How We Create a Culture of Belonging with Claude M. Steele

**Claude M. Steele** (0:00)
You can't keep people out of the mainstream and segregated into the worst conditions in society, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and just ignore that. Take that away and just assume it's just gonna take care of itself. You have to, as I think a testament to our humanity as a society, you have to find ways of helping people get genuine equal opportunity. So it's kind of a big personal mission for me in addition to being a scientist, I suppose. That's a set of values that I have about American society. I'm proud of America because we're taking this experiment on. Most societies aren't. Ours is.

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:43)
Hello, everybody. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. And you know, one of my favorite subjects in the world is social psychology. And we have a very influential and remarkable social psychologist today.
He's done such pioneering work on stereotypes and the threats that stereotypes present. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford. I majored at psychology at Stanford. So.

**Claude M. Steele** (1:14)
Oh, you did. So how, how.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:16)
Yeah.

**Claude M. Steele** (1:17)
When did you graduate?

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:18)
I graduated in the class of 76 Oh, yeah. I work for Phil Zimbardo and yeah.
I spent a lot of time in that building.

**Claude M. Steele** (1:31)
Yeah. Okay. You know the environment. Phil and I were good friends.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:35)
Oh yeah. He was truly a remarkable person. Yeah.
And this is Claude's latest book. It's called Churn, The Tension That Divides, and How to Overcome It. And I just read it. And so this interview is going to be about this book. Welcome to the Remarkable People podcast, Claude.

**Claude M. Steele** (2:00)
Great. My pleasure to be here. Been looking forward to it.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:03)
I know probably every interview started like this, but we got to do it just so we get everybody on, I don't know, the same page, but a similar page. So let's just start with the definition of the word churn.

**Claude M. Steele** (2:16)
Yeah. Churn is the anxiety, the tension that we can feel when we're in a diverse setting, in which we know that we could be judged, treated in terms of negative images or stereotypes of our group. It's the sort of psychological and physiological, but especially psychological feeling of discomfort. Boy, I don't know how they're going to think about me here.
I'm in a situation where maybe my identity and how people view that identity could be problematic in this situation. So, churn was a term that just came to mind as a way of capturing that emotion, that particular tension.

**Guy Kawasaki** (2:56)
Yeah. As I was reading the book and reading about your work, I thought to myself, Guy, do you ever feel this churn? And I looked at it and I said, you know what, Guy, I am old.
I am Asian. I'm from Silicon Valley and I'm male. And there are certain situations where I churn. So, doesn't everybody churn to some extent?

**Claude M. Steele** (3:21)
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think everybody does. That's one of the things that I liked about the term, finally. My background research or research program before that was focused on stereotype threat. And that's the kind of threat that churn is a reaction to. And most people had looked at that, studied that, as a factor that could affect people's performance, like their performance on standardized tests. Women taking a very difficult math test, or African Americans taking a very challenging academic test, standardized test. They're doing something that's important to them, but they're under this pressure of possibly confirming or being seen to confirm negative stereotypes in this society about their ability. So there's an added tension there. They're taking a test while they're in part in Churn. And so most of the research over the years, it focused on performance as the consequence of being in Churn. It's going to impair your performance. But what I wanted to pull out is that, oh, everybody experiences Churn in situations where those stereotypes and images are relevant. The white male who's been invited to the third diversity training session, and it's all women and minorities, he's likely to be in Churn.
He's in a situation where he worries, that doesn't know for sure, but he worries that he could be seen in terms of the negative stereotypes about his identity and in very negative ways as perhaps racist.
So Churn can be quite frightening sometimes.

**Guy Kawasaki** (4:59)
But Claude, are there people who are either so egotistical or so narcissistic, that they don't feel Churn at an extreme? Do you think that JD Vance and Stephen Miller ever feel Churn? Or like they're just, they're on another planet.