If anything, they were trying too hard. Being under the threat of a stereotype is different from self-fulfilling a stereotype. It’s being in a predicament, a social-psychological predicament. It’s having to contend with the real threat of being judged or treated in terms of a bad stereotype about your group. It’s a threat in the air that derives from stereotypes rooted in our nation’s history and the reaches of that history into the present. Right there in the middle of the test, these participants were contending with the far reaches of American history and society. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

There is poignancy to stereotype threat: It’s felt most by those in the stereotyped group who are most identified with achieving in the area where the stereotype applies, and who are trying to do challenging or frustrating things in that area. It affects most the vanguard of the group— as in Mirna wanting to succeed as an ultrarunner; as in women trying to break glass ceilings in finance; as in highly invested African American law students taking challenging state bar exams; as in white American males trying to succeed in elite basketball. That’s when, in the heat of frustration, the stereotype’s dark message— “everybody knows that, because of who you are, you probably can't do well at this, and that you probably don’t belong”— becomes personally relevant. That’s when it can cause enough churn to interfere with performance.

But it’s a different story when the task is difficult enough to cause frustration— when it’s at the frontier of one’s skills, so to speak. The experience of frustration gives credence to the stereotype. It tells the person: “Given your frustration, maybe the stereotype is true, and true of you,” or “Given your frustration, maybe others will see the stereotype as true, and true of you.” For people who care about doing well on the task, both ideas are upsetting, threatening. They try to forget— they try to forget the stereotype and push on.

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.

The actor’s perspective is different. The actor— the person in the setting coping with, among other things, the possibility of being stereotyped— is not looking at himself. He’s looking out at the circumstances he’s dealing with. It’s those circumstances that stand out to him, not himself. He’s likely, then, at least in large part, to see the effects of stereotypes differently than an observer: not as an idea about his group that he comes to believe at the expense of his own confidence and life outcomes but more simply as a threat posed by other people in the setting. He sees their stereotype-driven judgments and treatment of him that could disadvantage him in important settings like school, a business situation, or a traffic stop.

So, to the question of how to build trust in diverse settings, Churn recommends taking the actor’s perspective. It’s a mindset that searches for what people in the setting are contending with, including what they are contending with because of their identities.