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Whistling Vivaldi Summary

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The inspiration for Whistling Vivaldi was a narrative published by Brent Staples, who was a graduate psychology student at the University of Chicago at the time of the incident. When the African American student walked along the streets in casual clothes, couples would cross the street and others would avoid eye contact. Uncomfortable with the situation, Staples began whistling songs from The Beatles and “Four Seasons” by Vivaldi. Miraculously, pedestrians stopped avoiding him; some even offered Staples a smile. Social psychologist Claude Steele refers the phenomenon as an identity contingency. According to Steele (2011), contingencies are “conditions you have to deal with in a setting in order to function in it. And identity …show more content…

To stress the prevalence of the effects of stereotypes, Steele repeated his first experiment with white men and Asian men as the subjects. As the dominant group, white people are often unaffected by the stereotype, but in this particular experiment they underperformed greatly. Stereotypes even exist within racial groups. In one experiment, Steele had older people and younger people try to memorize 30 words for two minutes. Afterwards, they would try to write down as many words as they can. The group of older people who read an article confirming that age impairs memory wrote down significantly fewer words than the group of older people that did not receive the treatment. This is also an example of ageism (Henslin, 2017). A common motif in Steele’s experiments is a reminder of the stereotype, referred to as a cue. The experiments demonstrate that the smallest hint of a stereotype is enough of a cue to cause underperformance. In an experiment with girls and boys ages five to seven, the only difference between the treatment and control group was coloring a picture of a doll. Although most of the experiments in Whistling Vivaldi were conducted with homogeneity, Steele dedicated a chapter to discussing the long-term effects of stereotyping. It is said that African Americans are more susceptible to cardiovascular disease. Steele included a report that stated, “ ‘Nearly a third of black men (34%) are considered hypertensive, compared to 25% and 21% of white

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