Claude Mason Steele (born January 1, 1946) is a social psychologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, where he is the I. James Quillen Endowed Dean, emeritus at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, and Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, emeritus.
Formerly he was the executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley. He also served as the 21st provost of Columbia University for two years. Before that, he had been a professor of psychology at various institutions for almost 40 years.
He is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to minority student academic performance.Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African-Americans. ‘’Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62’’(1), 26-37. His earlier work dealt with research on the self (like self-image and self-affirmation)Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J., & Lynch, M. (1993). Self-image resilience and dissonance: The role of affirmational resources. ‘’Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64,’’:885-896.Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), ‘’Advances in Experimental Social Psychology’’ (Vol. 21, pp. 261-302). San Diego, California: Academic Press. as well as the role of self-regulation in addictive behaviors.Steele, C. M. & Josephs, R. A. (1990). Alcohol myopia: Its prized and dangerous effects. ‘’American Psychologist, 45’’(8): 921-933.
In 2010, he released his book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, summarizing years of research on stereotype threat and the underperformance of minority students in higher education.Steele, C. M. (2010). ‘’Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us’’. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. In 2026, he released a second book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, which examines the anxiety people experience in diverse, high-stakes situations.
Education and early life Steele was born on January 1, 1946, to parents Ruth (a white social worker) and Shelby (an African-American truck driver) in Chicago, Illinois. Claude recalls his family, including his twin brother Shelby Steele and two other siblings, as being deeply interested in social issues and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. Steele remembers his father taking him and his brother to marches and rallies whenever possible.Strumolo, A. L. (1997). Shelby Steele. Contemporary Black Biography. Encyclopedia.com His father pushed him to achieve security in the context of securing employment, but Claude construed achievement as success in education. He enrolled at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, where he earned a B.A. in psychology in 1967.
At Hiram College, Steele's passion for reading novels led to an interest in how the individual faces the social world. After being fully immersed in the Civil Rights Movement and the issues of racial equality, rights, and the nature of prejudice as a child, Steele formed a desire to study the topics in a scientific manner. He was especially keen to discover their effects on social relationships and quality of life.Krapp, K. M. (1999). Notable black American scientists. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research. Steele was inspired by African-American social psychologist Kenneth Clark's TV appearance discussing the psychological implications of the 1964 race riots in Harlem, New York City, which led to doing behavioral research. Steele conducted early experimental research at Hiram College in physiological psychology (looking at behavioral motives in Siamese fighting fish) and social psychology (studying how African-American dialect among kids maintains ethnic/racial identity), where he worked under the mentorship of social psychologist, Ralph Cebulla.
In graduate school, he studied social psychology, earning an M.A. in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 1971 at Ohio State University, with a minor in statistical psychology. His dissertation work, with faculty adviser Tom Ostrom at Ohio State, focused on attitude measurement and attitude change.
Career After receiving his PhD, Steele got his first job as an assistant professor of psychology for two years at the University of Utah. He then moved to the University of Washington for 14 years and received tenure in 1985.
In 1987, he moved to the University of Michigan, where he was a professor of psychology for four years. During the last two years, he simultaneously held the position of research scientist at Michigan's Institute for Social Research.
In 1991, he moved to Stanford University, where he was a professor of psychology for eighteen years, receiving the title of Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences in 1997. At Stanford, he also served as chair of the Department of Psychology (1997–2000), director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (2002–2005), and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2005–2009), among various other positions.
In 2009, he left Stanford to become the 21st provost and chief academic officer at Columbia University for two years. He was responsible for faculty appointments, tenure recommendations, and overseeing financial planning and budgeting.
In 2011, he left Columbia and returned to Stanford, where he served as the I. James Quillen Dean for the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. In March 2014, he became the executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California, Berkeley. He stepped down in April 2016 citing family reasons, shortly after a scandal erupted regarding the university's alleged disregard of sexual harassment.
Research Throughout his academic career, his work fell into three main domains of research under the broad subject area of social psychology: stereotype threat, self-affirmation, and addictive behaviors. Although separate and distinct, the three lines of research are linked by their shared focus on self-evaluation and how people cope with threats to their self-image and self-identities.
Addictive behaviors Although many people primarily associate Steele with his significant contributions in the development of stereotype threat research, the 14 years of his post-doctoral academic career that he spent at the University of Washington were focused on addictive behaviors and the social psychology behind alcohol use and addiction. He was interested in the role of alcohol and drug use in self-regulation processes and social behavior. Among his major findings was that alcohol myopia, the cognitive impairment by alcohol use, reduces cognitive dissonance,Steele, C. M., Southwick, L. L., & Critchlow, B. (1981). Dissonance and alcohol: Drinking your troubles away. ‘‘Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41’’(5): 831-846. leads to more extreme social responses,Steele, C. M., & Southwick, L. (1985). Alcohol and social behavior I: The psychology of drunken excess. ‘’Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48’’(1): 18-34. increases helping behavior,Steele, C. M., Critchlow, B., & Liu, T. J. (1985). Alcohol and social behavior II: The helpful drunkard. ‘’Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48’’(1): 35-46. reduces anxiety when it is combined with a distracting activity,Steele, C. M. & Josephs, R. A. (1988). Drinking your troubles away II: An attention-allocation model of alcohol’s effect on psychological stress. ‘’Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97’’(2): 196-205. and enhances important self-evaluations.
Self-affirmation While studying the effects of alcohol use on social behavior, Steele was formulating a theory about the effects of self-affirmation. Developed in the 1980s, self-affirmational processes referred to the ability to reduce threats to self-image by stepping back and affirming a value that is important to self-concept.
Steele often uses the example of smokers who are told that smoking will lead to significant negative health outcomes. The perception that they may be evaluated negatively by their willingness to engage in negative behaviors threatens their self-image. However, affirming a value in a domain completely unrelated to smoking but important to one's self-concept: joining a valued cause, or accomplishing more at work, will counter the negative effects of the self-image threat and re-establish self-integrity.
Self-affirmation theory was originally formulated as an alternative motivational explanation for cognitive dissonance theory that threats to the self led to a change in attitudes rather than psychologically inconsistent ideas, and self-affirmational strategies can reduce dissonance as effectively as attitude change.Steele, C. M. & Liu, T. J. (1983). Dissonance processes as self-affirmation. ‘’Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45’’(1): 5-19.
His research on self-affirmation and its effects demonstrated the power of self-affirmation to reduce biased attitudes,Cohen, G. L., Aronson, J., & Steele, C. M. (2000). When beliefs yield to evidence: Reducing biased evaluation by affirming the self. ‘’Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26’’(9): 1151-1164. lead to positive health behaviors,Sherman, D. A. K., Nelson, L. D., & Steele, C. M. (2000). Do messages about health risks threaten the self? Increasing the acceptance of threatening health messages via self-affirmation. ‘’Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26’’(9):1046-1058. and even improve the academic performance of minority students.Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., & Master, A. (2006). . ‘’Science, 313’’(5791): 1307-1310.
Stereotype threat Steele is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to explain real-world problems such as the underperformance of female students in mathematics and science classesSpencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. (1999). Stereotype threat and women's math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35: 4-28. as well as Black students in academic contexts. Steele first began to explore the issues surrounding stereotype threat at the University of Michigan, when his membership on a university committee called for him to tackle the problem of academic underachievement of minority students at the university. He discovered that the dropout rate for Black students was much higher than for their white peers even though they were good students and had received excellent SAT scores. That led him to form a hypothesis involving stereotype threat.Lesinski, J. (1997). Claude Mason Steele. Contemporary Black Biography. Encyclopedia.com.
Stereotype threat refers to the threat felt in particular situations in which stereotypes relevant to one's collective identity exist, and the mere knowledge of the stereotypes can be distracting enough to negatively affect performance in a domain related to the stereotype.
Steele has demonstrated the far-reaching implications of stereotype threat by showing that it is more likely to undermine the performance of individuals highly invested in the domain being threatenedAronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When White men can't do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. ‘’Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35’’: 29-46. and that stereotype threat can even lead to Black people having significant negative health outcomes.Blascovich, J., Spencer, S. J., Quinn, D. M., & Steele, C. M. (2001). African Americans and high blood pressure: The role of stereotype threat. ‘’Psychological Science, 13”(3): 225-229.
The theories of stereotype threat can be applied for better understanding group differences in performance not only in intellectual situations but also in athletics.