Claude Steele

They're white guys.

They're going to talk to either two black guys or two other white guys about either love and relationships or racial profiling.

Then the experimenter says, I'm going to go down the hall and get your conversation partners.

And while I'm gone, would you arrange these three chairs for the conversation?

Would you just pull them together for the conversation?

And that's kind of what we're interested in.

depending on the condition of the experiment that they're in, how do they arrange those chairs?

And you wouldn't be surprised to learn that when they're going to talk to two white guys about either topic or two black guys about love and relationships, they put the three chairs very close together.

But when they're going to talk to two black guys about racial profiling, there's a tension in the room.

There's churn going on.

I don't want to say something here that would, you know, get me seen as racist or something.

So they distance themselves in that condition.

So how do you overcome that?

That is really the central question of this work.

And we tried a number of things.

We tried some of the wisdoms that come out of diversity training.

That didn't really work very well.

Sometimes it even backfires.

But eventually we found something very simple that worked.

And that's kind of what launched our thinking in this direction.