Closing opportunity gaps, fostering belonging, building trust in classrooms and workplaces: Psychological interventions

Over the past several years, we and others have developed an effective intervention based on self-affirmation theory. Results of field experiments show that values affirmations can raise the performance of women, members of ethnic minority groups, and first-generation college students, thereby reducing achievement gaps in both short- and long-term grades. For example, in one of our earlier publications, a values-affirmation boosted grades among African American middle school students by 30%, an effect that persisted 2 years later when students left middle school.

How do values-affirmation interventions work?

Self-affirmation theory posits that people are motivated to maintain a sense of self-integrity — a view of themselves as adaptive and competent actors. However, situational stressors — contending with stereotypes, repeated evaluation, critical feedback — can threaten self-integrity and evoke psychological threat. It is not a specific self-concept that people are motivated to protect (e.g., “being a good student”) but an overarching narrative of their global adequacy (i.e., “I am a good person”). By reflecting on nonthreatened aspects of their lives in those stressful situations, values-affirmations can protect people’s self-integrity in threatening domains, thus reducing stress. With threat-related stress kept at bay, people are better able to perform up to their potential and feel more motivated to challenge themselves intellectually.

In one of our recent publications, we show that values-affirmations interventions can prompt structural changes in students’ social network positions. By the end of the term in a gateway biology course, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls and they were more central in the overall course friendship network. These differing social trajectories predicted STEM persistence: Affirmed students were 11.7 percentage points more likely than controls to take the next course in the bioscience sequence.

Collaborators

Geoffrey L. Cohen, David Yeager, David Sherman, Jonathan E. Cook, Kevin Binning, Michael Pasek