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Fostering Mutual Understanding: The Neurobiology of Intergroup Relations with Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
Understanding the Effects of Stereotype Threat
It’s really important that people perform at their best in the workplace, and they perform at their best in all academic situations, whether taking a finance test or a kindergarten test. One of the things that we’re finding in our laboratory and in workplaces around the country is that certain groups experience a kind of stress that’s unique to being stereotyped – that’s unique to being left out. For women, there’s a very strong stereotype in science that they’re not particularly inclined to do science well. In business, there’s a stereotype that women are not leadership-like. There’s also a strong stereotype that African Americans are seen as not smart. There’s a strong stereotype that Asian Americans are seen as not social. In each of these situations, each of these groups is experiencing a stress that’s very powerful, that importantly is not faced by other groups. And one of the things that we’re finding is that stress operates the way that any kind of normative stress operates. And what it does is, when people are under sufficient amounts of stress it causes them to underperform. It causes them to perform worse than how the dominant group in each of these situations perform.
Why is this important? It’s important because it erodes the very best kind of performance that you need to have in the workplace – what we call executive function. What it does is that it taxes your ability to work for long hours, to retain information, and it actually hurts your ability to learn. So even when you’re trying to learn new tasks, it undermines your capacity to learn. There’s nothing wrong with each of these groups. There’s nothing wrong with their brain, there’s nothing wrong with their personality, there’s nothing wrong with their motivation, and in fact, one of the things we’re finding is that the more motivated these groups are, the more they’re likely to experience this added stress. Because they want to do well, but this stereotype is like glue – it’s sort of sticking to them.
So the question is, what does this actually do to your brain? Well one of the things that we’re finding is that it tends to activate parts of the brain that are associated with emotion, and it tamps down or it shuts off parts of your brain that are actually needed to perform well – so the different parts of your brain in the prefrontal cortex that are associated with high performance. So in situations when one is under stress, what you want is you want to have your emotions sort of under control or tamped down, and you want to have your prefrontal cortex sort of active and functioning. And under conditions of stereotype threat, you actually find the reverse is happening.
Fundamentals of Intervention
So the first piece of intervention is diagnosis. Many of the very best companies care about these issues, but they don’t really have a clear understanding of what’s happening in their workplace. They don’t have an understanding about how things like performance evaluations, hiring practices, promotion practices, are all feeding into these stereotypes. We’re finding things like just underrepresentation, where there’s a whole lot of group x and there’s very little of group y in your workplace, just the lack of diversity can start to kick these stereotypes into play. So the first step is diagnosis: what are the issues that your particular company is facing? It’s going to be very different from a big company that is in Silicon Valley compared to a company in New York, compared to a startup, say, that has a multinational constituency across London and Italy and New York. So the first thing is to understand what are the stereotypes that are operating, and appreciate the fact that they might be different in different companies.
The second thing is sort of getting all members of the company on board in terms of being aware of these stereotypes. Many companies, they sort of care globally about the issues, but maybe it might be one or a few people. Diversity human resource people here, or a chief financial officer whose daughter learned about this in school, and really at every level of the company, from the top to the bottom, people need to be aware. That can come from diversity trainings. That can come from a really strong human resource department that really has an understanding on not just the practice, which is, “What are companies doing?”, but also the science underlying it. And what we find is that the science is really important because when people understand what is actually happening to their employees in terms of their performance, the tax on their brain, it erodes their work days, we’re finding that it’s linked to inflammation in terms of sickness – so once you start seeing how powerful it is that stereotypes are undermining your workers’ capacity, this is a lesson that’s really important from the top to the bottom, from new people to people that have been there for 20 years.
An Institutional Approach
What I like to focus on is how to remove the stereotypes that are institutionally in the workplace. We know that just increasing diversity – for every degree of diversity that you can increase in your company, you are reducing some of the stereotypes. We know this. We also know that when you train high-level executives about how to spot talent and to nurture talent not based on who looks like you, or who plays the type of games you like, or went to the same college, but truly what their workplace capacity is, that these kinds of mentoring networks are also effective. So we really need multiple kinds of interventions at multiple layers of the companies. And that’s one of the things that’s a pretty clear message.