Churn

—

Churn— Claude M. Steele

—

Introduction

Sometimes the complexity of a problem obscures a part of it that, if addressed, could greatly improve things. Take hospital-acquired infections, for example. These infections— pneumonia, bloodstream and wound infections, urinary tract infections— affect 1.7 million patients a year, killing as many as 99,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They have complex causes— invasive procedures like surgery and catheterizations, immunocompromised patients, stethoscope contact, pathogens that resist antibiotics, and so on. Yet disciplined handwashing by hospital staff with antibacterial soaps and gels can reduce their occurrence by 50 to 70 percent. Handwashing isn’t a cure-all. But it offers significant traction against these diseases.

At base, Churn is a practical book. It focuses less on the nature or politics of identity and more on what it takes to build trust between people of different identities— even oppositional identities— in the real-life settings of our lives. It spotlights a dimension of human relations— trust-building— that may be even more powerful than we thought.

We do have, after all, a debt to our past and the long shadow of identity structured opportunity, disadvantage, status, and inequality that it casts over our present lives.

It follows that an important route to fairness is to reduce these biases, to be identity-blind, not meted out based on identity. And for prejudices that prove difficult to eliminate, we want to mitigate the unfair effects— as when musicians are auditioned from behind a screen so their sex wont influence judgements of their musicianship.

Put more generally: In settings that are important to us and where we could be devalued based on stereotypes about our identity, we feel safer with our own kind.

Things like: How are people like me seen and treated here? Will I be supported here? Will it be a fair place for people like me? Diversity puts us in a state of mind in which identity is top of mind. Stressful emotions can arise. Thoughts scramble as we work to decipher and make meaning. To capture the anxious, ruminative nature of this state, my term for it is “churn,” a term whose utility I suspect will increase as the diversity of our life settings increases.

1. What Is Churn?

Churn is the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings. Its immediate cause, as noted, is stereotype or identity threat— the threat of being judged and treated badly based on negative feelings or stereotypes about our identities: our religion, race, age, sex, sexual orientation. This threat begins with knowledge that virtually everyone has— of the feelings toward, and stereotypes about, the major identities in our society. Then, when we’re in situations on which these feelings or stereotypes apply, this knowledge carries a threat: that we could be judged and treated in terms of those feelings and stereotypes.

Foreshadowing a chief hope of this book, Richeson and Shelton show that, using classic measures of racial bias, people found to be less biased, and subjects who have had more intergroup contact, are less stressed by diversity. We should keep hope alive. Still, taken as a whole, the research makes one thing clear: “Diversifying” a setting can cause stress and churn unless something is done to mitigate the effect.

Virtually every identity is negatively stereotyped in some way.

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).

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.

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.

Summarizing their own and other’s research, a distinguished group of Canadian psychologists led by Toni Schmader (Schmader, Micheal Johns, and Chad Forbes) points to three things that typically happen when people are under this threat. First, they’re stressed. Their heart rate, blood pressure, and sweating are elevated. Activity in their prefrontal cortex is often suppressed— which makes it more difficult to control attention, thinking, emotions, and behaviour. It’s harder to engage in the task at hand. Second, they’re self-conscious. The exhort themselves to double down, to disprove the stereotype. Then they monitor themselves to see if their efforts are working. Third, they try to suppress negative thoughts that, if allowed to surface, would deepen their sense of threat.

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.

She keeps remembering. Identity threat, in this way, is more blanketing than the threat of interpersonal judgements. It’s there anywhere the stereotype applies, and in those settings, it can come from anybody, anytime.

Imagine this playing out in important settings like school, the workplace, or public spaces. Being haunted by a dehumanizing stereotype about your group’s humanity, intelligence, or goodness can keep one in remembering mode, as a painful condition of life.

Identity threat can be life-shaping, pushing people in and out of settings, even in and out of whole walks of life.

2. Where Does Churn Come From?

This, I would suggest, is the social tension at the heart of the American experiment. It’s what makes us churn. In diverse settings we have questions: “Given my identity and the stereotypes about it, can I trust this situation?” “Will I be valued here?” “Treated fairly?” “Will I be heard here?” The struggle to answer these questions—to figure out how one’s identity will play out in a situation— is what churn is.

The African American parents face a different world outside of the parent-teacher conference. They, too, are racialized by diversity. But for them it is a more common experience. To work, be educated, get healthcare, buy food and clothes, they must regularly transact with people of different identities— often of greater social power and status— who may see and treat them stereotypically. Their day involves more diversity than does the teacher’s day. And that diversity can blanket their lives with the threat of stereotype-based devaluation, keeping them in churn much of the time.

In her book The Trayvon Generation, Elizabeth Alexander, the renowned African American poet and president of the Mellon Foundation, wonders if this burden doesn’t sometimes cause a “low-grade, undiagnosed depression,” especially in the young.

3. Churn Has an Antidote

When we trust, we accept. When we distrust, we resist. We look for alternative meanings and scenarios. And if the situation is important, we do this a lot; we churn.

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.

This doesn’t mean we have to live with the bad effects of bias. But it does mean that trying to mitigate its effects can be as important as trying to eliminate it altogether.

He faced these conditions not because he was George Floyd the individual but because of where his identity located him in society— a location he had no choice but to contend with.

Believing that one’s moral responsibility begins and ends with seeing people as individuals tends to push identity contingencies like these out of view. It pushes us to see people in terms of internal characteristics, or what we imagine their internal characteristics to be. On the last day of George’s life, we just see a large, middle aged Black man in a tank top possibly trying to pass a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in a corner bodega. We look for things about George the individual that could explain this— poor impulse control, a broader lack of executive self-control, dysfunctional cultural beliefs, deficits in employable cognitive skills. We downplay, or miss completely, the gauntlet of conditions tied to his race and class that he would have had to surmount in order to gain a secure connection to school, the economy, and society.

Similarly, there is an understanding of schools, workplaces, and public spaces of our society that we would like people to trust— that they are basically fair places that offer genuine and equal opportunity. But for people like George Floyd, and others whose families and communities have experienced identity-based disadvantages, this proposition can be difficult to trust. Saying that these places are now color-blind doesn’t help much. People remember. They know that the inequalities that stem from those disadvantages have not been remedied.

People are likely to take assertions of color blindness the way Calogero took Jane’s assertions that she liked Italian boys— as a well-intended hope for society but, perhaps inadvertently, as a denial of their lived experience— a personal claim of innocence more than a real commitment to a more just society.

Like Calogero, to trust, they would need a more concrete signal, like a gracefully unlocked car door, that tells them that in this setting, that vision of a fair, color-blind society can be trusted.

This book’s interest is to expand this approach to include a focus on mobilizing the settings of society themselves to foster successful integration. It sees these settings as having a capacity of their own, bottom-up, to foster successful integration— a capacity, perhaps underappreciated, to build trust across otherwise tenacious identity divides. It explores how to do this at several levels in society: in personal relationships and mentorships; in midsize settings like classrooms, sports teams, and small businesses; in larger institutions like universities and corporations; and in the overarching paradigms we use to design institutions like K-12 schooling.

That is, whereas our attitudes are often weak drivers of our behavior, our behavior is often a strong driver of our attitudes— our attitudes often change to fit or justify how we behave more than they cause behavior in the first place. For example, if we live segregated lives— the behavior— then prejudicial attitudes will likely arise to justify that segregation. So if building trust and reducing churn enables people to be comfortable with each other in diverse settings— think of the parents and teacher in the opening vignette— the prejudices that justified their separation may fade, replaced by attitudes that justify their coming together.

4. Be Wise, Not Color-Blind

In the 1950s, Erving Goffman, one of the leading sociologists of the last half of the twentieth century, wrote a classic book on the nature of stigmatization entitled Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. It was informed by a gay bar culture of that era in San Francisco. In that period of intense anti-gay bigotry, Goffman learned that the men of this culture had a term for straight people they trusted. The term was “wise” as in “he’s OK, he’s wise, he knows who we are, he sees us as fully human.” Miles Davis’s description of Gil Evan’s tells us that African Americans have similar terms: “he’s cool” or “he’s hip,” meaning, again, the he knows what’s up, he knows that racial stigmatization is a real predicament in the lives of African Americans, that it takes intelligence and strength of character to survive it, and that, in cases like Miles Davis’s, it can foster great art that reveals the humanity that exists behind stigmatization.

Gil Evans was hip to this. He didn’t say that he, Gil Evans, had decided to overlook Mile’s racial identity— be blind to it— and through that approach see him as fully human, as “just like everybody else.” That would be color-blindness. That would be sweeping aside as irrelevant a huge feature of Miles’s life and experience. It might be the view of a person occupying a high role in the Wilkerson play. A person who didn’t have to know the names of the people in the chorus. A person not wanting to appear prejudiced, perhaps, but not really wanting to be concerned about the experience of people in the lesser roles. What Evans saw and accepted was Miles’s actual experience and how he dealt with it. His affinity for Miles was a knowing affinity. That’s what made him “cool” despite his eating radishes out of a brown paper bag in Manhattan jazz clubs.

The rhetorical claim of color-blindness is often offered in defence of a good intention: to not discount someone’s full humanity based on their group identity. It’s an intention that I appreciate. But it unfortunately implies that one can overlook even profound parts of another person— experiences tied to their group identity— and still convincingly see them for who they are. So for the people on the receiving end, it can raise questions: If you don’t see my identity or acknowledge the conditions that go with it in this society, how can you see me for who I am? And if you don’t see me for who I am, how can I trust you?

Wiseness sees full humanity in human difference. It sees human differences as the way equal humanity manifests itself differently under different life conditions.

The teacher might have said that her school tried to be color-blind. Who could blame her? But the parents could take that as a red flag. It might not quell their sense of threat at all. To do that would require something more: some sign that, in this setting, they are seen and respected for who they actually are. They’d need this because of the worry pressed on them by those stereotypes. They’d need a concrete signal that despite those stereotypes, their full humanity is understood and respected.

This could take many forms. It could be the teacher inviting the parents to join her in a working relationship to support their son. She might express confidence in his potential. She could be specific about her goals for his development and pathways for getting him there. She could offer regular check-in phone calls. Down-to-earth help like this is the heart of wiseness. It shows that she understands and accepts their full humanity and the importance of the situation to them. It disambiguates her intentions, clarifies what she’s thinking.

Render real help. Things that signal good faith and, again, disambiguate intentions.

Wiseness can be as simple as seeing people in terms other than how they might be stereotyped— for example, inviting a qualified older person to lead discussion on new technologies. Or it could be holding a person to high standards in an area where their group is negatively stereotypes— for example, encouraging a strong female math student to take advanced physics or encouraging a talented white American basketball player to persist in elite basketball. These actions have wiseness.

The new tutor was different. She was relational, not gushy, but attentive. She intuitively understood you were working under the weight, the history, of a reputation— that it was “in the air,” waiting to be validated by your first frustration. She knew that any sign of a lack of confidence in your ability could send you into a churn of self-doubt and very likely kill your interest.

It began with wiseness. She engaged you with challenge. She picked problems captured by that phrase, “at the frontier of your skills.” “Now this is level three . . . It’s going to get more difficult.” Her instruction was Socratic. She wanted you to see that your own thinking could solve problems. She corrected you by asking questions about your reasoning. She inoculated you against frustration. She made it seem normal: “Now, this may be a little harder since it has been a minute since we have done that type of problem.” Her praise was largely indirect— “we’re ready for the next level of work”— or she reminded you of how hard the problem you solved was— with just a note of being impressed. She diminished your failures; “I think I didn’t tell you what I wanted.” She used questions to stimulate your curiosity; “OK, can you think of yet another way to solve the problem?” Her questions focused on you solving the small parts of math problems that enabled you to solve whole problems. She avoided any focus on the question of your math ability. She gave no direct praise or criticism of your performance or ability. She used no incentives. She simply led you, in tiny increments, to see your math potential for yourself. You accumulated successes. You became more engaged, more curious, more confident. You began to feel like you could do these problems— your math identity notwithstanding.

As Mark Lepper and his colleagues put it:

Exactly those things that one would do to present information to students most efficiently about the existence and sources of their errors and misconceptions are, at least for unconfident remedial [reputation-threatened] students, precisely the same things that seem likely to further undermine these students’ sense of competence and control.

The expert tutors understood that students’ first need was for someone to believe in their potential to learn, despite their reputation. The best tutors understood that students wouldn’t learn much without this. They understood the importance of being “wise.

It was an expected finding. It fit the reasoning my colleagues and I were developing. But it was nonetheless unsettling to see something so “in the air,” so abstract and unspoken, undermine a critical kind of trust that should be commonplace.

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.

Also as in the Cohen research, they were followed all the way through high school. The results were presented in three reports— the first published in 2016 and the last in 2021. This research, too, found that the self-affirmation intervention, in its first year, significantly improved the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students in schools where they were lower in number and in level of achievement— precisely the conditions in which their identity threat would be greatest. And again, this effect lasted. From the seventh grade through the last year of high school, the racial achievement gap for affirmed students grew 50 percent less each year than the gap for non-affirmed students. The achievement gap between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students had decreased by 42 percent by the end of high school. And the intervention increased the percentage of minority students eventually graduation from high school on time by 10 percentage points. All of this from a twenty-minute affirmation exercise in the seventh grade! It launched a process of ever-increasing engagement with school that lifted these students’ trajectories of achievement.

5. Trust in the Face of Power

As I worked on the ideas in Churn, I felt certain things were becoming clear: that trust was indeed a critical ingredient of successful diversity in many of the everyday settings and relationships of our lives; that wiseness— seeing full humanity in human difference— was a mindset for winning trust between people of otherwise wary identities; that giving people the opportunity to tell you about their values, their needs, and their own agendas amounted to wiseness and was a usable strategy; that when giving feedback across identity divides, it was especially important to convey faith in the other party’s potential; and that follow-through, giving real help in achieving these things, was just as essential.

It wasn’t that I believed these things, even if implemented all together, would always and definitely eliminate diversity tension. Rather, my growing conviction was that they could reduce these tensions— provide traction against them— in our relationships and everyday settings and thus expand the approaches we had to address this central American challenge.

Was wiseness a strategy for everyone? Would people with less enfranchised identities, those occupying lesser roles in the Wilkerson play, be comfortable using it?

For these people— women, minorities, gays, white men in diversity workshops, low-income earners— hearing that they should offer “trust” in diverse settings could trigger more “remembering” than “forgetting.” And there waiting for them is a compelling argument: “How can I trust people from groups that have done bad things to my group, people who benefit from advantages won by those bad things, people who often justify those advantages with dehumanizing stereotypes of my group, people who often see my group’s progress not as a good thing, or as justice-restoring, but as a zero-sum loss? Wouldn’t being ‘wise’ just make me more vulnerable to them— women to men, Blacks to whites, gays to straights?” And their churn wouldn’t stop there. It would also ask: “Why does responsibility for building trust in these settings fall to me? Shouldn’t it be first the responsibility of the more empowered?

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.

I’m using examples from African American experience. But unstable trust is not intrinsic to a group. It arises from a group’s lower position in the hierarchy of a setting. Imagine, for example, a white male in a diversity training seminar with mostly women, or in a Black history course with mostly African Americans. In many American settings, white males occupy a high position in the hierarchy of groups. But less so in these settings. In these settings they, too, like the teacher in the parent-teacher conference, could worry: “Do I ‘forget,’ and trust how this remark will be received?” “Do I ‘remember’ how my group can be seen, and withhold this remark?

In answer to the question “Is wiseness— offering trust to beget trust— for everyone?”: I’m afraid it’s too much to expect from the less powerfully situated in a diverse setting, especially early on. It simply makes them too vulnerable. And it could well seem impossible. In describing what he saw as President Barack Obama’s exceptional ability to offer trust to the American public, including white Americans, the African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “The vast majority of us [African Americans] are, necessarily, too crippled by our defences to ever consider such a proposition.

As a general rule, for diverse settings to be wise, it’s best for the more empowered to move first— the teacher before the students, the manager before the employees, the doctor before the patient, the parents before the children, the minister before the parishioners, the white students before the small number of minorities in a classroom, the coach before the athletes, the CEO before the rank file, the Black professor of African American history before the minority of whites in the class, the board before the organization’s administration, and so on. This isn’t to leave the less empowered off the hook. At some point, they, too must be wise— able to see full humanity in difference and put their trust in a setting. The point here—considering the identity power dynamics in a setting— is about who goes first in making wiseness a normative standard. The answer is clear: the more empowered. Most often that means the leadership.

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.

Power and status differences then, can frustrate trust building in a setting. And wiseness can counter that frustration. But for that to happen, it’s best that wiseness come first from the top. It’s too much to expect the vulnerable to risk further vulnerability by trusting first. (Though this can happen, as we shall shortly see.) Once leadership offers trust, like the wise feedback-giver in the Cohen experiment, it becomes a path the vulnerable can follow. So, the advice offered here is that in diverse settings— be it an interaction between a doctor and her patient, a lawyer and her client, a teacher as his students, an institution and its constituents, a business and its customers— the more empowered identity should lead with trust.

What he found was clear. When people were trusted in the first round of the game, they generally reciprocated that trust in the second round by giving their partner the dollar— trusting that he would later split the kitty with them. But when they’d been distrusted in the first round, when the other player withheld the dollar from them, they generally reciprocated that mistrust, keeping the dollar for themselves. Trust begat trust, distrust begat distrust.

The results were clear. Power did not suppress the reciprocation of trust. It amplified it. Compared to playing with a partner of equal power, participants reciprocated trust more when their partner had greater power. They also reciprocated distrust more when their partner had greater power. That is, when the partner distrusted them— failed to give them a dollar in the first round of the game— they were less willing to give him a dollar when their turn came. And this effect was stronger when their partner had more power than when he had equal power.

Still, Mooijman feels they raise an important caution for leaders, managers, and people in more powerfully situated roles in society: “Having power acts like a double-edged sword when it comes to trust development. Trusting others is particularly effective for promoting reciprocal trust, whereas distrusting others is particularly destructive for promoting reciprocal trust.

Leaving out trust instigated by the less empowered would miss how behaving out of trust— with faith in other people’s capacity for fairness— can be its own source of power, even when, or especially when, it comes from people lower in the social order.

Holding onto one’s faith in people’s capacity for fairness from a disempowered position, and in the face of intense opposition, while saturated with risks, has a moral power capable of moving a presidential election or, for that matter, the soul of a nation.

Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan looked at a related question: Which has been more effective at producing social change: armed violent resistance or nonviolent resistance? Embedded is a question about trust: Is offering trust in the ultimate humanity of one’s opposition, even from a vulnerable position, an effective way of producing social change, and if so, is it as effective as the threat and use of violence.

Chenoweth and Stephan built a dataset of all the mass change campaigns that happened in the world between 1900 and 2006, 323 in all. They divided them into those that were violent in nature (revolutions, insurgencies, coups d’état) or primarily nonviolent in nature (boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, protest marches, stay-aways). They then assessed how effective they were as measured by whether they achieved their stated goals within a year’s time and whether there was evidence that the campaigns themselves, rather than concurrent events or other differences between the societies were responsible for change.

Still, what Chenoweth and Stephan found was dramatic. The Selma march and the larger American civil rights movement were not exceptions. Nonviolent campaigns were ten times more likely to be successful than violent ones. They seem better able to inspire trust between people on opposing sides of a divide, reduce the doubting churn that otherwise exists between them, and thus enable more cooperation going forward. As Chenoweth put it in an interview with the Harvard Gazette in 2019, “Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns— whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.”

The Selma marchers, in their willingness to suffer people’s inhumanity out of faith in people’s ultimate humanity, had tapped into a less obvious but long understood source of power.

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.

Some years back, the brilliant Latina social psychologist May Murphy led a small team of researchers— James Gross, one of the nations leading emotion scientists, and me— in an experiment to get a closer look at what that “something” might be.

The results were different. Compared to women who watched the balanced video and to men who watched either video, women who watched the unbalanced video had elevated heart rates and blood pressure, and they sweated more. And, as an indication of their preoccupying churn, they remembered fewer incidental features of either the room they were in or of the video itself. These women were math and science majors. They cared about diversity in these fields— where they might spend their careers.

Elizabeth Alexander offers an answer in The Trayvon Generation. She describes having frequently visited a conference room at Yale University for over fifteen years as a faculty member and never once noting that the painting at the front of the room of benefactor Elihu Yale, after whom the university is named, included a small brown boy at his feet with an iron collar around his neck linked to a chain. She was shocked by her “delayed comprehension.” “I did my work under the matter-of-fact, unproblematized image of an enslaved brown figure at the foot of the most venerated person in the university’s history.

Material features of a setting reflect society, its history and culture. They signal what’s valued— which traditions, values, achievements— and who belongs.

So yes, settings and their features— before anyone in the setting does anything— can trigger identity threat and churn. Settings have agency of their own, an agency that can be a problem in an identity-diverse society trying to overcome stratification. Many of our settings— corporate boardrooms, waiting rooms, DEI workshops, art galleries and museums, hiking trails, neighbourhoods, faculty meeting rooms, classrooms, country clubs, college campuses— have features (from their demographics to pictures on the wall) that can push one or another identity into churn.

Male clutter depressed women’s interest in computer science. It had no effect on men’s. Again, the agency of a setting; its incidental features alone affecting something as important as women’s interest in an entire field.

Stephens assembled a distinguished team of collaborators— Stephanie Fryberg, Hazel Rose Markus, Camille Johnson, and Rebecca Covarrubias— to take up this question. They reasoned that the gap might stem in part from signals universities send to students about the “right way” to think about their college experience and— often unintentionally— about the kinds of people who belong there. They set out to test this logic.

For half of the participants, this letter was based on the letter normally sent to incoming students. It stressed four student goals:

• learning by exploring personal interests,

• expressing ideas and opinions,

• creating your own intellectual journey, and

• participating in independent research.

For the other participants, this letter listed goals more compatible with the culture of working-class students:

• learning by being part of a community,

• Connecting with fellow students and faculty,

• Working together with and learning from others, and

• Participating in collaborative research

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!

Our society has an inherent challenge: Many of its settings still have features that reflect our identity-stratified history and organization. Our schools, workplaces, churches, classrooms, civic organizations, and boardrooms have features that can make it harder for some identities to trust that they are a part of the “we” in the setting. Identity-blindness implies that, along with identity itself, these features don’t matter much— they can, or should, be ignored. But they do matter— to all of us. Think of being the “only one” or “one of only a few” in any important setting— as my hands reminded me, for example: one of only a few whites in a Black History seminar, one of only a few Blacks in a symphony orchestra, or one of only a few women in an advanced math course on Riemann surfaces. But there’s good news: as the Stephens experiment and the 3M company show, when these features are addressed, improvements can happen, sometimes without much effort or cost.

As to method, Mary Murphy and her colleagues have developed a deft and usable approach they call a “cues audit.” In settings like corporate divisions, academic departments, non-profit organizations, boards, classrooms, small businesses, and churches, do three things.

First, educate. Explain how features of settings— the proportion of different identities in the setting; the pictures on the wall; the references people use in their speech; the style differences in people’s clothing; the language people use to designate different identities— can cause churn in some people while going unnoticed by others.

Second, ask people to identify features in a setting that imply that some identities belong there more than others, or that expectations are higher for some identities than for others.

Third, through group discussion, develop plans for addressing the ill effects of problematic cues. This could mean eliminating some cues, developing better understanding of other cues, modifying cues.

Experience can tell us important things about how to make good ideas work— for example, that how something is done can be as important as what is done. A cues audit can yield information that is invaluable to the life of a setting. Look at how dramatically it changed 3M. But experience with such efforts tells us something else too: to avoid a heavy hand in implementing it. It shouldn’t become a tyranny. I suspect you know what I’m saying. We shouldn’t use relatively small violations of emerging mores to morally condemn or socially ostracize a person— to “cancel” them. Terms or behaviour that degrade the humanity of other groups— mortal sins— have to be off-limits. But experience suggests it’s wiser to treat venial sins with more latitude. Reacting too strongly to them can undermine the very goal we’re after— a setting with a climate of greater trust and lower churn. Remember the manager who keeps talking to his staff about his European cathedral tour when many of them can't afford an out-of-town vacation.

But another concern was how they should protest, and how the kind of society they wanted to achieve should shape their protests. In answer, Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed from Josiah Royce (1855-1916) the construct of the “beloved community”— in which people live as brothers and sisters, recognize their interdependence, and act with compassion for one another across identity lines.

In the founding documents of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an arm of the movement that organized the Freedom Rides and the Mississippi voter registration drives, the religious historian Charles Marsh describes how SNCC drew from this concept: “Only ‘redemptive community’ could supersede ‘systems of gross social immorality’ and nurture an ‘atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice’ [become] actual possibilities.

The concept of “beloved community” is perhaps too dated for contemporary use. But it does point to the value of keeping the endgame in mind: achieving a climate in these places in which our identities— the full breadth of them— feel safe and like they can belong and flourish.

This is why I like Mary Murphy’s stress on making a system of evaluating the features of settings an educational effort. In that regard, two general guidelines might be useful. First, it should be a low-key, routine practice that, for the most part, focuses on incremental changes that are well integrated into the functioning of a setting. It shouldn’t be done once and forgotten. Nor should it be done only when a crisis has arisen. It should be a recurring, normalized activity— part of the operational woodwork.

Second, these efforts should involve the participation of as many people as possible. When people feel they haven’t been heard they tend not to trust. But when their input is a regular, normalized part of how a setting functions, they’re better able to trust it even when they disagree.

The aim is to establish a practice that keeps people in touch with each other’s experience of the setting. An advantage of locating such an effort in specific settings is that that’s where trust-building changes are often most feasible and their outcomes most measurable. It enables a culture in which change is empirically driven (see the next chapter for a superb example) and takes place at a pace that is more evolutionary than revolutionary— both features of which foster stability and trust.

7. Making Institutions Wise

“What does it take to succeed here?” I was genuinely confused— in a cloud of ambiguity. And, as one of only eight African Americans in a student body of nine hundred or so at the time, that ambiguity had a certain toxicity: Like Mirna on the trail, I worried that how people saw my race could affect how they saw and treated me. I couldn’t rule out that possibility. I was knee-deep in churn.

They exposed people to loud noise, then measured their reactions— psychological and physiological— to see how much stress it caused. Half of the participants were given a way of coping: a red button on their desk that they were told could lower the noise. The other half experienced the noise with no red button, no way of coping. By this time, the literature was clear on a major point: the mere knowledge that one has a way of coping with a stressor can reduce its impact.

The new study habits I’d learned from Pat gave me the same sense New Yorkers have about their stresses: that I knew what to do. I knew how to cope. The ambiguity lessened. My frustration lessened, and with it my sense of being under threat. A weight of race was lifted, even though Pat’s help had nothing directly to do with race.

My answer begins with a reminder: Not coping well with a situation that is important to one’s future is stressful for anyone.

Transitions often involve ambiguity over how to cope effectively in the new setting. They instigate in all of us a search for what the challenges are, and for how best to meet them. But for those negatively stereotyped in the setting, this search has an extra consideration. It inevitably raises the possibility that they may face bias— devaluation, low expectations, little tolerance for error, little willingness to be associated with— and then the further worry about how to cope with all of this.

Could this be an additional strategy for integrating our society’s organizations and institutions? Give people the red buttons they need to reduce ambiguity about how to cope in the institution. Give them an understanding of the institution and its infrastructure. Give them the social and cultural capital needed to understand the value of the experience. Give them tools and resources. Show them pathways forward. It can seem like an unusual approach to integration or diversity. But remember, it’s ambiguity over how to cope in important settings that virtually forces people facing identity threat to “remember,” to worry that bias is a source of their frustration and discomfort. For them, it’s an unavoidable part of trying to figure out what’s wrong, what’s not working in a setting.

Suppose an entire institution took this approach. What if a university, for example, tried to do for its students what Pat Neal did for me? Would it— by giving students red buttons and reducing toxic ambiguities— improve student outcomes?

In contrast, in Renick’s early years at GSU he knew of several low-income students who were dropped from school for not meeting only one small bureaucratic requirement, never to be heard from again. These kinds of experiences brought Renick to an important insight: Academic ability was rarely the reason low-income students dropped out of college. It was mostly little things, potholes along the road to graduation. As Andrew Grumbel put it in Won't Lose This Dream, his compelling book describing the transformation of GSU: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, academic performance was not the most important predictor of student success or failure.

Nearly all of the transformations at GSU followed a pattern: A review of institutional data reveals a problem, and then data is used to understand it, design solutions, evaluate small-step interventions, and develop and evaluate university-wide scale-ups. Data is also used to manage the often turbulent political waters of persuading colleagues of the need for change and to again their support. As Grumbel put it: “This was a strategy that would come to define the entire trajectory of Renick’s student success work: start small, show the benefits, then scale the program university wide.” The approach is not “you have to adapt to us” but “we have to adapt to you,” said Darryl Holloman, dean of students and vice president of student affairs from 2012 to 2018. As a strategy for institutional change, it inspires trust at every turn.

Yes. Dramatically so. On a campus with so many low-income students, the overall six-year graduation rate in 2003 was 32 percent. In 2024, it was 52 percent. What about toxic ambiguity? If it especially affects the more negatively stereotyped, you’d expect the ambiguity-reducing effects of these efforts to cause the greatest improvements among African American and Hispanic students. In 2003 the graduation rate for African Americans was 29 percent— only 18 percent for African American males. For African Americans in 2022, the graduation rate was 55 percent! For Hispanic students, the gains are even greater. In 2003 their overall graduation rate was 22 percent. In 2024 it was 58 percent. In a society where the percentage of these groups with college degrees in 2003 was 50.2 percent for whites, 27.8 percent for Hispanics, and 34.2 percent for African Americans, Georgia State is a striking engine of upward mobility and an advantage-equalizing force for traditionally less enfranchised students.

A ten-member University Innovation Alliance has committed to exploring its data-driven strategies. Also, GSU has its own National Institute for Student Success, headed by Renick, that helps regional public universities use this approach. As the degree of implementation progresses in these schools, graduation rates have increased, sometimes drastically so, especially for low-income and minority students. And there is another sector of American higher education that, in taking a more developmental approach to its students, has long used its own versions of GSU-type supports: historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Information. Social capital. Timely intervention and support. A structure outlining clear expectations. These reduce the ambiguity that can become toxic by expanding churn into mistrust and alienation. They foster success for everyone. But they especially help those under stereotype-driven suspicion of not belonging. They reduce performance gaps between these and many other groups. They foster a successful form of diversity, even when they don’t directly address diversity at all. For example, in the years since the GSU student success programs reached maturity, GSU has reliably produced more African American graduates than any other college or university in the nation.

To be clear, the other programs are extraordinarily strong. At the time of the survey, Berkley had the second-highest number of science departments ranked in the top five nationally. Weaker science wasn’t the cause of their weaker performance with women and minorities. Nor did it reflect a lack of interest in seeing all students succeed. The cause seemed to be a lack of ambiguity-reducing structures and practices. Other programs surely had some of these elements. But not all of them. And perhaps not as well coordinated as those in Chemistry.

There is, of course, another pedagogical mindset in graduate education: Give students the freedom to find what they care about, a true passion that will sustain them as their careers unfold. In this mindset, it’s reasonable to rid programs of as much structure as possible to allow students’ own talents, ingenuity, and interests to guide their development. This approach has produced generations of distinguished scientists and scholars. But it may not work as well for a diverse student body. The ambiguities it allows into the training experience may impose a special burden on students whose identities put their belongingness under suspicion. The open-ended freedom assumed to foster development could leave them in near-constant churn.

It’s important to stress that the UC Berkley College of Chemistry, like GSU, used multiple practices to reduce ambiguity and give support in the setting. Multiple red buttons. Any one practice alone might not be enough. Take procedural justice— the degree to which a community adheres to nondiscriminatory, transparent practices in matter of hiring, promotion, and adjudicating disputes.

This book argues instead for a “wise” model of inclusion, as practiced at GSU and Berkley Chemistry: meeting the students or inductees where they are, with trust in their potential to develop and with a focus on giving them the red buttons— the information, know-how, resources, timely coaching, social capital, and so on— and showing them the way forward, all of which will enable them to stay in the setting and cope well. These things lower ambiguity and churn— as illustrated in Pat Neal’s effect on me, and in the effects of GSU and Berkley Chemistry’s institution-level strategies.

They haven’t dropped the practice of giving grades, or jettisoned the lecture format, or lessened their commitment to research excellence. They haven’t restricted their commitment to a narrow sector of the population. Rather, they’ve added capacities that detect and meet the developmental needs of all students, including the less resourced and identity-threatened. They don’t lean back, presuming to select students who have what it takes to succeed in their institution. They lean in; take responsibility for developing students’ abilities and talents. And following this developmental approach they’ve built solid foundations of institutional trust that greatly facilitate student success.

8. Making Guiding Paradigms Wise

What about how the setting sees its purpose, the assumptions it makes about how to fulfil that purpose, and the systems and practices it puts in place to realize that purpose? Can the paradigm that defines and organizes a setting itself be a source of identity threat to some people, perhaps enough so to affect their trust, comfort, and performance?

The goal of the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the 1960s was to help low-income children get the skills they’d need for school and life. The project measured “hard” cognitive skills, assessed by tests, and “softer” character traits like persistence and getting along with others, assessed by teachers and self-reports. Looking at how these children grew up, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and his colleagues found that “softer” traits predicted children’s life outcomes— whether they finished college, their income level, and the equality of their jobs— better than “harder” cognitive skills measured by tests. Kirabo Jackson, a Northwestern University economist, found essentially the same thing for the entire 2005-2012 cohort of North Carolina ninth graders— 573,963 students. Their character— this time measured through behaviours like attendance, on-time graduation, suspensions, and grade point average— predicted life outcomes such as college attendance and later income better than cognitive test scores.

Think of Tyler showing up to school— possibly prospecting for food in trash cans along the way. He’s undoubtably in a preoccupying state of churn. He knows he might be seen and treated in school based on the poverty and status of his family, on skill and vocabulary deficiencies possibly tied to that poverty, on having a dialect and even clothes that reflect his social status, on not having seen much of the world outside his neighbourhood, and so on.

What he needs when he gets to school is something other than cognitive accountability— its good intentions notwithstanding. He needs signals that address his churn and that help resolve it: signs from adults and fellow students, for example, that he belongs in that school, that he is valued for who he is and who he can be, and that he is seen as having the potential to succeed there. And it wouldn’t hurt if he found some things about school interesting. For example, if his homeroom teacher read the class a compelling story every morning to get the day rolling. He needs signals that despite his status— and his churn to the contrary— he can trust the school’s beneficence toward him.

Yet in his school— very likely in the grip of cognitive accountability— he isn’t likely to have such experiences. Rather (as we shall see), he’s likely to get a more basic skills curriculum not much connected to his life, needs, or interests; a rigid disciplinary system; and frequent assessments of his cognitive skills that, from his perspective, may reinforce his image as a poor student— to himself and others.

Could such misguidance be a root of the educational inequalities that trouble our society? Could an expanded paradigm— one that also focuses on building students’ trust in their school’s ability and willingness to invest in them— make a transformative difference?

Brilliant field studies by the MIT behavioural economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton cognitive psychologist Eldar Shafir, described in their book Scarcity, show that the scarcities of poverty (like those of time) can so focus one’s attention on immediate demands that little bandwidth is left for planning, learning about options, doing homework, and building relationships and cultural capital. The urgency of his sister’s having to rummage through garbage to find enough cans that his family could have milk and cereal at the same breakfast narrows Tyler’s bandwidth for school.

A big way that poverty undermines schooling is to make it seem irrelevant to one’s life.

The ability to delay gratification manifested itself when the environment proved reliable, the experimenter trustworthy, but not when it proved unreliable— when the experimenter couldn’t be trusted to follow through on his word. All of the children could delay gratification. They had the capacity. But they did so only when it made sense, only when the experimenter showed he could be trusted.

So, the cognitive-accountability paradigm may keep out of view, or at least in dim view, something very important to the academic achievement of students like Tyler— the social-psychological dimension of his school experience, including that tied to his identity. The cognitive-accountability paradigm is essentially identity-blind. It knows that this aspect of a student’s experience can affect school achievement— for example, that it can be helpful when student experience is shaped by a middle-class background and less so when it is shaped by a lower income background.

Billy Aydlett, principal of Leataata Floyd Elementary School, in Sacramento, California, in describing his low-income students in a 2013 New York Times article by Jennifer Kahn, summarized the basic insight of one such area: “What we discovered was that these kids weren’t going to be able to make progress on the academics until they’d gotten help with their social and emotional issues.

These social-emotional learning (SEL) practices sensitize students to their emotional lives and foster the development of traits like self-control, curiosity, resilience, and emotion regulation. But they also give them a sense of being seen and valued for who they are— a sense of being in a place more attuned to their needs and experiences, a schooling environment they can more easily identify with.

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.

For students facing Tyler-type identity threat, they improve performance less by directly affecting their learning than by reducing the identity threat that can otherwise interfere with their learning. That’s their route of action, their shared active ingredient. They do it in different ways. But they all change the socio-psychological experience of school for these students. And throughout the now extensive literature testing these effects, it is for these students that these interventions have their largest, most reliable effects.

Looked at from the standpoint of cognitive accountability, these strategies— socio-emotional learning strategies or strategies reducing the identity threat many students can experience in school— can seem beside the point, of marginal importance, not rooted in cognitive principles of learning. But looked at from the standpoint of building students’ trust in their schooling and their identification with it, they have a clear unity: They all address Tyler’s primary need to trust, care about, and engage with school. The good news here is that from an expanded paradigm— the identification paradigm— falls a much-expanded set of fixes.

In Improbable Scholars, David Kirp offers an example of how effective this approach can be, even when scaled up to an entire school district. His focus is on low-income Union City, New Jersey, schools where students score as well as their much better-off suburban counterparts in writing, reading, and math. No silver bullets. No off-the shelf reform package. Rather, it’s stable leadership and day-to-day, year-in, year-out commitment to doing all the big and little things that put expert-tutor wiseness into students’ daily lives: child-centered over staff-centered priorities, big investments in preschool, rigorous and integrated curricula, explicit and constant attention to building cultures of respect and confidence in students’ potential. The academic mission of these schools is unconditional. But they understand that when a focus on building trust is persistently applied— in curriculum decisions, disciplinary policies, rules for composing student study groups, after-school options, the examples used in presenting STEM material, the hiring of teachers and staff— it can take a school to a tipping point of effectiveness for all students.

This is how good schools— like good restaurants, as my colleague Joshua Aronson pointed out to me— get built. Guiding principles are minutely and persistently applied. We keep track of how they work, and we refine them to better and better effect. It is the ground game of school improvement.

9. Going Forward

In its place, Churn proposes a strategy of trust building— predicated on the assumption that we trust those, independent of their identity, who help us function well in a setting.

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.

Can this approach be formed into a usable strategy for building foundational trust and lowering churn in diverse settings? I believe so, and propose a strategy with three goals: seeing, welcoming, and supporting.

Mississippi was seeing. He put it simply: “if you really want to do something with somebody else, really want to work with that person, the first thing you have to do is make a personal connection. You have to find out who it is you are working with.”

I think of seeing as the most important component of trust-building.

The larger point is that the effort to foster trust in diverse settings— a university, a small business, a sixth-grade classroom, a new start-up, a medical office, a magazine— is likely to be incomplete without seeing, without, as much as possible, walking in the shoes of the people involved.

Welcoming. When we enter a setting that is important to us— a university, a recreational area, a diversity workshop, a workplace— a churn-causing question hangs in the air: How will my identity— who I am— affect my experience here? To build trust in diverse settings, it’s important to give people a welcoming experience that addresses that question.

Yet shown in the Stephens research described in chapter 6, welcomes can go wrong: they can alienate people, even if inadvertently, as well as welcome them. Recall the finding: When a welcome letter ostensibly written by a college president emphasized independence, finding one’s own passion, and working independently, working-class students were affected enough that they performed worse than non-working-class students on a subsequent verbal reasoning test. And at orientation, when independence was emphasized but no mention was made of communication values, working-class students got lower grades than other students on a subsequent test. These were students whose admission credentials and high school grades were on par with those of everyone else participating in the experiment. There’s a lesson in these findings: When bringing a diversity of people into a setting, it’s especially important that welcoming be inclusive. When it’s not— again, even inadvertently so— it can have serious consequences.

It’s difficult to feel welcome if acceptance is seen as conditional on affiliating with values one is just becoming aware of.

Greyston Bakery, in Yonkers, New York, is the primary supplier of brownies to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company and has its own line of baked goods sold at Whole Foods. It’s also committed to serving its low-income surrounding neighbourhood— an effort that begins with the way it welcomes potential employees. It uses an Open Hiring model that explicitly welcomes “those who face rejection elsewhere.” It replaces “scrutiny with trust.” It does away with background checks, résumés, drug testing, credit checks, and interviews.

Supporting. After welcoming comes support: giving people the know-how to manage the challenges and the opportunities inherent in a setting and, as much as possible, related challenges in their lives. This is important. It helps put to rest the nagging question that spurs churn, the question about whether your identity will disadvantage you. It doesn’t rule out the possibility. But it diminishes its likelihood. It changes the feel of even larger organizations. I point again to the examples of Georgia State and UC Berkley Chemistry.

• Help should be less about getting outcomes and more about supplying the knowledge and know-how needed by people in the setting to achieve those outcomes.

• To the extent possible, it’s good for this help to be made available to everyone in the setting— as at Georgia State and UC Berkley Chemistry. Offering help to just some groups— as we’ve learned from decades of trying this through various forms of remediation— can wind up stigmatizing those groups and worsening the stereotype threat and churn they experience.

• Help is less about exhorting people to take on goals or embody strengths of character (in the form of ambition, resilience, open-mindedness) and more about how to do specific things that enable them to make progress in a setting.

• Relatedly, it’s probably wise, especially at the outset of a support effort to focus on small, manageable goals that lead incrementally to larger achievements.

• As a last principle, an ounce of early intervention is probably worth a pound of remediation— maybe two pounds. The sooner people get the knowledge and know-how needed in a setting, the greater the impact that knowledge and know-how can have, and the more they will trust the setting as a place where their needs will be met.

In my experience, there is something important to understand about tactics: Their effectiveness is often situationally specific. A given tactic may work well in one setting, inspiring hope. But then not work at all in a different setting, or even backfire. Yet when this happens, it may not be the fault of the tactic. It may be a problem of its fit in the setting. A college welcome letter that inspires students in an upper-middle-class high school may alienate students in a working-class high school. Diversity training may work well in a setting that has built a strong culture of trust but backfire in a setting of new or transient employees.

Successful efforts at building trust are often achieved through trial-and-error experimentation in the local setting in which they are to be used. Remember how Renick handled the problem of students losing their Hope Scholarships. He started small. He tried things and kept track of their effect, jettisoning or improving what didn’t work, incrementally expanding what did work, until he and his colleagues had essentially transformed a university. That’s what I mean by trial-and-error experimentation— modifying systems to better meet, in that case, student needs. A strategy like seeing, welcoming, and supporting can guide the search for tactics needed to build trust. But the process isn’t complete without further effort of developing tactics to implement the strategy, often through trial and error.

Lerner argued as follows: To feel comfortable in the world, we need to believe the world is basically just— that generally people get what they deserve. Thus when we see a person suffering for little reason, it upsets us by implying that maybe the world isn’t just. And to restore that injured image, we might actually derogate such a victim— blame them for their suffering— as a way of restoring our needed belief that the world is just, and that people do in fact get what they deserve.

In one of the most surprising findings in the history of social psychology, this is just what happened. Subjects derogated the victim, downgrading her personality and character.

CODA: And Everyone Can Do It

The last few chapters focused on how to design institutions and the paradigms that shape them— how to form wise communities.

For trust to build in a setting, it must be clear that the more powerfully situated are invested in it. It is they who will have the authority to make organizational room for a trust-building connection.

In seeing, each party must accept the importance of making a personal connection with the other— must understand, as Robert Moses did in Mississippi, that they should go talk to each other. They should get a sense of what the others are like; how they see their roles (as teacher or parents, for example); what their intentions, hopes, and concerns are; what conditions and circumstances they are contending with; what their needs are. This getting-to-know-you effort is worth a lot. It conveys respect. And it helps the parties understand each other’s needs— for example, in the parent-teacher conference itself, and in going forward as teacher and mentors. It tells each party what would be helpful to the others and it gives both parties some assurance that they are reasonably well understood.

Welcoming, in the context of the parent-teacher conference, means welcoming the perspectives of the other party. The temptation, of course, is to view the conference as a chance to express one’s own views.

Perhaps the best way to do this is to be curious. Welcoming is an invitation to hear, with interest, the other party’s experience and thinking.

As trust builds in the relationship, it can deepen mutual understanding, this is important. Few things are as trust-building as real help. And few things frustrate trust-building as much as parties withholding help or not recognizing each other’s needs.

It’s message, as noted, is that trust-building is a game played largely on the ground. It’s who listens, listens again, is genuinely welcoming, and collaboratively gives people the help they need to succeed in a setting. It’s who’s wise. This is the heart of the matter. And anybody— that is, everybody— can do it.