Gregory M. Walton’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

Students from low-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds such as first-generation or low-income students are often portrayed as deficient, lacking in skills and potential to succeed at university. We hypothesized that such representations lead low-SES students to see their SES-identity as a barrier to success and impair achievement. If so, reframing low-SES students’ identity as a source of strength may help them succeed. Testing this hypothesis in a highly scalable form, we developed an online low-SES-identity-reframing exercise. In Experiment 1 ( N = 214), this exercise helped low-SES students to see their SES-identity more as a source of success and boosted their performance on an academic task by 13%. In Experiment 2, a large randomized-controlled intervention field experiment ( N = 786), we implemented the identity-reframing intervention in a university’s online learning program. This improved low-SES students’ grades over the semester. Recognizing the strengths low-SES students bring to university can help students access these strengths and apply them to schooling.

Poverty is multidimensional, associated not only with a lack of financial resources, but also often social-psychological constraints, such as diminished agency and aspirations. Through a series of field experiments, this paper assesses the causal impacts of culturally wise interventions designed to build women’s agency on poverty reduction efforts in rural Niger. Moreover, the study identifies a model of agency that is “culturally wise” because it is the most motivational and functional in the study cultural context. Study 1 reports descriptive evidence that an interdependent model of agency—that is grounded in social harmony, respect, and collective advancement and that accounts for relational affordances for individual goals—is predominant in rural Niger. This stands in contrast to a more self-oriented, independent model grounded in personal aspirations, self-direction, and self-advancement that is more common in the West. Study 2 explores the psychosocial mechanisms of a highly effective, multifaceted poverty reduction program that included two psychosocial interventions—a community sensitization and a life skills training, which incorporated both models of agency. Although the results support the role of intrapersonal processes (including enhanced self-efficacy and optimistic future expectations) in driving economic impacts, there is equal, if not greater, support for relational processes (including increased subjective social standing, control over earnings, and social support). Study 3 conducts a mechanism experiment to disentangle the causal effects of interventions grounded in independent agency (“personal initiative”) or interdependent agency (“interpersonal initiative”). The results show that the interdependent agency intervention, which is considered to be most “culturally wise,” led to significant effects on economic outcomes as well as both intrapersonal and relational processes. By contrast, the independent agency intervention showed impacts on intrapersonal processes alone. These findings show the promise of an emerging area of research at the intersection of behavioral science, cultural psychology, and development economics for addressing complex global problems like poverty and inequality.

Students from low socioeconomic-status (SES) backgrounds such as first-generation and low-income students are often portrayed as deficient, lacking in skills and potential to succeed at university. We hypothesized that such representations lead low-SES students to see their SES-identity as a barrier to success and impair achievement. If so, reframing low-SES students’ identity as a source of strength may help them succeed. Testing this hypothesis, we developed a highly scalable online-exercise. In Experiment 1 (N=214), this SES-identity-reframing exercise helped low-SES students to see their SES-identity more as a source of success, and boosted their performance in an academic task by 13%. In Experiment 2, a large randomized-controlled intervention field-experiment with 786 students, we implemented the identity-reframing intervention in a university’s online-learning-program. This improved low-SES students’ grades over the semester. Acknowledging the strengths low-SES students bring to university settings can help these students access their strengths and apply them to schooling.

Widespread narratives frame mental illness as a sign of personal weakness. We theorized that these narratives impair individuals’ ability to realize their strengths and pursue their goals. To test this hypothesis, and to attain a practical intervention-tool, we developed a brief (~20-minutes), highly-scalable exercise that inverts weakness-narratives by highlighting the strengths people show contending with depression. Three large randomized-controlled experiments (Ntotal=748) show that this identity-reframing-exercise enhanced the confidence of people who had experienced depression to pursue their goals (Experiments 1a-b); and, over two weeks, the progress they reported making towards a self-selected goal from 43% to 64% (Experiment 2). Lessened stigma mediated the gain in confidence (Experiment 1b): While 71% of control-condition participants thought the strengths needed to pursue their goals did not describe people with depression well, identity-reframing reduced this to 52%. Complementing treatments of depression, efforts to invert weakness-narratives can help people recognize and access their strengths.

Groups that face systemic disadvantage, such as refugees or people facing poverty, are sometimes viewed as essentially weak, passive victims. We show that weak-victim narratives are common, especially among liberals: they are well-represented in media, especially liberal media (Study 1), and commonly endorsed, especially by liberals (Studies 2a, 2c, 4, & Supplementary Study 1). What leads people and especially liberals to endorse weak-victim narratives? Weak-victim narratives conflate weakness (“weak”) with a sympathetic recognition of disadvantage (“victim”; Study 2b). This ambiguity facilitates their endorsement among liberals and their contribution to paternalistic behavior (Study 2c). Relatedly, mediation analyses (Studies 2a, 2c, & Supplementary Study 1) and experimental data (Study 2d) show that the perception of disadvantage, which is more pronounced among liberals, contributes to narrative’s endorsement. Experimental data also suggest that people sometimes endorse the weak-victim narrative strategically when seeking approval from liberals (Study 3). What are consequences? Correlational and experimental evidence show that the weak-victim narrative, as compared to a strong-agent narrative, leads liberals to see members of disadvantaged groups as less strong and agentic (Studies 4, 5, & 7) and to treat people in ways that are functionally disempowering: donating more money to disempowering rather than empowering aid organizations known to undermine recipients’ confidence in their abilities through paternalistic representations of aid (Studies 5-6), and encouraging students to quit challenging but valuable learning opportunities (Studies 2c & 7). Eleven studies (Ntotal=1,948) point to a novel mechanism, common among liberals, that facilitates the disempowering treatment of disadvantaged groups.

Many low‐status groups are portrayed as deficient. Countering such stigmatizing narratives, identity‐reframing interventions reframe low‐status group members as strong and resourceful agents. This approach can help members of low‐status groups successfully pursue major life goals. In one test, an identity‐reframing intervention increased engagement in an online‐university among refugees by 23% over 1 year. In another, it increased the degree to which people with experiences of depression successfully completed a meaningful self‐chosen goal over 2 weeks. The present review describes how identity‐reframing interventions work on a practical and theoretical level, where they might not work, how they contribute to theory and practice, how they can be adapted to new populations and contexts, and what novel questions they direct us to.

Inequality and deep poverty have risen sharply in the US since the 1990s. Simultaneously, cash-based welfare policies have frayed, support for public assistance has fallen on the political right, and prejudice against recipients of welfare has remained high. Yet, in recent years Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction, a policy proposing to give all citizens cash sufficient to meet basic needs with no strings attached. We hypothesized that UBI can mitigate the partisanship and prejudice that define the existing welfare paradigm in the US but that this potential depends critically on the narratives attached to it. Indeed, across three online experiments with US adults (total N = 1888), we found that communicating the novel policy features of UBI alone were not sufficient to achieve bipartisan support for UBI or overcome negative stereotyping of its recipients. However, when UBI was described as advancing the more conservative value of financial freedom, conservatives perceived the policy to be more aligned with their values and were less opposed to the policy (meta-analytic effect on policy support: d = 0.36 [95% CI: 0.27 to 0.46]). Extending the literatures on moral reframing and cultural match, we further find that this values-aligned policy narrative mitigated prejudice among conservatives, reducing negative welfare-related stereotyping of policy recipients (meta-analytic effect d = −0.27 [95% CI: −0.38 to −0.16]), while increasing affiliation with them. Together, these findings point to moral reframing as a promising means by which institutional narratives can be used to bridge partisan divides and reduce prejudice.

Objective: Using archival and experimental methods, we tested the role that racial associations of first names play in criminal sentencing. Hypotheses: We hypothesized that Black defendants with more stereotypically Black names (e.g., Jamal) would receive more punitive sentences than Black defendants with more stereotypically White names (e.g., James). Method: In an archival study, we obtained a random sample of 296 real-world records of Black male prison inmates in Florida and asked participants to rate the extent to which each inmate’s first name was stereotypically Black or stereotypically White. We then tested the extent to which racial stereotypicality was associated with sentence length, controlling for relevant legal features of each case (e.g., criminal record, severity of convicted offenses). In a follow-up experiment, participant judges assigned sentences in cases in which the Black male defendant was randomly assigned a more stereotypically Black or White name from our archival study. Results: Controlling for a wide array of factors—including criminal record—we found that inmates with more stereotypically Black versus White first names received longer sentences β = 0.09, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) [0.01, 0.16]: 409 days longer for names 1 standard deviation above versus below the mean on racial stereotypicality. In our experiment, participant judges recommended significantly longer sentences to Black inmates with more stereotypically Black names above and beyond the severity of the charges or their criminal history, β = 0.07, 95% CI [0.02, 0.13]. Conclusions: Our results identify how racial associations with first names can bias consequential sentencing decisions despite the impartial aims of the legal system. More broadly, our findings illustrate how racial biases manifest in distinctions made among members of historically marginalized groups, not just between members of different groups.

Research on group dehumanization has focused largely on the perpetrators of dehumanization or on its negative emotional and cognitive effects on targets. We theorized that people would also reassert their humanness in response to dehumanizing portrayals of their group. Experiment 1 showed that Black individuals responded to a dehumanizing representation of their racial group by emphasizing their experience of more complex, uniquely human emotions versus emotions more associated with other animals. Experiment 2 and a supplemental experiment showed that Black, but not White, individuals responded to group-based dehumanization by depicting more complex self-portrayals. Taken together, these studies begin to illustrate that targets of group-based dehumanization are not simply passive victims but respond actively, resisting negative representations of their group by reasserting their humanness.