Stereotypes shouldnt affect our pursuit of success.

[Music]

let’s begin with an exercise

i have a few boxes next to me i would

like each of you

to choose one of these boxes

now based on the box you picked there’s

a certain trait

that it represents and that trait will

represent you

for example if you picked the green box

i want you to respond to my speech with

very optimistically with you’re going to

respond to my speech with in a very

positive manner

if you pick the pink box you’re going to

be a little more pessimistic today

you’re going to respond to my speech

with more of a negative attitude

if you pick the yellow box you’re going

to be more skeptical

today you’re going to respond to my

speech and

think a few times before you really

decide to agree to what i have to say

if you pick the purple box you’re going

to be very gullible today you’re just

going to

finally believe what i have to say and

believe it to be true

now what i’ve just done is assigned each

of you to a stereotype

without even realizing it stereotypes

are something that

affect all of us it’s just a fact of

life

it’s something that we all have in

common society has put

all of us into our own boxes some tiny

like mine but all confining nonetheless

claude m steele is a social psychologist

who has spent his career studying

stereotypes

in one of his experiments he had a group

of black students and a group of white

students play golf

in the first round he told the students

i am going to measure

raw athletic ability the black students

did fine in this round

but the white student’s performance

suffered he did it again

but this time he told him i am going to

measure sports strategic intelligence

the white students did fine in this

round but the black students performance

suffered

there are a few things that we can learn

from this experiment

the first is that the awareness of that

stereotype

for whites it being that they’re smarter

or for blacks it being that they’re

stronger

the awareness of these respective

stereotypes

put a burden on these students and

caused them to conform

into their respective boxes

the second the thinking can be

changed society puts out a bunch of

norms and environmental cues that cause

us all to

conform into our respective stereotypes

but

if we offset that pressure that that

pressure with

different environmental cues and

different norms

as a society then we can alleviate that

pressure

and that burden that causes us all to

conform to our various boxes

now i hope that you are still in those

boxes you placed yourselves in earlier

did you make me feel a little restricted

maybe a little claustrophobic almost

like the walls were closing in on you

this is what happens when you’re crammed

into these metaphorical boxes

now you could have responded in another

box

you could have responded the way you

just the way you wanted to

it would have been better another box

may have been more appealing but

no single box could have given you that

complete freedom

it is instead more important to

understand

that when we are put into these boxes

it’s important to realize that we

shouldn’t put other people or ourselves

into these boxes

it is instead more important to realize

everyone’s differences

not to put them into these boxes but to

celebrate these differences

maybe one day there won’t be any boxes

thank you

you