As a social psychologist in the tradition of Kurt Lewin, I am committed to identifying psychological processes that contribute to social problems and to developing theory-based interventions to affect these processes. My research examines diverse contexts, including education, health, intergroup relations, and the environment using laboratory and field-experimentation. This research simultaneously advances psychological theory, demonstrates the importance of psychological processes in major social problems, and suggests novel remedies to these problems.
I. Wise Interventions
At a high level, I am deeply interested in the power of what I call "wise interventions" to address persistent social problems (Walton, 2014). These interventions aim to remedy specific psychological processes that contribute to a problem or that prevent people from flourishing. Wise interventions can simultaneously demonstrate the role of specific psychological processes in contributing to major social problems, thus underscoring the value of basic theory and research in psychology, and serve as novel, theory-based reforms to help people thrive.
In addition to the social-belonging intervention described in the next section, which is a major focus of my research (Walton & Cohen, 2007; Walton & Cohen, 2011; Walton, Logel et al., 2015), I have contributed to the development and evaluation of interventions in diverse areas in collaborations with other scholars. In education, these include:
I have also contributed to the development of interventions in other areas, including:
In addition to the development of new interventions, I am committed to efforts to develop ways to scale more established interventions. This is important both so interventions can reach more people and so we can conduct large-scale science to understand how intervention effects intersect with social contexts. I have pursued this interest through the College Transition Collaborative, which is dedicated to delivering and evaluating brief social-psychological interventions in the transition to college to full incoming cohorts of students; through PERTS, which is dedicated to developing scalable interventions in education; through the National Growth Mindset Study, a collaboration with David Yeager, Dave Paunesku, Carol Dweck, and many others in which we will deliver a growth-mindset of intelligence intervention to 9th grade students in 100 randomly sampled schools across the country
I am also committed to helping foster a better understanding of psychological approaches to social problems and social change among psychologists, policy-makers, practitioners, and the public at large. I have contributed to White Papers on psychological interventions for the Gates Foundation (Dweck, Walton & Cohen, 2011) and the White House (Yeager, Paunesku, Walton, & Dweck, 2013) and have written a number of review articles on psychological interventions, including for social scientists and policy-makers (Kenthirarajah & Walton, 2015; Walton, 2014; Yeager & Walton, 2011; the latter received two major awards from the American Education Research Association) and for practitioners (Aguilar, Walton, & Wieman, 2014; Yeager, Walton, & Cohen, 2013).
II. Understanding Social Worlds: Implications for Motivation and Achievement
Beyond my high level interest in interventions, a primary theoretical focus of my research involves how people understand the social worlds they live and work in and how they fit into and relate to others in these settings. I have explored this broad interest in three primary lines of research.
II.A. Social Belonging and Group Differences in Academic Achievement
One of the most pressing societal problems is the persistent inequality in academic achievement between different social groups. While many structural factors contribute to this inequality, I have long been interested in the role of psychological processes, such as those stemming from negative intellectual stereotypes (Walton & Cohen, 2003), and how theory-based interventions that address these can reduce inequality in education (Yeager & Walton, 2011).
One consequence of negative stereotypes is to cause people to wonder whether others will fully include, value, and respect them. As the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “The central feature of the stigmatized individual’s situation in life…is a question of…‘acceptance’.” This state of belonging uncertainty (Walton & Cohen, 2007) can cause students to monitor school for indicators of whether they belong or not. From this perspective, even routine events—like receiving critical feedback or feeling lonely—may seem like proof of a global lack of belonging and undermine students’ motivation and achievement. I found evidence for this process in laboratory research. When students were exposed to subtle information indicating that they might have few friends in a field of study, Black (but not White) students questioned their belonging and potential in the field, and even discouraged a same-race peer from pursuing it (Walton & Cohen, 2007).
My social-belonging intervention aims to prevent such corrosive attributions by providing a nonthreatening narrative for feelings of nonbelonging in school. Black and White first-year college students read a survey of upper-year students, which indicated that feelings of nonbelonging are normal at first in college and dissipate with time. This was designed to help students attribute challenges to the difficulty of the transition to college for all students rather than to an enduring lack of belonging (cf. Wilson et al., 2002). A writing exercise encouraged students to internalize this idea. In total, the intervention lasted an hour. There was little effect for White students. But for Black students, the intervention raised GPA from sophomore through senior year, halving the achievement gap (Walton & Cohen, 2011). How did this occur? One process involves the predicted effect on students’ construal of adversities. Daily diaries soon after the intervention showed that the intervention sustained Black students’ sense of belonging in the face of adversity and this mediated the long-term gains. Three years after the intervention we also examined students’ happiness and self-reported health; the intervention improved these outcomes for Black students, eliminating race differences. Ongoing follow-ups examine students’ objective health records from college as well as outcomes in adulthood.
New research extends these findings to women in STEM. A customized version of the social-belonging intervention (and a novel intervention, affirmation self-training) raised women’s first-year grades in male-dominated engineering majors, eliminating gender differences (Walton, Logel et al., 2015), and caused similar improvements in the construal of daily events. Further research explores replicability with large-samples and when delivered in such a manner as would be feasible on a large scale. Whereas past interventions were delivered one-on-one or in small groups, colleges can reach entire incoming classes with online prematriculation materials. In trials at three institutions, my collaborators and I tested online, prematriculation versions of the social-belonging intervention (and several related interventions) with full cohorts of students (total N>9,500). These interventions raised full-time enrollment in the first-year by 11 percentage-points among low-income, ethnic-minority students exiting a public high school system (Experiment 1); increased disadvantaged (ethnic-minority and first-generation) students’ full-time enrollment at a flagship public university by 4 percentage-points (Experiment 2); and increased disadvantaged students’ cumulative first-year GPA at a selective private university by 0.10 points (Experiment 3). The latter two effects reduced the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students by 35-50% (Yeager, Walton, Brady, et al., in prep).
Questions of mechanism and heterogeneity: Understanding effects over time and in contexts. A critical question involves how brief psychological interventions can cause lasting effects. Historically social psychology has emphasized the power of the immediate situation in shaping psychology and behavior. But if the proximate situation is all-powerful, how could brief interventions generate long-lasting effects? This issue raises important questions about how social-psychological processes unfold over time and within contexts, connect the field to other disciplines (e.g., developmental psychology, sociology), and suggest unique remedies to social problems (Walton, 2014).
One way a brief psychological message may have enduring effects is if the message becomes instantiated in the structure of people’s lives (see Kenthirarajah & Walton, 2015). For instance, if students feel more confident in their belonging, they may be more likely to approach peers or to reach out to advisors; relationships they form may then support higher achievement (Walton & Cohen, 2007). My recent research supports this possibility. In the engineering study, the social-belonging intervention not only led women to construe daily adversities as less threatening; it also increased the representation of male engineers in women’s friendship groups. The prematriculation interventions led disadvantaged students to form more close friendships on campus, to join more student groups, and to seek out more academic support services (e.g., TAs or professors). Here a psychological process (greater confidence in belonging) becomes embedded in students’ lives as an ongoing resource for higher achievement (for a related example involving learning, see Taylor & Walton, 2011). An important implication of this analysis involves the context-dependence of psychological interventions: these interventions may depend on the presence in settings of factors that can propagate the effects of an initial change in psychology forward in time, such as opportunities for better relationships and for learning.
Scaling and large-scale science. The scalability of online prematriculation interventions means that they have significant potential for large-scale science and for application. To pursue this opportunity, my colleagues and I have created the College Transition Collaborative--a group of researchers and colleges and universities dedicated to creating, delivering, and evaluating brief social-psychological interventions with full incoming classes at multiple sites. A critical question involves heterogeneity around treatment effects—where (in what kinds of schools) and with whom (what kinds of students) are interventions more and less effective—and how this heterogeneity informs questions of process. For instance, are interventions more effective in settings that expose students to more threatening cues (e.g., numeric underrepresentation), where belonging concerns may be more salient (Walton, Logel et al., 2015)? Are they more effective in settings that allow a student with a change in psychology to gain more traction over time, for instance where advisors and faculty are more responsive if students reach out? Such questions inform our understanding of how change unfolds over time and in social contexts, and thus carry both theoretical and applied implications. This project also leverages the Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS), a center at Stanford my students and especially Dave Paunesku and Carissa R, colleagues and I built to support highly scalable intervention research, which we have used to conduct large-scale trials of social-belonging, growth-mindset, sense-of-purpose and other interventions with diverse populations.
Extension to school discipline. One of the most severe forms of inequality in school involves the extreme disparities in discipline rates between African American and Latino youth and other children. Repeated disciplinary incidents remove students from the classroom, denying them opportunities to learn; they also contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.” With Jason Okonofua and Jennifer Eberhardt, I theorize that feelings of nonbelonging and mechanisms by which stigma and negative stereotypes undermine teacher-student interactions and relationships over time gives rise to these disparities (Okonofua, Walton, & Eberhardt, under review). Consistent with this thesis, I have found that brief randomized interventions targeted both at bolstering students’ sense of social-belonging (Goyer, Walton, et al., in prep) and at encouraging teachers to maintain positive relationships with students during disciplinary interactions (Okonofua, Paunesku, & Walton, in prep) can reduce disciplinary incidents among minority students.
II.B. Mere Belonging: Implications for Motivation, Emotion, and Intergroup Relationships
Another area of my research explores the hypothesis that a primary source of people’s sense of self lies in small cues of their social identity—cues that signal to whom they are socially connected. Although much past research examines the consequences of well-established, deeply valued relationships, my research on mere belonging explores minimal cues of social connectedness, even with unfamiliar others. I hypothesize that simple cues of social connection can cause people to merge psychologically with others. For instance, studies find that cues like a shared birthday with a math major increase students’ motivation in math and promote shared goals (Walton, Cohen, et al., 2012; for similar effects with 4- 5-year-olds, see Master & Walton, 2013) and facilitate shared emotions and physiological reactions (Cwir, Carr, Walton, & Spencer 2011). In one study, after a confederate had jogged in place, participants who had been led to feel socially connected to her had greater cardiovascular reactivity than participants merely exposed to her. Many of these effects were mediated by participants’ sense of social connectedness to the peer at hand. This research shows that the boundaries between self and other are surprisingly fluid; the goals, motivation, and emotions of others to whom we feel connected readily become our own.
Tiffany Brannon and I recently explored implications of mere belonging for intergroup relations (Brannon & Walton, 2013). Extending my prior research, we found that people expressed greater interest in the culture of a peer of another ethnicity when they had been led to feel socially connected to her. Moreover, extending psychology’s consistency theories (e.g., dissonance), the opportunity to act on this interest by freely taking part in a relevant cultural activity, which could seem inconsistent with holding prejudicial attitudes, reduced implicit prejudice immediately, and 6 months later promoted more positive intergroup attitudes. This research illustrates how a theoretical account of underlying psychological processes can inform a long-standing theoretical and applied problem: When and how does intergroup contact contribute to more positive intergroup relations.
II.C. Cues of Working Together: Implications for Intrinsic Motivation, Norms, and Stereotype Threat
A third area examines not a sense of personal social connection to another person or group but the perceived opportunity to work with others on a task. The capacity to work together is a foundation of human culture that affords enormous social and personal benefits. Given this, Priyanka Carr and I hypothesized that simple social communications that signal that another person treats you as a partner working with them rather than as working separately would fuel intrinsic motivation, even when people work on their own. Consistent with this, a series of studies found that people told they were working on a puzzle “together” and who anticipated exchanging tips with peers (rather than writing tips for or receiving tips from the experimenter) showed increased intrinsic motivation, including freely chosen persistence, enjoyment, performance, and, in some conditions, the choice to do similar tasks 1-2 weeks later (Carr & Walton, 2014; for similar effects in early childhood, see Butler & Walton, 2013).
In one extension, my collaborators and I hypothesized that one reason social norms can be motivating is because they can signal an opportunity to work with others toward a common goal (cf., Goldstein et al., 2008). In one study, we found that normative appeals that conveyed an opportunity to work together led to greater reductions in paper-towel use in public restrooms than analogous appeals that did not (Carr, Howe, & Walton, under review). In a second extension, I hypothesized that cues of working together from members of a majority group could displace stereotype threat—the worry that people could view or treat one negatively as a consequence of a stereotype (Steele, 1997; Walton & Carr, 2012). A series of experiments found that such “micro-inclusions” eliminate stereotype threat among women (Aguilar, Carr, & Walton, in prep; cf. Logel, Walton et al., 2009).
III. The Interpretation of Group Differences in Achievement and Implications for Affirmative Action
Research on stereotype threat implies that widely known negative stereotypes could systematically undermine performance among women and ethnic-minority students. If this is the case, group differences would not just reflect real differences in ability. A part of the ability of stereotyped students would be “latent,” or hidden by psychological threats. With Steve Spencer, I tested this latent ability hypothesis in two meta-analyses combining data from 18,976 students in 5 countries (Walton & Spencer, 2009). We found that when threat was removed from either laboratory or real-world settings women and minorities performed better than men and non-minorities who had the same prior test scores and grades. The magnitude of this superior performance—the latent-ability effect—indexes the degree to which the prior measures underestimated the potential of ethnic minorities and women. The size of the effect suggests that most of the gender gap on the SAT-Math test, for instance, and much of race gaps on the SAT are due to psychological threat. This paper received the 2010 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
These results carry profound policy implications. They suggest (1) that organizations can tap considerable hidden potential in members of negatively stereotyped groups by remedying psychological threat in their internal settings and (2) that in interpreting grades and test scores in admissions and hiring, organizations that account for the threat present in typical prior environments can simultaneously make more meritocratic and more diverse decisions. My colleagues and I call these procedures affirmative meritocracy: this is a form of affirmative action justified entirely by a traditional definition of merit. In addition to writing policy (Walton, Spencer, & Erman, 2013; see also Logel, Walton, et al., 2012) and law-reviews on this topic (Erman & Walton, 2015), I led a group of social psychologists in working with legal scholars to inform the Supreme Court of these issues in Fisher v. Texas (Brief of Experimental Social Psychologists, 2012).
IV. The Social Malleability of the Self
Several additional lines of research explore how the self is socially constructed through top-down processes. One line of research examines subtle linguistic cues in self-descriptions (Walton & Banaji, 2004). Building on past research, Chris Bryan and I theorized that noun phrases (e.g., “I am an X”) signal that a behavior represents an identity—the kind of person one is or could become. When this identity is valued, we predicted that nouns would increase the likelihood that people would engage in a relevant future behavior. In one test, the day before a major election people completed a survey with questions that referenced voting using either nouns (e.g., “How important is it to you to be a voter in tomorrow’s election?”) or verbs (e.g., “How important is it to you to vote in tomorrow’s election?”). The noun condition caused an 11 percentage-point increase in voter turnout, one of the largest boosts ever observed (Bryan, Walton, et al., 2011). The results highlight how people’s desire to see themselves as having positive identities can be channeled, even through subtle means, to motivate socially important behavior (for related research in early childhood, see Bryan, Master, & Walton, 2014).
Other research examines the popular theory that people have a limited degree of willpower, which is easily depleted. Past research finds that after people exert self-control they perform less well on subsequent self-control tasks, which is commonly interpreted as “ego depletion.” Contrary to this notion, Veronika Job, Carol Dweck and I have explored the hypothesis that people’s theories about willpower are responsible for “depletion” effects. We show that it is only when people believe or are led to believe that willpower is limited (i.e., easily depletable) that they show depletion effects (Job, Dweck, & Walton, 2010; Miller, Walton et al., 2012); this is because a limited theory sensitizes people to otherwise irrelevant cues of their available resources, such as minor feelings of tiredness (Job et al., 2010) or the consumption of glucose (Job, Walton et al., 2013). Further, a non-limited theory predicts more successful self-regulation over time in real-world settings, especially when people face significant self-control demands, and better grades (Job, Walton, et al.,2015). Ongoing research tests interventions to change people’s willpower theories in real-world settings.
V. Conclusion
In all my research and teaching, I am committed to simultaneously advancing psychological theory and to addressing major social problems. By conducting both laboratory and field-experimental research, my work identifies novel psychological processes and examines how these processes play out in real-world settings, affect important behavioral outcomes, and unfold over time in interaction with contexts.
I. Wise Interventions
At a high level, I am deeply interested in the power of what I call "wise interventions" to address persistent social problems (Walton, 2014). These interventions aim to remedy specific psychological processes that contribute to a problem or that prevent people from flourishing. Wise interventions can simultaneously demonstrate the role of specific psychological processes in contributing to major social problems, thus underscoring the value of basic theory and research in psychology, and serve as novel, theory-based reforms to help people thrive.
In addition to the social-belonging intervention described in the next section, which is a major focus of my research (Walton & Cohen, 2007; Walton & Cohen, 2011; Walton, Logel et al., 2015), I have contributed to the development and evaluation of interventions in diverse areas in collaborations with other scholars. In education, these include:
- Growth-mindset of intelligence interventions, which dissuade people from the toxic belief that intelligence is fixed and you either have it or you don't (Paunesku, Walton, et al., 2015);
- Prosocial purpose interventions, which help adolescents identify their prosocial purposes for working hard on foundational learning tasks, which can bolster achievement among poorly performing adolescents (Yeager et al. 2014);
- Value-affirmation interventions, which can raise achievement among people who face negative stereotypes in an academic setting (Walton, Logel et al., 2015);
- Unconditional regard interventions, which can reduce feelings of shame following poor performance (Brummelman, Thomaes, Walton et al., 2014);
I have also contributed to the development of interventions in other areas, including:
- Perspective-taking interventions, which can help couples manage conflict and sustain marital satisfaction (Finkel, Slotter, Luchies, Walton, & Gross, 2013);
- Identity-labeling interventions, which can increase voter turn-out (Bryan, Walton, et al., 2011);
- and many others not yet published.
In addition to the development of new interventions, I am committed to efforts to develop ways to scale more established interventions. This is important both so interventions can reach more people and so we can conduct large-scale science to understand how intervention effects intersect with social contexts. I have pursued this interest through the College Transition Collaborative, which is dedicated to delivering and evaluating brief social-psychological interventions in the transition to college to full incoming cohorts of students; through PERTS, which is dedicated to developing scalable interventions in education; through the National Growth Mindset Study, a collaboration with David Yeager, Dave Paunesku, Carol Dweck, and many others in which we will deliver a growth-mindset of intelligence intervention to 9th grade students in 100 randomly sampled schools across the country
I am also committed to helping foster a better understanding of psychological approaches to social problems and social change among psychologists, policy-makers, practitioners, and the public at large. I have contributed to White Papers on psychological interventions for the Gates Foundation (Dweck, Walton & Cohen, 2011) and the White House (Yeager, Paunesku, Walton, & Dweck, 2013) and have written a number of review articles on psychological interventions, including for social scientists and policy-makers (Kenthirarajah & Walton, 2015; Walton, 2014; Yeager & Walton, 2011; the latter received two major awards from the American Education Research Association) and for practitioners (Aguilar, Walton, & Wieman, 2014; Yeager, Walton, & Cohen, 2013).
II. Understanding Social Worlds: Implications for Motivation and Achievement
Beyond my high level interest in interventions, a primary theoretical focus of my research involves how people understand the social worlds they live and work in and how they fit into and relate to others in these settings. I have explored this broad interest in three primary lines of research.
II.A. Social Belonging and Group Differences in Academic Achievement
One of the most pressing societal problems is the persistent inequality in academic achievement between different social groups. While many structural factors contribute to this inequality, I have long been interested in the role of psychological processes, such as those stemming from negative intellectual stereotypes (Walton & Cohen, 2003), and how theory-based interventions that address these can reduce inequality in education (Yeager & Walton, 2011).
One consequence of negative stereotypes is to cause people to wonder whether others will fully include, value, and respect them. As the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “The central feature of the stigmatized individual’s situation in life…is a question of…‘acceptance’.” This state of belonging uncertainty (Walton & Cohen, 2007) can cause students to monitor school for indicators of whether they belong or not. From this perspective, even routine events—like receiving critical feedback or feeling lonely—may seem like proof of a global lack of belonging and undermine students’ motivation and achievement. I found evidence for this process in laboratory research. When students were exposed to subtle information indicating that they might have few friends in a field of study, Black (but not White) students questioned their belonging and potential in the field, and even discouraged a same-race peer from pursuing it (Walton & Cohen, 2007).
My social-belonging intervention aims to prevent such corrosive attributions by providing a nonthreatening narrative for feelings of nonbelonging in school. Black and White first-year college students read a survey of upper-year students, which indicated that feelings of nonbelonging are normal at first in college and dissipate with time. This was designed to help students attribute challenges to the difficulty of the transition to college for all students rather than to an enduring lack of belonging (cf. Wilson et al., 2002). A writing exercise encouraged students to internalize this idea. In total, the intervention lasted an hour. There was little effect for White students. But for Black students, the intervention raised GPA from sophomore through senior year, halving the achievement gap (Walton & Cohen, 2011). How did this occur? One process involves the predicted effect on students’ construal of adversities. Daily diaries soon after the intervention showed that the intervention sustained Black students’ sense of belonging in the face of adversity and this mediated the long-term gains. Three years after the intervention we also examined students’ happiness and self-reported health; the intervention improved these outcomes for Black students, eliminating race differences. Ongoing follow-ups examine students’ objective health records from college as well as outcomes in adulthood.
New research extends these findings to women in STEM. A customized version of the social-belonging intervention (and a novel intervention, affirmation self-training) raised women’s first-year grades in male-dominated engineering majors, eliminating gender differences (Walton, Logel et al., 2015), and caused similar improvements in the construal of daily events. Further research explores replicability with large-samples and when delivered in such a manner as would be feasible on a large scale. Whereas past interventions were delivered one-on-one or in small groups, colleges can reach entire incoming classes with online prematriculation materials. In trials at three institutions, my collaborators and I tested online, prematriculation versions of the social-belonging intervention (and several related interventions) with full cohorts of students (total N>9,500). These interventions raised full-time enrollment in the first-year by 11 percentage-points among low-income, ethnic-minority students exiting a public high school system (Experiment 1); increased disadvantaged (ethnic-minority and first-generation) students’ full-time enrollment at a flagship public university by 4 percentage-points (Experiment 2); and increased disadvantaged students’ cumulative first-year GPA at a selective private university by 0.10 points (Experiment 3). The latter two effects reduced the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students by 35-50% (Yeager, Walton, Brady, et al., in prep).
Questions of mechanism and heterogeneity: Understanding effects over time and in contexts. A critical question involves how brief psychological interventions can cause lasting effects. Historically social psychology has emphasized the power of the immediate situation in shaping psychology and behavior. But if the proximate situation is all-powerful, how could brief interventions generate long-lasting effects? This issue raises important questions about how social-psychological processes unfold over time and within contexts, connect the field to other disciplines (e.g., developmental psychology, sociology), and suggest unique remedies to social problems (Walton, 2014).
One way a brief psychological message may have enduring effects is if the message becomes instantiated in the structure of people’s lives (see Kenthirarajah & Walton, 2015). For instance, if students feel more confident in their belonging, they may be more likely to approach peers or to reach out to advisors; relationships they form may then support higher achievement (Walton & Cohen, 2007). My recent research supports this possibility. In the engineering study, the social-belonging intervention not only led women to construe daily adversities as less threatening; it also increased the representation of male engineers in women’s friendship groups. The prematriculation interventions led disadvantaged students to form more close friendships on campus, to join more student groups, and to seek out more academic support services (e.g., TAs or professors). Here a psychological process (greater confidence in belonging) becomes embedded in students’ lives as an ongoing resource for higher achievement (for a related example involving learning, see Taylor & Walton, 2011). An important implication of this analysis involves the context-dependence of psychological interventions: these interventions may depend on the presence in settings of factors that can propagate the effects of an initial change in psychology forward in time, such as opportunities for better relationships and for learning.
Scaling and large-scale science. The scalability of online prematriculation interventions means that they have significant potential for large-scale science and for application. To pursue this opportunity, my colleagues and I have created the College Transition Collaborative--a group of researchers and colleges and universities dedicated to creating, delivering, and evaluating brief social-psychological interventions with full incoming classes at multiple sites. A critical question involves heterogeneity around treatment effects—where (in what kinds of schools) and with whom (what kinds of students) are interventions more and less effective—and how this heterogeneity informs questions of process. For instance, are interventions more effective in settings that expose students to more threatening cues (e.g., numeric underrepresentation), where belonging concerns may be more salient (Walton, Logel et al., 2015)? Are they more effective in settings that allow a student with a change in psychology to gain more traction over time, for instance where advisors and faculty are more responsive if students reach out? Such questions inform our understanding of how change unfolds over time and in social contexts, and thus carry both theoretical and applied implications. This project also leverages the Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS), a center at Stanford my students and especially Dave Paunesku and Carissa R, colleagues and I built to support highly scalable intervention research, which we have used to conduct large-scale trials of social-belonging, growth-mindset, sense-of-purpose and other interventions with diverse populations.
Extension to school discipline. One of the most severe forms of inequality in school involves the extreme disparities in discipline rates between African American and Latino youth and other children. Repeated disciplinary incidents remove students from the classroom, denying them opportunities to learn; they also contribute to the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.” With Jason Okonofua and Jennifer Eberhardt, I theorize that feelings of nonbelonging and mechanisms by which stigma and negative stereotypes undermine teacher-student interactions and relationships over time gives rise to these disparities (Okonofua, Walton, & Eberhardt, under review). Consistent with this thesis, I have found that brief randomized interventions targeted both at bolstering students’ sense of social-belonging (Goyer, Walton, et al., in prep) and at encouraging teachers to maintain positive relationships with students during disciplinary interactions (Okonofua, Paunesku, & Walton, in prep) can reduce disciplinary incidents among minority students.
II.B. Mere Belonging: Implications for Motivation, Emotion, and Intergroup Relationships
Another area of my research explores the hypothesis that a primary source of people’s sense of self lies in small cues of their social identity—cues that signal to whom they are socially connected. Although much past research examines the consequences of well-established, deeply valued relationships, my research on mere belonging explores minimal cues of social connectedness, even with unfamiliar others. I hypothesize that simple cues of social connection can cause people to merge psychologically with others. For instance, studies find that cues like a shared birthday with a math major increase students’ motivation in math and promote shared goals (Walton, Cohen, et al., 2012; for similar effects with 4- 5-year-olds, see Master & Walton, 2013) and facilitate shared emotions and physiological reactions (Cwir, Carr, Walton, & Spencer 2011). In one study, after a confederate had jogged in place, participants who had been led to feel socially connected to her had greater cardiovascular reactivity than participants merely exposed to her. Many of these effects were mediated by participants’ sense of social connectedness to the peer at hand. This research shows that the boundaries between self and other are surprisingly fluid; the goals, motivation, and emotions of others to whom we feel connected readily become our own.
Tiffany Brannon and I recently explored implications of mere belonging for intergroup relations (Brannon & Walton, 2013). Extending my prior research, we found that people expressed greater interest in the culture of a peer of another ethnicity when they had been led to feel socially connected to her. Moreover, extending psychology’s consistency theories (e.g., dissonance), the opportunity to act on this interest by freely taking part in a relevant cultural activity, which could seem inconsistent with holding prejudicial attitudes, reduced implicit prejudice immediately, and 6 months later promoted more positive intergroup attitudes. This research illustrates how a theoretical account of underlying psychological processes can inform a long-standing theoretical and applied problem: When and how does intergroup contact contribute to more positive intergroup relations.
II.C. Cues of Working Together: Implications for Intrinsic Motivation, Norms, and Stereotype Threat
A third area examines not a sense of personal social connection to another person or group but the perceived opportunity to work with others on a task. The capacity to work together is a foundation of human culture that affords enormous social and personal benefits. Given this, Priyanka Carr and I hypothesized that simple social communications that signal that another person treats you as a partner working with them rather than as working separately would fuel intrinsic motivation, even when people work on their own. Consistent with this, a series of studies found that people told they were working on a puzzle “together” and who anticipated exchanging tips with peers (rather than writing tips for or receiving tips from the experimenter) showed increased intrinsic motivation, including freely chosen persistence, enjoyment, performance, and, in some conditions, the choice to do similar tasks 1-2 weeks later (Carr & Walton, 2014; for similar effects in early childhood, see Butler & Walton, 2013).
In one extension, my collaborators and I hypothesized that one reason social norms can be motivating is because they can signal an opportunity to work with others toward a common goal (cf., Goldstein et al., 2008). In one study, we found that normative appeals that conveyed an opportunity to work together led to greater reductions in paper-towel use in public restrooms than analogous appeals that did not (Carr, Howe, & Walton, under review). In a second extension, I hypothesized that cues of working together from members of a majority group could displace stereotype threat—the worry that people could view or treat one negatively as a consequence of a stereotype (Steele, 1997; Walton & Carr, 2012). A series of experiments found that such “micro-inclusions” eliminate stereotype threat among women (Aguilar, Carr, & Walton, in prep; cf. Logel, Walton et al., 2009).
III. The Interpretation of Group Differences in Achievement and Implications for Affirmative Action
Research on stereotype threat implies that widely known negative stereotypes could systematically undermine performance among women and ethnic-minority students. If this is the case, group differences would not just reflect real differences in ability. A part of the ability of stereotyped students would be “latent,” or hidden by psychological threats. With Steve Spencer, I tested this latent ability hypothesis in two meta-analyses combining data from 18,976 students in 5 countries (Walton & Spencer, 2009). We found that when threat was removed from either laboratory or real-world settings women and minorities performed better than men and non-minorities who had the same prior test scores and grades. The magnitude of this superior performance—the latent-ability effect—indexes the degree to which the prior measures underestimated the potential of ethnic minorities and women. The size of the effect suggests that most of the gender gap on the SAT-Math test, for instance, and much of race gaps on the SAT are due to psychological threat. This paper received the 2010 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
These results carry profound policy implications. They suggest (1) that organizations can tap considerable hidden potential in members of negatively stereotyped groups by remedying psychological threat in their internal settings and (2) that in interpreting grades and test scores in admissions and hiring, organizations that account for the threat present in typical prior environments can simultaneously make more meritocratic and more diverse decisions. My colleagues and I call these procedures affirmative meritocracy: this is a form of affirmative action justified entirely by a traditional definition of merit. In addition to writing policy (Walton, Spencer, & Erman, 2013; see also Logel, Walton, et al., 2012) and law-reviews on this topic (Erman & Walton, 2015), I led a group of social psychologists in working with legal scholars to inform the Supreme Court of these issues in Fisher v. Texas (Brief of Experimental Social Psychologists, 2012).
IV. The Social Malleability of the Self
Several additional lines of research explore how the self is socially constructed through top-down processes. One line of research examines subtle linguistic cues in self-descriptions (Walton & Banaji, 2004). Building on past research, Chris Bryan and I theorized that noun phrases (e.g., “I am an X”) signal that a behavior represents an identity—the kind of person one is or could become. When this identity is valued, we predicted that nouns would increase the likelihood that people would engage in a relevant future behavior. In one test, the day before a major election people completed a survey with questions that referenced voting using either nouns (e.g., “How important is it to you to be a voter in tomorrow’s election?”) or verbs (e.g., “How important is it to you to vote in tomorrow’s election?”). The noun condition caused an 11 percentage-point increase in voter turnout, one of the largest boosts ever observed (Bryan, Walton, et al., 2011). The results highlight how people’s desire to see themselves as having positive identities can be channeled, even through subtle means, to motivate socially important behavior (for related research in early childhood, see Bryan, Master, & Walton, 2014).
Other research examines the popular theory that people have a limited degree of willpower, which is easily depleted. Past research finds that after people exert self-control they perform less well on subsequent self-control tasks, which is commonly interpreted as “ego depletion.” Contrary to this notion, Veronika Job, Carol Dweck and I have explored the hypothesis that people’s theories about willpower are responsible for “depletion” effects. We show that it is only when people believe or are led to believe that willpower is limited (i.e., easily depletable) that they show depletion effects (Job, Dweck, & Walton, 2010; Miller, Walton et al., 2012); this is because a limited theory sensitizes people to otherwise irrelevant cues of their available resources, such as minor feelings of tiredness (Job et al., 2010) or the consumption of glucose (Job, Walton et al., 2013). Further, a non-limited theory predicts more successful self-regulation over time in real-world settings, especially when people face significant self-control demands, and better grades (Job, Walton, et al.,2015). Ongoing research tests interventions to change people’s willpower theories in real-world settings.
V. Conclusion
In all my research and teaching, I am committed to simultaneously advancing psychological theory and to addressing major social problems. By conducting both laboratory and field-experimental research, my work identifies novel psychological processes and examines how these processes play out in real-world settings, affect important behavioral outcomes, and unfold over time in interaction with contexts.
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