Whistling Vivaldi Summary

In the second chapter of the book, Whistling Vivaldi, the author, Claude M. Steele, makes a number of fair assessments on how people’s prejudices and preconceived notions can interfere with someone’s ability to live up to their full potential. Even those who don’t notices these preconceptions can be unintentionally placing them on others, unwittingly experiencing them, or both. There are several key points that Steele raises in his writings which reinforce the aforementioned thoughts, one being that the students are unconsciously aware of the biases they place on themselves, another element is that when students feel bigotry being placed upon them, they oftentimes underperform, and lastly the lack of balance which can be found in experiments.

But provided you aren’t in a hate group, it’s likely an involuntary reaction to meeting someone new. Whether accidental or not, people still feel the results of these judgements and they can place unwanted stresses. What’s worse is that people often will accidentally burden themselves with these stereotype threats. Stereotype threats are when someone fears themselves to be at risk of confirming a negative stereotype. For example, as Steele notes in the book, in the University of Michigan Steele noticed that a number of underperforming students were black. As he correctly assumed, the poor showings weren’t a case of any racial “superiority”, but rather they were the result of stereotype threats. As Steele says, “Against this backdrop, black students worried about belonging, about whether or they could find a valued place in campus life [...]” (Steele 25). Of course everyone feels these external pressures, though some are able to mostly ignore them, many, however, aren’t. And when the prejudices are so strong that they enter someone’s subconscious, they can start to interfere with those people’s ability to