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Okay, good afternoon it’s a real pleasure to be here today and have this opportunity to talk to you. My name is Richard Van Camp and I’m a teacher here at the language centre, as you may know. And in my capacity as a language teacher, I have opportunities on nearly daily basis to discuss various scholarly issues with students of the departments of Psychology and Sociology as well as the Faculty of Sport Science. And I’m particularly interested in where the concerns of each of these different diciplines intercept. Hence the topic today. Before I get to the topic though I would also like to give credit where it is due, one of the important figures in this area is Claude Steele of the University of Stanford and I’m indebted to him, as you will see later in this presentation. Okay, so what is the problem, so to speak, or the reaseach question…well it is this:
“Do stereotypes act detrimentally, or as a stumbling block so to say, to achievement on the sporting field where there may be societal expectations about the identity of an elite athlete in that particular sport?”
So to give you a picture of what I am talking about, in an American context, one can point to the scarcity of African-Americans in the NHL, or in contrast, the disproportionate number of African-Americans who are playing in the NBA, as examples informing our expectations about what a hockey player or a basketball player should look like.
Hence the catchy title of my presentation: Why white men can’t jump: an argument for the role of stereotype threat.
It is hard to say where this phrase first hardened into accepted cultural knowledge, a sort of in-joke we can all chuckle at.
It may be that this view of the quote unquote natural athlete has is roots in slavery. In fact Social Darwinists have argued that African Americans are indeed actually better natural athletes because slavery bred them to be so. This argument is now widely discounted so I’m not going to refute it here. My dating of this stereotype of the natural athlete is from a 1992 movie White men can’t jump, I assume some of you have seen this movie.
It did fairly well at the box office. It was your run- of- the- mill Hollywood buddy flic about a black guy and a white guy who dislike each other very much but by the end of the movie they have become best buddies- kind of a typical plot. It is not a cinematic masterpiece but I am interested in how the plot plays on this common stereotype. The title, as I mentioned already is a sort of in-joke in America, probably other places as well, and it comes from the idea that this player, white player, who is kind of a typical goofy white guy is able to bet on street basketball games and hustle other black players out of their money because it turns out he’s pretty good. So the expectation is that he wouldn’t be good at basketball because he’s a white guy. Okay, so it seems that the stereotype of a white man not being physically talented in basketball has hardened into such a strong stereotype in this culture, perhaps other cultures as well, that is it fine to joke about in a Hollywood movie title. As I am sure you will agree not all stereotypes can be so freely used in a movie title, you might think what about Women can’t count, or worse still Finns can’t talk. I can also admit that around this time, speaking of basketball, that I was a basketball player when this movie was released. And I have to say that I often found myself contending with this image this possibility, wondering if I should stick to another sport because I’m a goofy white guy who can’t jump
Ok, but that was all by way of introduction…
Okay let me now outline how I’m going to proceed from here: First, I’m going to shift gears a little bit and try to sketch out some of the concepts. I am going to be borrowing again from Claude Steele, particularly the concepts of stereotype threat and disidentification.
Second, l’m going to take a stab at summarizing some of the research that Claude Steele and his colleagues have done, particularly with regard to women in mathematics. It may seem to you I am going off on a little bit of a tangent because talking now about academic achievement not athletic achievement, nevetheless, I think that Claude Steele’s works serves as a sort of a benchmark for research in this area. Okay, it may also, however, be valid to point out now that there are some important differences as well between academic and athletic domains. But I’m going to hold off on this and perhaps in the end of this presentation we can discuss some of these differences in detail.
And then in the third part of my presentation, I want to highlight some studies done on stereotype threat in the athletic domain particularly by Jeff Stone at the University of Arizona. And, finally, I am going to conclude by revisiting the question posed in the beginning and discuss how stereotype threat fits into the myriad of other explanations for success or failure of certain groups in the sporting arena.
Okay, let’s get going. So the concepts, first off, stereotype threat simply refers to being in any situation any domain in which a stereotype about a group to which you belong might be relevant. This does not mean that the stereotype has to be there. That is nobody has to have said something in particular. You simply as the person of that group have to think that it’s a possibility.
Indeed, it suggests to me that even talented athletes are psychologically vulnerable and that seemingly harmless “white men can’t jump” sort of jokes, uttered in the right context, at the right time, may do more harm than we realize. If you allow me to stretch this out, one may ask: how many talented kids drop out sports? That is the disidentified, to use Steele’s term, when they face the prospect of these threats again and again.
Moreover, we might ask what is the barrier that this stereotype presents to ellite level athletes. Let’s take runners, long- distance runners, in the Finnish context when they come up against East-Africans, Kenyans and Ethiopians. Clearly there is a stereotype there. How does this affect them in a competitive situation? To summarize the problem here, because this really is a challenging psychological situation: on one hand, as humans, we don’t want to be believe we are stereotyped. We want to believe that actually we sort of have the power in every situation to determine the outcomes. On the other hand, part of our psychology -perhaps it’s subconscious- is constantly searching for clues that we may be stereotyped. Okay, it’s a daunting situation.
Now, if I can move towards a conclusion, it does pay to be cautious about answering these questions when talking about athletic situations. That’s because there is a variety of influences that may come into play in particular in sporting context. You can think about living in high altitude, having access to equipment, such as a skiier, and there are also physiological ones: there is no denying in the fact that in basketball it helps to be tall.
Okay, finally in conclusion I would like to leave off with a little practical advice. Baker and Horton, in an occasional piece written in 2002 to make the following suggestions. I must say that this is based mostly on speculation because as we know there hasn’t been that much research done in this domain.
First, it must be clear when developing athletes that athletes must be told that racial dominance in a sport is not a consistent cause, that is, it is not a real obstacle to success. It may be a pattern, but that doesn’t mean that it determines whether you can be an athlete in that sport. So it’s been found it’s very important just to aknowledge that and to say that to people, just as you should tell a woman that it is possible that she can succeed in mathematics.
Secondly, it is very important to notice that the problem, that this is about social mistrust more than it’s about your own self-doubt. So that means that an athlete may doubt his or her performance because of things said by coaches, teammates or even potentially an audience. Off hand comments or jokes, again “white men can’t jump”, before or during a practice or competition may actually serve to break trust and to undermine a performance. Okay, so that concludes my presentation and I would like to invite questions and comments at this point.