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