Claude Steele came to UW a month or two ago and gave a presentation on stereotype threat and identity threat. Basically, people and society give off cues all the time about their attitudes and prejudices regarding people of certain groups. The people of the affected groups unconsciously internalize the stereotypes being applied to them and, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, tend toward the patterns expected of them. For example (to use one of Claude Steele’s examples), if you give a test to a white kid and tell him while giving it to him that Asians tend to do better on this test, but he should try hard, anyway, the white kid will score less well than if you didn’t give him that social cue. You can imagine the kinds of social cues we give to African-Americans, women, etc. and realize that from the get-go some social groups are at a total disadvantage due to our unconscious stereotypes. Identity threat is sort of like the same thing. Steele’s argument is that people identify with whatever identity is most threatened. So, a black woman might identify more as black or more as a woman depending on her situation (and I think implicit in this is that people’s self-identifications change with different settings).
Continue reading Are virtual worlds doomed to replicate social problems of real life?