Tackling Stereotypes: Making It Easier for Everyone to Do Their Best Work
Everywhere you look, marginalized groups are receiving advice about how to succeed. They’re told to adopt everything from the growth mindset to power poses. What if you believe in yourself, but you’re striving to do your best work in an environment where stereotypes prevail? Could other people’s beliefs hinder your performance?
We’ll explore stereotype threat – the splinter of anxiety you feel when you’re afraid you’re about to live up to someone else’s negative beliefs. Research shows that anxiety can lead students and faculty to underperform on difficult tasks and challenging decisions.
In this interactive keynote, we’ll identify when stereotype threat happens, why people who care about doing outstanding work are more susceptible to this threat than people who phone it in, and what you can do to prevent it from literally getting the best of you and your students.
About our Speaker
Therese Huston, Ph.D. is a cognitive scientist at Seattle University, and the New York Times calls her new book, How Women Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), “required reading on Wall Street.” Therese received her BA from Carleton College and her MS and PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, and she founded the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University. Her first book, Teaching What You Don’t Know, was published by Harvard University Press. She’s also written for the New York Times and Harvard Business Review and recently gave her first TEDx talk on what smart groups have in common.