Outright Bias versus Unseen Pressures

As a professor of social psychology, Claude Steele’s studies focus on how what goes on inside of a person’s mind is affected by what is going on around them. This means that he spends a lot of time looking at personal perception in different groups of people. He is not just interested in how people respond to obvious, surface level interactions, but delves deeper into how people react to subtle social cues. A lot of Steele’s work focuses on racial tensions and racial inequities. Very little of Steele’s work focuses on people who appear outright racist, openly discriminate, or use slurs. Instead, Steele looks at greater societal forces that can lead to inequities, such as those that push people into mostly making friends with other people of their own race. He looks at the anxiety a student feels when they...