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.

Again, no predicament. So it’s not the stereotype per se that impairs their performance. It’s the stereotype plus who they are, what’s important to them, the stiffness of the challenge they face, and whether they are in a setting that is diverse enough that the stereotype could be in play. It’s these elements together that make a performance-impairing predicament.

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.

The common presumption is that biases like racism, sexism, and homophobia are the chief corrosives of diversity. And the are bad, to be sure. What I’m arguing is that churn is a further corrosive— in many common situations, as corrosive as prejudices themselves. Is the white teacher avoiding a needed conversation with Black parents because she is prejudiced, or because she is worried that a misstep in the conversation could get her seen as racist? Is it prejudice? Or is it churn that makes her hesitate? The point is that reducing churn can sometimes be as important in diverse setting as reducing prejudice itself.

Admittedly, this idea asks for an expansion of our thinking.

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.