't want to miss bringing it down to a concrete answer to your question of how do you, how do you manage churn? Hmm. Do you use it as a cue? I want to talk about that

40:09more, but first I want to talk about what I started to talk about, which is that for a lot of people, Obama is a divisive figure. You know, like everything that we have just said about him, there's a whole lot of people in this country who would say the exact opposite. And I never know what to make of that. And I'm not alone. I mean, you know, I, you know, I just think it's an incredible that, you know, we can look at this, this man, like so many people can look at him and see him as our leader. You know, somebody who really behaved in a way that a lot of us could emulate, you know, thoughtful, curious, articulate, you know, and always kind of trying to bring out the best in people. I feel when I, when I watched him speak or, you know, or if I watched him in a setting with other world leaders, I thought, this is it, this is how I should behave. And so many people in this country looked at him and did not see that, um, couldn't see it apparently.

41:12Well, I don't think I'm struggling with it. And I'm sure a lot of people watching this right now are struggling with it too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't claim any of this is going to overpower everything. And that part of my emphasis on talking about specific situations that we live in is because in those situations, I think we have the opportunity for these strategies to work. You know, if you're talking about a presidential candidate who many Americans are never going to see very closely, it's he's going to be the reality that candidate is very different from how that candidate is abstractly represented in Fox News versus. And that's what they know of him. Right. They're working in fast as they can to demonize him. And so, and people have no direct experience to counter that. That's going to win. That's going to prevail. But you know, real, you know, every day lives with each other. That's where this strategy I was describing.

42:14I think at the end of the individual level has a chance to create a good society. Yeah. Well, you know, I think at least some of the hostility is rooted in hostility towards Obama's approach to negotiating difference and churn. You know, because it really is something that has become, I mean, it's inherently political, you know, because we're talking about power differences between groups. And that's something you discuss a lot in your book is how power differences do affect churn and how the churn that people experience is the impact can be quite different depending on what those power differences are. And maybe we should, maybe we should take a minute to talk about that. Sure. I do think in a setting, it's a lot to expect the identity that is maybe the most disempowered, the most traditionally disempowered, to be the first to trust. That's a lot to ask in the face of a group that traditionally, historically, they've not been

43:23able to trust. I think that's one of the real tensions in American life is, is it how can I trust these people given what they've done and what, you know, how kind of, you know, the way they talk. And I think it makes it, it's in, in, in this era, where we have a very divisive administration that doesn't even bother to dog whistle. They just put out racist videos. How does that, that makes, as an African American, very difficult to trust, that we're in a society where, where our humanity is going to be recognized and so on. So I don't want to diminish the reality of that. In, in, in any way, I think it's an extremely unfortunate thing. I think it's something that, you know, is a threat to many societies. Certainly, Nazi Germany is a good history of, you know, point by point kind of how you can use hatred to create a political

44:25constituency by pointing to other people blaming things on other people. And so anyway, I want to acknowledge that, but, but I also, I also don't want to lose hope here. I, I have to go get up every day and go to work. And most people do. And how do I deal with that? That's what this book is about. Yeah. It's not, it's not so much about how to fix the administration or the political climate. It's more about what I could actually do in the relationships that I have in my life that would make them work better and that would make me enjoy them better, feel more comfortable in a setting and able to, able to learn from difference, to, to be able to see full and equal humanity in difference is a gift. It's a gift. And that's what I'm talking about. That I, picking that mindset up and, and using that as a daily feature as something in my daily life,

45:30not something that I go to the, you know, at the end of the day, I argue with my crazy uncle at Thanksgiving or something. That's a lot of sound and fury. But down on the ground, I think there's a greater possibility of relationships than we, than we think, thinking that that's really the impetus for writing the book is searching for how to, how to open that up. So, so that people can, can see that. Do you experience churn? Sure. Yeah. When do you experience it these days? Oh, I see. I'm old. That's the identity around which, and I'm in a world full of young people. Yeah. Right. Right. How is he up to date? I will see this. Yeah. Does he know how to use R? There's so many things that I'm starting to experience that myself. I mean, I, you know, like I think part of the value of reading your book is that it really does cause you to

46:31reflect on your own experiences with churn. Yeah. You know, I was telling you in the green room that like, as I was reading your book, I just found myself like kind of developing a taxonomy of churn in my life. Yeah. Some of which was actually quite trivial. Some of which was kind of big and significant. And I don't think I had thought about it that self-consciously before. But I really do think you sort of put your finger on a concept is something that we, we live with. Yeah. You know, I was talking with, I was reading your book and it was sitting on the dining table and I was talking with my partner who's an ER doctor. And she's like, what does that book about? So I explained it to her and the way you explained it. And she is a person. She's an ER doctor. You know, she was, she, you know, she had a very, you know, she came from a public school and had a very elite education after that and became an ER doctor and she is tough as nails. And I was

47:31like, you probably never experienced churn. And she's like, no, I experience it all the time every day. And I thought about that. I was a little embarrassed for myself because I was like, she's right. I mean, I like every day when she comes home from a shift at the hospital. Yeah. I hear about churn because she's dealing with many different kinds of people all the time. Yeah. Yeah. If you can, I mean, I think it's, I think it's a great gift and a great challenge of America. This is the American experiment. All these different people. We're trying to integrate into a democracy. Yeah. And so it's an inherent challenge, I think. Oh, we have a question from the audience. Okay. We have question. We have many questions. All right. Well, I'm just going to ask these already. Let's see. Okay. This is a good one. Do you think churn has been exacerbated post-COVID, this directly pivots from talking about work in the ER, or is it worse in the younger

48:31generation? So do you think it's been exacerbated by COVID by experience with COVID, or is it just worse than the younger generation? No, I think it has been exacerbated. I mean, I, you know, I don't want to drift into a political conversation, but we've had a very divisive despite my efforts to drag you into one. I'm a psychologist. There's where I'm secure about the psychological analysis there, not the political. That's not my game as much, but I mean, I can't help but ignore, I can't help, I can't ignore that this has been an extremely divisive period. I am older. I live through a lot of decades of American life, and this is one of the more fractious divisive where it's been openly used as a way of building a political base in a way that I maybe I haven't seen since the 50s. Yeah. It's so definitely we are in a period where where it exacerbates the churn between us.

49:38Now, even in ordinary circumstances, you sit down next to somebody at a basketball game and you whereas before, you know, 10 years ago, you wouldn't think twice or you'd be a lot more relaxed about it. Right. So I do think this era has has a lot more churn in people's lives. Yeah. Insecurity about how to deal with difference. What can I say? What can I not say? Are those people as bad as they say they are? How will I be received here if I try to interact with them? Could I send my kids to school with them? So many questions like that are what churn is and we're in a period where those questions are all over the place. Yeah. All right. Next question. Churn sounds like a particular kind of social anxiety slash phobia. Do you see it differently?

50:41Do I see it differently? It sounds like the person is asking is saying, well, isn't this just social anxiety? Oh, it's a form of it. It's a form of it. Yeah. That's what I had been thinking as well. I wouldn't quarrel with that at all. It's an attempt to describe a particular form of it that I think is particularly important in many of our much of our lives, much of our daily lives in a society. What we Americans, I think, aren't as aware of sometimes, is how big an experiment we're in the middle of. We're trying to bring these big sub-populations together into an integrated, highly functioning democracy, which we've done for the most part. But since the 60s, we've committed to that not being one group on top, but we're trying to have every identity not be the basis of opportunity and resources in society in the way it was before the 60s, before the civil rights movement. Now we're trying to have

51:47this really, genuinely, genuinely integrated society. That's where the challenge that has been there all along emerges. You know, when I was in my 20s, I traveled a whole lot. One of the things that most surprised me was that in a lot of societies around the world, people sort of take for granted a certain amount of prejudice against outsiders. And there's really no real effort to fight against it. I'm generalizing, and I'm not going to mention any particular culture here, but I saw it again and again and again, and it made me appreciate this aspect of the United States that there was a lot of self-conscious anti-racism. We should give ourselves a lot more credit for that. I think we should. I was very struck by it. I mean, I think Europe now with the problems

52:49having with immigration is that they're beginning to rely on our thinking because we lead the world in trying to have a diverse society. Yeah. Well, and I think there's something slightly neurotic about going on where I think a lot of us want a very diverse society, and yet me, but at the same time, we're very scared of having a diverse society. Those two impulses are, I think that that's partially what's going on right now. I think that's partially why our society can seem so neurotic, especially from the outside, speaking of visiting countries. I think a lot of people come to the United States and they're like, you people are crazy about diversity. It's like, well, yeah, that's because we want contradictory things. We want them both. Personally, I feel like you get a commit to one of the other. What are you seeing as the two poles? I'm seeing fear of diversity versus

53:49embracing it as part of our specialness. Yes. Again, I keep stressing the same point. I think my argument has the most chance of being persuasive when you think about when I think about the world I actually live in function and work in, where I have some influence over how that goes. As soon as you start talking about the larger world, I don't know how to get a handle on it that would be able to, then this talk just seems to be utopian kind of talk. But if you're talking about the actual concrete situations that we live in, the classes we teach, the workplaces we work in, the systems of promoting and hiring. You talk about those concrete things. I think that is where we given the kind of strategies I'm laying out here, the sort of whysness. I think we can make a real difference and get to this multiracial, multiethnic society that we say we want a post-racial

54:54society that we say we want that. And we've committed to it in the law. That is the significance of the 60s is that it jettisoned the laws that enabled the segregation we lived under up until that time. Severe segregation. You could call it apartheid when I was a kid. We overcame that legally. Now we're trying to actually do it in fact down on the ground. And I'm trying to point to the value of working down on the ground. Not so much in the abstract clouds. But in the simple relationships between people, the simple things we can do to make those settings less able to make us feel more comfortable with each other. And to be more effective in some ways, why the parts of the book that I guess are newest to me and maybe in some ways my favorite are when I talk about several universities level programs where I think the university did things that

56:00made enable those students that it served to trust and to wind up with diversity being such a positive feature in those environments. Not a problematic feature. So I've, anyway, I could go on in that vein, but that's the ambition of the book. Two more questions. Sure. Can you talk more about how your personal story experiences informed this thesis slash research? Well, you know, I'm an integrated guy. I talk about this a little bit in the book and the introduction to put all my cards on the table. I was born in on January 1st, 1946 to an interracial couple in Chicago, Illinois. And so I've been in a diverse, I've never known another situation other than diversity in a sense. And it has given me, maybe that's why I enjoyed

57:05writing so much about Obama, who had a similar experience. You live like that and you know the humanity in different people. You know that different people have equal humanity. Some people who have very little mastery of the language and have had a rough way to go and have the same embedded in that person is often in areas that they know about an incredible amount of intelligence and decency. And so I've, it's been a consistent experience of mine throughout my life. Maybe more so than for many Americans. But that does give me a set of intuitions about this and the possibilities again of being practical. What I like about trust building as an approach, I think it's, I think it's been an ignored strategy for building a diverse society. We hadn't thought about that. But that's what it's all about. Yeah. Is building the trust and that is

58:08beautifully a game that's played on the ground. It's who shows up and listens and who really responds to the real needs of people who really helps in that sense. And then you trust people across all kinds of identity divides. Yeah. When somebody treats me like that and that's happened in my life, I don't care what their, what their identity is. It's very different, very different backgrounds than me. But I trust them because they listen to me, they respond to my actual needs, not what they thought I needed, but they, we work things through those, those relationships are, are possible. And we're not even thinking about them. We're way up here in the, in the, the sound and fury of, of our political dramas at every minute. And we're thinking, we're, we're feeling hopeless about this dimension of life, this gift that we have as a, as an American society, we're feeling kind of hopeless and fatigued. And how could that work? We're, we're in

59:10five wars. I don't even know what they're about. Yeah. So that's, again, part of the ambition here. Yeah. You know, your discussion of trust really did strike me as being one of the most important contributions of the book. I think it is. I feel like it's so much of the way we talk about diversity. People don't talk about trust. And when I was reading it, I thought to myself, yes, this sounds correct. Yeah. This feels right. And it's something that we really neglect and all of our diversity building efforts. It seems to me. Yeah. And I, I think, and I, as I say, I, it's exciting to me because I think building trust is much more manageable than, say, eliminating prejudices. Yeah. It's so hard, you know, change persons, leaves, I, I, as a social psychologist, I know a hard person. Trust the person. Yeah. Or try to anyway. But, but once I trust you, my attitudes, um, follow, um, prejudice goes, well, prejudices go away when I, when we,

1:00:15we have a, of a connection where I, I, a human connection, then my prejudices begin to go away. We can hold on me. Uh, so I, I, I, I, that, that's another hopeful dimension here. Well, and I also think there's a kind of ask for, um, I think of it in terms of being an ask of white people, which is to try to be trustworthy. Yeah. Um, and understand that's what, that's what the issue is. Mm hmm. It's not personal. Right. It's historical. Right. Can I trust you? Right. Do I remember or do I forget with you? Right. And I'm, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to come to a sense of forgetting it with you. Then I'll believe you, we're open to doors, open a whole different world comes into view. Mm hmm. I have a great final question. Okay. It's a great question to ask a scientist. Um, what do you want to see studied in relation to churn? There's so many limitations of the studies to date and what more work needs to be done.

1:01:19Yeah. Yeah. Oh, there's so many things. I, I think I, I hope it opens, I hope it has even a, even a portion of the good fortune that stereotype thread had of, of, of attracting interest in, there's so many hype. I'd like, for example, does, does trust, maybe, maybe establishing trust between people is the best way of reducing prejudices, beliefs and so on. That needs to be tested. That's, that's a program of research right there. Uh, that I'd love to see undertaken. Uh, to feel picked that up because I, I, I think again, I, the intuition I'm, I'm, uh, feeding on here is that, is the trust building has been under recognized. Like, I've talked to many colleagues, like, well, I told the students this and I told them that and they, they have no reason to trust you. And, you know, they, and they, why don't they, why don't they listen to me? Why don't they, why don't they do what's in their own self-interest? Why don't they, well, they, they're in a, they're in a situation. If you, if you really talk to them, you, you'd see

1:02:22they're in a situation where it's difficult for them to, to just forget and trust you. They need a little something there. And then I think that road can be built. That road can be built. Once it's understood that that is the road that needs to be built. And I, I hope, if, I hope the book, if it accomplishes anything, it accomplishes that, and maybe this is a road we should test. We should look at more carefully that this should direct some scientific interest in the, in the years ahead. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. This was really interesting. Well, thank you. Pleasure on my part. So that was Claude Steele talking about churn, the tension that divides us and how to overcome it. And I hope people consider ordering it at the local independent bookstore. And for information about the Commonwealth World Club World Affairs membership and upcoming programs, please visit www.commonwealthclub.org. I am Jeremy Smith. Thank you very much and take care.

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