In his novel Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele proposes that when we internalize the prejudices others have of us, we start to act on these prejudices. The most striking example of this was demonstrated in a study that examined the performance of women on a math test. Before taking the test, one control group acknowledged their femaleness by filling in the gender box that is ubiquitous on nearly all standardized tests, while the other control group did not. Surprisingly, the first control group, which acknowledged their gender, did noticeably worse on the test than the second group, which did not, suggesting that self-held prejudices of our own gender can affect our performance and alter the decisions that we make. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is