Supercommunicators, page 18
Stereotypes, of course, surround all of us. In fact, it was stereotypes—of a very different sort—that influenced Jay Rosenbloom and so many other doctors to think poorly of patients who refused their advice. There was a social stereotype—doctors are experts—that pushed physicians to think of themselves as enlightened. Another stereotype—doctors are know-it-alls beholden to corrupt government recommendations—pushed patients to view their physicians with suspicion. Social identities can change how we act, even if we don’t intend them to, even if we wish they didn’t. These identities can push us to double-check our answers or arrogantly tell a patient “I know better than you.”
Steele and other researchers have found some methods for counteracting stereotype threats. When, in one experiment, they told female participants that a test had been specially designed to sidestep perceived gender differences, and, in another, told Black students that a test “did not measure a person’s intellectual ability” but rather “problem solving in general,” it lessened the impact of stereotype threat. “With this instruction we freed these Black participants of the stigma threat they might otherwise have experienced,” Steele wrote in his book.
Put differently, when researchers changed the environment, it made stereotypes less salient and therefore less threatening. “You can do that in a classroom, which is good,” Steele told me. “But it’s hard to do that in society, where everyone knows these stereotypes exist.”
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In 2005, another group of female and male math students were invited to participate in another experiment. This time, however, the study was occurring on the campus of Texas Christian University, under a different group of researchers who had changed the protocol slightly. To make sure a threatening stereotype was at the forefront of everyone’s minds, the lead researcher, Dana Gresky, told the participants at the start of the experiment, “I’m studying the GRE because of the well-known stereotype that men usually outperform women on math tests.” This kind of overt manipulation, previous studies had shown, would ensure that a number of women would be thinking of this stereotype, and would score worse on the exam as a result.
Then the participants were divided into three groups and taken to separate rooms.
One group started on the math portion of the GRE right away with no preamble or further instructions.
Members of the second group, before starting the test, were asked to briefly describe how they saw themselves. An easy way to do this, Gresky told them, was to sketch out a chart describing a few of their identities and roles. But time was short, she warned, so they should include only the most basic information. She showed them an example she had sketched:
The third group was also told to describe how they saw themselves before starting the exam. This time, however, they were instructed to “write as much as you can” and make detailed sketches that provided plenty of information about the various clubs they belonged to, their hobbies, and the numerous identities and roles they occupied in different parts of their lives. They were also given an example.
After making their sketches, participants in groups two and three started the math test.
The researchers wanted to see if “stereotype threat might be alleviated by reminding individual women of their multiple roles and identities,” they later wrote. “A typical college woman might identify herself by her sex, race, ethnicity, social class, religion, sorority, class in school, job, athletic team, club membership, family…. Would it help the average woman’s math performance to think about social identities other than being a woman, even if those other identities suggested no extraordinary math talent?” The researchers’ hypothesis was that by prompting a test taker to remember all her complex identities, they could change the environment, just enough, to diminish the anxiety that had been triggered when Gresky, in her preamble about GRE stereotypes, had pushed everyone to focus on just one identity: Women who perform poorly on math tests.
Later, the researchers scored the exams. The women in groups one and two performed worse, on average, than the men. Just as the researchers expected, priming these women to think about a negative stereotype had undermined their performance—even in the case of group two, who had briefly described how they saw themselves.
But the women in group three, who had been pushed to think about all the various facets of their lives and all the identities they possessed, ended up performing just as well as men. There was no difference in scores. The stereotype threat had been neutralized by reminding women of the multitudes of identities they possessed. “Drawing self-concept maps with few nodes proved ineffective,” the researchers wrote. “Drawing self-concept maps with many nodes, in contrast, allowed women who had been placed under stereotype threat to perform significantly better.”
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As Dr. Rosenbloom learned about these kinds of studies, they seemed to suggest a solution to one of his problems: How to counteract the “physician knows best” stereotypes inside so many doctors’ heads. Rosenbloom knew how easy it was, once he put on the white coat, to start feeling one-dimensional, to become “The Doctor.” “But if you can remember that you’re a parent, then you know how scary it is to make health choices for your kids, and that sparks a little bit of sympathy,” he told me. “If you can remember that you’re a neighbor, then you know neighbors don’t say things like I know better than you.”
In a Who Are We? conversation, we sometimes latch on to a single identity: I am your parent or I am the teacher or I am the boss. In doing so, though, we hobble ourselves, because we start to see the world solely through that one lens. We forget that we are all complex and that, if we were thinking like parents instead of doctors, we might also ask skeptical questions about the drugs a stranger wants to inject into our kids. We might remember that asking questions is what good parents are supposed to do.
With this lesson in mind, Rosenbloom began a new routine: Whenever he met the parents of a patient, he spent a few minutes finding an identity they had in common. “If they talked about other family members, then I would mention my own family, or if they said they lived nearby, then I would say where I lived,” he told me. “Doctors aren’t supposed to discuss their personal lives, but I thought it was important to prove that we had a link.”
It might have seemed, to the patients, like he was trying to put them at ease. But he was also doing it for himself. “It reminded me I was more than a doctor,” he said. “Then, when someone would say something irrational—like vaccines are a big plot—instead of getting annoyed, I felt some connection, because I know what it feels like to get pushed around by experts. I’ve experienced that.”
It’s crucial, in a Who Are We? conversation, to remind ourselves that we all possess multiple identities: We are parents but also siblings; experts in some topics and novices in others; friends and coworkers and people who love dogs but hate to jog. We are all of these simultaneously, so no one stereotype describes us fully. We all contain multitudes that are just waiting to be expressed.
This means that a Who Are We? discussion might need to be more meandering and exploratory. Or it might need to go deep and invite others to talk about where they come from, how they see themselves, how the prejudices they confront—racism, sexism, the expectations of parents and communities—have impacted their lives. “When my son goes to school, I tell him, remember, that test may be hard today, but think about who else you are,” said Gresky, the researcher at Texas Christian University. “We can make the bad voices in our head less powerful by remembering all the other voices in there, too.”
The process for drawing out those voices is relatively straightforward: In a Who Are We? conversation, invite people to talk about their backgrounds, allegiances, how their communities have shaped them. (“Where are you from? Oh, really? What was it like growing up there?”) Then, reciprocate by describing how you see yourself. (“You know, as a southerner, I think that…”) Finally, avoid the trap of one-dimensionality by evoking all the many identities we all possess as a conversation unfolds: “I hear you saying that, as a lawyer, you support the police, but as a parent, do you worry about cops pulling over your kid?”
This, of course, is only one part of a Who Are We? conversation. Remembering that we all contain multitudes can help us see each other more clearly—but it won’t necessarily convince, say, a vaccine-resistant parent to trust a doctor.
To do that, we need to find an identity we can share.
ENEMIES PLAYING SOCCER
In the spring of 2018, flyers began appearing in Qaraqosh, Iraq, announcing the formation of a new soccer league. This was a bit surprising because Qaraqosh was, at that moment, only just recovering from a brutal war. Over the previous few years, the city’s Christian population had been relentlessly attacked by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Hundreds of Christians had been killed and some fifty thousand forced to flee their homes. ISIS combatants had ransacked churches, torched Christian-owned businesses and assaulted Christian women. When ISIS finally withdrew from Qaraqosh in 2016 and Christian refugees began returning, many felt betrayed by their Muslim neighbors. “When I bump into them now, they turn their faces and walk away,” a sixty-year-old Christian man told a reporter in 2017. “They know what they did. They know they’re guilty.”
Before the ISIS invasion, there had been a number of amateur soccer teams for adults in Qaraqosh, but most of them were only for Christian players. Christians and Muslims almost never played together. In fact, Christians and Muslims hardly ever intermingled, even off the field: There had always been Christian restaurants and Muslim restaurants, Christian grocery stores and Muslim grocery stores, each with bouncers checking IDs that listed people’s religion.
When Qaraqosh’s Christian refugees started coming home, their soccer teams gradually began playing again. Then came the day when the flyers appeared in Christian neighborhoods announcing a new league and inviting players to an informational meeting. Inside a church half-destroyed by fire, the league’s organizers explained that they were sponsoring a tournament. It would be free of charge, open to any existing team, and everyone who participated would get a jersey with their name emblazoned on the back. There would be professional referees at each game, fresh nets and balls, and trophies for the winners. There was a catch, however: Only teams that already existed could participate, and though it was customary, in Qaraqosh, for teams to have nine players, each team in the league would need twelve players. What’s more, while half the teams would be permitted to add any players they wanted—and they would, presumably, all be Christian—on the other half of teams, the three additional players would be Muslims selected by league officials.
The league had been dreamed up by Salma Mousa, a PhD candidate at Stanford who was interested in testing what’s known as the contact hypothesis—the theory that, if you bring people with clashing social identities together under specific conditions, you can overcome old hatreds. The idea that a soccer league might overcome deep enmities in Qaraqosh, where a vast majority of Christian residents, when polled, said their Muslim neighbors had betrayed them, seemed preposterous. And, in fact, at the informational meeting, when coaches and players learned that half the teams would need to accept Muslim players, many walked out. “They told us this would ruin the teams,” Mousa told me. “They said we were going to cause another war.”
However, the lure of professional referees and large trophies convinced a few teams to sign up. Then the new jerseys arrived, and soon everyone wanted in. Eventually, forty-two teams joined the league. Mousa and her assistants assigned Muslim players to half of them, handed out schedules, and sat back to watch.
Practices, at first, were tense. Some Christian players refused to introduce themselves to their Muslim teammates, and they sat as far from each other as possible on the sidelines. “The Muslim players tried to fit in,” Mousa said, but the Christians were openly hostile. However, Mousa had instituted a rule that every teammate needed equal playing time, so although the Christians and Muslims didn’t mingle on the benches, they were forced to cooperate during practices and games.
That alone was sufficient to cause a shift. Some teams had initially insisted on speaking Syriac—the language spoken by Christians in the Middle East, but essentially no one else, including most Muslims—and, not surprisingly, it had caused on-field communication problems. So coaches on two teams instituted a new rule for their players: Everyone must speak Arabic, which both Muslims and Christians understood. When those teams began winning, other coaches started copying the rule.
About a week later, a group of Christian players complained that their Muslim teammates were habitually late, costing them precious practice time. The Muslim players explained they were coming from across town and had to pass through multiple checkpoints on slow-moving buses. So the Christian players pooled donations to pay for taxis to speed the Muslims across the city.
Eventually, Mousa had trouble telling the Christian and Muslim players apart. They sat together on benches. They celebrated together after goals. One team chose a Muslim as their captain. Some all-Christian teams began complaining they were at an unfair disadvantage because they didn’t have any Muslims. When Mousa surveyed the players, she found those on mixed teams “were 13 percentage points more likely to report that they would not mind being assigned to a mixed team next season, 26 percentage points more likely to vote for a Muslim player (not on their team) to receive a sportsmanship prize, and 49 percentage points more likely to train with Muslims six months after the intervention ended.” Prejudices didn’t disappear, of course. Christian players admitted they still felt uncertain about other Muslims, those who weren’t their teammates. But the shift was striking: One day, as Mousa and her colleagues walked through Qaraqosh, they saw a few Christian players inside a bar watching Barcelona play Real Madrid. Next to them were their Muslim teammates, who the Christians had somehow gotten in.
Before the Qaraqosh tournament’s championship game, featuring the Qaramlesh Youth versus the Guards of the Nineveh Plains, the players posed for a group photo. Both teams were a mix of Muslims and Christians, and some players carried portraits of family members who had been killed, “these huge photos of uncles and cousins who had died,” said Mousa. “And right next to them is a Muslim, and their arms are around each other.” After the Guards of the Nineveh Plains won, all the teams voted on player of the year. A Muslim was chosen. Polls conducted five months later showed that the Christians continued playing with Muslims, and that, as one player put it, “when the game is over, we hug, kiss, congratulate each other even when we lose…. We see each other in the neighborhood, call each other, invite each other for a glass of tea or coffee at home.” Muslim players told pollsters “there isn’t this idea of which community you’re from” and they “proposed to league staff that they invite all-Muslim teams from the area to participate in the future.”
The results exceeded even Mousa’s expectations. “Maybe some people will say, well, that’s because sports breaks down barriers,” Mousa told me. “But it’s not just that. It’s how we structured everything that made the difference.”
In fact, there were three decisions in designing the league that changed the environment so that players could bond. These are the same choices at the core of any successful Who Are We? conversation.
The first decision drew on the same psychology that helped boost the scores of female math students by reminding them of their non-mathematical identities: The soccer teams were deliberately structured to give players roles that nudged them to think about identities beyond religion. One player might be Muslim, but he was also the goalkeeper, and he led stretches during halftime. Another player was Christian, but was also in charge of bringing sports drinks, was the team captain, and always gave an inspiring speech before games. “There was an effort, by the teams themselves, to give everyone different identities,” said Mousa. “And those identities became more important than religion because they were related to winning.”
The second crucial decision was to make sure that, on the field, all the players were equal. Within Qaraqosh, there were hierarchies: Christians, historically, had been wealthier than Muslims and better educated. The invasion had temporarily upended things by expelling much of the town’s upper class, but as Christians returned, the old social order reasserted itself. “But on the field, because everyone had to play the same amount, all the players were the same,” said Mousa. “There weren’t power differentials.” That meant that old rivalries and grudges—social identities that put one group above another—were put aside, at least for the duration of a game.
The final reason this experiment worked is the same reason a Who Are We? conversation, if it goes well, succeeds: It allowed the players to form new in-groups, to establish social identities they had in common. And those in-groups were powerful because they built on identities that players already possessed. It might seem surprising, to an outsider, that Muslim and Christian players would bond so quickly. But it didn’t wholly shock Mousa because she wasn’t asking them to redefine themselves. She was simply making an identity they already carried—soccer teammates—more salient, and as a result their religious identities were a little less loud.
These kinds of environmental shifts point to what is needed for a successful Who Are We? conversation:
First, try to draw out your conversational partners’ multiple identities. It’s important to remind everyone that we all contain multitudes; none of us is one-dimensional. Acknowledging those complexities during a conversation helps disrupt the stereotypes within our heads.
