Proffitt was conducting experiments in which he asked groups of students to estimate the grade of various hills around UVA’s campus. A hill on campus might actually have a 5 percent grade, but a typical participant would estimate that it had a 20 percent grade. One day Proffitt took a look at the most recent batch of experimental data and was stunned to find that suddenly the students had gotten much better at estimating the grade of a particular hill. Proffitt and his team delved into the mystery and discovered that the latest batch of questionnaires had been filled out by members of UVA’s women’s varsity soccer team. The hills didn’t look so steep because these were extremely fit Division 1 athletes who would have relatively little trouble walking up them. How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation.

In a third condition, the feedback-giver said to each participant that he was using high standards in evaluating their work and that, having looked at their essay, he believed that they had the potential to meet those standards. This signalled to the Black participants that they weren’t being stereotyped. If they were, they wouldn’t be held to high standards or have their potential affirmed. This feedback was water on parched land for Black participants. They trusted it as much as white students did. And trusting it, they used it to improve their essays. Three times more of them took their essays home to improve than did participants in any other condition of the experiment.

6. Making School and Work Settings Wise

And this could happen, I also knew, without them being aware of it. I intuitively understood how stereotypes worked. They specified what was normal. My weak performance could confirm a stereotype about African Americans, while my strong performance could be taken as unusual. One’s hands, of course, should be beneath notice in such seminars. But the sight of my hands could push me into a churn of “remembering”— even without anybody present doing anything in particular to provoke it.

But when the letter conveyed a more collective campus culture— a culture better matched to that of working-class students— those students performed the same on the anagram task as students with college-educated parents. The representation of college culture in the president’s welcome letter was enough to immediately affect students’ cognitive functioning!

Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen tested the effect of a similar intervention at the college level. They exposed freshmen to a persuasive message that presented the social stresses of college life as transient and as something everyone experiences. This message improved Black students’ grades over their next three years in college when compared to Black students who didn’t get this message. How did it do this? Further analysis showed that it helped Black students see college stress as something not peculiar to their identity. It reduced their identity threat. They could trust their environment more— churn less— and their grades reflected it.