[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, everyone. This is Radiolab, the podcast. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And Jad's sick.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't explain the situation that you, the podcast listener, are in. There's been some confusion here among our podcast listeners exactly what's going on. In the last five podcasts, you've listened to completely-produced hour-long programs.

JAD: Yes. That's why we began Radiolab as a radio show, hour-long programs which we work very, very hard on.

ROBERT: Yeah. I mean, I think of us as having two—we have Radiolabs for the radio, which are hour-long programs.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: And you just heard a bunch of those. And then we have Radiolabs just for you if you sign up. Those are called the podcasts. And we could do stuff on the podcast that are a little less formal.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And not that we're terribly formal on the radio, but it's just a looser form. So we can have a shorter length.

JAD: Shorter.

ROBERT: Or longer.

JAD: Or longer. Yeah, that's true. That's true. We've ran—we ran conversations between you and various smarty pants that have run pretty long.

ROBERT: Really long.

JAD: And have been—have been great.

ROBERT: Yeah. Or close to forever.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: But the point is, this is now the beginning of a podcast. So this is not—and if you're wondering where to find us on the radio, the issue there is that we're on the radio at different times all over America. So you have to ask your local station when they run Radio lab.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: Sometimes it's in the mornings, sometimes it's in the evening. But the podcast is anytime you choose.

JAD: That's right. And starting with this podcast, this post-season five podcast, I want to read to you, Mr. Krul ...

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: ... the second paragraph of an article that was recently in the New York Times.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Have you heard about this fellow Barack Obama?

ROBERT: I've heard of the New York Times. Oh, yes. I've heard of him, too.

JAD: Okay. Well, new researchers have documented—I'm quoting here—what they call "an Obama effect," showing that a performance gap between African Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech, and again after the presidential election.

ROBERT: So to back up, that means, translating into normal English.

JAD: Yes. Go ahead.

ROBERT: That some researchers decided to give a 20-question test to a bunch of people. They were young people and older people, too. Just take a test. It's a GRE test. It's a verbal test that you take to go to graduate school.

JAD: But before they take the test, they have to list their race.

ROBERT: Yes, they do. So you put down your race, and then you take the test. Now the first time they administered the test was sometime last year before Barack Obama was a big deal.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: And Blacks performed poorer—poorer than whites.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: More poorly.

JAD: Yeah. So whites on average, at that point, answered 12 questions out of 20 correct, and Black subjects answered only 8.5 on average out of 20.

ROBERT: So that's a significant difference, although that was a small sample. Then they gave the exact same 20-question test—again, GREs, again, the verbal—to a group of people after Barack Obama had become the nominee of the Democratic Party, had given an acceptance speech in Denver, Colorado, and was a pretty famous and important guy.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: And then they gave it yet again after Barack Obama had been elected President of the United States. So there's—there's these multiple test takings, and what they noticed was after Barack Obama had become fabulous, Blacks taking the test scored about the same as whites. Before Barack Obama had been fabulous, Blacks performed more poorly. And there's a—there's a long-standing reason for the previous performance, but the new performance that's very interesting.

JAD: Pretty stunning. But I mean, we should say by way of caveats that this is a really preliminary study. It's ...

ROBERT: Not been peer reviewed. Other guys never looked it over.

JAD: Not a huge number of subjects in the study.

ROBERT: But nevertheless, very intriguing.

JAD: Yes, and there is actually precedent for this—for this ...

ROBERT: Way of thinking.

JAD: The precedence goes back to a psychology professor named Claude Steele.

CLAUDE STEELE: I got a job offer—this is in the '80s at the University of Michigan, and it was part psychology and part to administer a minority student program there. And in the process, I saw data that surprised me.

JAD: What he saw was a troubling trend. Two kids would enter Michigan, one was Black, one was white. They'd come in at the exact same level.

CLAUDE STEELE: Same skills, same SATs scores.

JAD: So theoretically, they should do the same when they get to Michigan. But without fail, or almost without fail, after one semester ...

CLAUDE STEELE: The Black kid was lining up with lower grades.

JAD: How much lower?

CLAUDE STEELE: Pretty—pretty dramatic. At least two thirds of a letter grade.

JAD: Meaning if the white kid got an A, the Black kid who should be getting an A too, is instead getting a B.

CLAUDE STEELE: That's right.

JAD: Or a B plus.

JAD: That's significant.

CLAUDE STEELE: That's significant. That's significant.

JAD: And he also, by the way, saw this performance gap between women and men when it came to math.

JAD: To the same degree?

CLAUDE STEELE: The same degree. In advanced math courses, it was comparable. I learned this as a national phenomenon. If I was to walk into almost any college class in the United States, I'd have a very high probability of finding exactly that.

JAD: What could explain these differences?

CLAUDE STEELE: There was something there that people didn't understand, and that we certainly didn't understand.

JAD: So he figured he would start with the woman-in-math issue. He brought a bunch of women in and a bunch of men. Sophomores.

CLAUDE STEELE: Brought them into the laboratory one at a time, gave them a half an hour section of the Graduate Record Exam you take if you're a math major. Very, very difficult math.

JAD: Hmm.

CLAUDE STEELE: And sure enough, the women who had all the same credentials coming into that situation performed dramatically worse than the men.

JAD: Worse as in ...?

CLAUDE STEELE: It'd be a couple hundred points on an SAT test.

JAD: Big difference.

CLAUDE STEELE: It was a big effect.

JAD: So Claude Steele thought, "All right, step one complete. I've got a lab situation that resembles the real world. Good. Now the next step is to tweak things a little bit, see if I can mess around with it. Now normally, in these situations ...

CLAUDE STEELE: The test giver's got a little white lab coat on, and he brings in a big stack of cellophane-wrapped tests and puts a clock on the table. And it's all—it's all—you know, it's like, that's gonna intimidate almost anybody.

JAD: Maybe that's what's happening, he thought. What if I took away the clock, took away the coat, and most importantly, right before the test, I had the test giver instead of saying the normal, "I'm going to give you a test" pre-test thing, maybe instead, say something like this.

CLAUDE STEELE: "Look, you may have heard that women don't do as well as men on difficult standardized math tests. You may have heard that. But that is not true for this particular test.

JAD: Oh!

CLAUDE STEELE: This particular test does not show gender differences. Never has, never will.

JAD: He wondered if maybe saying that simple sentence before giving the test would have an effect.

CLAUDE STEELE: And sure enough, I wouldn't be here if their performance didn't go up, and go up to match that of the equally-skilled men.

JAD: That performance gap totally vanished.

CLAUDE STEELE: Gee, look at this thing! So we raced and did it very quickly the same kind of an experiment with African Americans.

JAD: There, the pretest disclaimer went like this.

CLAUDE STEELE: This is an instrument that we use to study problem solving, and it is not diagnostic of individual's intellectual ability.

JAD: In other words, this is not a test of your intelligence. I repeat, not an IQ test.

CLAUDE STEELE: So just do the best you can.

JAD: And with that simple disclaimer at the start ...

CLAUDE STEELE: Same kind of an effect.

JAD: The Black students and the white students were now equal.

CLAUDE STEELE: Just recently, Ryan Brown and Eric Day did an even cleverer treatment. There is an IQ test which is nonverbal.

RYAN BROWN: It's called the Advanced Progressive Matrices.

CLAUDE STEELE: It has figures.

RYAN BROWN: Very abstract. They got lines crossing.

CLAUDE STEELE: That you have to match, and so on.

RYAN BROWN: Checks. It's essentially pattern matching.

ERIC DAY: Diamonds with dots in them.

RYAN BROWN: Totally visual.

ERIC DAY: Yeah.

CLAUDE STEELE: And so they could represent that test as it is as an IQ test. It's in fact seen as the gold standard of IQ tests, because it's quote, "culture free."

RYAN BROWN: There's no math, there's no reading.

CLAUDE STEELE: Because it doesn't involve language. Or you could represent the exact same test as a puzzle.

ERIC DAY: Puzzle.

RYAN BROWN: A puzzle.

JAD: Meaning you can give an IQ test to a bunch of kids, and the Blacks will perform worse. But if you give that same test, lose the word "test," lose the word "IQ," and just call it a "puzzle?"

RYAN BROWN: The Black participants suddenly jump up in their performance.

ERIC DAY: Basically, we got a reversal.

CLAUDE STEELE: When you represent it as a puzzle, Blacks perform as well as whites.

RYAN BROWN: They did, yeah.

JAD: That's all it takes. Just change a few words.

RYAN BROWN: In fact, there's even better research on this by a guy named Jeff Stone at University of Arizona, who's shown this with golfing tasks, where he's had Black and white golfers just putt.

JAD: Putting? We're talking about putting?

RYAN BROWN: Well, think about—think about what it takes to putt effectively. Are you a golfer?

JAD: No.

ERIC DAY: Ryan's not either, so he doesn't know what he's talking about.

RYAN BROWN: That's right. So I'm gonna make this up.

JAD: [laughs]

JEFF STONE: What we did was we got a miniature golf situation where each hole changed and people had to work around obstacles.

JAD: This is Jeff Stone. He runs the Social Psychology of Sports Lab at the University of Arizona. And here's what he did: he tested his Black and white putters in two scenarios. Scenario one, using the word "intelligence."

JEFF STONE: When we told him it was a measure of sports intelligence, Black participants did about four strokes worse than white participants.

JAD: But when he changed it, took out the word "intelligence" and framed instead as a test of your natural athletic ability, there, the results totally flipped.

JEFF STONE: Flipped. And we had now whites performing significantly worse than Blacks by about four strokes. If you look at the recent US Open that was played in San Diego, Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate went four days between holes.

JEFF STONE: They went to an 18-hole playoff on Monday.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Yes!]

JEFF STONE: And were still tied.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Sudden death we go.]

JEFF STONE: And Tiger finally won it on the first playoff hole.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Tiger Woods wins a third US Open Championship!]

JEFF STONE: By one stroke. So when you talk about four strokes, that's a huge difference.

JAD: All right, so here's my question: stereotypes are powerful, okay, that makes sense. But in terms of understanding how this works, can you make this tactile for me? Like, if the stereotype that's having all these effects is like a thing, like as like a little gremlin that bites? Like, when in the test-taking process does it actually, like, do its damage?

JEFF STONE: That's gonna—that's gonna be way open to debate.

JAD: What does seem to be clear from the data, according to Eric Day and Ryan Brown and Claude Steele, is that the gremlin only seems to appear when the test is sufficiently hard.

CLAUDE STEELE: If the test is easy, it's important to point out, these effects don't happen.

JAD: It's not that the gremlin is not there.

ERIC DAY: Well, he walks in with you, but he doesn't speak necessarily until things get challenging.

CLAUDE STEELE: As soon as the test gets difficult ...

ERIC DAY: That's where the voices kick in.

JAD: Which means that for most of the test, everybody's doing about the same. It's only at problem number 17, the one about cosines and factorials and whatever, where things start to go wrong—at least that's the theory. At that problem, the Black student starts to stiffen up a little bit.

CLAUDE STEELE: That's right.

JAD: And Claude Steele's measured this.

CLAUDE STEELE: Their blood pressure is elevated, their short term memory is impaired.

JAD: It's that flicker of frustration through their body that wakes up the gremlin who starts to whisper in their ear.

ERIC DAY: I don't know if you can do this.

CLAUDE STEELE: Oh, shit! Is what they say about us true?

ERIC DAY: They don't think you can do it.

JAD: All the usual stuff. And even if the student doesn't believe it, which is likely ...

ERIC DAY: See, you don't have to believe it. That's the kind of insidious thing here.

JAD: ... just the fact that he has now this extra bit of mental chatter ...

ERIC DAY: That little guy whispering.

JAD: ... well, it's a distraction.

CLAUDE STEELE: And that makes their performance go down.

JAD: Just a little bit.

ERIC DAY: All this dialogue is keeping you from being a hundred percent focused on the task at hand, which is solving these problems.

JAD: So the real, subtle power of a stereotype isn't that it prevents you from doing the thing you want to do, it distracts you for just a beat from doing the thing you want to do. And that may be all the difference.

ROBERT: Okay, so we're almost done with this particular podcast, but before we go, I think we should have the letters section which I'll do like this: bum bum bum ba bum bum bum. Letters. They get letters! So we have this letter, Jad Abumrad.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: A number of people have wondered, who had listened to our Diagnosis show—for those of you who haven't listened to the Diagnosis show, you'll have to listen to it to understand this question, but they're very curious what happened to patient X, who had pancreatic cancer in the show.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But we never quite explained his fate. What is the outcome?

JAD: Yeah. Yeah, that's—that's actually a really good question. Patient X had his entire pancreas removed, and many years later is doing fine. He's still alive. Although the pancreas being a very important organ, when it was removed, he became a diabetic. So it's a pretty radical, radical surgery, but it, you know, arguably saved his life.

ROBERT: Okay, the next question. Bum bum bum ba bum bum bum. This comes from your father and your mother, Jad.

JAD: [laughs] I think I know where this is going.

ROBERT: And it goes like this: what is wrong with you? Is essentially what they're saying. And I'd like to join them in that. For those of you who remember the show, was it Choice when you did this? Suddenly in the middle of the show and for no reason, at the end of a segment, Jad used a term of opprobrium to—he used a name that is normally associated with female dogs, and just simply called the audience ...

JAD: Go ahead and just say it.

ROBERT: "Okay, bitches." And then, like, all hell broke loose.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And I thought at the time, "What?"

JAD: [laughs] It's true. You should—it's true. You should go on record as being a dissenter from the beginning.

ROBERT: I thought, why did you—why would you do that?

JAD: Okay, so here's the thing: some people found—many people found it funny. Many people did not find it funny, and I sincerely apologize to people who didn't. I mean, look, I'm in my 30s, okay? I grew up watching MTV. It's—you know, you go out with your friends and you're like, "All right, bitches. You ready to go out to dinner?"

ROBERT: Do you actually say that?

JAD: Yeah. It's a term of endearment.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: It just popped out during one of the sessions. You remember this. It was really ...

ROBERT: I do. I thought it was, like, really insulting and stupid. But ...

JAD: No, you didn't find that ...

ROBERT: Then you do this—this generation card thing on me. So, like, I get—like, I get scared.

JAD: [laughs] Right.

ROBERT: Alright, so obviously, that's what all the young people are doing. But you know what? I got so many people come and say, "What's wrong with him? Why did he do that?" And a lot of them were your age, or dare I say it, like, 19, 20, 21.

JAD: Yeah, I think you're exaggerating.

ROBERT: Must be a cultural thing.

JAD: I think it's generational. But it doesn't even matter at this—honestly, if I could do it again. I would take it back.

ROBERT: You would?

JAD: No offense. No offense meant. I mean, where it came from for me and I think people who were my age, they—you know, it wasn't an attempt to be hip. It's just something that happened in the booth. It was funny, and so we left it in. We probably shouldn't have.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Because my parents will not let me forget it.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: They're always like—at dinner, they're like, "Can you pass the salt, bitch?"

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: "What do you think of the chicken roast, bitch?" All right, mom. I get it. I get it.

ROBERT: They're such good parents.

JAD: [laughs] Anyhow, I guess we should go. All right, so Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation.

ROBERT: Also by Nurse Nestle, who will try to get Jad back to bed and tucked into sleep as soon as possible.

JAD: Right. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: Nurse Nestle? Is that what I said? I don't know why.

JAD: I never know what you're gonna say.

ROBERT: No, I don't. I really don't.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll I guess catch up with you in two weeks.

 

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