Search

A promising way to mitigate inequality is by addressing students’ worries about belonging. But where and with whom is this social-belonging intervention effective? Here we report a team-science randomized controlled experiment with 26,911 students at 22 diverse institutions. Results showed that the social-belonging intervention, administered online before college (in under 30 minutes), increased the rate at which students completed the first year as full-time students, especially among students in groups that had historically progressed at lower rates. The college context also mattered: The intervention was effective only when students’ groups were afforded opportunities to belong. This study develops methods for understanding how student identities and contexts interact with interventions. It also shows that a low-cost, scalable intervention generalizes its effects to 749 4-year institutions in the United States.

The present research examines the conditions under which educating non-stigmatized individuals about the experiences of members of stigmatized groups leads to paternalistic or more respectful views of the target. We propose that when these efforts ask members of non-stigmatized groups to focus only on the difficulties experienced by stigmatized targets, they will lead to more paternalistic views of targets because they portray targets as being in need of help. In contrast, we propose that when these efforts take a broader focus on stigmatized targets and include their resilience in the face of their difficulties, they will lead to more respectful views of targets. Four studies supported these predictions. Across studies, White participants who focused only on a Black target’s difficulties subsequently perceived the target as more helpless and less competent than controls. Participants who focused on the target’s resilience in the face of difficulties perceived him as more competent.

We design and experimentally evaluate two low-cost, scalable interventions – an online preparatory module to help students reflect on and overcome barriers and a text-message coaching program – in a sample of over 3000 undergraduate students at a large Canadian university. Supplementing administrative data on academic outcomes with a unique follow-up survey on student well-being, we estimate positive program effects on non-academic outcomes such as feelings of satisfaction and belonging, despite estimating null effects on course grades and credit accumulation. Given the low costs associated with administering these programs, our results suggest that the positive impacts on student well-being may warrant program expansion even in the absence of impacts on academic outcomes.

An emerging literature documents the many challenges faced by college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Little is known, however, about how students responded to the adversity. Focusing on two large Canadian universities, we provide some of the first evidence on the coping strategies students reported and the relationships between their endorsement of specific coping strategies and their subsequent well-being. Students focused on compensating for a lack of structure by creating new routines, maintaining social connections, and trying new activities. Conditional on baseline problems indexes, students who initially endorsed social connectedness as a strategy score significantly higher on a comprehensive well-being index five to twelve weeks later.

Weight gain and loss arise from environmental, genetic, biological, and behavioral factors. Most North Americans desire weight loss or maintenance, but most gain weight throughout adulthood. In a society rife with thin ideals and anti-fat bias, especially for women, one under-recognized factor could contribute to this weight-gaining trajectory: the activation and persistence of psychological threat. We used multiple methods to contact participants from two previous studies in which weight-dissatisfied women were given either a values affirmation to buffer them against psychological threat, or a control task. An average of 2.32 years after the affirmation manipulation, higher body mass index (BMI) women who had been affirmed maintained their weight, whereas controls gained weight. There was no effect on lower BMI women. Additional analyses ruled out alternative explanations. Results underscore the role of psychological threat in long-term weight gain. Our findings suggest that a more holistic analysis of weight-gaining trajectory is essential for understanding processes behind weight maintenance and change.

When members of a stigmatized group find themselves in a situation where negative stereotypes provide a possible framework for interpreting their behavior, the risk of being judged in light of those stereotypes can elicit a disruptive state that undermines performance and aspirations in that domain. This situational predicament, termed stereotype threat, continues to be an intensely debated and researched topic in educational, social, and organizational psychology. In this review, we explore the various sources of stereotype threat, the mechanisms underlying stereotype-threat effects (both mediators and moderators), and the consequences of this situational predicament, as well as the means through which society and stigmatized individuals can overcome the insidious effects of stereotype threat. Ultimately, we hope this review alleviates some of the confusion surrounding stereotype threat while also sparking further research and debate.

Americans have been gaining weight in recent decades, prompting widespread concern about the health implications of this change. Governments, health practitioners, and the general public all want to know: What is the best way to reduce the health risks associated with higher body weight? The dominant weight-loss solution to this “obesity problem” encourages individuals to lose weight through behavior change. This solution rests on the assumptions that higher body weight causes health problems, that permanent weight loss is attainable, and that weight loss improves health. But comprehensive reviews of the scientific evidence find mixed, weak, and sometimes contradictory evidence for these premises. We suggest that a different solution to the “obesity problem” is needed – a solution that acknowledges both the multifaceted nature of health and the complex interaction between person and situation that characterizes the connection between weight and health. Thus, we use the lens of social psychological science to propose an alternative, well-being solution to the “obesity problem”. This solution has the potential to improve health by encouraging eating and exercising for optimal health rather than weight loss, by developing interventions to reduce weight stigma and discrimination, and by helping higher body-weight people cope with the stress of stigma and discrimination.

Psychological interventions can narrow college achievement gaps between students from nonstigmatized and stigmatized groups. However, no intervention we know of has investigated effects for one highly stigmatized group: people of higher bodyweights. We analyzed data from a prematriculation social-belonging intervention trial at 22 colleges, which conveyed that adversity in the college transition is normative, temporary, and nondiagnostic of lack of belonging. Nine months postintervention, higher weight participants in a standard belonging treatment had higher first-year grade point averages (GPAs) than controls and maintained more stable weights, an indicator of physical well-being. Effects of a belonging treatment customized to specific colleges were directionally similar but nonsignificant. Exploratory analyses revealed that effects did not differ by race and that weight effects were driven by women. Together, results show that higher weight students contend with belonging concerns that contribute to a weight gap in GPA, but belonging interventions can raise GPA and promote healthy weight stability.

In a randomized-controlled trial, we tested 2 brief interventions designed to mitigate the effects of a “chilly climate” women may experience in engineering, especially in male-dominated fields. Participants were students entering a selective university engineering program. The social-belonging intervention aimed to protect students’ sense of belonging in engineering by providing a nonthreatening narrative with which to interpret instances of adversity. The affirmation-training intervention aimed to help students manage stress that can arise from social marginalization by incorporating diverse aspects of their self-identity in their daily academic lives. As expected, gender differences and intervention effects were concentrated in male-dominated majors (20% women). In these majors, compared with control conditions, both interventions raised women’s school-reported engineering grade-point-average (GPA) over the full academic year, eliminating gender differences. Both also led women to view daily adversities as more manageable and improved women’s academic attitudes. However, the 2 interventions had divergent effects on women’s social experiences. The social-belonging intervention helped women integrate into engineering, for instance, increasing friendships with male engineers. Affirmation-training helped women develop external resources, deepening their identification with their gender group. The results highlight how social marginalization contributes to gender inequality in quantitative fields and 2 potential remedies.

This research examines whether acceptance messages from close others about one's weight predict changes in stressful weight concern and body mass index (BMI) over time. Participants reported weight concern and BMI in three waves of data collection spanning approximately 9 months, and reported the messages they received from parents, friends, and romantic partners concerning their weight in the second wave of data collection. Participants normatively gained weight during the study period. But for vulnerable women, those initially high in weight concern, receiving fewer acceptance messages about weight was associated with weight gain, whereas receiving more acceptance messages was associated with decreases in stressful weight concern and weight maintenance, or even loss, over time. Alternative predictors, mechanisms, and models were also tested.

Whereas some research has found that low self-esteem individuals (LSEs) with high implicit self-esteem fare better psychologically than those with low implicit self-esteem, other research has found they fare worse. In an attempt to integrate and extend this work, we propose that the well-being of LSEs with high implicit self-esteem is responsive to outcomes in important domains; they are more debilitated than LSEs with low implicit self-esteem by negative outcomes but benefit more from positive outcomes. In Study 1, LSEs with high implicit self-esteem had higher state self-esteem than those with low implicit self-esteem after positive feedback. In Study 2, LSEs with high implicit self-esteem had higher well-being (higher trait self-esteem and less severe depressive symptoms) than LSEs with low implicit self-esteem two weeks after receiving high grades, but lower well-being after receiving low grades. Thus, individuals with discrepant low self-esteem might be aptly characterized as having responsive self-e...

Self-affirmation interventions, in which people write about personal values, show promise as a technique to help people cope with psychological threat. However, recent research shows that awareness of self-affirmation effects undermines them. We hypothesized that awareness attenuates self-affirmation effects only when completion of the affirmation is externally imposed, rather than personally chosen. In two experiments, self-affirmation effects reemerged when “affirmation-aware” participants were given a choice about either whether to affirm or not (Study 1) or simply which value to write about (Study 2). These results suggest that people can learn to actively apply self-affirmation as a tool for coping with everyday threats.

Quitting smoking, practicing safer sex, and eating healthy foods can substantially reduce the risks of lung cancer, AIDS, and diabetes, respectively. However, in spite of efforts to inform the general public that their behavior puts them at risk of such diseases, rates of such healthy behaviors remain low. Thus, an important question remains: does the risk people perceive of a given health consequence actually play a role in their health behavior? According to key health behavior models, perceived risk is hypothesized to play a major role in predicting health behavior (see the Health Belief Model;1–3 Protection Motivation Theory;4,5 protection adoption process;6 and the C-SHIP model7,8). Although some empirical evidence supports this relation, there are alternative explanations and inconsistent findings that potentially diminish the value of perceived risk as a key determinant of health behavior. With respect to smoking, perceived health risk may play a particularly important role in predicting quitting behavior. Given that most antismoking campaigns rely on conveying health risk to motivate people to quit, the extent to which perceived risk predicts quitting behavior warrants further investigation. In this article, we investigated the relation between perceived risk and the process of quitting smoking. Although quitting behaviors are at least partially controlled by environmental and biological factors, findings from the present study may help underscore the important role perceived risk plays in health behavior change.

Baumeister, Tice, and Hutton proposed that individuals with low self-esteem (LSEs) adopt a more cautious, self-protective self-presentational style than individuals with high self-esteem (HSEs). The authors predicted that LSEs’ self-protectiveness leads them to be less expressive—less revealing of their thoughts and feelings—with others than HSEs, and that this self-esteem difference is mediated by their perceptions of the interaction partner’s regard for them. Two correlational studies supported these predictions (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, LSEs became more expressive when their perceived regard was experimentally heightened—when they imagined speaking to someone who was unconditionally accepting rather than judgmental (Study 3) and when their perceptions of regard were increased through Marigold, Holmes, and Ross’s compliment-reframing task (Study 4). These findings suggest that LSEs’ expressiveness can be heightened through interventions that reduce their concerns about social acceptance.

Social-psychological research conducted over the past 15 years provides compelling evidence that pervasive psychological threats are present in common academic environments—especially threats that originate in negative intellectual stereotypes—and that these threats undermine the real-world academic performance of non-Asian ethnic minority students and of women in math and science. As a consequence, common measures of academic performance, including both grades and test scores, systematically underestimate the intellectual ability of ethnic minority students and of women in quantitative fields (Walton & Spencer, 2009). We review evidence for these psychological threats, discuss their implications for the meaning and interpretation of common performance measures used in important admissions decisions, and address their implications for the efforts of colleges and universities to create positive academic environments that allow all students to thrive.

Chronically insecure individuals often behave in ways that result in the very social rejection that they most fear. We predicted that this typical self-fulfilling prophecy is not immutable. Self-affirmation may improve insecure individuals’ relational security, and this improvement may allow them to express more welcoming social behavior. In a longitudinal experiment, a 15-min self-affirmation improved both the relational security and experimenter-rated social behavior of insecure participants up to 4 weeks after the initial intervention. Moreover, the extent to which self-affirmation improved insecure participants’ relational security at 4 weeks predicted additional improvements in social behavior another 4 weeks after that. Our finding that insecure participants continued to reap the social benefits of self-affirmation up to 8 weeks after the initial intervention demonstrates that it is indeed possible to rewrite the self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection.

The goal of the present research is to demonstrate, and then alleviate, the role of thought suppression in depressing women’s math performance under stereotype threat. We hypothesize that when taking a math test, women (but not men) attempt to suppress thoughts of the math-related gender stereotype. Suppression leads to underperformance when it uses up cognitive resources. In Study 1, women underperform on a math test and show postsuppressional rebound of the stereotype when cognitive resources are reduced. In Study 2, women suppress the stereotype after a math test begins, but show rebound when the test is complete. In Study 3, making the stereotype irrelevant to the test improves performance and reduces postsuppressional rebound. In Studies 4 and 5, we test a strategy women can use to make suppression easier, and show that it restores math performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later, and this association was explained by subjective reports of poor social bonds. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 but used a longitudinal design with 6 waves of data collection, assessed self-reports of concrete health-related behaviors (i.e., number of visits to the doctor and classes missed due to illness), and measured both subjective and objective indicators of quality of social bonds (i.e., interpersonal stress and number of friends). In addition, Study 2 showed that poor-quality social bonds predicted acute drops in self-esteem over time, which in turn predicted acute decreases in quality of social bonds and, consequently, acute increases in health problems. In both studies, alternative explanations to the model were tested.

Recent research has demonstrated that stereotype threat—the concern that others will judge one negatively due to a stereotype that exists about one's group—interferes with women's performance on standardized math and engineering exams. In the current research we find that when a shortened version of the Fundamental of Engineering Exam is described as a test that is diagnostic of ability (i.e., when stereotype threat is high) women perform worse than men on the test. When stereotype threat is reduced, however (by characterizing the test as non-diagnostic or as not producing gender differences), women do just as well as men. The implication of these results for improving the engineering education environment is discussed.

Nilanjana Dasgupta's stereotype inoculation model brings together important theorizing about identity, belonging, and achievement to propose that ingroup members can be a “social vaccine” from the ...

INTRODUCTION Article 11 of the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) requires countries to implement health warnings on tobacco products. The Article 11 guidelines advise countries to periodically rotate warnings to prevent "wearout" of the health warnings. This study investigates potential wearout of cigarette health warnings during a period of 9 years in 2 countries: Canada, where larger pictorial warnings were implemented approximately 1 year prior to the study, and in the United States, where small text-only warnings were in place for 17 years at the beginning of the study. METHODS Data were drawn from national samples of smokers from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Surveys in Canada (N = 5,309), and the United States (N = 6,412) who were originally recruited by telephone with random digit dialing. Changes in 4 measures of health warning effectiveness and in a composite Labels Impact Index were examined over 8 waves of survey data (2002-2011). Analyses were conducted in 2012. RESULTS The health warning effectiveness measures and the Labels Impact Index indicated that the effectiveness of both the Canadian, and the U.S. warnings declined significantly over time. The Canadian warnings showed greater declines in effectiveness than the U.S. warnings, likely due to the initial novelty of the Canadian warnings. Despite the greater decline in Canada, the Canadian pictorial warnings were significantly more effective than the U.S. text-only warnings throughout the study. CONCLUSIONS Health warnings decline in effectiveness over time. Health warnings on tobacco products should be changed periodically to maintain effectiveness.

Social identity threat is the notion that one of a person's many social identities may be at risk of being devalued in a particular context (C. M. Steele, S. J. Spencer, & J. Aronson, 2002). The authors suggest that in domains in which women are already negatively stereotyped, interacting with a sexist man can trigger social identity threat, undermining women's performance. In Study 1, male engineering students who scored highly on a subtle measure of sexism behaved in a dominant and sexually interested way toward an ostensible female classmate. In Studies 2 and 3, female engineering students who interacted with such sexist men, or with confederates trained to behave in the same way, performed worse on an engineering test than did women who interacted with nonsexist men. Study 4 replicated this finding and showed that women's underperformance did not extend to an English test, an area in which women are not negatively stereotyped. Study 5 showed that interacting with sexist men leads women to suppress concerns about gender stereotypes, an established mechanism of stereotype threat. Discussion addresses implications for social identity threat and for women's performance in school and at work.