Claude Steele at NYU

In Steele's talk last night he told of an experiment to measure the effect of identity threat. The researcher tells a white male subject that he's to have a conversation with two other people, either two blacks or two whites. The conversation will either be about racial profiling or about love and relationships. The subject is then lead into a room with three chairs. The researcher tells the subject to arrange the chairs as he goes to bring in the interlocutors, then leaves. In the results, researchers found that when the subject was to talk with other whites, the chairs were placed close together. When he was to talk with blacks about love and relationships the chairs were closer still. When the subject was racial profiling with blacks, the chairs were far apart, and the more non-racist the subject was, the further the chairs were. As to the latter results, they followed the typical pattern of his studies. As to the fact of the subject placing his chair closer to the imagined black participants when the topic was love and relationships, Steele laughed and said, "In this case, your guess really is as good as mine." Posted by eku at January 23, 2004 9:06 AM