Claude Steele

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.

His earlier work dealt with research on the self (like self-image and self-affirmation) as well as the role of self-regulation in addictive behaviors.

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.

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.

His father pushed him to achieve security in the context of securing employment, but Claude construed achievement as success in education.

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.

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.

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.

After receiving his PhD, Steele got his first job as an assistant professor of psychology for two years at the University of Utah.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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, leads to more extreme social responses, increases helping behavior, reduces anxiety when it is combined with a distracting activity, and enhances important self-evaluations.

While studying the effects of alcohol use on social behavior, Steele was formulating a theory about the effects of self-affirmation.