 Thank you so much for coming. My name is Danielle Wood. I'm one faculty here at the Media Lab. I lead a research group called Space Enabled. Our work is to advance justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space. And part of what we think about with justice is continuing to ask how people of all backgrounds, of all genders and ethnicities and racial and national backgrounds, can be involved with advancing how we use technology to make the world better. Please come. We have plenty of seats. Come find a few seats in the front. And there's still a few spots available for you. So please don't stand. Today we are having an ongoing dialogue that is continuing really a wonderful theme that's been happening throughout this academic year at MIT. I think many of you have followed the dialogue spurred by the Slavery at MIT Project. How many of you have followed that discussion? To know we of course have uncovered a particular historical evidence adding to our knowledge that MIT is not somehow separate from the slave community but really directly apart because the founder of MIT owns slaves. We were also privileged a few weeks ago to host here, right in this room, Dr. Ibram Kendi, professor of American University, who is the author of a book called Stamped from the Beginning. The subtitle reads the definitive history of racist ideas in America. We were privileged to have this discussion with Dr. Kendi understanding that racist ideas are not produced based on ignorance or people who just don't understand those who are different from them but rather they are consciously produced ideas by those with more economic and political power who are choosing to maintain their power by creating ideas that make another race seem less inferior or in some way less value than others. That helps us give a foundation to see that so many of the key aspects of our culture and our policies and our society are grounded in racist ideas but we need not fret because now we have the chance to consciously generate anti-racist ideas. So here at the Media Lab we are practicing an ongoing process that will take years to become anti-racist and that's part of this dialogue we are also going to ask what can we do as faculty and as students, as staff, as members of the community to make everyone feel comfortable. There's a few seats right up front for the brave if you're willing, come on up. It's possible to respond to what we know are often negative stereotypes about either racial groups, about women, about other kinds of categories. There's also a few seats on the side. It's possible to respond by consciously making a choice to help somebody who may be experiencing a negative stereotype feel more comfortable and this is one of the key aspects of our speakers work today. So I thank you all for joining. I'm so pleased to see that the kind turnout and what we have is an opportunity to continue to ask how do we work to make our environment both more anti-racist and also more welcoming of a diverse community and it's work that all of us must undertake together. And with that I'm so pleased to make an introduction to our speaker, Professor Claude Steele. He works currently as a professor of psychology at Stanford University but he has many years of experience at several elite universities that you may have heard of such as Berkeley and Michigan and we're partly thankful to have him here because he also regularly dialogues with leaders in universities as they think about how to make their own environment more welcoming and how to overcome what we've known as stereotype threat which you'll hear about today. Some of his research has particularly shown that some of the challenges facing both minorities and women in science and technology fields can directly be attributed to this concept of stereotype threat meaning as people like me who are small in number in our group in society such as myself as a professor here as one of the only African American women here in this environment. We are under the challenge of having to constantly feel like we have to approve that we are beating negative stereotypes but it's not possible to disprove these stereotypes because they are just lingering kind of ghosts that are out there and impossible to defeat. But what is possible is for leaders and for community members to make people feel more comfortable and welcome in an environment despite these stereotypes. Professor Steele is well known for doing academic research on this topic but also for applying it as a leader and administrator in several universities. He's also done work in areas of other research including a topic called self-affirmation theory and he'll be discussing both his research as well as related research by other colleagues and the applications he sees both for campuses and beyond today. I want to add that he's really been encouraging to us as the leadership here in the media lab. I really want to give credit to Joi Ito for the original idea to invite him and to say thank you for your willingness to dialogue with us as we explore these issues further. I recommend to you to check out the book called Whistling Vivaldi which is one summary of some of the key research on this topic of stereotype threat and I found it personally as I read it both challenging sometimes alarming and other times very empowering. I say challenging first because in a way it helped me recognize challenges I would have been facing but I was not previously conscious of. Times when I might have been feeling pressure but not actually aware of it or trying to address it. This gives me a sense of empowerment but it also gives me a sense of caution that is part of taking care of myself as a professional. I have to ask how can I get support so that I can overcome the negative impacts of stereotypes as well. So I think you guys will also feel that similar kind of empowerment in hearing the talk today. So let me invite up Professor Steele. I'm so grateful to have you. Please join me and just to give a sense of what's going to happen next he will speak about the next half hour or so and share on both his research and thoughts. I'll come back and ask you a few moderated questions and we'll have a dialogue and there'll be time for all of you to ask questions as well. We'll pass the mic around for our closing few minutes. So please plan your questions and we look forward to discussion with all of you. Thank you. Thank you for that very good introduction. It's a real pleasure to join you and to be part of the institution's consideration of these issues. It's an honor and a privilege and I'm excited to be here. And people tell me that the weather is always like this here in Boston. So how could I go wrong? Well, I'd like to talk about a basic problem which has been occupying me recently. I suppose in the last year or so. How do you have a successfully diverse community? How do you do that? It's interesting how that problem hasn't been a real focus. At least I don't find many people thinking about that directly. So that is what I'd like to pick up. By community I mean all, you know, classrooms, graduate programs, universities, schools, corporate cultures, manageable places where we might have some chance to, I guess I can use the word engineer here without any worry. So I'm going to because I think that's the right way to think about it. How can you engineer these communities so that they work well and by successful? I mean that they are places where everybody feels like they can thrive and take advantage of the opportunities that are there and benefit from the culture of the community. Unencumbered by identity and stereotypes about those identities. How can you put together such a community? I'm going to try to answer three questions about that. The first one, why it's important to do that, comes from my research, longstanding now, 25, almost 30 years on stereotype threat and social identity threat more generally. I think it is from that research that I and my colleagues have inched our way into the idea that this question is now especially important and that there may be challenges that we haven't been full, that our ethos, our moral ethos in the United States hasn't fully acknowledged and enabled us to get to work on. So I want to pick up that question of why I think diverse communities, successful diverse communities are important. Now then I'm going to go out on a limb and propose what I think is needed to make one work. So I may, if you had me back in six months, it may be slightly different, but I'm going to try to make a concrete proposal and then having done that, I'm going to try to come up with how. And that really does come from our years of research on this. Are there things that are useful? These are not going to be highly specific, but they're going to be pretty specific principles that I think might be useful in inching us toward a successfully diverse community. So in my mind, there are two sections to the talk. One is a kind of review of stereotype threat and social identity threat, what that means and what that's about, a little bit of that. And then into this question of, okay, now how do you go from there to this notion of a successfully diverse community? So I'll begin with the stereotype threat work. It began trying to solve a very practical problem which is known in a psychometric literature as underperformance. That is when members of a group whose abilities are negatively stereotyped in the broader society, I began working on the experience of African Americans in college, also women in STEM fields. And when you have a group whose abilities are negatively stereotyped in that way and you match them for their credentials, for their test scores, their grades, their evidence of their abilities in the field, when you match them, you still get going forward in schooling a different level of performance, an underperformance. The group whose abilities are negatively stereotyped don't do quite as well as other people whose abilities are not stereotyped even though they have exactly precisely the same kind of preparation. And that was the puzzle for me that got me really interested in this whole line of research. I thought up to that time, I think as many people do, that if you got the groups equally prepared, you would get equal outcomes. Why on earth would you not get equal outcomes at that point? But you don't. It's still the case that this underperformance phenomenon is lawful in American society. It is absolutely lawful. I'm sure you can find it in your own classes if you do that exercise of lining up students' performance as a function of the test scores and like that they have coming into the university. So after wandering for some years, five or so, the concept of stereotype threat was born as at least a partial account of this underperformance phenomenon. That's where it came from, this notion of stereotype threat. It was not divined out of the mist or something. It really was in struggling with trying to understand this particular phenomenon that it came into existence. It is a very simple process. I think people experience stereotype threat of one form or another on a daily basis. It is anytime you're in a situation or you're doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities, your age, your race, your sex, your sexual orientation, your region of the country, your social class, anytime you're doing something or you're in a situation where a negative stereotype about one of those identities is relevant, you know at some level that you could be judged or treated in terms of that stereotype. And if what you're doing is very important to you, then the prospect of being judged and treated that way can be upsetting and it can interfere with your functioning right there in the immediate situation. And over time it can affect your willingness to go down a whole path of life, a whole career path of life, for example, because you feel that discomfort in that path of life and it just seems like maybe I should pick another path of life where I feel a little more comfortable. Maybe I should pick another region of the country where I feel a little more comfortable. Maybe I should pick another college where I feel a little more comfortable or a different corporation or you can begin to see this pressure which seems duphic as a social psychological pressure, the prospect of being seen in terms of a negative stereotype, can have pretty profound effects on the experience we have in our lives and in the decision-making, important decision-waking we make in our lives. I always point out, I did this in the book that describes this research, my father was born in 1900 and his father was, I'm not saying this for effect but it's just the way, his father was a slave. So he would look at something like the construct of stereotype threat and I can imagine hardly wanting, he would be hard for him to take it seriously. He would, how can you be upset about some kind of stereotype when we have gotten through this and that and this and now you're complaining about it. He'd have that impatience with it, I'm sure. He never lived long enough to hear about this construct or react to it that way but I think there is just a part of all of this including myself that wonders if something as vaporous as a stereotype pressure can have these kinds of effects on people's experience but there is, you have to keep in mind, you know, stereotype threat is a cousin of us worrying about being negatively judged or negatively treated by anybody and you can just think of people who might think badly of you in some way that's important to you, how upsetting that could be. It's just that in the case of a stereotype you know that everybody in your environment knows the stereotype and could treat you that way. We all know the stereotypes of all the groups. We can all take out an envelope and write down the major stereotypes of all the groups and so if you're in this society you know that the, you know that people know the stereotypes and when they're relevant you know that you could be judged in terms of them and it's critical to point out that it's when the, the activity is important to you that this pressure is really a powerful, can be a really powerful pressure. Well there are now studies that approach I think by last count something like 500 different experiments examining one form of stereotype threat or another form. I'll tell you just to illustrate the concept and the nature of the research. The very first one we did was with women in math and what we did was to get women and math sophomores and juniors at the University of Michigan who were really, really, really good at math. They had very high entry level SAT scores. They'd taken at least two calculus courses, gotten at least B plus and no calculus courses and told us that math was very important to their personal goals, their professional ambitions and the like and we matched them with the men so that the men had exactly the same credentials and then we had them take a test, a half hour section of the graduate record exam, you take if you're a math major, a really hard math test, we had them take that test alone in a room and our idea was that if stereotype threat is a is a factor this will be a different experience for a woman than it would be for a man. For a man the frustration this test is causing could cause all kinds of self-doubts like maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was at math that I really picked the right make the right career choice or it could cause that and that could interfere with their performance but for women there would be all of those pressures but the additional pressure that maybe this frustration is a signal that I'm confirming this stereotype about women's lack of ability in quantitative areas or that I will be seen it will be taken as evidence by others that I lack this ability because I'm a woman and that extra pressure might cause an underperformance here even though you have women and men carefully match for their abilities with that extra pressure women's performance might go down in comparison to those men and it did 15 15 points that you think of think of an IQ points of essentially a standard deviation it went down it's important to point out that that alone is not evidence for stereotype threat in fact as I also talk about in the in the book our colleagues were quick to point out that that finding could be taken as evidence in behalf of the stereotype that you're just showing that there is a gender difference in math performance when you give a very difficult test that's where it shows up so this put a lot of attention in in our lab like I have to say I talk about this in the in the in the book how difficult this period was but you're a scientist you gotta gotta go ahead so we needed to come up with a way of doing the experiment over again but this time taking a stereotype threat out of the situation and if it was a stereotype threat that was repressing women's performance and you took it out their performance should go up to match that of equally skilled men so after a long time we found a very simple way of doing that which is to just say to all participants men and women alike as they went in to take the test alone in a room by themselves that you quote may have heard that men and women that men excuse me you may have heard that women don't do as well as as men on difficult standardized math test you might have heard that but that's not true for the test you're taking today the test you're taking today is a test on which women always do as well as men so all of a sudden with that sentence you've taken out the extra pressure of the stereotype in that situation because you they're taking now a test on which nothing about being a woman is is relevant here women always do as well as men on this this this test it leaves in place the other pressures it's important to point out that you're frustrated maybe you're not as good at math as you thought you would but it's not because you were a woman that you're not as good at math as you thought you were because this test can't show that when we did that women's performance went up to match that of equally skilled men and that was one of the biggest days certainly in the history of this research program if not my life it was extremely heartening to see that carefully done we carefully set this up we replicated it multiple times before we ever submitted it we submitted anyway I'll go on about that later and then we immediately did the I left Michigan and went to Stanford in the early 90s and we did this with race I'll tell you another experiment that I like better than the ones we did because there's acuteness to it that makes it a better story to tell but black and white college students are given an IQ test the Ravens progressive matrices IQ test is a nonverbal IQ test each item is a big square with a pattern on it five little squares with patterns on them and you just have to pick which of the little squares has the same pattern as the big square and it starts out easy and then it gets frustrating difficult and it's that point it's the frustration here that's very critical because that's what makes the stereotype about your group relevant to interpreting the experience you're having in the immediate situation it brings the stereotype online you might not be thinking about it other than that but when frustration is there it makes it relevant so sure enough you you you bring you give the the test and black students score 15 points lower than white students which is interestingly the difference between whites and blacks IQ scores in the general population 15 points but here's the nice part why I like telling you so you you don't have to get rid of the stereotype threat we could represent this non-verbal IQ test as not an IQ test at all but just as a puzzle that we're working on we're we're in a this is a psychology laboratory we're looking at different puzzles and how people enjoy them and so forth and so we want you to work on this puzzle and have this you know we you know give it all you've got but have fun so now it is not a an activity that could confirm or be seen to confirm this reputation that your group has out there in the stereotype that is cut off it's not the stereotype is your relevant because it's got nothing to do with that and in that kind of situation you know frustration is is a is fun you do puzzles because you like the fun you like the frustration you're going to beat this thing and when you do that the difference between blacks and whites and IQ goes away no difference so by this time we were getting some confidence that this could that this stereotype threat phenomenon could actually have some impact on intellectual performance we started doing all kinds of things we did the the women in math study in Poland and because we had been told that in Poland in STEM fields there was a much much higher female participation rate than there was in the United States and that therefore there wouldn't be a strong evidential basis for this gender stereotype about math ability there and this this stereotype is weaker in that society then you shouldn't get stereotype threat effects there and we didn't oh tiny little ones so this began to clarify the the the process we're talking about a situational pressure that in that reflects the stereotypes of of this particular society this is not it's important to stress because the dominant story social science story of of psychological story for how stereotypes affect people over the 20th century is a stereotype the following story the stereotype you grow up in this society you hear the stereotype over and over again it's hammered hammered hammered in to quote Gordon Allport and then then pretty soon when you're in situations where the abilities that are stereotyped are relevant you self-fulfill the stereotype it's a person seen as a personality thing it's something in you this belief in the stereotype that you carry from one situation to the next and that's how stereotypes affect people they're taken in and whether they're consciously believed or unconsciously believed who cares they're believed and they drive behavior towards self-fulfillment when they're relevant that's the that interestingly W. E. B. Du Bois invented that that theory in in the late 19th century Freud is the guy that really used it to explain the experience of Jews and women and other groups Gordon Allport that was the story this is a different story this is a story that says the threat is situational that what I'm what is affecting me is not my belief in the stereotype what's affecting me is my assessment that I'm in a situation where I could be judged in terms of that stereotype and so I might behave in I might be affected by in one situation maybe talking to one person I might turn 45 degrees and talk to somebody who I don't feel at all like they're ever going to stereotype me in that way and feel no stereotype threat it's it's it's a situational pressure of that sort so you get situational variation in the in the nature of the of the of the effect and that is really a good thing because that is probably more remediable a problem a diagnosis of the problem then the former diagnosis would be how does it affect performance I think think think multitasking and I think all of us have had this this kind of an experience where you're doing two things at once you're trying to do a task that's right in front of you and you're trying to worry about whether you're being seen in terms of the stereotype I've been using recently the the analogy of of it's like living with a snake in the house you've been told there's a snake in the house this actually happened to me so I I have some empathy with this analogy I know what this is like uh my son so I'd come in he never so I'd go out for weeks we never so I'd go out we never found it uh so for a long time you know you you're doing you're kind of chopping your onions for dinner and uh what is that and uh I I think that's what it's like you're kind of you know you could be seen in terms of say you don't know if you are though and so you're kind of reading cute part of your cognitive resources are allocated to reading cues in a situation as to whether you are in fact and you're talking to other people who might be in the same situation you're sorting through what what what does this mean and how come he didn't turn return my email is that interpretable and so it's important to understand the one of the dominant modes this drives us into is vigilance about how the identity is being seen and it doesn't require any particular uh knowledge other than just the fact that we're members of this society we know the stereotypes we know where they're relevant we know we could be judged in terms of it and there it is there's the there's the problem there's the challenge um okay how does it get in just drifting into the uh question of a diverse uh community uh it that asking myself that question pushed me more toward being an amateur uh social sociologist i guess because uh you you start you you start you have to think about well what is a arousing this threat in our in our lives on a daily basis what features are doing it is it is this threat coming from from my understanding that there are prejudice people in the environment who might treat me that way is that is that where it's coming from and if i could get rid of that prejudice i wouldn't have this worry at all that's one uh idea but um the more you think the more you see that the threat has much much broader origins than that um here's a list just the way our society is organized around the identity is enough to keep this question uh alive i start the book talking about my experience in the third grade uh coming home from school in the last day of school and and it's in chicago segregated chicago we're all black we're coming home we're not even anyway we're all coming home together and one kid in the group says i'm gonna go swimming every day in this summer i'm gonna do this and every everybody else in the group knew better than that no you're not uh they don't let us go to that pool except on a wednesday afternoons so um uh he's what we all kind of are dumbfounded we don't know really what to make of this who is who are we who are they who has the power what what sense does this make what is it about us you don't you don't know what you just know that this society is organized around that identity and that whether you want to or not you're gonna have to deal with that organization so signs of that organization alone are enough to raise the possibility that you could be seen and treated in terms of that stereotypes about that uh identity you think about the history of the united states uh as as as professor kindi i guess talked about a few weeks ago uh here uh our society's been right from the beginning as the old world met the new world has been using identity to organize the assignment of advantage and disadvantage in society that's one way to to put it right from the beginning uh who's in the social contract who's not in the social contract so you have native americans put on reservations you have huge genocides of various sorts uh with african-americans you have slavery and so on there have always been to our credit resistances so might count the civil war as a resistance like that certainly the civil rights movement but uh nonetheless our our society has been deeply organized around this identity and and not in a positive way and it continues to be the case uh i was talking earlier about having heard civil several panels of civil rights lawyers uh at the commemoration of martin Luther king's assassination describing how in one walk of life after the next there are all of these laws principles practices traditions that discriminate uh think about real estate uh covenants predatory lendings uh redlining uh you know uh think about school financing where does the money go where do the good teachers go in a public school system uh think about access to health care uh it it goes on and on uh as as you can imagine if you take each walk of life you can are uh see these organizations and so indications that that is in play can keep an individual in a situation where those stereotypes are relevant on guard and basically mistrusting the benevolence or whatever of the larger society of the diverse community you're trying to have how we represent history that's certainly been a much talked about in in uh recent years uh how do we valorize who do we valorize in history apparently this debate was started at mit over uh concerns uh or recognition or an understanding of of of that so how do we handle it who do we what what do we do um the composition of a setting who's who in the environment is another signal that can be read as to how much an environment is friendly how likely one is to be stereotyped uh in terms of it I think I think ideologies especially uh uh ideologies about ability when you think about academic settings but also when you think about corporate settings and the like uh is is uh is uh the critical abilities here are those things genetically or god-givenly determined uh and are fixed and some people have them and some people don't have them is that the way we think about ability or do you think about ability as as something that can be expanded now incrementally with deliberate practice over time do you think do you think uh god-given or do you think the 10 000 hour rule that's that's an ideological choice there the science is not going to answer that question at this point it it does not support uh certainly the genetic story that's just way beyond our the ability of science at this point to to talk about but we have a strong ideology about and we organize our schools around that for example just think about tracking uh as an example well when you put that together with a stereotype that my groups doesn't have this critical ability and then i spark to experience a little frustration in this domain it may just be a simple signal that i don't belong here you add those things uh uh together so i want to conclude from that cursory view of of my amateur uh episode as an amateur uh sociologist that uh i think that we're missing a fundamental challenge or at least we haven't wanted to make be conscious about it maybe we do understand it at a certain level but but bringing people bringing people into a diverse setting together uh it isn't just bringing people of different colors or something it's bringing people who have had very different experiences in this society together in a common community and that's what the challenge is and at and at base i think the challenge is one of trust and that is what is made difficult by uh trying to create a modern diverse community that's the challenge that it's its members has is is creating a sense of trust in that in that community when for all of these reasons historical and ongoing people have perfectly rational reason not to trust this or to have a very short uh patience for for mistrust in in a situation and that that is uh something that if we are going to achieve this level of diversity that i think we all want at some level we may have to address we may have to figure out uh ways of of of creating that we have had i'm thinking of schools now um most of our pedagogy was developed we inherited from an era when we were trying to educate educate a pretty homogeneous community of people largely white males of a certain class and our pedagogical traditions strategies how do you mentor people what the nature of curriculum how does talent show itself how all of these assumptions that make up a pedagogy come from uh an era when social uh diversity was not really a much of a factor a little bit but certainly not like what we're talking uh today so uh do those same assumptions practices behaviors in the like work when you're trying to bring together people who had these very different uh experiences in this uh in this society that's that's a i think the the the basic question i and i i the i i don't think they do in many instances i i think some things you just take tough tough love you know you're not going to trust somebody who treats you that way if you come from a certain background it just isn't going to work that kind of direct uh feedback is going to be troubling so we have to i think uh in moving forward come up with ways that builds trust as a part of our pedagogical uh effort and this is really important because the society is rapidly becoming more diverse in 1970 81 percent of the population was white uh today it's about 65 64 percent by 2040 it's going to be less than 50 by 2050 it'll be a lot less than 50 percent things are things are moving quickly we we have to be able to uh develop pedagogies and institutions and communities that really do function well with a diversity of people people coming from from very different backgrounds um to function okay how then do we do it five minutes okay you've got the right format for this so i do want to hurry through these things i'll do it in a kind of listy way but we can explore things as as questions come up the first thing is i think we have to get comfortable talking about identity for i think for all the reasons i'm i i've kind of mentioned it's difficult for americans to feel comfortable with identity we would just live just gave you talk to the faculty senate at stanford a couple weeks ago i can't tell you how many people said why can't why can't the students just leave their identities at the door this this is biochemistry what the hell's i got to do with their identities and um you know i wish that were true and i i remember the optimism uh like that in the 1960s when first when things in the united states first got racially more integrated with the desegregation decision of the supreme court the civil rights bill uh things got doors opened and people could you could go to to universities like this whereas before you couldn't or at least not in any significant numbers uh so uh and at that moment there was this optimism that you just open the door will all kind of become colorblind we'll kind of control our biases and this damn society will work that's what it's going to take and we don't have to talk about identity because identity is going to threaten that it's just going to bring up a bunch of stuff and it's going to make us very uncomfortable well here's an experiment that i think points to a particular way to get comfortable talking about identity uh this was uh on the stereotype threat that whites can feel in interracial conversations uh so we have white males come to the lab at at at stanford they think they're going to have a conversation with two other uh students they see the pictures of the two students they're either two black guys or they're two white guys and then they find out that the topic of the conversation is going to be either love and relationships which you can talk to anybody about or it's going to be racial profiling so you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna talk to either two white guys or two black guys either about love and relationships or racial profiling and then the then the experimenter says look i'm going to go down the hall and i'm going to get your conversation partners and bring them back to the conversation by the way well i'm going would you arrange the three chairs for this conversation and as you can sense as soon as they arrange the chairs for the conversation the experiment's basically over that's what we're interested in how do they space themselves for this conversation depending on who they're going to have it with and what they're going to have it about and you can predict when they're going to have the conversation with two white guys about anything the three chairs are close together when they're going to talk to the two black guys about love and relationships the three chairs are close together but when they're going to talk to two black guys about racial profiling they put the black guys at some distance from them. And interestingly, the least prejudice they are, the more they do that. We've measured prejudice beforehand. So we know, these are Stanford students, it's not a huge range, but there's some variation, and the least prejudice put those conversation partners the farthest away. It is the strongest women math students who show the effects of stereotype trend on perform. It's the most committed, strongest African-American students who show the biggest stereotype threat effects. What makes stereotype threat an effect is not just the presence of the stereotype, it's caring about doing well in the domain where the stereotype applies. That's what is the pinch. And here it's the most progressive students are in some ways the most that they would just hate to screw up in this conversation to be seen as a racist. That's the stereotype threat they're under in that situation, and it's just painful. So they put the, anyway, what makes them put their chairs closer together is where I'm going with this story. And what makes them do that is a simple sentence again or several sentences that says, look, nobody really knows how to have these conversations. They're made difficult by the history of the United States. I often use the example of the standard parent-teacher conference where the parents are black and the teacher is white. Just think about that. And that's a good illustration of what I'm talking about by trust being problematized. The black parents are saying, can this teacher really see the talents of my kid? And are they going to take any little infraction and see him as having aggressive tendencies? And I got to be vigilant to that. And the teacher is saying, can I say anything to these parents that would be constructive or helpful without being seen as a racist? So there they are with their different forms of stereotype threat. That's the problem of diversity is trying to get trust into that conversation. Well, in this case, what helped get trust into that conversation was this instruction. Nobody knows how to have these conversations. Look, take it as an opportunity to learn, as a learning opportunity. Ask questions. Don't make long statements. Don't try to behave in ways that would show that you're not racist. Don't try to perform not being racist. Just ask questions. Use it as an exploration. Don't make a nuisance to yourself, but ask questions. When we did that, they put their chairs very close together. So I think that does speak to a posture that's critical in starting to embrace this phenomenon, this challenge that we have as a society, is that we're going to have to disinvest from the notion that we understand everything and that our model of sort of color blindness, which is certainly the dominant model, is the Atticwood model, and it's up to this task. We have to kind of back off from that and really expose ourselves to these interactions and to try to view them as learning opportunities and behave accordingly. And there's nothing like being nice. Being a jerk is really bad in a diverse, it's bad anytime, but of course it's really bad in a diverse situation. It just sends threat throughout the, like an electrical force throughout the setting. Okay, that's one thing I think with regard to institutions. Another thing that's important is to be proactive in precisely the way you guys are being proactive as a, are more typical mode of responding. I take responsibility. I've been a provost of two universities, so I can't get away from this charge myself, but we've been more reactive. When, when something happens or students get upset, then we, we try to respond and we're back on our heels and we're trying to, and it's not plausible. It doesn't engender trust. And we do, that we have only a standard repertoire of responses. We set up a task force and a committee and that's, and the students are like, we've heard that and nothing has changed. And I'm, I'm 72 years old. A lot has changed in my life, so I've seen a lot of change, but, but these kids are born in 1998 and they haven't seen that much change. And they don't have, and they still see this as a way, way to go. There's a very different experience for them. And they need to see so that you don't ask them to sign up for the wrong side of history. They need to see some proactive attention to this issue. That's where I think we are in this, in this case. Otherwise, they're just going to have to assume that the tacit deal is that they, you know, be quiet and sign up for something that's not too cool by modern standards. So being proactive is incredibly important here. Wise feedback. We have a ton of studies on this. When you're giving critical feedback, you first have to affirm the abilities of the person you're giving it to. Maybe in a homogeneous environment where there's already a lot of trust involved, you don't have to do that. But when you're trying to build those kind of relationships, that's the big question in the person, the students, the colleagues' mind is how do I sort out whether the critical feedback is a criticism of me and my abilities or just a particular issue or work at hand? So I need to have an explicit signal that you have faith in me. That's an added, that's an added ingredient to the pedagogy that I think we need going forward. Narrative. At Yale, these are freshmen. They see a 40 minute videotape of a kid who's 18 months ahead of them at Yale, African American kid. And that kid says, look, when I first came to Yale, I really felt anxious. I didn't, I felt like I didn't belong. I didn't know what to, I just went home on the weekends. I just didn't like it here, man. And then eventually my father made me come back and then I formed a singing group with my roommate and we got invited to perform at a couple of department colloquia, the receptions afterwards. And so I saw this colloquium and they were pretty interesting. I saw a really interesting one in sociology. And then I heard a fantastic one in biology. And now I have taken three biology courses. And I think biology can be that's where I want to put my life. And Yale has so much to offer in that regard. It's the end of the videotape. And the African American kids who see that, their letter grades go up randomly assigned to that condition to see it or not see it. The kids who saw it, their letter grades go up about a third of a letter grade. And four years later, there's virtually no underperformance in that group randomly assigned and a very different pathway of course selection. So how could that be? Okay, coming to an end here. How could that be? There's a it's a this underperformance as it turns out is a recursive process. I go to college, I'm under the weight of the stereotype. I get frustrated with my work a little bit. I get even more worried about whether how I'm being seen there and how significant my identity is, I get more vigilant. I don't don't put as much attention to my work. It goes down. And you get a recursive process that goes downhill. If you with what what the this intervention did this this narrative that was injected, so to speak, into the minds of these students did was to put in a positive to initiate a positive recursive process. Oh, it's not so bad. There is light at the end of it's bad. Now it's realistic. But there's hope. And with that, I kind of relax a little bit. I pay more attention to what's right in front of me like the work I do a little better than because I do a little better, I feel a lot better about this whole place. And because I feel a lot better about this whole place, I start to this vigilance is beginning to fade and I begin to perform a lot better. And eventually, you know, I'm out of that hole, so to speak. Well, when you think about, again, a diverse community, I think we have to pay attention to the nature of the narratives that we as institutions provide students. I think the master at this was Barack Obama, who could who could give narratives that fit exactly that pattern where there's a realistic assessment of the challenges in society. But there's hope and that you can be part of the the change in the situation. So I really think that's an that's an incredibly important dimension of us addressing this challenge is that we can't just leave it at the at the point of dark analysis, we have to have the hope that there are ways of of of going forward and and and and feeling comfortable in situations. The last thing I say is that I increasingly getting persuaded that sometimes direct instruction about cultural capital is a good idea. At Berkeley, we did a survey of how women and and minorities compared to men in in the steps you take toward these were in physical science graduate programs in the steps you take toward publication and getting a good job. Is there a difference in the rate at which those two groups do that? Yes, there is a difference. Women and minorities did not do they didn't submit as many conference proposals. They didn't have as good relationships with their advisors and so on, except in the College of Chemistry and in the College of Chemistry, they just had a very almost by most by the standards of most graduate programs a minutely orchestrated program where you knew what was expected of you all the time and you knew where you stood most of the time. And and with that in place, the cultural capital people come from different backgrounds. It takes a while for I can remember this in my own. Remember this is my own undergraduate experience. I remember taking a French course when I first got to college and I got to college on an athletic scholarship, a swimming scholarship. That's a story there. But nonetheless, that's how I got there. And I would go on as huge high school in Chicago and I didn't have any. I read books. That's how I read novels. That's how I could do OK. But I didn't know the business of how you go to college. And I remember taking my French class and getting a D and wondering what I did everything you could imagine that would be needed to to to get a good grade in this course. Well, I studied 10, 15 minutes every couple of days on this. How come I how come I didn't get it? I got a roommate that was a good student. I just did everything he did. And college was relatively easy after that. If you get organized, you know, it's not that colleges are developmental process. Anyway, that's another stage. But I don't want to put aside sometimes just, you know, like laying it out. This is what it's about in the graduate school. My advisor did this for me beautifully. This is what it's about. This is how you do it. This is how you evaluate how you stand on things. This is why you keep a couple of things going. They just gave me the cultural capital I needed to to do it. And I think when that's there, people have a much stronger foundation with which to proceed along the path toward a successfully diverse community that we that we strive for. So I'll stop at that point. And then then Daniel will that make are you gonna say a few things and then ask questions. We're not finished. Let's give a round of applause to our speaker though. I'm going to start the dialogue by offering a few questions of my own. And I invite you all to prepare your questions as well. We'll have time for both. So thank you so much for that discussion. And I hope the audience has captured some of your key points. First, that this findings on stereotypes are based on decades of research, many experiments done by your team and by other teams. I want to dig into one topic out of the book, Whistling Vivaldi, that was not discussed yet, the topic of over efforting. And the reason is I think that the audience of students at MIT is a prime community that may fall into that trap. I'll briefly summarize what I took away and then ask you to comment on it. Sure. One area of the research done by both you and by others was finding that often, as you heard, it's people who care deeply about their success who are likely to experience some of the challenges of stereotype. And some communities, when they want to do well and be the stereotype, just want to keep working harder and harder until they can beat it. And sometimes, for example, in the case of a math student that was being studied, it means that they just want to work hard by themselves to try to overcome and be successful in a math class. What they really need to do is get together with a group and work actually less hard but have more dialogue and more support. Can you please talk about over efforting from that point? And how, because in a way, when I read the story, it gave me a lot of hope that I don't just need to work harder on my own. I need to know where to work smarter and get more support to overcome these kinds of challenges. Can you please address that? Yeah, sure. It's a great, I love to talk about that because in some ways it's more personally relevant than some of the other things. But I remember talking to a Princeton academic advisor who said, for people who are in the med school path, I kind of keep track of how they're doing an organic chemistry. And if they're not doing so well, I say, stop, drop it. Don't flunk it, drop it. And you take it at a junior college and then bring the credit back or audit the course and then take it over again. But pick up a strategy and she couldn't, she could convince everybody, but she couldn't convince the black students to do that. They would take the course and plunge ahead and get the bad grade and then get knocked off there. So we did an experiment. I feel like we've got an experiment for everything, but we did one where we had them do anagrams, students do anagram. They could see these anagrams were really, really, really hard. And for half of them we let them think that this was, these were white students and black students. For half of them we let them think that the anagrams were tied to as measures of cognitive abilities. For the other half, we went to great lengths to convince them they're not, they're just puzzles again, they're just nothing to do with cognitive ability. Then they've seen how hard these anagrams are. The experimenter comes in and says, look, I'm desperate with my dissertation. Could you help me by doing a few more anagrams? How many more would you be willing to do? Well, the white students, no matter how you represent the test as a measure of abilities or not as a measure of abilities, they say, I'll do, I hate this, I'll do two more for you. When the measure is not about cognitive abilities, nothing to do with cognitive abilities, the black students say, I hate this, I'll do two more for you. But when the measure, when they're allowed to think that the measure is about cognitive abilities, the thing that their group is negatively stereotyped about, I'll do 10. So there it is. They're over-efforting. And that's how they, that's how your performance goes down on a standardized test, by the way, too, is that you're trying too hard. You're not giving up, you're trying too hard. You interpret that as they're choosing to do more of the difficult task in order to work harder to prove that they're going to beat the stereotype. They're taking my father's advice, beat the stereotype. Which I also take away because as I read the book, I realized, I have to consciously choose to not try to beat stereotypes in order to make sure that I'm not. And that's a form of self-care by checking to make sure that I'm not trying to do something. Because basically you point out it's really impossible. Even if we do, even if we are successful in these challenging classes or in these opportunities to get tenure, the stereotype will still exist, even if we achieve what we're trying to achieve. I find that very empowering. Yeah, yeah, I mean it is, the Buddhists have the concept of right effort. And that's a good guiding strategy here. You need, you know, you have to put effort in, but you can over-effort and it becomes anxious effort and it becomes inefficient because you need to be talking to other people about the concepts behind these calculus problems. And if you were talking, you'd pick that up. But when you're all alone, you're just in your room and you're just checking the answers at the end of the book and that's not teaching you the concepts at all. And then you take the test and you get a little grade and that's really demoralizing because you put all that time in. And so the business of working smart I think is important. So the alternative to over-efforting is to find support from people that can help you but also don't try to beat the stereotype. Yeah. Let me ask a harder question, I hope. It's about the title of Whistling Vivaldi. It kind of bothers me. Meaning, the premise behind the title says there was somebody who had the experience. He's a young black man. I think in Chicago, right? And he describes how, as he walked down the street, he experiences a sense that people are afraid of him because in Chicago, there's a stereotype that black men are dangerous. Therefore, his coping mechanism is to swissle classical music like Vivaldi so that when people who might be believing the stereotype see him, they relax a little bit. And now this may be true and useful but it's also terribly racist. Meaning, it's racist to say that a black person has to go around assimilating into this kind of white identified culture in order to be seen as safe. And so it really depresses me that's the best we can do is try to fit in to the dominant culture in order to be successful. Well, I don't use the title as an act of advocacy. That, oh, the answer is to whistle Vivaldi. It's more a case of what we get pushed into. And I think you can. So I'm getting older. There are a lot of age stereotypes. And I think people whistle Vivaldi intensely around that kind of. There wouldn't be a hair dye industry without some. Why are we doing it? Well, we're kind of presenting ourselves as youthful as we can. So I don't think what's losing Vivaldi is is much more. It's kind of of the same category of things, but it does show what American racial dynamics is doing to us. And that's that's why I picked it out. If we were in in Lagos, Nigeria, with a very different where races is not that it doesn't have American history. You wouldn't get that in the same in the same way. So anyway, thank you for sharing. I understand. I'm being provocative on purpose. I'll take one more step. I want to reflect with you on your experiences as a leader in your past positions, particularly at Berkeley, where we there's been public discussion. I wanted to ask for your reflection for those who may be familiar. You had the opportunity to serve as a provost at Berkeley. And there was a time when there was news around sexual harassment cases. And I think you had a chance to apply some of the lessons from your research in your work, but also learn some lessons through some challenging opportunities. So we find reflecting on what you learned and why you ultimately step down for the position. Yeah, they're kind of unrelated to all all those things, which gives me an opportunity to point that point it out. But but I think I was part of a decision process that that went wrong in a particular case. This was this was a provost. I was provost and this involved the case of a dean having a sexual harassment judgment against him. And the question was, how did you sanction the dean? And in the results of this process, we did not ask the dean to step down. The survivor had didn't want to be a part of that environment anymore, quite understandably. And but the way in which the whole thing was characterized through the process of the university led to this particular decision. I in retrospect felt that this was a wrong decision that that it is very quickly thereafter. And I wrote a wrote an open letter to the Berkeley community, which I would encourage everybody to look at because it includes the lessons learned there and where I'm trying to really spell spell them out and it describes the situation, describes what happened, describes why I felt it wasn't we didn't reach a good decision, why I thought a lot of the apparatus of the way universities functioned around these things at the time were problematic. And I still do. And I think we're still in an era where we're where we're learning how that works that that, you know, in universities like corporations, there's a function, a mode of functioning that is self-preservational. And sometimes that self-preservational logic reasoning can protect the university's material interest at the expense of its morality. And I felt this was a case where that happened. And I felt it should be noted by somebody. So if you really want to read the background of that, I think it's there. And then I do have a list of things that I think would help with this. And one is in a big university like that one, there needs to be some contact between the decision makers and the survivors. There was, you know, I was months down the road and had no sense of who this person was. And so you take as a received wisdom the way that case moves up through a lot of different channels. A lot of processing is happening before it gets to you. And I felt if you're going to make a sanctioning decision, you need to know the person. You need to know what happened. You need to talk about that. And that doesn't happen enough. And if that would be a big improvement, there are costs on both sides. How much do you put survivors in this retarking sexual harassment here? How much do you put survivors through in order to reach a just decision? But I think you do need to do more than what is typically done. And there are other things that I think that that's spells out. So I guess you don't get it when you Google me, but you'll have to just ask for an open letter to the Berkeley campus from Claude Steele. And you'll get it. I appreciate your candor on this. I think it helps the audience feel even more comfortable just dialoguing with you. So thank you for that. Appreciate that. As we continue, I just want to summarize with you some of the lessons I took away. It really can apply directly to universities like ours. How we can take the lessons from your research and your experience. I heard things such as ensuring that there's physical cues in the environment that show that all cultures are welcome, ensuring that there's representatives from multiple groups in leadership and that there's a confidence of people from all different backgrounds can move up the ranks in an organization. Do you want to add anything to what you would recommend as ways to apply this in a place like the Media Lab? Well, I don't want to fall back into repeating my list of things, which is more I'm working on that list trying to try different things out, see how much they hold against the literature. I do wish if I could wave of magic wand that we who administer, teach in these institutions had some greater appreciation for the impact of things. I do wish that. Because we're so somebody, maybe Joey was putting it this way, we optimize for other things. We optimize for academic contributions, for applied contributions. We have a system set up to optimize in a certain set of things, and that can sometimes inherently devalue things that are critical for a diverse, successfully diverse society. So I often think that you can do a lot of stuff over here to think about diversity. But one of the things we have to also think about is what competes with those efforts and how to get a balance between what competes with those efforts and the efforts. That's, I don't know the older I get, the more I think we have a tremendous focus on whether or not we're prejudiced or racist. I can come back to that question as a psychologist in a minute. But I think and we hold that we sort of think that if we could purge ourselves of those things that all of these inequalities and the like would go away and that we would have successfully diverse communities. If we leave in place the structures and these exclusive focus on certain goals without finding a way to incorporate in other goals, I don't think we're going to make it. I think no amount of effort on eliminating bias and implicit bias and the like is going to make it. We have to think more fundamentally about what our institutions are about. Just as we discussed with Ibron Kindi that if racist policies or non-inclusive policies are in place, they have to be replaced and racist ideas can then follow up to support them. Yeah. I do want to invite the audience and I'm going to come around with the with the mic, you know, to invite some questions. I see one here and I'll come to join a moment. Go ahead. Hi, Professor. Thank you very much for the. OK. Hi, Professor. Thank you very much for the awesome talk. So I have two questions and I promise I'll be quick. The first one is I wonder if you can share some of your research on positive stereotypes. So, for example, I'm Chinese-American and I'm from the Department of Mathematics, secondary PhD. I'm sure you can think of stereotype about me. And I remember that in my high school, the stereotype that Asians are good at math because they're Asians, it did not motivate me to study math. Because I and I remember I clearly made effort to counter those stereotypes by say reading really esoteric English literature like the Canterbury Tale and the Bear Wolf. And I told people that I enjoyed those readings despite I found them boring as hell. So I wonder if you can share some of your research in that realm. And the second question is diversity is a big issue in graduate student admissions. In the Department of Mathematics at MIT, in my year, there's one Hispanic and zero African or African-American. In the upcoming year, the student who will start in September, there's zero African-American and zero African and zero Hispanic. And I have one Hispanic friend who confessed to me that he did not feel like the department really welcomed him. And it's not really that anyone explicitly discriminates against him. It's just a lack of space for which he can communicate his culture and his special, you know, his unique perspective into mathematics and into the world. So I wonder as drawing experience from your previous job as provost and as an academic, what should the department and the university administrations do? What kind of role should they play in fostering this kind of safe space for students and minorities to communicate, you know, that their cultures and their unique perspectives? Thank you. Okay, first, the positive stereotyping. There is research. There's a phenomenon called stereotype lift where if your group is possibly stereotyped in an area or you are not a member of the group who's negatively stereotyped in the area, you can experience a certain lift in performance. I use the example of myself as an African-American male from Chicago in basketball. I was a pretty mediocre basketball player. That might even be a bit euphemistic. And but I didn't feel as bad as I was that I didn't belong because that's what we do. You know, since I was in my group, my neighborhood, we do this. So it took a lot of frustration to be a signal that you should get something else that you can do. To discourage me, I think that's in part because of the general stereotype, the ethos. I'm protected a little bit. It takes more frustration to chase me out of there. Whereas if a group is negatively stereotyped in that, it might take very little frustration and they would decide, this is not for me. So the stereotype structures does, it affects how we think about ourselves, how we interpret our own abilities, our skills and the like in that way. So there is clearly a phenomenon where I benefit from being positively stereotyped because frustration doesn't signal as automatically that I don't belong in that way. So it does have that effect. It's not as big as the negative effect. It's important to point out a stereotype list is kind of nuanced, but it's there. The other question about institutions, I do think as institutions, and I'm gonna point to my own role as a faculty, we need to take more responsibility for this effort, for these efforts. We need to see as part of our responsibility as teachers, mentors, advisors, lecturers, that we have to build trust and that we have to have, that a part of doing it well in a diverse society is building the trust you need to be an effective teacher. That's a fundamental responsibility that goes with it. Now, it's not a part of faculty's sense of responsibility. Again, when I was at that Martin Luther King Commemoration, there was a quote that was very moving in which he, at the end of his life, he's ruminating about things and he says, well, one real worry I have about integration is that our kids are gonna be taught by people who don't love them. And I think that's a deep, profound, simple thing. It's hard to learn from people that you don't trust, but I think, you know, the next weekend I was at a Batz mitzvah and in the moving the Torah around, the rabbi describes this is what embodies the wisdom of our people and we're giving it to this young woman and this is what this whole ceremony in the Torah is about is transferring that wisdom to the next generation and it won't happen unless it's done with love. And I find it hard to, those are big examples, but there's something about that, that there is a relationship between people that is needed in order to be an effective instructor and to effectively transmit knowledge. And I think in our faculty roles, we need to develop that capacity or we're not gonna be a successfully diverse society. Yeah, I have to believe that. I think about my own academic advisor and that is what happened after a while. Probably a lot of us in the audience can think about that. We're not just, you know, brains on sticks that you can program or that a simple curriculum thing is gonna fix everything. There's human relationships here, there's history here, there's a lot that has to happen for us to make this diversity work. The question on the front row. Yes, thank you so much for gracing us with your time and your insights and the examples that you... Sure. Hi, I'm Joy, I'm part of the Media Lab. So in the examples that you provided in terms of stereotype threat, you talk about identity and generally you talked about identity along the either gender identity, so women studying math or racial identity with black people and IQ. But I was curious if you had done any studies about the intersections of identities because you mentioned 500 experiments, I'm hoping somebody has... Somebody did that, yeah. Yeah, done it. Yeah. I wish I could give you an informed answer. But even though I know the number of studies, I don't know all of the content of those studies. And so I don't know, it's a question that comes up and I think it's going to vary if you want to just... My scientific guess is that sometimes it's going to be additive, the effect of two negatively stereotyped identities. I did see some evidence of this, I remember at the University of Michigan, African-American women in chemistry. I saw data which looked to me like it was best explained by an additive effect. But other times, just a single real bad effect is enough and adding more doesn't seem to make much difference. So sorting that out, I think really is a task for the future and as I said, maybe some people have begun to do that but I just don't know what results they've begun to find. Other people are working on the visibility of identities. If you don't know that I'm bipolar, would that affect my experience of you saying something negative about mental health or I had a student ask me that one time? So I know, he said, I'm bipolar, I heard you talk, I couldn't raise my hand because I thought if I did ask a question about that, I would be deeply stereotyped, I wouldn't get a job, I wouldn't get a girlfriend, my whole, blah, blah, blah. So I feel a lot of threat even though people are looking at me and they can't see the identity off hand. So there's a lot of research which is sort of sorting through that kind of issue, like the issue of intersectionality. We have time for one or two more questions. We'll start here. Hi Professor Dill, thank you very much for the talk. It's been super interesting especially as someone who's finishing their PhD here and starting a faculty position in September, these are the top of mind for me. Well congratulations. Thank you. I'm very curious about the way that you reframed kind of admission criteria. You were talking about how it's not just about diversity in terms of gender or race, it's about diversity of life experiences and that we need to think more broadly about that. My concern, something that I've actually heard faculty here do is to take that argument and use it to identify privileged international students as folks bringing in that diverse background here as opposed to thinking more broadly in the way that you're I think actually intending that terminology about who we should be admitting. And so I'd love you to respond to that especially if someone at the provost level on how do you kind of communicate to faculty and the admission folks how to take that broader definition seriously. So maybe, let me, maybe not quite clear on that. You're saying in the admissions process. Yeah, so folks have thought about that diversity argument and have used a criteria of diverse background experiences to make the case for instead of focusing on how we are working on for instance like underprivileged minorities in the United States in the ways that they should be brought in through a pipeline into admissions here at MIT or at the Media Lab, they've thought about how we should actually also be thinking, that same criteria can be used for international students who are coming from privileged backgrounds. I see, yeah. Well, I do think, yeah. I mean, there has to be some balance here and you can't evade the responsibility to this society I suppose if I can talk very generally by saying that kind of diversity will make it unnecessary for me to develop a capacity to handle this other kind of diversity because that's a really, I don't know, kind of head in the sand attitude about it. So that's my reaction to that as a strategy but I do also recognize the value of international diversity. I mean, I think that really is, that's a resource for everybody and so attention has to be given to that and that's important. It's just that it shouldn't supplant our challenge of dealing with our responsibility to this society which I think involves dealing with the history of this society and the way it's positioned people and recognizing that it is a real history, that it's positioned people really differently and that we're gonna have a diverse society, we need to do things about that. And when people say that, something like what you, I tend to interpret it cynically as a way of dodging this other question. Next question. Hi, thank you for your time again. You spoke briefly about how the pedagogy that we have right now derives from a time when we were educating a pretty homogenous group of people and how we'll need to revamp our pedagogy going forward and I was wondering what approach you envision as a society taking to try to revamp our pedagogy so that it incorporates and works for more diverse communities. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, the specific things I mentioned, I think are things that I get from the literature that I know about strategies for doing that. For the, I would, if you think of our standard pedagogy, it's really K through, I don't know, 26. I think all of it needs to be rethought in relation to this diversity project. I should also say, I haven't said a word about why I think diversity is, why I think it's so important academically. I mean, I do think that's worth, it's hard to trust, you know, problems are often solved by people bringing in different perspectives as much as they are by bringing in people who have a more rarefied level of skill or experience even in some area. You get a new insight from people being who they are, seeing a problem is who they are. I, in my own field of psychology, I came into it when it was largely male and we were all sort of competitive with each other about how much we could make psychology look like linear algebra. We could model every process. It turned out to be kind of a foolish effort, but it was a macho thing and, you know, we had to compete with our different models. Anyway, women came in and the reach of the field expanded dramatically. They just got our attention focused on really important things that we weren't focused on before and that made the field a much richer field. Then more minority scientists came in the field and that expanded it yet again. I would say something like stereotype threat would be an example of that, where it's a concept that might not occur to somebody who's not dealing with that as a major factor of their in their lives. So just the experience of having to deal with that, you see it, you know it's real, you know at the heart of it what's going on here and you can, that becomes a source of insight. Well, that's how I think diversity can contribute to even the most arcane sciences. That it's not, it's, it brings in perspectives, different perceptions of how things should be used that expand the reach of sciences. So I want to just, since I got a chance to say why I think it's really important to the core work of an institution, I wanted to say that. But at any rate, I would just wind up repeating all of my strategies for how to make diverse, a diverse environment to answer the more basic question. But, yeah. I think this is an excellent place to stop and I want to appreciate everyone who's come and share with us your questions. Thank you so much for the time today. Thank you. I really enjoyed the discussion. There'll be a few minutes for you guys to get the speaker right afterward. So thank you. Thank you.