When Diversity Is Stressful, Focus on Building Trust

We talk with Claude M. Steele about his new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It.

By Claude M. Steele, Jeremy Adam Smith

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Claude M. Steele’s 2010 book, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, reshaped how psychologists understand prejudice.

In that book, Steele introduced the concept of stereotype threat—the idea that people can underperform when they fear confirming a negative stereotype about their group. The research helped explain disparities in academic testing, workplace performance, and many other settings.

Steele is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University (and a former executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley). Over the past three decades, his work has influenced fields ranging from education to organizational leadership.

His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, serves as a kind of sequel to Whistling Vivaldi. While stereotype threat focuses on how stereotypes affect individual performance, Churn explores the broader tension that can arise when people from different backgrounds interact in situations that matter.

When the Commonwealth Club World Affairs, in San Francisco, invited me to interview Steele about the book, I jumped at the opportunity. Our conversation explored how identity, anxiety, and trust shape interactions in classrooms, workplaces, and everyday life. What follows is an edited version of that on-stage discussion.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Before we talk about your new book, I want to start with Whistling Vivaldi, which came out back in 2010.

Claude Steele: That book described the research journey that led me and my colleagues—Steve Spencer, Josh Aronson, and others—to the concept of stereotype threat.

That’s when someone faces a negative stereotype about one of their identities—such as race, age, or religion—in a situation that matters to them, like a job interview or a test. In those moments, the possibility of being judged through the lens of that stereotype can be distracting and upsetting. It interferes with your ability to perform in the moment. And if you expect to encounter that pressure repeatedly in a particular environment—say, a profession or a field of study—you might decide not to participate at all.

The research became widely known because it showed that stereotype threat could affect something as important as standardized test performance. For example, a highly motivated African American student taking a difficult exam might experience normal frustration and start wondering, Am I confirming that stereotype about my group? Will others see my performance that way? That extra pressure can undermine performance.

Over the years, researchers have seen this dynamic in many contexts—athletic performance, negotiations, academic settings, and more.

Eventually, I began to think people were missing the broader significance of the idea. The same kind of tension often appears in interactions between people of different identities. In diverse settings, people may worry about being seen through negative stereotypes. That concern can make them hyper-aware of how they’re behaving, what they’re saying, and how they’re being interpreted.

JAS: You’ve compared that experience to multitasking. A person under stereotype threat is juggling extra mental tasks while everyone else can focus on the main activity.

CS: Exactly. If I’m in a group composed entirely of people like me—say, a group of older men—I don’t feel much anxiety about ageist stereotypes. But if younger people join the group, I might start wondering: Do they think I have outdated ideas? Do they assume I’m not technologically savvy? I know what the stereotypes of older men are…and that I could be judged in terms of them.

Diversity brings us together with people of different identities. When that happens, we lose the security that we won’t be judged by outgroup stereotypes. That worry is experienced as tension. 

JAS: Your new book introduces the concept of “churn.” What does that mean?

CS: “Churn” is my term for exactly the tension I just described. To illustrate, let’s begin by imagining a seventh-grade parent-teacher conference. The parents and student are African American; the teacher is white.

The parents know the stereotypes about African Americans, about their intellectual abilities, about their aggressiveness, etc. So on the way to the meeting, they may worry: Will the teacher see our child’s real potential? Will ordinary mistakes be interpreted as signs of aggression or lack of ability?

As they walk into the meeting then, they’re in a state of churn—a kind of vigilant anxiety about how their and their son’s identity will shape their experience in the meeting and their son’s experience in the school.

Meanwhile, the teacher has her own form of stereotype threat. She knows the stereotypes about her racial identity. She may be deeply committed to fairness but nonetheless worried that anything she says—even constructive criticism—could be interpreted as racism.

Both parties enter this conversation in that state of tension I am calling churn—an agitated concern about how their identities will affect how they are judged and treated (and for the African American parents, how their son’s identity will affect his experience in the school). Both parties wonder: Will I be judged and treated fairly in this meeting? Is there some way I should behave, or not behave, to ensure this? Will I be given the benefit of the doubt? Etc.

Most approaches to diversity stress the need to reduce intergroup prejudices—something I heartedly endorse. But churn is different. It affects the prejudiced and non-prejudiced alike—arising as it does not from prejudice per se, but from the identity threat that all parties in a diverse setting can feel.

Churn is a form of social anxiety tied to identity.

JAS: And you argue that churn shows up especially in important situations.

CS: Yes. In low-stakes settings—riding the subway, sitting in a crowd—it usually isn’t a factor.

But when the stakes are high, the threat of being negatively stereotyped increases. That’s when churn becomes more powerful.

Churn isn’t inherently bad. It is simply the effort to cope with identity threat in a situation. It reflects the existence of that threat—and that the person can’t yet trust the situation enough to feel safe from it.

JAS: Another way of putting it might be that churn prevents people from entering a state of flow, where they’re fully immersed in the task.

CS: Exactly. Let me describe an experiment that illustrates this.

My colleagues and I asked white and Black Stanford students to write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that strong essays might be published in a campus magazine. Two days later, they returned to receive feedback from a white evaluator.

When feedback was delivered in a straightforward way—or preceded by generic praise—white students trusted it. But Black students trusted it much less.

Why? Because they couldn’t be sure whether the criticism reflected the essay itself or stereotypes about their group’s abilities.

But when the evaluator said, “I’m applying high standards to these essays, and I believe you can meet those standards,” Black students’ trust changed dramatically. They trusted that feedback more than anyone else and were far more likely to revise their essays using it.

Why did that work? Because it signaled clearly: I’m not judging you through those stereotypes of your group. I believe in your ability.

That kind of communication builds trust—and trust is the antidote to churn.

JAS: So how do individuals build that trust?

CS: At the individual level, it often comes down to conveying that you see someone’s full humanity.

There’s a term in the research literature—“wise.” It originally came from an ethnography of gay communities in the 1950s. A “wise” person was someone outside the group who understood their humanity and didn’t reduce them to stereotypes.

When people feel that recognition, they begin to trust you. Often the simplest way to show that is through genuine curiosity—listening, asking questions, taking an interest in someone’s experience.

JAS: So curiosity helps create trust.

CS: Yes. When you feel churn, it can be a signal to adopt a learning mindset. Instead of defending oneself, or retreating, ask questions. Be polite. But be curious. People can sense genuine interest, and that can transform the interaction.

JAS: Some people might say that sounds like a lot of work.

CS: Remember, I’m talking about important settings in our lives—classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, athletic teams, and so on. In those places, showing respect and interest in others can be far less work than dealing with the consequences of not doing these things.

Moreover, in these settings, I think many people really want to have ways of reducing churn and feeling more comfortable with and connected to others across identity divides. The chief mission of this book is to give people concrete ways of doing that, of feeling more comfortable in diverse settings, and better able to enjoy their great benefits.

JAS: Let’s talk about how power differences might affect churn and trust.

CS: Sure. I think it’s a lot to expect the groups that have historically been the most disempowered to be the first to trust. That’s a big ask.

And in the current divisive era—when we have leaders who don’t even bother with dog whistles in preference for openly racist messaging—it becomes even harder. For African Americans, for example, but for other groups, too, this kind of behavior and rhetoric makes it difficult to trust that their full humanity is appreciated or even recognized.

I don’t want to diminish that troubling reality in any way. But I don’t want to lose hope either. I still have to get up every day and go to work, and so does everyone else. So the question becomes: What do we do in our everyday lives?

That’s really what this book is about. It’s not about somehow directly fixing the political climate, for example. It’s about what we can do within the diverse settings and relationships in which we actually live our lives, to feel more comfortable and able to engage the riches that our differences can offer us. That’s what motivated me to write the book.

JAS: Do you experience churn? When?

CS: Of course. I’m older, and I work in a world full of young people. Sometimes the question is, “Does he even know how to use a computer?” There are moments like that.

JAS: One of the things I appreciated about the book is that it really made me reflect on my own experiences with churn. As I read it, I found myself developing a sort of taxonomy of churn in my own life. Some of it was trivial, some of it more significant—but I realized I hadn’t thought about it very consciously before. It feels like you’ve put your finger on something we all live with.

CS: I’m glad to hear that. In many ways, this is the American experiment. We’re trying to build a democracy that integrates people from many different backgrounds. That’s inherently challenging.

JAS: There’s something a little neurotic about it. From the outside, people sometimes look at the United States and think, “You people are obsessed with diversity”—and they have a point. Many Americans want a very diverse society, but at the same time we’re afraid of what that diversity means, and we must fight against feeling threatened by people who are different from us. Those two impulses are constantly in tension within the American mind. And the truth is, as a people, we seem to want two contradictory things at once. We want the comfort of sameness and we want the vitality offered by living with many different kinds of people. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now in the United States.

CS: Exactly. And that’s why I keep emphasizing the importance of focusing on the worlds we actually inhabit—the classrooms we teach in, the workplaces we’re part of, the systems of hiring and promotion we help shape.

When you talk only about the larger society, the conversation can start to feel abstract or utopian. But when you focus on concrete settings, that’s where real progress can happen. That’s where the strategies I talk about—practical forms of wisdom about trust—can actually make a difference.

The United States made a legal commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy in the 1960s when we dismantled the laws that upheld segregation. When I was a child, the system was so rigid it could fairly be called apartheid. Legally, we changed that—one of our society’s greatest achievements. Now the challenge is making equality of opportunity real in everyday life.

And that happens in relationships—through the small things people do that make it easier to trust each other and work together. Some of the examples I describe in the book involve university programs that created conditions where students could genuinely trust their institutions. In those environments, diversity became a treasured feature of their experience, not a problem.

One reason I’m hopeful is that building trust may actually be more manageable than trying to directly eliminate prejudice. Changing someone’s beliefs is incredibly hard. As a social psychologist, I know how difficult that is.

But trust is different. Many of us have done that in our lives. We have fairly good intuitions about how to do it and what’s required. And then, as the trust between us builds, our attitudes and beliefs begin to change naturally. Prejudices start to loosen their grip when there’s a genuine human connection.

JAS: It also seems like there’s an ask here—especially for white people—to try to be trustworthy.

CS: Right. And to understand that the issue isn’t all personal—it’s largely historical. The question is: Can I trust you? Do I carry the memory of the past into this interaction, or can I begin to set it aside with you?

When trust starts to form, the door opens to a very different kind of relationship.

JAS: Whistling Vivaldi spurred years of research about stereotype threat. What would you like to see researchers study about churn?

CS: I’d love to see research testing whether a focus on building trust is an effective way of reducing prejudice. I’ve suspected this for a long time now. It could be the focus of a whole research program.

My intuition is that trust-building has been an under-appreciated factor in bridging identity differences. I heard colleagues say, “I explained everything clearly to my students—why don’t they listen?” But if the students are wary about trusting you, information alone won’t help. If we really talk to them and listen, we may see, as in the experiment I mentioned above, that they are in a situation that makes trust difficult. Before they can fully absorb the information we’re trying to pass on, they need some evidence or signal that their full humanity is appreciated—that they’re not being reduced to those stereotypes that they know exist, and that they know you know.

Once a foundation of trust is there, the road to learning becomes easier. My hope is that this book encourages researchers, and the rest of us as well, to explore that road more seriously in the settings where we live our lives.