COLUMN ONE : Can Racial Stereotypes Psych Out Students? : In a controversial new view of underachievement, Stanford’s Claude Steele says poor performance by blacks and others is linked to a fear of fulfilling negative images.

Two students, one black and the other white, sit next to each other in a college classroom. Both are bright and from middle-class families. They went to decent high schools and did well on college placement exams. But the black student is flunking, and the white one is not.

Why do they perform so differently?

Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele believes he has an answer. And it isn’t genetics, social class, lack of academic skills, family dysfunction or segregation--the usual suspects in the lineup of explanations for the stubborn problem of black underachievement.

Steele says that blacks--or any member of a group freighted with negative stereotypes--constantly labor under the suspicion that the stereotypes about them are true. Thus, women contend with the image of being mathematical klutzes, the elderly with insinuations of forgetfulness, blacks with the specter of intellectual inferiority. This burden alone, he believes, can make an otherwise competent student flounder.

His work is likely to stir up the scientific community, where many researchers believe that a number of factors underlie group differences in academic performance.

But Steele’s theory, tested in the lab and on campus, turns some common psychological assumptions on their head. In the process, it offers ammunition to both sides of the affirmative action debate.

Steele argues that the possibility of being judged by a stereotype--or inadvertently fulfilling it--can cause an anxiety so disruptive that it impairs intellectual performance. The victim may reject the stereotype, yet can’t avoid its glare.

Steele calls this condition “stereotype threat.” For black college students, it can deaden the commitment to academics, becoming a barrier as effective, he says, as a lock on the schoolhouse door.

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Steele and Joshua Aronson of the University of Texas offer proof that pervasive negative stereotypes about blacks’ intellectual ability create a “situational pressure” that distracts them and depresses their academic performance.

The trigger can be astonishingly trivial--asking a student to identify his race before taking a test, or suggesting that the test will measure intellectual performance.

But defuse the stereotype threat by removing those triggers, their research says, and black students score as well as whites.

Suggesting the phenomenon’s universality, Steele and professor Steven J. Spencer of Hope College in Holland, Mich., found the same results in experiments examining women and the image that they are mathematically inept. Steele and Aronson have found even white men may be stereotype-vulnerable: Their scores plummeted in testing situations that implied their math ability would be measured against that of Asians.

“If they can feel stereotype vulnerability,” Aronson says, “anybody can.”

Yet it is Steele’s and Aronson’s work involving blacks that has received the most enthusiastic attention, in part because of the promise it holds for solving what has seemed an intractable problem.

Dropout Rate a Problem

Nationally, the college dropout rate for African Americans is 70%, almost twice that of whites, despite three decades of efforts aimed at boosting their academic success.

“It is an extremely encouraging program of research,” said Jennifer Crocker, a University of Michigan social psychologist. “It suggests this is a problem we can do something about . . . these group differences in achievement.”

The harshest criticism so far has come from a painfully close source: Shelby Steele, the conservative essayist who is Claude’s identical twin brother.

In an extraordinary outburst, the San Jose State English professor, an ardent foe of affirmative action, has accused Claude of stealing his ideas and applying them to a more politically correct agenda.

“This has stood between us for some time,” Shelby wrote in a scathing letter to the New York Times in October, after the newspaper ran an article contrasting their views. What his brother now calls “stereotype threat,” Shelby claimed, is really his idea of “racial vulnerability,” which Shelby explored in a series of essays published five years ago.

The Stanford Steele replied with his own letter, denying the charges and spelling out the differences between his theory and his brother’s ideas.

Trying to patch up their relationship, Claude initially declined to be interviewed for this article without assurances that Shelby would not be mentioned. He relented after reaching an agreement with Shelby that neither would comment on the other’s work.

Claude began investigating the problem of black underachievement in the late 1980s, while on the faculty at the University of Michigan. Asked to join a committee studying student retention and recruitment, he came upon some astounding statistics: grades and Scholastic Achievement Test scores of blacks and whites who were flunking out.

The conventional wisdom said that when black college students failed it was because they were ill-equipped, felled by substandard schooling since kindergarten.

But Steele found that those with the best preparation--reflected in high SAT scores--were failing more frequently than those with lower scores, and at a rate more than three times that of whites with similar scores.

Among black students, 18% to 33% were bombing out, compared to 2% to 11% of whites. And the dropout rate was the highest among students ranked in the top third by SAT scores.

“That pattern surprised me,” Steele said recently. “Something else was going on in that situation beyond just skill preparation.”

At Stanford, which hired him in 1991, Steele embarked on a series of experiments with Aronson, then a postdoctoral student, to test the hypothesis that social stigma was hampering blacks’ intellectual performance.

In the first two experiments, three groups of undergraduates were recruited to take a test made up of the toughest items from the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam, used by graduate programs to assess aptitude.

The first group was told that the test would provide a genuine measure of verbal reasoning ability--a cue that researchers thought could trigger in blacks fear of being judged according to a stereotype about their intelligence.

The second group was given no suggestion that intellectual prowess was being measured. It was told that the test would merely evaluate the factors involved in solving verbal problems.

The third group’s students got the same instructions as the second with one addition: The test would challenge them.

The researchers theorized that stereotype vulnerability works, in part, by preying on self-doubt any test-taker may feel when struggling to answer a difficult question.

Giving students an alternative context for evaluating their performance--that their frustration might be caused by the test’s difficulty rather than any mental deficiencies--could be another way of shielding them from stereotype anxieties.

Researchers said the results of the study confirmed their hunches. Black students who thought the test would measure verbal ability scored significantly lower than whites in their group, and lower than blacks given other introductions.

“This was the first clear demonstration that we had something,” Steele said.

In their next experiment, Steele and Aronson wanted to establish what psychological process was unleashed by the murmur of stereotypes. Did cuing blacks that their intelligence was being measured set off thoughts about the relevant, damning stereotype?

They invited 35 undergraduates to take a difficult test. But just before they began, the students were asked to complete 80 word fragments, some associated with negative black stereotypes (such as race, lazy), and others suggesting self-doubts (such as dumb, shame).

The students also filled out questionnaires asking for personal information, such as musical preferences.

These exercises were meant as a sort of racial Rorschach test, “to find out what is psychologically active in a person’s mind” during the exam, Steele said.

He and Aronson found that blacks who were told the test would assess mental abilities completed the most word fragments related to negative stereotypes and self-doubt. And they recorded fewer stereotype-related preferences (such as rap music) than other blacks or whites.

Those results, the researchers said, suggested that the mere threat of having their intelligence measured aroused in blacks thoughts of stereotypes about intellectual inferiority. And these students tried to distance themselves from those thoughts by disavowing stereotypical interests.

Fears Can Be Eased

Coming just as their mental powers are being stretched by the exam, self-doubt causes blacks to labor twice as hard, but to ill effect, Steele theorizes: They reread questions and recheck answers, in the end working less efficiently and making more mistakes.

“When a black kid sits down to take an ability test,” Steele concludes, “bang! Racial stereotypes are activated . . . and are probably driving their emotions and behavior in that situation. . . . You’re self-conscious, you don’t have as much to allocate” to the task at hand.

In the final experiment in this series, all subjects were told they would take a test that would not reflect their ability. The only variable was that half of the subjects were asked to identify their race on the test sheet.

When blacks were asked to state their race, they scored dramatically lower than whites. But when the race question was absent, their scores matched those of whites.

In other words, the barest hint of stigma seemed to dampen blacks’ achievement, but lifting it was the key that opened the lock.

“I think that is the major contribution of our work, really,” said Steele, “showing that stereotype threat is a situation that can be turned on and off.”

Even some proponents of a competing theory--that genetics account for group differences in intelligence--such as UC Berkeley professor emeritus Arthur Jensen, concede that Steele’s research may have some merit and is worth further study.

But Jensen--an educational psychologist who caused an uproar in 1969 when he wrote an article suggesting that black children had low IQs that were largely inherited--also said that “stereotype vulnerability” is, at best, a “minor contributor” to racial differences in standardized tests. He cited a recent study showing that the gap appears as early as age 3, “before any conscious awareness of societal [attitudes] toward blacks have been imbibed.”

How well Steele’s theory holds up won’t be known for years. To answer some of his critics, he is in the midst of replicating his experiments using classic intelligence tests, which Jensen and others consider truer gauges of the ability to think and reason.

What is certain is that the theory already is challenging common views of prejudice and how it affects achievement.

Richard Nisbett, a University of Michigan social psychologist and noted authority on the psychology of stereotypes, observed that Steele’s “is really quite a different notion about prejudice than the way people thought in the past.”

Black underachievement previously has been tied to prejudice in two ways: Racism shortchanges black children, who wind up with the worst teachers and the most dilapidated campuses. And black students internalize negative stereotypes, which gives rise to crippling self-loathing.

The latter idea informs much of the movement to eliminate affirmative action. Shelby Steele has written powerfully of the danger of such “racial vulnerability” in his 1990 book, “The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.”

Affirmative action, he wrote, has perpetuated blacks’ “inner realm of racial doubt.” That doubt itself, he said, “becomes an unrecognized preoccupation that undermines their ability to perform . . . “

This debilitating power of stereotypes was part of “an entire framework of ideas lifted without attribution” by his brother, Shelby alleged in his letter to the New York Times.

Asked in a recent interview whether he still believed his brother’s theories borrow from his, he would only say, “We do not comment on each other’s work.”

In Nisbett’s view, Claude’s take on the problem is distinctly different from Shelby’s, and suggests a different solution than a wholesale scrapping of affirmative action.

Stereotype threat rejects self-victimization as an explanation for black failures: The problem arises from imperfect situations rather than imperfect psyches.

“The brilliance of it [is] to locate the problem out there ,” Nisbett said. “There are circumstances that can trigger susceptibility to those stereotypes, and there are things institutions can do to make it more or less likely that people will feel vulnerable to them.”

Steele and colleagues at Michigan are five years into a comprehensive effort to demonstrate how that vulnerability can be lessened.

Michigan’s 21st Century Program is based in large part on Steele’s research. Blacks and whites, randomly recruited, live and study together. They discuss personal and social issues in weekly rap sessions or seminars. Their regular course work is supplemented by evening “mastery workshops” in English, calculus, chemistry and physics, taught by upper-class students and emphasizing collaborative study.

Dramatic Results

By avoiding the self-segregation that is standard at most colleges, the program works against what Steele calls “pluralistic ignorance”--the racial isolation that can lead blacks, for instance, to assume their poor grades are the result of a racist professor. When blacks and whites room and study together, they have the opportunity to see their struggles in a different, nonracial light.

The benefits for blacks have been striking. Last year, the average GPA for 21st Century students was 2.89, almost a point higher than that of other blacks. For the top two-thirds of blacks, it eliminated the grade gap with whites. And in the program’s first two years, 90% of blacks went on to graduate.

Whites in the program also earned higher grade averages than other white students, but Steele said the increase was not statistically significant.

Some observers say the workshops are responsible for blacks’ improved performance. Others credit the unique group culture--the value placed on studying, the collaborative ethic, the socializing that cuts across race.

Steele, who is analyzing the program, believes that black students’ strong gains are caused by a combination of these factors.

The effort--which will be doubled to 500 students next fall--embraces what Steele calls “wise schooling”: education must have at its heart the belief that every student is “up to the challenge of school.”

Stereotypes, he reasons, threaten that principle. So do the remedial programs into which so many minorities are funneled.

Instead, Steele says, schools should strive to reinvent themselves in ways that eliminate the stereotype threat. That means ending remedial programs that set minimal goals and rethinking those affirmative-action efforts that, in subtler ways, send minorities the message that they are not up to the competition.

And it means encouraging in students the idea that their ability to learn is not fixed, but expandable--an optimistic counterpoint to “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book that renewed debate over the genetic basis of intelligence.

The success of these principles, Steele notes, has already been demonstrated by a number of prominent educators, such as former Garfield High teacher Jaime Escalante, who motivated underachieving East Los Angeles math students.

“If there is any single principle involved,” Steele said, “it is ‘Challenge them, don’t remediate them.’ Challenge conveys faith in their potential.”