The social psychologist Joshua Aronson and I did one of the early experiments testing this. We invited white and Black Stanford University students into our laboratory one at a time and gave them a very difficult thirty-minute section of the verbal Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

But Black students have lived with their racial identity. They know it can matter. They didn’t know that it would matter in this instance. But they knew it could. Thus their predicament. To be safe, not to be misled, they were less trusting. They stayed in churn.

Such caution has its costs. There could be value in that feedback. It might help them with their essay and their writing generally. Trusting less means they’d miss out on that benefit. And this would happen over and over in a diverse school.

They were left with that nagging ambiguity: Was it my essay or a bias of the feedback-giver that shaped the feedback? In these two conditions, Black students wanted to trust the feedback, be motivated by it. But there was that ambiguity. They remained in churn, protectively less engaged. Take this ambiguity away— as did the wise feedback-giver— and Black students showed strong trust and motivation. Their capacity to trust and be motivated was there all along. The spark they needed was evidence that the feedback-giver’s expectation of them was not limited by the stereotype about their group’s abilities.

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.

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.