1. Claude Mason Steele was born on January 1,1946 and 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.
Claude Steele served as the 21st provost of Columbia University for two years.
Claude Steele is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to minority student academic performance.
Claude Steele's father pushed him to achieve security in the context of securing employment, but Claude construed achievement as success in education.
Claude Steele was especially keen to discover their effects on social relationships and quality of life.
Claude 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.
Claude Steele conducted early experimental research at Hiram College in physiological psychology and social psychology, where he worked under the mentorship of social psychologist, Ralph Cebulla.
Claude Steele then moved to the University of Washington for 14 years and received tenure in 1985.
Claude Steele was responsible for faculty appointments, tenure recommendations, and overseeing financial planning and budgeting.
Claude Steele was interested in the role of alcohol and drug use in self-regulation processes and social behavior.
Claude Steele often uses the example of smokers who are told that smoking will lead to significant negative health outcomes.
Claude Steele is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to explain real-world problems such as the underperformance of female students in mathematics and science classes as well as Black students in academic contexts.
Claude Steele discovered that the dropout rate for Black students was much higher than for their white peers even though they were good students and had received excellent SAT scores.
Claude Steele has demonstrated the far-reaching implications of stereotype threat by showing that it is more likely to undermine the performance of individuals highly invested in the domain being threatened and that stereotype threat can even lead to Black people having significant negative health outcomes.
Claude Steele has spearheaded many successful interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of stereotype threat, including how to provide critical feedback effectively to a student under the effects of stereotype threat, inspired by the motivating style of feedback of his graduate school adviser, Ostrom, and how teacher practices can foster a feeling of identity safety.
In 2010, Claude Steele published his first book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, as part of the Issues of Our Time series of books exploring timely issues from the voices of modern intellectuals.
Claude Steele offers a host of strategies for reducing stereotype threat and enhancing minority student performance; he hopes that society's knowledge of stereotype threat will lead to understanding and accepting diverse groups' differences.
Claude Steele had been accused of being lenient with Choudhry by allowing him to retain his position as Dean.
Claude Steele stated his regrets about not preemptively removing leadership to create a less threatening environment for the complainant.
Claude Steele's twin brother, Shelby Steele, is a conservative writer and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.