HANDBOOK OF WISE INTERVENTIONS

Handbook of
Wise Interventions
HOW SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
CAN HELP PEOPLE CHANGE

edited by

Gregory M. Walton
Alia J. Crum

THE GUILFORD PRESS

New York  London
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Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Walton, Gregory M. (Gregory Mariotti), editor. | Crum, Alia, editor.
Title: Handbook of wise interventions : how social psychology can help people change /
  editors, Gregory M. Walton, Alia J. Crum.
Description: New York : The Guilford Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references
  and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020030933 | ISBN 9781462543830 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Social psychology. | Social problems. | Operant behavior. | Change
  (Psychology) | Psychology, Applied.
Classification: LCC HM1033 .H3727 2020 | DDC 302—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030933
 About the Editors

Gregory M. Walton, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology and the Michael ­Forman
University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. His research
focuses on how basic social-psychological processes contribute to major social problems,
such as how negative stereotypes and stigma change school settings for minority group
members in ways that can undermine these students’ feelings of belonging and achieve-
ment. Dr. Walton develops novel psychological interventions to address these processes,
including to increase student motivation, improve academic achievement, and reduce
achievement gaps between groups. He is a recipient of many awards for his research,
including the Cialdini Prize and the W
­ egner Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Soci-
ety for Personality and Social Psychology.

Alia J. Crum, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Pri-
mary Investigator of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab. Her research focuses on mindsets;
how they affect important outcomes in such domains as exercise, diet, and stress; and
how they can be consciously and deliberately changed through intervention, to increase
physiological and psychological well-being. Dr. Crum is a recipient of awards, including
the Director’s New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health and the Ris-
ing Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science. She has worked as a clini-
cal psychologist for the VA health care system and has developed interventions focused
on mindset change for organizations, including LinkedIn, UBS, Stanford Health Care,
and the U.S. Navy.

v
 Contributors

Shannon T. Brady,PhD, Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University,

Winston‑Salem, North Carolina
Christopher J. Bryan, PhD, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, Texas
Patricia Chen, PhD, Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Robert B. Cialdini, PhD, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona
Geoffrey L. Cohen, PhD, Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Education,
and (by courtesy) Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Alia J. Crum, PhD, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Mesmin Destin, PhD, Department of Psychology, School of Education and Social Policy,
Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
Carol S. Dweck, PhD, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Amit Goldenberg, PhD, Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit,
Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts
Noah J. Goldstein, PhD, Anderson School of Management, University of California,
Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California
James J. Gross, PhD, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Eran Halperin, PhD, Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Israel
MarYam G. Hamedani, PhD, Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real World
Questions, Stanford University, Stanford, California

vii
viii Contributors

Isaac J. Handley-Miner, BA, Department of Psychology, Boston College,

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Emily J. Hangen, PhD, Department of Psychology, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Judith M. Harackiewicz, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–
Madison, Madison, Wisconsin
Ivan A. Hernandez, MS, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University,
Chicago, Illinois
Chris S. Hulleman, PhD, Curry School of Education and Frank Batten School of Leadership
and Public Policy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Jeremy P. Jamieson, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Rochester,
Rochester, New York
Kristin Layous, PhD, Department of Psychology, California State University, East Bay,
Hayward, California
Hae Yeon Lee, PhD, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Mohini Lokhande, DPhil, Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration
and Migration, Berlin, Germany
Laura B. Luchies, PhD, Center for Social Research, Calvin University,
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Denise C. Marigold, PhD, Social Development Studies, Renison University College
at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Tim Müller, DPhil, Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research,
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Jessica M. Nolan, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Scranton,
Scranton, Pennsylvania
Jason Anthony Okonofua, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Michael Ruiz, BA, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley,
Berkeley, California
P. Wesley Schultz, PhD, Department of Psychology, California State University San Marcos,
San Marcos, California
David K. Sherman, PhD, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University
of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California
Erica B. Slotter, PhD, Department of Psychology, Villanova University,
Villanova, Pennsylvania
Eric N. Smith, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
Gregg Sparkman, PhD, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
 Contributors ix

Nicole M. Stephens, PhD, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University,

Evanston, Illinois
Sarah S. M. Townsend, PhD, Marshall School of Business, University
of Southern California, Los Angeles, California
Bradley P. Turnwald, PhD, Department of Psychology, Stanford University,
Stanford, California
Gregory M. Walton, PhD, Department of Psychology, Stanford University,
Stanford, California
David S. Yeager, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, Texas
 Contents

Introduction 1
Gregory M. Walton and Alia J. Crum

PA R T I .  Education

 1. A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 9

Carol S. Dweck and David S. Yeager

 2. The Social‑Belonging Intervention 36

Gregory M. Walton and Shannon T. Brady

 3. Self‑Affirmation Interventions 63

David K. Sherman, Mohini Lokhande, Tim Müller,
and Geoffrey L. Cohen

 4. The Utility‑Value Intervention 100

Chris S. Hulleman and Judith M. Harackiewicz

 5. Difference‑Education: Improving Disadvantaged Students’ 126

Academic Outcomes by Changing Their Theory of Difference
Nicole M. Stephens, MarYam G. Hamedani, and Sarah S. M. Townsend

xi
xii Contents

 6. The Pathways Intervention as a Model to Design Broader Systems 148

of Equitable Student Support
Mesmin Destin and Ivan A. Hernandez

 7. The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 166

Patricia Chen

PA R T I I .   Health and Well-Being

 8. Happiness Interventions 191

Kristin Layous

 9. The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 217

Alia J. Crum, Isaac J. Handley‑Miner, and Eric N. Smith

10. Stress Reappraisal Interventions: Improving Acute Stress Responses 239

in Motivated Performance Contexts
Jeremy P. Jamieson and Emily J. Hangen

11. Values-­Alignment Interventions: An Alternative to Pragmatic Appeals 259

for Behavior Change
Christopher J. Bryan

12. The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention: Emphasizing the Tasty 286

and Enjoyable Attributes of Healthy Foods
Bradley P. Turnwald and Alia J. Crum

PA R T I I I .   Conflict and Relationships

13. The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 305

David S. Yeager and Hae Yeon Lee

14. The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 324

Jason Anthony Okonofua and Michael Ruiz

15. The Group‑Malleability Intervention: Addressing Intergroup Conflicts 346

by Changing Perceptions of Outgroup Malleability
Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, and Eran Halperin
 Contents xiii

16. The Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions Intervention: 366

A 7‑Minute Marital Conflict Intervention Benefits Relational
and Individual Well‑Being
Erica B. Slotter and Laura B. Luchies

17. The Abstract Reframing Intervention: Helping Insecure Individuals 385

Benefit from Romantic Partners’ Positive Feedback
Denise C. Marigold

PA R T I V.  Sustainability

18. The Social Norms Approach: A Wise Intervention for Solving 405
Social and Environmental Problems
Jessica M. Nolan, P. Wesley Schultz, Robert B. Cialdini,
and Noah J. Goldstein

19. Dynamic Norm Interventions: How to Enable the Spread 429

of Positive Change
Gregg Sparkman

Author Index 448

Subject Index 463

 Introduction

Gregory M. Walton and Alia J. Crum

The interventions shared in this volume address some of the hardest problems we face in
our personal lives and as a society. Long-­standing educational inequalities lead to lost
potential, social conflict, and worse health and economic prospects. Too many people
are unhappy in their marriages and stressed in their jobs. Rates of obesity, diabetes, and
cardiovascular disease continue to creep upward, but even simple remedies, like motivat-
ing healthy eating, remain notoriously difficult. Conflicts between cultures and groups
appear intractable. Climate change is upon us, yet reversing widely practiced unsustain-
able behaviors can feel like a lost cause.
You might wonder: What in the world are such diverse problems all doing in the
same book? The answer is that we can make progress on each using a “psychologically
wise” intervention (Walton & Wilson, 2018). Each chapter describes the everyday inter-
pretations that feed into a problem and, in turn, shows how helping people to new ways
of thinking that are authentic, appropriate, and adaptive for their context can make a
difference, sometimes profound.
The “wise intervention” approach is distinct from other traditions and social reforms
because it does not rely on improving the objective qualities of situations, such as to
hire more tutors or to rearrange a cafeteria to make healthy options more accessible,
or of people, such as to increase students’ IQ. Instead, the power of wise interventions
comes from the rich intersection between psychological interpretations and the contexts
in which they arise. Wise interventions recognize that how we make sense of ourselves,
other people, and our circumstances does not exist in a vacuum but is a product of the
cultural and social contexts in which we live. They then rely on a simple observation:
that altering a maladaptive or pejorative interpretation, especially at a key time or in an
important context, can change how a person engages with the contexts and settings they
inhabit.
An enormous benefit of this approach is that, in the right circumstances, an initial
change in interpretation can become self-­confirming. Then, even a brief exercise can

1
2 Introduction

transform people’s lives. For example, the intervention discussed by Slotter and Luchies
(Chapter 16) used three 7-minute exercises to help couples take a third-party perspective
on conflict in their marriage. This strengthened marital relationships over a year. Walton
and Brady (Chapter 2) discuss a social-­belonging intervention, delivered in an hour-long
session in the first year of college. It improved grades over 3 years and life and career
satisfaction 7–11 years later.
How is that possible? How do these interventions work? What do they tell us about
people and social problems and efforts at reform?
To showcase this work, we invited the leading researchers who originally developed
diverse wise interventions to share their work. We gave each author a detailed 12-point
outline and asked them to address specific questions in a common order. Some chap-
ters present well-­established interventions. For example, values affirmation (Sherman,
Lokhande, Müller, & Cohen, Chapter 3) and social norms interventions (Nolan, Schultz,
Cialdini, & Goldstein, Chapter 18) have been tested and replicated in numerous contexts
for more than a decade. Others share hot-off-the-press approaches that have only recently
been tested in real-world situations (e.g., Sparkman’s dynamic-­norm approach, Chapter
19; Turnwald & Crum’s taste-­focused labeling intervention, Chapter 12).
The 12 questions we asked authors are ones we believe are important for any inter-
vention to address—­even (especially) if the answers are still being worked out. They are
as follows:
First, we asked for background: “What is the intellectual history, research tradi-
tion, and theorizing from which the intervention draws?” For instance, Sherman and
colleagues (Chapter 3) describe basic research on people’s need for self-­integrity, the need
to see oneself as adequate, moral, and competent; how defensiveness and poor function-
ing can result when this need is threatened; and how this insight led to value-­affirmation
interventions that bolster a sense of self-­integrity to help students who face negative ste-
reotypes in school perform better, shrinking inequalities.
Second, we asked about psychological process: “Describe how past studies shed light
on a critical psychological process—­the subjective meanings the intervention will aim to
affect.” Wise interventions address an array of fundamental interpretations:

• Is something good or bad? Are stress and arousal helpful or harmful (Crum,
Handley-­M iner, & Smith, Chapter 9; Jamieson & Hangen, Chapter 10)? Are veg-
etable dishes appealing or unappealing (Turnwald & Crum, Chapter 12)?
• Can things change? Can challenges improve or are they fixed and permanent, such
as academic struggles (Dweck & Yeager, Chapter 1), feelings of nonbelonging in
school (Stephens, Hamedani, & Townsend, Chapter 5; Walton & Brady, Chap-
ter 2), experiences of bullying (Yeager & Lee, Chapter 13), or groups in conflict
(Goldenberg, Gross, & Halperin, Chapter 15)?
• Who am I and what can I become? Am I a good and decent person (Sherman et
al., Chapter 3)? What are my values and how can they be expressed in my behavior
(Bryan, Chapter 11)? Is schoolwork useful to me and relevant in my life (Hulleman
& Harackiewicz, Chapter 4)? How can I act efficiently to achieve my goals (Chen,
Chapter 7)? What am I grateful for (Layous, Chapter 8)? What kind of person
could I become if I work hard in school (Destin & Hernandez, Chapter 6)?
• How should I understand people and relationships? When my partner compli-
ments me, does that mean he or she loves me (Marigold, Chapter 17)? How should
 Introduction 3

I interpret conflicts with a spouse (Slotter & Luchies, Chapter 16) or a student
who misbehaves in class (Okonofua & Ruiz, Chapter 14)? Can bullies change, or
will I always be a victim (Yeager & Lee, Chapter 13)? Can my relationship with a
place improve (Stephens et al., Chapter 5; Walton & Brady, Chapter 2)?

Third, we asked about evidence: “What is the evidence of the effectiveness of the
intervention in improving personally and/or socially important outcomes?” Each chap-
ter presents evidence from at least one randomized controlled trial that shows how an
intervention can improve important outcomes in a real-world setting, such as reducing
suspensions for middle school students (Okonofua & Ruiz, Chapter 14), improving atti-
tudes and behavior between Israelis and Palestinians (Goldenberg et al., Chapter 15),
increasing healthy eating (Bryan, Chapter 11; Turnwald & Crum, Chapter 12), or raising
academic performance over time (Dweck & Yeager, Chapter 1; Walton & Brady, Chapter
2; Sherman et al., Chapter 3; Stephens et al., Chapter 5; Destin & Hernandez, Chapter 6;
Chen, Chapter 7; Jamieson & Hangen, Chapter 10; Yeager & Lee, Chapter 13).
Fourth, we asked about mechanisms: “Describe evidence for how the intervention
achieves these effects.” For instance, Crum and colleagues (Chapter 9) show how an
intervention that represents stress as enhancing (as opposed to debilitating) can improve
health and work performance by changing what people pay attention to, what emotions
they experience, what they are motivated to do, and what their bodies are prepared to do,
as evidenced by their physiology.
Fifth, we asked about effects over time: “Does the intervention produce lasting ben-
efits? Why, how, and when?” For instance, Walton and Brady (Chapter 2) show that the
social-­belonging intervention improves school performance and life success over years
by helping students engage more in the school social community (e.g., e-­mailing profes-
sors, joining student groups) in ways that build peer and mentor relationships of lasting
benefit.
Sixth, we asked about heterogeneity: “In what kinds of social contexts and with
whom is the intervention more and less likely to be effective and why?” For instance,
Dweck and Yeager (Chapter 1) discuss how growth mindset of intelligence interventions
are more effective in high schools where peer norms support growth-­oriented behaviors—­
and less effective in schools where acting on a growth mindset might be uncool. Value-­
affirmation interventions are more effective with people whose identities are under threat
in a context, such as negatively stereotyped racial-­minority students, but less effective for
people not under threat (Sherman et al., Chapter 3).
Seventh, we asked about cousins: “What other interventions is this intervention
most closely related to? How is it similar and how is it different?” For instance, Jamieson
and Hangen (Chapter 10) and Crum and colleagues (Chapter 9) both aim to help people
see stress as an asset and not a negative. But they use distinct approaches that make one
more suitable for motivated performance contexts and the other for cases where the spe-
cific stressor is not easily identified or is more chronic and diffuse.
Eighth, we asked about content and implementation: “Describe the intervention
content or exercise in concrete terms and provide specific examples. Consider includ-
ing and annotating specific intervention materials.” Many chapters provide detailed
resources for implementing the intervention. For instance, Turnwald and Crum (Chapter
12) share a toolkit that teaches practitioners how to label foods more indulgently (https://
sparqtools.org/edgyveggies). Walton and Brady (Chapter 2) include annotated materials
4 Introduction

and share reflections from practitioners who implemented the social-­belonging interven-
tion at diverse institutions through the College Transition Collaborative at Stanford Uni-
versity.
Ninth, we asked about nuances and misconceptions: “What are one to two nuances
people might miss about the intervention that are critical to its effectiveness? What do
these nuances tell us about the nature of the intervention and the psychological process it
targets?” Stephens and colleagues (Chapter 5) caution against ways a different education
intervention could be misunderstood or misused to perpetuate stereotypes.
Tenth, we asked about implications for practice: “Discuss how this intervention can
be implemented effectively in field settings to make a difference for people’s lives and/
or institutional goals.” For instance, Turnwald and Crum’s (Chapter 12) taste-­focused
labeling approach flies in the face of the typical strategy for promoting healthy foods—­
highlighting their healthy attributes—­which can inadvertently make them less appealing.
Eleventh, we asked about implications for theory: “What does this intervention tell
us about who we are, about people, and psychological processes? What does this inter-
vention tell us about a given social problem?” Sparkman’s (Chapter 19) dynamic norms
approach shows that people conform to salient change in norms, even when this behavior
would violate current norms—that is, to behaviors that are not yet but are becoming
normative. And Yeager and Lee’s (Chapter 13) intervention to teach students an incre-
mental theory of personality highlights the important role played by implicit perceptions
of fixedness (“I’ll always be a victim; you’ll always be a bully”) in retaliatory processes
that contribute to school bullying.
Twelfth, we asked about future directions: “What are the high-­priority next steps
for this intervention for research?” Many of our authors offer suggestions for testing par-
ticular theoretical questions, including for scaling interventions and for moving to new
contexts. For instance, Destin and Hernandez (Chapter 6) discuss how their pathways
intervention could be extended to peers and teachers to instill systemic change.
While all sections of each chapter will be of value to readers, some may be more
relevant for some readers than others. If you are a practitioner looking for a solution in a
specific area, you may be most interested in the “Content and Implementation” section,
which provides direction for applying a particular intervention; but we also encourage
you to be mindful of the “Nuances and Misconceptions,” as well as the “Heterogene-
ity” sections, which will help you apply the intervention skillfully and thoughtfully and
avoid misunderstandings. If you are a social psychologist conducting similar research,
you might be particularly interested in the “Psychological Process,” “Mechanisms,” and
“Effects over Time” sections. We encourage all readers to compare and contrast across
chapters, as noting the similarities and differences across approaches will help engender
a deeper and more integrated understanding of what wise interventions are, how they
work, and how they can move outcomes that matter.
How are the chapters organized? Somewhat artificially, by the primary outcome of
interest investigated in a line of research to date. However, important outcomes are often
deeply interrelated, as are academic motivation and achievement, health, well-being, and
personal relationships. Thus, many powerful psychological interventions affect multiple
kinds of outcomes, or could do so as explored in future work, even as a primary focus
has been in one area to date.
Together, these interventions illustrate the truth that every social problem is, in
part, a psychological problem (Walton & Dweck, 2009). Yet no social problem is only
 Introduction 5

a psychological problem. Nor are wise interventions a silver bullet. The problems we
face are beastly, complex, and stubborn. And beastly, complex, and stubborn problems
require solutions from all angles, including a careful consideration of resources, incen-
tives, nudges, and the capacities of individuals for change. Wise interventions offer an
additional tool.
In some ways, this volume represents a back to the future for social psychology. The
field was forged out of the need in the mid-20th-­century to understand the intergroup ani-
mosities and conflicts that defined World War II. Then followed a “cognitive revolution”
and an intense focus on controlled laboratory experimentation and deep understanding
of psychological processes. As the new century dawned, researchers began to fuse these
methodological and theoretical insights with a renewed commitment to real-world, eco-
logically valid contexts—­a focus that has since exploded. It’s back to the future, but with
a new level of empirical sophistication and vigor for using social-­psychological insights
to understand and address the pressing problems of today.
What wisdom you have in your hands! The interventions presented in this volume
were not easy or simple to construct. They are founded on hard-won psychological
insights, typically cultivated over years of research in the laboratory and the field, with an
intense commitment to understanding how interpretations play out in the real world and
how altering them might help people achieve their goals. Yet all of the interventions you
will read about are under construction and that construction is ongoing (Dweck, 2017).
In each case, there are important questions outstanding about why, how, for whom, and
in what contexts an intervention works or does not work. There is much we have yet to
learn. Above all else, we invite you to a journey of discovery about the role of psychology
in our everyday lives and how we can build this understanding to improve our lives, the
lives of others, and our societies.
Welcome!

REFERENCES

Dweck, C. (2017). Growth mindset is on a firm foundation, but we’re still building the house.
Mindset Scholars Network Blog. Retrieved from https://mindsetscholarsnetwork.org/
growth- ­mindset-­firm-­foundation-­still-­building-­house.
Walton, G. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2009). Solving social problems like a psychologist. Perspectives
on Psychological Science, 4, 101–102.
Walton, G. M., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and
personal problems. Psychological Review, 125, 617–655.
 PA R T I

EDUCATION
 C H A P TE R 1

A Growth Mindset about Intelligence

Carol S. Dweck and David S. Yeager

Wise interventions can create a world of new meanings for people, and growth-­mindset
interventions portray a world in which human abilities are not fixed but can be developed.
Growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence programs are grounded in decades of foundational work and
have undergone years of development and testing. These programs not only vividly convey
the idea of malleable ability to students but also make students eager to adopt the idea and
able to apply it in their schoolwork and in their lives. In this chapter, we discuss the roots
and the evolution of growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interventions, recent large-scale experi-
ments that shed light on how and when they work best, and our vision for the future of these
interventions.

Wise interventions create a psychological world and invite people to enter it. It is
often a world that equips them to face potentially threatening challenges and to face them
with greater confidence and effectiveness because they have a new way to think about
those challenges. As a result, they are more likely to behave in ways that can bring better
results, be they emotional, social, or academic/professional results.
A growth mindset about intelligence is the belief that intellectual abilities are not
fixed but rather can be developed, for example, through hard work, good strategies, and
help and mentoring from others. In contrast, a fixed mindset is the belief that intellec-
tual abilities are fixed and cannot be improved. In this chapter, we show how growth-­
mindset interventions have been developed and refined with the aim of creating a world
of meanings—­one that encourages students to take on challenges, interpret setbacks or
struggles in adaptive ways, and persist in the face of failure (e.g., Aronson, Fried, &
Good, 2002; Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Paunesku et al., 2015; Yeager,
Romero, et al., 2016; Yeager et al., 2019; see Dweck & Yeager, 2019, for a review). Ulti-
mately, this can result in greater growth and achievement, potentially decreasing long-­
standing grade disparities.
Yeager and Lee (Chapter 13, this volume) show how a growth mindset about
personality can create a similar psychological world in the social domain and how

9
10 I. Education

growth-­mindset-­of-­personality interventions can, in this way, have an impact on depres-

sion, anxiety, and social behavior, such as aggression.
Because a growth-­mindset intervention seeks to create a world of new meanings, an
important theme of this chapter is that it is not sufficient to simply “teach the facts” of a
growth mindset and then expect students to change. The intervention must be sensitive,
resonant, and compelling in the way it introduces the concept, explains it, helps people
understand how to apply it to their lives, and motivates them to do so (see Dweck & Yea-
ger, 2019; Yeager, Romero, et al., 2016). Moreover, the environment a person is in must
support this new understanding and the actions it motivates.

BACKGROUND

Mindset research grew out of two lines of previous research: learned helplessness (Selig-
man & Maier, 1967) and attribution theory (Weiner & Kukla, 1970). The research on
learned helplessness showed that animals exposed to uncontrollable negative events even-
tually stopped trying to prevent those events or escape from them. They remained passive
even when the environment later changed and would have rewarded their efforts. We saw
this behavior as perhaps similar to that of students who give up in the face of difficulty
when in fact they have the ability to learn and do well.
Attribution theory, particularly the groundbreaking work of Weiner and colleagues
(e.g., Weiner, 1985; Weiner & Kukla, 1970), revealed the importance of studying peo-
ple’s perceptions and interpretations—­in this case, how people understood the causes
of their successes and failures (i.e., the “attributions” they made for their successes and
failures). In doing so, it provided a way to begin to understand the psychology of persis-
tence versus helplessness in humans—­that is, it gave us a way to understand why, among
people who are equal in ability, some respond to challenging, threatening, or negative
events (such as failure) with persistence and some do not. The research growing out of
attribution theory suggested, for example, that viewing your failure as resulting from
your lack of effort was more likely to motivate persistence than viewing it as coming
from your lack of ability, since the latter is often seen as more stable and less controllable
(see Weiner, 1985; Weiner & Kukla, 1970).
Attribution theory’s great gift to the world was a well-­defined variable (attributions)
that could be precisely manipulated and could change behavior. The whole idea that
motivation could be based on interpretations was tremendously exciting, especially since
the field was emerging from the long behaviorist era in which ascribing any thinking
to any organism, even humans, was seen as unscientific. However, whereas attribution
theorists viewed ability as stable and uncontrollable (Weiner, 1985), mindset research
took people’s interpretations a step further by proposing that people could view ability
itself as something that is fixed or, instead, as something that can be developed. More-
over, these different mindsets about ability could set the stage for the different attribu-
tions when a failure or setback occurred. This idea spawned a new research program
to understand the ramifications of these different perspectives on ability (see Dweck &
Leggett, 1988).
Mindsets can be seen as beliefs about the nature and workings of human attributes
(or attributes of the world): What is this attribute, what are its properties, how does it
work? In the case of mindsets about intelligence, the mindset is a belief about whether
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 11

intellectual abilities are fixed or can be developed; it is a belief about whether people can
develop their abilities through their own agency in the context of the necessary guidance,
mentoring, and support from others. The research has shown that these mindsets—­the
belief in ability as fixed or as malleable—­are related to a host of meaningful variables
and it has established the effects of mindsets on academic outcomes. More specifically,
mindsets have been found to be at the center of a web of variables, which we have called
a “meaning system” (Blackwell et al., 2007; Dweck & Yeager, 2019; Robins & Pals,
2002). This means that the mindsets, when activated, may trigger and act through a host
of other psychological variables.
Generally speaking, a fixed-­mindset meaning system is organized around people’s
concerns about their (fixed) abilities and how these abilities will appear or be judged.
Holding a fixed mindset has predicted people’s adoption or display of negative effort
beliefs (the belief that the need for high effort implies low ability or that effort will be
ineffective for those with low ability; Blackwell et al., 2007; Leggett, 1986; Miele &
Molden, 2010; Miele, Son, & Metcalfe, 2013); their performance goals or performance-­
avoidance goals (the desire to validate or protect one’s ability, often by avoiding chal-
lenges that might reveal inadequacies; e.g., Hong, Chiu, Dweck, Lin, & Wan, 1999; Rob-
ins & Pals, 2002; see also Blackwell et al., 2007); their helpless attributions (the belief
that setbacks imply low ability; Blackwell et al., 2007; Dweck & Yeager, 2019; Hong et
al., 1999; Robins & Pals, 2002); and, as a result, fewer positive strategies in the face of
setbacks (persistence, remediating deficiencies, appropriate help seeking; Blackwell et al.,
2007; Moser, Schroder, Heeter, Moran, & Lee, 2011; Nussbaum & Dweck, 2008; Rob-
ins & Pals, 2002), which can lead to less than optimal learning or performance.
In contrast, the growth-­ mindset-­
meaning system tends to be organized around
learning and developing one’s abilities. Holding a growth mindset has predicted people’s
adoption or display of more positive effort beliefs (the idea that hard work can build
abilities), learning goals (the desire to improve one’s ability by approaching challenging
learning tasks), resilient attributions (the belief that setbacks do not signify a lack of
ability but signify a need to change strategy), and, as a result, more positive, “mastery-­
oriented” strategies in the face of setbacks (sticking with challenging assignments rather
than falling back to easier ones), which can lead to enhanced learning or performance.
These mindsets have particular resonance in a society that has been divided in its
beliefs about the nature of intelligence. On the one hand, there has been a belief, stem-
ming from the writings of Galton (Hereditary Genius; 1892), Terman (Genetic Studies
of Genius; 1926), and Jensen (The g Factor; 1998), that intelligence is hereditary and
unchangeable—­and that it determines what people are capable of accomplishing. One of
us (Dweck) had a sixth-grade teacher who was so enamored with this view that she seated
the class around the room in IQ order and treated students accordingly.
However, there has also been a forceful opposing view, which was well articulated
by Alfred Binet, the co-­inventor of the original IQ test. Binet (1909/1975) expressed his
alarm at the increasing use of his test by people who asserted that they were measur-
ing what they considered to be fixed intelligence. Binet did not see it that way at all:
“A few modern philosophers . . . assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quan-
tity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brute
pessimism. . . . With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase
our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than
we were before” (1909/1975, pp. 106–107). (See, e.g., Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, &
12 I. Education

Munro, 2007; Ramsden et al., 2011; Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2005, for research on
the malleability of intellectual abilities and executive function; see Sauce & Matzel, 2018,
for a thoughtful perspective on the role of environment and experience in the develop-
ment of intellectual abilities). This view of intellectual ability as something that can grow
with experience and learning is in harmony with the strand of American culture that
reflects a can-do attitude and the idea that, no matter who they are, people can develop
themselves with the necessary support and opportunities. Our research on mindsets has
examined the impact of people’s own beliefs about intelligence and has asked: What is the
impact on people’s motivation and achievement of taking one view or the other?
The relationships between the fixed or growth mindsets and the variables that are
allied with them and give them their power have been studied in several ways. These
include moderate- to large-­sample correlational studies in which mindsets predict the
other variables in the meaning system, which then go on to predict academic or social–­
emotional outcomes (Blackwell et al., 2007, Study 1; Dweck & Yeager, 2019; Robins &
Pals, 2002; see Figure 1.1). They have also been investigated by demonstrating a correla-
tion between mindsets and specific variables in a given setting and then, in a separate
study, manipulating the mindsets to produce that effect experimentally to demonstrate
the causal effects of mindsets (e.g., Hong et al., 1999).
As an example, Hong et al. (1999, Study 1) initially showed that participants who
held more of a growth (vs. fixed) mindset were more likely to attribute their failure on a
laboratory task to effort, a factor that is typically considered highly controllable. They

FIGURE 1.1.  The links between mindsets, the mindset meaning system, and academic outcomes
in three large studies. The mindset meaning system index is a composite of five items representing
the meaning system constructs. Mindset was measured with three fixed mindset-­framed items.
Statistics are zero-order correlations estimated by meta-­analytically aggregating three datasets:
The U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) pilot (N = 3,306; Yeager, Romero, et
al., 2016); the U.S. NSLM (N = 14,894; Yeager et al, 2019); and the Norway U-say experiment
(N = 5,246; Rege et al., in press). All p’s < .001.
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 13

also showed, in a field study (Study 2), that those holding more of a growth mindset were
more likely to take remedial action in the face of a deficiency—­in line with their greater
emphasis on effort attributions. But were the mindsets a causal factor in the effort attri-
butions and remedial action?
To provide some background, in Study 2, freshmen at the University of Hong Kong
were offered the possibility of taking a remedial English course. Among those who were
deficient in English, this would be an excellent idea since all academic work and materials
were in English. Yet among the students who were deficient, those with more of a growth
mindset were the ones who showed far more enthusiasm for taking the course. It looked
as though those with a fixed mindset might possibly put their college performance in
jeopardy rather than admit to needing a remedial course.
Then, in an experimental study (Hong et al., 1999, Study 3), students were tem-
porarily taught a growth or fixed mindset (by means of a persuasive article) and then
experienced a failure on a task taken from an intelligence test. How did they understand
their failure and were they willing to take a tutorial that could improve their performance
on the test? After their poor performance, those in the growth-­mindset group were more
likely than those in the fixed-­mindset condition to attribute their poor performance to
a lack of effort, and were also far more likely to opt for the remedial tutorial. Finally,
follow-­up analyses suggested that the difference in effort attributions mediated the dif-
ference in the tendency to take remedial action. In short, this experiment showed that the
mindsets can directly cause a difference in attributions and, in turn, a difference in the
willingness to address one’s deficiencies. (It is important to note that all students were
thoroughly debriefed at the end of the study.) A series of experiments by Nussbaum and
Dweck (2008) lent further support to the finding that a growth mindset can cause more
constructive, remedial actions in the face of failures than a fixed mindset.
We are often asked how mindset theory is related to attribution theory. As suggested
above, the answer is twofold. Mindsets grew out of attribution theory and mindsets can
set the stage for students to orient toward different attributions, as shown in our exper-
imental studies. When students are thinking in terms of fixed traits versus malleable
qualities, different reasons for their failures come to mind.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

We just spelled out the meaning systems that have been revealed by research on fixed and
growth mindsets. Here, we focus on how it all works when students are experiencing
those meanings.
When students enter challenging or uncertain academic situations—­as they do when
they go to a new school or take a difficult class—they often worry whether their intel-
lectual abilities are up to the task. In a fixed mindset, where those intellectual abilities are
viewed as limited and unchangeable, they may wonder whether they will look and feel
dumb. As a result, a cascade of processes (the fixed-­mindset-­meaning system, Figure 1.1)
can be triggered. Students may then be afraid of the looming challenges, become reluc-
tant to exert effort (or become anxious when they do), see setbacks as confirming their
worst fears—and so on in a continuing cycle. We have seen firsthand that even students
who make it into the top universities in the United States can be caught in this fixed-­
mindset cycle, worrying about saying something stupid, making a mistake, or getting a
14 I. Education

disappointing grade, and thereby revealing what they perceive to be their “permanently
deficient” intellectual capacity.
For one project we sought to understand what the fixed mindset sounded like in stu-
dents’ own voices. This project (sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance-
ment of Teaching) focused on community college students who had failed a placement
test and were required to take developmental (remedial) math courses, an abyss from
which many never emerge. After failing the placement test, there was palpable despair in
many, expressed in fixed-­mindset language, such as “I am embarrassed by how stupid
I am and suddenly feeling very discouraged . . . I can’t even tell which fraction is bigger
than another, or where they should fall on the number line. I feel like crying.”
Such fixed-­ability attributions for their placement in remedial math were common:
“I don’t think I’m a math person”; “Me and math are like oil and water”; “When I got to
this [math] class, it was pretty much like a brick wall . . . I’m just not that kind of person”;
and “My whole family [was] never good at math. . . . ” They also spontaneously expressed
negative effort beliefs. Here is a student talking about how other students—­those who
did not place into remedial math—do not need to apply effort to learn: “They’re the ones
who really catch on quickly—­they can really advance their skills.”
The task of a growth-­mindset intervention is to break this cycle and to shift stu-
dents into a growth-­mindset-­meaning system. In a growth mindset, students may, of
course, still be anxious when they enter a new school with as yet unknown standards
and requirements, but they may also be excited about being exposed to new subjects and
about what they will learn. And even if they have a disappointing initial experience, they
may be more likely to remain ready to exert effort, give more positive attributions for
setbacks, and continue to exhibit constructive strategies to make this learning happen—­
particularly if they are in supportive environments.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Initial Interventions
Three early-stage randomized trials evaluated growth-­mindset interventions in face-to-
face settings with relatively modest samples (Aronson et al., 2002; Blackwell et al., 2007;
Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003). Although the interventions varied in the format for
conveying a growth mindset, in the growth-­mindset materials, and in the populations
of students who participated in the evaluation studies, they produced similar results.
Students who received the growth-­mindset intervention tended to show greater academic
performance relative to controls, as measured by grades or achievement test scores.
More specifically, in their seminal study, Aronson et al. (2002) asked university stu-
dents to mentor younger students and to write “pen pal” letters to them over the course
of several sessions. This was the first use of the “saying-­is-­believing” exercise for growth-­
mindset interventions—­that is, the mentoring of the younger students was intended to
help instill the growth-­mindset messages in the university students themselves. In this
exercise, the participants encouraged the younger students to adopt a growth mindset
by explaining to them that the “brain is like a muscle,” and that connections in the
brain grow stronger in response to rigorous learning experiences (messages that are now
core to the growth-­mindset intervention). Over the next semester, the African American
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 15

college students in the growth-­mindset group earned higher grades (grade-point aver-
ages [GPAs]) overall compared to two control groups that received either no treatment or
information about multiple intelligences, as well as showing higher enjoyment and valu-
ing of academics. A second study, conducted by Good et al. (2003; N = 138 across four
conditions), found that an in-­person growth-­mindset program had a significant overall
effect on the achievement test scores of middle school students and was effective at nar-
rowing the gender gaps in achievement.
In another seminal study, Blackwell et al. (2007) implemented a growth-­mindset
intervention via eight in-­person workshops. The study was conducted with seventh-­grade
students (N = 91 across two conditions) who attended a relatively low-­achieving junior
high school where students’ math grades were declining over the seventh-­grade school
year. Blackwell and colleagues embedded several sessions of training in growth mind-
set within a larger eight-­session workshop on study skills and compared the effects to
a group that received eight sessions of study skills alone. The growth-­mindset content
began with scientific content, or “news you can use.” (See Figure 1.2.) As in the Aron-
son et al. (2002) and Good et al. (2003) interventions, the Blackwell et al. intervention
led students to envision themselves growing stronger connections in their brains as they

FIGURE 1.2.  The first page of the scientific article that was used in the Blackwell, Trzesniewski,
and Dweck (2007) intervention and that served as the starting point for many subsequent revised
interventions. Reprinted with permission from L. S. Blackwell.
16 I. Education

learned from new and challenging content. This was followed by activities to illustrate
how learning can make you smarter.
Blackwell and colleagues (2007) found a significant effect of the experimental condi-
tion on change in grades following the intervention. Specifically, students in the study-­
skills control group continued to show declines in their math grades. However, for stu-
dents in the growth-­mindset condition, the decline in grades was halted. The everyday
behaviors of students in the treatment group showed that they were more motivated
and engaged, as well—that is, math teachers, blind to students’ experimental condition
assignments, were more likely to nominate students for showing improvements in chal-
lenge seeking and hard work when they had been in the growth-­mindset condition. Thus,
when students learned that the brain’s abilities can be developed over time, they seemed
more willing to seek out challenges and to stay engaged in their math classes, despite the
difficulty.

Preparing to Scale Up
These early studies, although small in scale, raised an intriguing question: Could the
growth-­mindset message be communicated even more efficiently, in a way that could be
scaled up? If so, then it would be possible to replicate these growth-­mindset intervention
effects in larger and more generalizable samples, and to begin to conduct studies that
shed light on mechanisms that explain the sustained effects from a short treatment.
Starting in the 2010s, a number of randomized trials did just that. Using a newly cre-
ated online platform, Paunesku and colleagues (2015) administered abbreviated versions
of the scientific content about the brain’s malleability from the Blackwell et al. (2007)
study, along with a “write a letter to a future student” exercise that drew on the Aron-
son et al. (2002) method. These short, self-­administered, but still compelling, growth-­
mindset sessions were delivered via a web survey, which made it easier to reach larger
samples and to randomly assign students to condition. Students’ grades were obtained
from school records several months after they completed the intervention.
The first time this shorter intervention was evaluated in a randomized trial was in a
pilot study with community college students taking developmental math—a population
with striking fixed mindsets, as suggested previously. In this pilot study (see Yeager &
Dweck, 2012, for a description), we learned that the growth mindset intervention signifi-
cantly reduced the rate at which students dropped out of their developmental math course
(from 20% to 9%).
It may seem surprising that we saw such promising results from a short online treat-
ment. But the vivid and emotionally persuasive message that your brain can grow when
you work hard on hard tasks and that you no longer had to feel “dumb at math” because
schoolwork was hard resonated with students deeply and, they told us, felt liberating.
The letters students wrote “to a struggling friend” suggest how much they related to the
growth–­mindset message:

“Friend, I know you have been struggling in school for a little while and are becom-
ing discouraged, but there’s something I’d like to share with you. I read this interest-
ing article recently and it explained how we can grow our brains. They did studies
on animals and it showed that learning new skills to work your brain could help
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 17

us become smarter and better at any subject. We can use better strategies to learn
things and practice, practice, practice. So maybe we can be study buddies and learn
new skills to work and grow our brains to make new and bigger and better connec-
tions. I hope this encourages you because you are not ‘dumb’ and could just use a
little help, and maybe we could do it together.”

Or this from a focus group several months after the intervention:

“I thought I’d never do well and I felt so confused. . . . It was hard to see it at the time,
but all that confusion really paid off. It’s like something I read about the brain—
when you don’t understand something, that’s when your brain can grow the most. I
really believe that now. . . . After a lifetime of thinking ‘I can’t do math,’ I finally feel
like I can be good at this!!!”

The initial evidence, both the data and the testimonials, convinced us that even time-­
limited exposures to the growth-­mindset idea, when done well, could be inspiring and
actionable for students who needed to hear it.
The next crucial step involved randomized evaluation studies in grade 9–12 settings,
and across multiple schools. Paunesku and colleagues (2015; N = 1,594 students, K =
13 schools) evaluated the shorter intervention, somewhat revised for high school stu-
dents. They found that the growth-­mindset intervention improved GPAs in “core” classes
(math, science, English, and social studies) for students who, prior to the intervention,
were earning lower grades than their peers.

Scaling Up Further
Yeager and colleagues next tested whether this “scalable” intervention could be improved,
adapted, and scaled up further, and whether doing so could improve outcomes for an
entire population of students. In a first case, the population was the entire incoming class
at a large, public 4-year university. Yeager, Walton, and colleagues (2016, Experiment 2;
N = 7,335 students) took the previous Paunesku et al. (2015) intervention and added tes-
timonies from more advanced students in which they described how they used a growth
mindset to make sense of the difficulties that accompanied the transition to college. This
updated growth-­mindset intervention significantly improved full-time enrollment rates
among students who face disadvantages on the basis of their race or social class, thereby
potentially narrowing the achievement gap. Later, a different team of investigators repli-
cated the study and found treatment effects on first-year grades among Hispanic/Latinx
students at a different large, public 4-year college (Broda et al., 2018; N = 7,686).
In the next case (Yeager, Romero, et al., 2016), the population of interest for the
growth-­mindset intervention was ninth-grade students making the transition to U.S.
public high schools. This study served as a pilot study for a larger intervention with a
nationally representative sample of ninth graders, discussed below. In this pilot study,
the intervention was put through an iterative design process to tailor the message for this
population. The result was a version that sharpened the elements that had been added
over the years: compelling scientific information, engaging writing exercises, and testimo-
nies from older students. This intervention was evaluated in a preregistered randomized
18 I. Education

trial (N = 3,676 students, K = 10 schools). As predicted and as found in the Paunesku et

al. (2015) trial, the intervention improved the grades of ninth-grade students who had
had relatively lower grades beforehand (Yeager, Romero, et al., 2016).
These studies, however, were all conducted with samples of convenience—­that is,
samples that were relatively easy to recruit. The kinds of sites that are typically eager to
opt into experimental interventions may yield biased effect sizes (Allcott, 2015; Tipton,
2013). Because of this, the evidence obtained from the experiments we have presented so
far show only that growth-­mindset interventions can have effects in some places and for
some students, but it cannot tell us where, how, and under what conditions the interven-
tion would be effective.
To find this out, building on the foundation of the prior studies, we launched the
National Study of Learning Mindsets, which was a longitudinal evaluation of a growth-­
mindset intervention in a nationally representative sample of U.S. public high schools
(Yeager et al., 2019; see also Dweck & Yeager, 2019). Conducting randomized trials in a
nationally representative sample is rare, but it was important for taking the next big steps
in our research program. This study used an expert third-party research firm to recruit
the representative sample and collect and process the data. With a representative sample,
we could now locate schools that showed stronger and weaker effects and we could use
measures of schools’ and students’ characteristics to gain new insights into mechanisms
that sustained or curtailed the effects of growth-­mindset programs.
We also further upgraded the material, making it more attractive and compelling, as
well as adding new exercises, including an exercise in which students wrote about how
they could use their stronger brains to achieve the goals they valued in life. (The reason
for this is that we did not assume that all students would want stronger academic skills
for their own sake but might need to reflect on a personal reason to “grow their brains.”)
As in previous studies and in line with our preregistered prediction, the growth-­mindset
intervention improved overall GPAs for ninth-grade students who, prior to the interven-
tion, were earning lower grades in their schools relative to their peers (students below the
median in GPA in their schools; Yeager et al., 2019).
We are excited to report that researchers are now beginning to take our materi-
als and evaluate scaled-­up growth-­mindset intervention materials in other nations. One
group of economists, working with the World Bank, showed effects of a growth-­mindset
intervention among adolescents in high-­poverty areas of Peru (Outes, Sánchez, & Vakis,
2017). Another group, led by economists, replicated the growth-­mindset intervention
effects among high school students in Norway (Bettinger, Ludvigsen, Rege, Solli, & Yea-
ger, 2018; Rege et al., in press).

Heterogeneity
Interestingly, although a growth-­mindset intervention tends to influence mindsets and
the choice of challenge tasks (such as the choice of hard vs. easy problems) for students
across the achievement spectrum (Rege et al., in press; Yeager, Romero, et al., 2016; Yea-
ger et al. 2019), it has translated into higher grades chiefly among those students who are
not already earning high grades. It is possible that higher-­achieving students may show
benefits on other outcomes, such as opting into more challenging courses over time, and
we have evidence from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (Yeager et al., 2019) and
a replication in Norway (Rege et al., in press) that this is the case. Thus, heterogeneity
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 19

of intervention outcomes may depend on where the student has room to move—up the
grade ladder or into more challenging courses.
One important way to learn about what leads to heterogeneity in intervention effects
is to conduct your experiment in settings that have high and low levels of a factor. In the
National Study of Learning Mindsets we focused on the extent to which the peer and
teacher factors would influence the growth-­mindset effect, and found that the growth-­
mindset intervention was more effective at changing grades when the school or class-
room context was supportive of the growth-­mindset message—­that is, stronger effects
on grades appeared when peer norms favored challenge-­seeking behaviors (Yeager et
al., 2019), or when the teacher held more of a growth mindset (Yeager et al., 2020). We
examine these findings in more detail below as we turn next to how intervention effects
are sustained over time.
In sum, it appears that a growth-­mindset intervention is most effective among stu-
dents (1) who are facing ongoing academic challenges, and (2) who are in school or class-
room contexts that support the maintenance of growth-­mindset beliefs and behaviors.

Effects over Time
What happens after a growth-­mindset intervention? The previous section identified some
of the factors that can facilitate long-term growth mindset effects, but here we delve a bit
more deeply into the proposed sequence of processes that may unfold over time to bring
about those effects. This is a topic that has, of course, been of great interest to us.
We assume that after a growth-­mindset intervention, students may try out growth-­
mindset beliefs and behaviors, such as greater challenge seeking and harder work in the
classroom, and if this yields positive results—­such as greater learning, higher grades,
approval from teachers, or support from peers—the greater challenge seeking and hard
work will continue and even increase.
We mentioned above that in the National Study of Learning Mindsets (Yeager et
al., 2019), the mindsets of students’ math teachers made a difference. Specifically, the
teachers who themselves held more of a growth mindset had students who showed larger
sustained effects of the growth-­mindset treatment (Yeager et al., 2020). This could well
be because teachers with more of a growth mindset are more likely to notice changes in
students’ challenge seeking and effort, to believe that these changes can make a difference
in learning, and therefore to support these changes.
There were early hints of this in the Blackwell et al. (2007) intervention that an
environment that is supportive of growth-­mindset behaviors could play a role. In that
study, as noted earlier, their seventh-­grade math teacher did not know which students
had received a growth-­mindset versus control (study-­skills) intervention. Nonetheless,
the teachers singled out more of the students in the growth-­mindset group as showing
changes in academic effort, in perseverance, in the seeking of challenges, and in request-
ing mentoring. Noting the changes, these perceptive teachers may have rewarded, sup-
ported, and helped sustain the students’ increased dedication to their work.
Another factor we mentioned earlier that made a difference in the longevity of the
mindset effects was peer norms (Yeager et al., 2019). Did peers in a student’s school show
a strong norm of seeking to work on challenging tasks? We found that when they did,
the overall advantage of the growth-­mindset group over the control group was larger
than average (in fact, about double). However, when the peer norm of challenge seeking
20 I. Education

was weak, the students showed little or no effect over time of having received a growth-­
mindset treatment—­even though the intervention changed their mindsets and led them
to choose a challenging task within the intervention session to the same degree as stu-
dents in the schools with strong peer norms. This finding suggests that when students
considered putting their growth mindset into practice in their classrooms, perhaps they
felt reluctant to go up against established peer norms and risk disapproval, or they may
have actually tried out new behaviors in the classroom and were not met with support or
approval. Future research could study this process as it unfolds, as well as systematically
investigate ways to influence peer norms to allow and support growth mindset behavior.
Finally, a new growth-­mindset intervention performed in Norway (Rege et al., in
press) showed how school policies could allow or prevent the effects of a growth-­mindset
intervention. Some of the schools in the study required students to choose the level of
their math course before the school year began. Other schools, however, allowed students
to make their choice a couple of months later, after the start of the new school year. Since
the growth-­mindset intervention was administered after the start of the new year, it was
chiefly students in the latter schools who were able to profit from the intervention in
terms of being motivated to choose advanced math courses at an appreciably higher rate
than the control group.
Clearly, there is still much more to learn about student, peer, teacher, and school fac-
tors that can help sustain growth-­mindset effects over time and, in particular, about the
processes through which they do so. This learning will help make future interventions
more effective for more students and will inform educators how best to create cultures
and policies that are more conducive to challenge seeking, persistence, and achievement
in their students.

Effect Sizes
What effect sizes would be considered noteworthy for a growth-­mindset intervention
(or any educational interventions)? Experts in evaluation studies (e.g., Cheung & Slavin,
2016; see also Hill, Bloom, Black, & Lipsey, 2008; Kraft, 2018) have argued that evalu-
ating effect sizes requires choosing the appropriate benchmarks. In the current case, this
means asking: What effects are typical for rigorous, high-­quality educational interven-
tions, ones that seek to improve meaningful educational outcomes, such as grades? In
other words, what effect sizes are typical for large-­sample interventions (be they ones
involving changes in curriculum, instruction, school organization, or student motiva-
tion) that use randomized trials and choose important, objective student outcomes as the
dependent variable?
Prominent educational economist Susan Dynarski (2017), addressing educational
outcomes, concluded that “a fifth of a standard deviation [0.20 SD] is a large effect.”
This statement is based on the “best-­evidence synthesis” movement, which uses evidence
from large, rigorous evaluation studies to determine the effects of interventions that seek
to raise grades or test scores (Cheung & Slavin, 2016). It was recently confirmed by a
report on a large number of the newest randomized trials in education funded by the U.S.
federal government (Boulay et al., 2018). Among these promising interventions, the ones
that ended up having significant effects tended to top out at around 0.20 SD.
To give a better feel for the magnitude of this effect, around 0.20 SD is the effect of
a year of schooling for adolescents, a year with an excellent versus average teacher, or a
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 21

smaller class size for adolescents (see Yeager et al., 2019, for a review). Given the many
variables affecting outcomes in educational settings, this effect is an achievement, even
for multifaceted, labor-­intensive, and costly programs.1
There is a larger point, however. The point is that even a seemingly modest effect
propagated over large numbers of students, particularly at a very low cost, can produce
meaningful changes in the education and economic trajectories for many, many students.
The growth-­mindset intervention with its online platform and very low cost per student
is capable of scaling to large populations, leading more students to enjoy challenges, pass
courses they might have failed, take harder courses than they would have, and contribute
to society in ways they might not have otherwise.
It is noteworthy, then, that growth-­mindset interventions have shown much of what
is considered a “large” effect size in real-world educational experiments. Not surpris-
ingly, early studies that involved multiple sessions conducted by highly trained profes-
sionals showed larger effect sizes. However, these procedures were time-­consuming and
costly, and therefore not really scalable.
One should not expect the same effect sizes for studies that delivered much more
minimal (under an hour) self-­administered, online growth-­mindset materials. Nonethe-
less, the effect size on core course GPA for lower-­achieving students several months pos-
tintervention for studies that delivered these more minimal growth-­mindset programs
was 0.10 SD–0.14 SD across three replication studies (Paunesku et al., 2015; Yeager,
Romero, et al., 2016; Yeager, Walton, et al., 2016; see also Yeager et al., 2019), and the
National Study of Learning Mindsets as well—that is, growth-­mindset interventions can
provide roughly half of the largest effects typically seen for much more extensive and
expensive adolescent interventions.
Considerably larger effects were found in the National Study of Learning Mindsets
for schools that had peer norms that supported a growth mindset (and that were not
already among the highest achieving 25% of schools). Low- or medium-­achieving schools
with supportive norms approached or exceeded treatment effects of 0.20 SD (Yeager et
al., 2019). Moreover, as we learn more about the factors that sustain the treatments and
turn them into higher grades and more advanced course taking, we hope to enhance the
effectiveness of the growth-­mindset programs and obtain even higher effect sizes.
In sum, the effects of our growth-­mindset interventions are noteworthy compared
to many of the most successful large and comprehensive educational interventions and
are found under the most rigorous of conditions. These effects are especially meaningful
given the very low per-­person cost of the intervention, the ease of access, and the short
time involved in its administration.

COUSINS

Growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interventions have many offspring and many cousins.

But before we turn to these relatives, we mention again some of the siblings, such as the

1 Larger effects have sometimes been obtained when interventions are not rigorously evaluated (e.g., did
not use randomized controlled designs with large samples) or when researchers control the tests that
students take as the postintervention measure (so the intervention could “teach to their test”; Boulay et
al., 2018; see also Cheung & Slavin, 2016).
22 I. Education

international large-­sample replications that have used our materials, such as Bettinger et
al. (2018) in Norway, and Outes et al.’s (2017) World Bank project in Peru. We also wish
to mention an intervention with parents (Andersen & Nielsen, 2016) and intervention-­
relevant (although not yet intervention-­based) findings with teachers (Canning, Muenks,
Green, & Murphy, 2019; Fuesting et al., 2019; see also Rattan, Good, & Dweck, 2012).
In the research by Canning et al. with 150 college science, technology, engineering, and
math (STEM) professors, those professors who held a more fixed mindset had double
the achievement gap among their students—­that is, double the achievement gap between
White/Asian students and students from underrepresented minority groups. On average,
everyone did better with the growth-­mindset professors but especially those from under-
represented groups. Further, students reported that the growth-­mindset professors used
pedagogical practices that put more emphasis on learning and development, and this was
a mediator of the enhanced performance. These findings provide a foundation for future
interventions with teachers, and we continue to discuss this in “Future Directions” below.
Another line of work that is paving the way for future mindset interventions is a
program of research on organizational mindsets, spearheaded by Canning, Murphy, and
colleagues (2020). In a series of studies, spanning data from major business organizations
to data from laboratory experiments, people’s perceptions of an organization’s fixed or
growth mindsets about talent predicted such important things as their own commitment
to the organization, their report of immoral practices within the workplace, and their
perceptions of true support for innovation even when it might not succeed.
The growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interventions have already given birth to a pro-
gram of research on growth-­mindset-­of-­personality interventions noted earlier, spear-
headed by David Yeager (see Yeager & Lee, Chapter 13, this volume), in which students
were taught that personality was not simply fixed but consisted of qualities that could
be developed over time. Among other things, these interventions have led to meaningful
improvements in adolescents’ aggression (Yeager, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2013) and
stress responses (Yeager, Lee, & Jamieson, 2016), and decreases in the onset of symptoms
of clinical depression in students in their first year of high school (Miu & Yeager, 2015;
see also Schleider & Weisz, 2016).
Scholars have also taken growth-­mindset interventions into the real world of conflict
resolution (Halperin, Russell, Trzesniewski, Gross, & Dweck, 2011; Goldenberg et al.,
2018; Goldenberg, Gross, & Halperin, Chapter 15, this volume), showing, for example,
that teaching the parties in the Middle East conflict that groups do not have fixed, inher-
ent qualities (are not inherently evil or aggressive) can lead to increases in hope for prog-
ress and in support for real concessions, increases that endured over a 6-month period
of unrest.
Mindset research has also begun to address issues of health (Burnette, Forsyth, Des-
marais, & Hoyt, 2019; Mueller, Rowe, & Zuckerman, 2017; Thomas, Burnette, & Hoyt,
2019). Moreover, growth mindset interventions in the area of health (beliefs about the
nature and causes of health and disease) pioneered by Alia Crum and her colleagues
(Crum, Leibowitz, & Verghese, 2017) have yielded many landmark findings, including
findings that illuminate the workings of placebo effects (see also Crum, Handley-­M iner,
& Smith, Chapter 9, this volume).
Growth-­mindset interventions that enhance empathy are also beginning to emerge
(Weisz, 2018; see Schumann, Zaki, & Dweck, 2014), as well as interventions that teach
a growth mindset about emotions (the idea that people can modulate and improve their
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 23

emotions; Smith et al., 2018). There are also other lines of research that could easily
spawn interventions in the future, such as research on growth mindsets about prejudice
(beliefs about whether prejudice is fixed or malleable; Carr, Dweck, & Pauker, 2012;
Neel & Shapiro, 2012; see also Rattan & Dweck, 2010, on the confronting of bias) and
research on mindsets or theories about willpower (beliefs about whether the capacity for
willpower is fixed or malleable and limited or abundant; e.g., Job, Walton, Bernecker, &
Dweck, 2015; Mukhopadhyay & Yeung, 2010).
As we have seen, growth-­mindset interventions address the issue of whether a human
attribute, such as intelligence or personality, can be developed—­that is, whether it is con-
trollable through personal agency and environmental support or not. However, these are
not the only possible kinds of mindsets. Other mindsets can address beliefs about differ-
ent aspects of the nature and workings of attributes of humans or the world. For example,
in a fascinating line of work, Crum, Salovey, and Achor (2013; see also Crum, Handley-­
Miner, & Smith, Chapter 9, this volume) have studied whether people believe stress is
good (facilitating) or bad (debilitating), the consequences of these beliefs, and the benefits
of an intervention offering people a view of the potential benefits of stress. Following
this lead, Haimovitz and Dweck (2016) have examined beliefs about whether failure is
facilitating or debilitating, finding that parents who believe failure is debilitating seem to
be transmitting more of a fixed mindset of intelligence to their children. These are just
some of the relatives in the large and growing growth-­mindset family.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

As an overview, growth-­mindset interventions teach students that their intellectual abili-

ties are not fixed, but can be developed with effort, good strategies, and lots of input,
advice, and support from others. They are taught that they can build a stronger brain,
and this is backed by compelling scientific research on how the brain changes with learn-
ing.
But this is not enough. This is just the first, informational, part. The rest of the
intervention has to resonate with students’ experiences. It has to place students’ school
experiences within the growth-­mindset-­meaning system. Growth-­mindset interventions
convey, for example, that feelings of effort or difficulty in school are signs that you are
growing your abilities, not signs that you lack ability. The intervention also helps students
to understand how they can put a growth mindset into practice in their schoolwork and
to see how a growth mindset can help them personally in their life goals. It has to take
them into the world of growth mindset and make them want to and be able to live there.

The Intervention Basics
The growth-­mindset intervention has evolved over the years as it has been evaluated in
new studies and in different contexts (see Dweck & Yeager, 2019). Throughout its life,
the intervention has usually involved three elements. The first is scientific credibility. The
growth-­mindset intervention conveys the new and emerging neuroscience of the brain’s
amazing potential to change and develop, and it explains that it is through intensive learn-
ing that denser and stronger neuronal connections are formed. The intervention goes on
to explain that, therefore, struggling to master something new or experiencing setbacks
24 I. Education

are not signs of inability, but rather are the means through which people strengthen the
connections in their brains and get smarter.
The second element is a sticky or memorable metaphor: that the brain is like a muscle
(Aronson et al., 2002). Intervention participants learn that the way that academic expe-
riences strengthen the brain’s connections can be seen as analogous to how strenuous
exercise strengthens our muscles. The goal of this framing is, again, to undermine nega-
tive effort beliefs and fixed-­ability attributions and instead evoke the value of effort and
difficulty in a growth-­mindset-­meaning system.
The third critical element involves features that help bring these ideas to life. These
include testimonies from older students who were exposed to and used growth-­mindset
messages to improve their learning in school. In more recent interventions, we have added
testimony from one or more admired figures who used a growth mindset and its prin-
ciples to achieve their goals in life.
There are also writing assignments for the participant. One of the most commonly
implemented exercises in the growth-­mindset intervention, as we mentioned earlier, is
a “letter to a future student” writing assignment (originated by Aronson et al., 2002).
Students imagine a future student their age who is having a hard time in school and does
not yet know the growth-­mindset message. They are then asked to write a compelling and
encouraging letter to the future student, using the ideas they just learned about a growth
mindset. These ideas are listed for them as a reminder of what they can include. Not
only might this exercise lead the participants to elaborate on the growth-­mindset ideas
more fully (resulting in improved memory of the intervention messages), but it can also
encourage internalization of the message through the “saying-­is-­believing” effect (Aron-
son, 1999) discussed above—an effect that can enhance the likelihood that students will
apply the learning to their own schoolwork in the future.
Finally, in recent iterations, we have included an exercise to help students understand
why it’s important to have a stronger brain. Through the work of others (e.g., Fryberg,
Covarrubias, & Burack, 2018), we realized that not all groups of students may believe
that increasing their intellectual abilities is a valuable pursuit for its own sake. For this
reason, we now include an exercise that asks students what they hope to achieve in their
lives and then asks them to write about how a stronger brain could help them achieve it.
Despite all these elements, an intervention can easily be derailed if it does not convey
respect for the participants. This is particularly important with adolescents. Thus, we
begin the program by inviting students not only to participate in the program but also
to contribute to its development, since they are the experts on school and student life. In
this way, they are not simply research participants but are potential shapers of the future
program. In other words, we enlist them as collaborators who have important informa-
tion to offer, and we request this information throughout the intervention.
As suggested above, every growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence intervention must be tai-
lored to the target population in terms of, for example, age, school transition, and culture
or subgroup. In our own interventions, we have spent considerable time molding the
program to the psychology of the particular participants in that study. This is why in
our national study of the transition to high school we helped students understand why
a strong brain is important—­we realized, as noted above, that this value is not univer-
sally understood or shared. This means that researchers or practitioners must address the
issues, needs, values, and norms of their population in tailoring a new growth-­mindset
intervention.
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 25

It is also worth clarifying what the growth-­mindset intervention does not do. The
intervention does not promise students that they will reach any particular level of ability
in the future or that they will achieve any specific goal. Rather, the intervention empha-
sizes the capacity for continued development and improvement over time.
Current interventions also avoid focusing on effort alone as the vehicle for intellec-
tual growth, since sheer effort may be useless if a student does not have good strategies or
effective mentoring from others. For this reason, the intervention does not simply exhort
students to “try hard.” Moreover, effort exhortations alone are unlikely to be effective
even for promoting effort. Adults are always nagging students to try harder, with little
effect. But perhaps even more importantly, high effort has negative implications in a
fixed-­mindset-­meaning system: If you have to try hard, it means you are not smart (see,
e.g., Blackwell et al., 2007; see also Meyer, 1982). Thus, continual effort exhortations
could be insulting or threatening to students.
In summary, growth-­mindset interventions begin by providing basic information
about the malleability of intellectual abilities—­ about the brain and its capacity for
growth. This is done in a compelling way, first scientifically and then in a personally
meaningful way—that is, in light of the scientific evidence, students are led to reinterpret
the meaning of effort and setbacks, not as negative things, but as vehicles for growth.
Along the way, they are given opportunities to internalize the growth mindset and they
are led to think about how a stronger brain could help them in their important future
endeavors.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

The concept of a growth mindset may seem quite simple: It is the belief that abilities (or
other personal attributes) can be developed. However, we have found that it can easily be
equated with other concepts that people are familiar with (such as being open-­minded)
or with isolated aspects of the meaning system (such as effort).
Many educators have succeeded amazingly well in communicating and implement-
ing a growth mindset in their classrooms and schools (Berger, Woodfin, & Vilen, 2016;
Crow & Dabars, 2015). An elementary school principal whose school implemented
growth-­mindset concepts reported:

“By embracing the productive struggle and helping our students understand that
through doing hard things they have the opportunity to grow their brains, we have
unleashed a wave that has contributed to our student growth landing in the top ten
percent of our state.”

And yet, there are many nuances to a growth mindset and its implementation that
must be kept in mind for implementations to be effective. Here are questions we have
been asked, along with our answers and their implications for interventions or educa-
tional practice.

• If a person has a growth (or fixed) mindset about intelligence, does he or she
have the same mindset about other human qualities, such as personality or athletic abil-
ity? There is only a very modest correlation among mindsets about different abilities or
26 I. Education

qualities, so people can most definitely have different mindsets about different attributes.
We have also observed that people can have different mindsets about themselves and oth-
ers. They may think, for example, that their own intelligence is more fixed than other
people’s, but their personality is more malleable than others’.
• Within a domain, like intelligence, do people have just one mindset and not the
other? In the past few years, we have come to understand that while people can have pre-
dominantly a fixed or predominantly a growth mindset about intelligence, everyone is a
mixture. For example, a person may be in a growth mindset most of the time, but certain
events, such as challenges, criticism, or failure, can trigger a fixed mindset. Indeed, any
event that makes people feel that their intelligence is being judged (by themselves or oth-
ers) can trigger a fixed mindset in them. This suggests that future interventions, rather
than just teaching a growth mindset, might also teach students how to recognize their
“fixed-­mindset triggers” and how to work their way back to a growth mindset in the face
of triggering events (e.g., Orosz et al., 2020). Indeed, interventions in general can more
deliberately teach people strategies to maintain intervention effects over time.
• Is a growth mindset all about effort? As we noted, perhaps the most common
misconception is that a growth mindset is strictly about effort—­that all a student needs
to do is to apply effort and all will be well. However, sheer effort, without good strate-
gies, resources, support, and mentorship, is often insufficient. And, if students are led to
believe that sheer effort should be sufficient, they may feel particularly inept when they
fail. Again, putting the onus entirely on the students and their effort denies the critical
importance of environmental support and resources in fostering success. Another prac-
tice that can result from putting an exclusive emphasis on effort is the offering of lavish
praise for students’ effort while neglecting their poor learning progress. This kind of
praise is meant to make students feel good even if they are failing to make strides in their
learning. This is ironic because implementing a growth mindset is precisely about helping
students make progress in developing their abilities, not about hiding their deficiencies
behind a veil of praise.
The bottom line is that educators or intervenors who simply focus on effort are most
likely not creating a full growth-­mindset-­meaning system or building an environment
that supports it, and their age-old exhortations to try hard (or their frequent praise for
effort) could end up being ineffective or undermining.
• Does a growth mindset mean that everyone is the same; that there are no differ-
ences in talent or ability; that anyone can achieve anything? While a growth mindset is
the belief in everyone’s potential to continually develop and improve, it does not mean
that everyone is the same at any given time, and it does not guarantee that even with great
effort everyone can end up at the same place. Although we believe that people’s potential
is typically great—and usually cannot be known in advance of good mentoring, good
strategy use, opportunities, and devotion to learning over long periods of time—­educators
may mistakenly believe they are instilling a growth mindset when they tell their students,
“You can do or be anything!” However inspiring this may sound, it may often be unhelp-
ful, particularly when the educator is not paving the way by giving students knowledge
about the routes they must travel, a head start on the many skills and strategies they must
learn, and perhaps preliminary access to resources required to start them on their path. In
fact, students may later blame themselves when they fail to achieve their goals.
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 27

• Are lectures on growth mindset enough? In this context, we might also mention
that some educators provide a lecture or two on growth mindset, show some TED Talks,
or put a growth-­mindset chart on the walls, but do not change their practices or class-
room culture in ways that would really make students believe that they should take on
challenges, not worry about mistakes, ask for help, or take pride in their progress. Good
implementation requires that these growth-­mindset supports be baked into teachers’ poli-
cies and practices. The key point is that those designing a growth-­mindset intervention
need to develop a deep, nuanced understanding of the concepts it rests on and then design
the intervention to expertly convey the concepts, why they are important, and how to
apply them. Even with our decades of research on mindsets and our experience with
mindset interventions, it still took us 2 years to develop the intervention materials we
delivered in the National Study of Learning Mindsets (see Table 1.1). In designing a class-
room or school to support a growth mindset, educators also need to think through how
their practices foster and reward taking on challenges, sticking to them, using strategies,
interpreting failures, and, perhaps above all, valuing progress.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

There is growing evidence that educators’ mindsets play a role in students’ motivation
and achievement. Above we cited research by Canning, Muenks, and colleagues (Can-
ning et al., 2020) demonstrating that college students, especially those from underrep-
resented groups, earned lower grades in the STEM classes of fixed-­mindset professors
and reported less motivation in those classes. Research is also beginning to document
the things educators do in their classes that have these effects, such as focusing on

TABLE 1.1.  The R&D Process Used to Develop a Scalable Growth-Mindset Intervention
Phase Years References Step
1 2010–2012 Paunesku et al. (2015); 1.1. Test the “base” versions, adapted from in-person
Yeager, Walton, et al. interventions
(2016)

2 2013–2014 Yeager, Romero, et al. 2.1. Attempts to rewrite

(2016) 2.2. A/B tests (N ≈ 3,000)
2.3. User testing (N ≈ 300)
2.4. Extensive rewriting to finalize “new” version

3 2014–2015 Yeager, Walton, et al. 3.1. Head-to-head test of “base” versus “new” with
(2016) proxy outcome (N ≈ 7,500)
3.2. Preregistered evaluation of “new” versus control,
GPA outcome, convenience sample (N ≈ 3,600)

4 2015–2016 Yeager et al. (2019) 4.1. Extensive rewriting to finalize “newer” version
4.2. Preregistered evaluation of “newer” versus
control, GPA and course-taking outcomes,
national sample

Note. R&D, research and development; GPA, grade-point average. Adapted from Dweck and Yeager (2019). Adapted
with permission from Sage Publications, Inc.
28 I. Education

and rewarding improvement or giving students chances to revise their work, as well as
resources for improving their work (Canning et al., 2019; Sun, 2015; see also Rattan et
al., 2012). And, as we noted above, similar findings are beginning to emerge from the
National Study of Learning Mindsets, which included data from math teachers and their
students.
These findings are important. It is our view that the full potential of growth-­mindset
interventions to enhance students’ motivation and achievement will not be realized until
we can supplement direct-­to-­student interventions with teacher interventions and per-
haps with school reform (since it may be difficult to create growth-­mindset climates
when teacher are themselves evaluated on their students’ short-term test scores). As we
saw earlier, many educators may not have learned the nuances of a growth mindset and,
even if they have, there are still many factors that may discourage teachers and school
administrators from experimenting with new school or classroom learning and reward
structures: (1) educators may not know how to turn their knowledge into classroom prac-
tices that communicate and support growth mindsets in their students and (2) the incen-
tive systems embedded in schools and institutions—­such as teacher accountability or
school rankings based on test scores—­may discourage teachers from experimenting with
new practices and (3) cultural models (Markus & Kitayama, 2010) of how teaching and
learning are supposed to proceed may not be optimal for many students (teachers lectur-
ing rather than students collaborating and mentoring one another; relatively permanent
ability groupings; grading strictly on outcomes and not factoring in improvement; short-
term classroom units rather than longer multifaceted projects that may involve work in
the community).
Prominent educators have grappled with many of these issues. For example, using a
growth-­mindset perspective, Boaler (2015) has rethought mathematics teaching; Berger
and colleagues (2016), in the Expeditionary Learning (EL) schools, have rethought ele-
mentary school structure and curriculum; and Michael Crow, the president of Arizona
State University, has completely overhauled the conception, purpose, structure, curricu-
lum, and practices of his institution to provide a model for the modern U.S. university
(see Crow & Dabars, 2015). In each of these cases, students engage in more self-­initiated,
deeper, more intrinsically motivated learning—­the kind of learning that sustains a growth
mindset and the kind of learning that will help students think and thrive in the modern
world. It would be exciting to study these programs directly to determine whether growth
mindsets are indeed fostered and sustained in these settings and to examine the role that
the mindsets might play in enhancing the benefits of these programs.
One impediment to improving practice is that teachers do not have good ways to
gauge which of the teaching practices they try are working and which are not. For exam-
ple, if a teacher tries some growth-­mindset practices meant to enhance student engage-
ment with challenging material, how can they tell whether they have succeeded? In an
exciting new undertaking, Dave Paunesku and Sarah Gripshover (research scientists at
the Project for Educational Research that Scales [PERTS]), and their colleagues (www.
perts.net/engage) have devised and are testing methods for quickly and anonymously
surveying students on a weekly basis to see whether there are changes in their reported
engagement that follow their teachers’ introduction of new methods.
Finally, in a major new initiative, Stephanie Fryberg and Mary Murphy (profes-
sors at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, respectively), working with
teachers in the Seattle, Washington, public school system, have been developing a new
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 29

curriculum to teach educators a more deeply nuanced growth mindset and how to imple-
ment it in their classrooms. Once it is completed and rigorously tested, it will be made
available to educators online at no cost. At the same time, C. Y. Chiu (professor and Dean
of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong) and his colleagues, working
with educators in Hong Kong, are developing and testing online programs for teachers
and administrators. It will be interesting in the future to understand cultural differences
in how growth-­mindset interventions are best designed and implemented.
In closing this section, we call attention to what a daunting task it is to create
growth-­mindset programs that all teachers can use successfully. Some of the most skilled
psychologists, researchers, and educators are dedicated to this task, but it will surely take
considerable time before the task is complete. Indeed, we think that changing classroom
culture is the next “Mt. Everest” that the mindset research community will need to climb
together.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Mindset research and interventions support the idea that people build powerful beliefs
about themselves, and that these beliefs can affect their motivation and ultimately their
accomplishments (Dweck, 2017; Walton & Wilson, 2018). In the case of fixed and
growth mindsets, based on their experiences in their settings and the messages embedded
in their culture, people develop beliefs about whether their attributes, such as intelligence,
are fixed at a certain level or can be developed. As we have seen, these mindsets—­by sig-
naling to people what they can or cannot accomplish in a given environment—­can have
cascading effects, influencing their goals, effort, reactions to setbacks, and longer-­term
performance.
This viewpoint has important implications for understanding how people work—
that is, what makes them tick. It locates beliefs at the core of motivation and what is so
important is that beliefs can be changed (Dweck, 2017; Walton & Wilson, 2018). Thus,
mindsets (and the other key psychological variables explored in this volume) give psy-
chologists and practitioners a target for interventions. It does not mean that it is easy for
people to see things in a new way, but with helpful input they can often get there. When
beliefs that play important roles in people’s lives are targeted, the results can be greater
than one might expect, and this, we believe, is why short interventions done properly can
be effective. The emphasis on beliefs also leads us to try to understand the environments
people are in, how those environments support different beliefs, and how we might alter
those environments to support more fruitful ways of thinking—­that is, ways of thinking
that help people reach their goals.
Mindset interventions show us that social problems often have a psychological
component (Walton & Dweck, 2009). Whether we are talking about recycling, energy
consumption, healthy eating, or school dropout, we are often trying to get people to
change their behavior by changing their minds. Yet, many or most interventions in the
“real world” are based on the idea that change, such as educational change, comes only
from large, costly restructuring of schools or curricula. Of course, structural change
will always be highly important, and mindset changes and structural changes can work
well together. Nonetheless, when structural changes are not yet forthcoming, “sufficient”
structural factors may be in place to make a change in “psychology” take root. In the
30 I. Education

National Study of Learning Mindsets, meaningful change took place among students in
lower-­achieving schools. Many schools may not have been well resourced but there were
still opportunities for learning that could be better capitalized upon.
What other social problems can benefit from addressing beliefs to bring about
behavior change? The other chapters in this volume provide many compelling examples.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

We have already shown the potential of growth-­ mindset interventions to improve

students’ outcomes on a large scale, as in the National Study of Learning Mindsets.
Throughout the chapter we also discussed the high-­priority next steps, such as under-
standing more about the school contexts that support and sustain growth-­mindset effects
or understanding how to help educators to implement a growth mindset more effectively.
Another direction is to understand more about which effects—­GPA, advanced course
taking, maintaining full course loads, school persistence, and college entrance—­should
be expected for which students in which contexts. We noted that different metrics are
affected in different settings and with different students, but we are eager to understand
this better.
Yet another direction is to understand how to move education toward a focus on
students’ more joyful, more self-­directed, more meaningful learning and away from such
a strong focus on achievement test scores. The former, in the context of a growth-­mindset
environment, will prepare students for today’s challenging world; the latter will not.
Thinking about today’s world, we would love to understand more about how to make
work environments embody more of a growth mindset to enhance employees’ challenge
seeking, persistence, teamwork, innovation, and development, and we and others have
been conducting research in this area (Canning et al., 2020).
Many, many institutions could become places of growth. Even prisons could poten-
tially become places of greater growth and not just places of retribution. In 2008, I
(Dweck) received a letter from a man who, as a juvenile, had been sentenced to life
imprisonment. He asked me if I really believed he could change and he requested a copy
of my book Mindset. In early April of 2019, I received the following e-mail from him,
entitled “I’m Home”:

“Dear Professor Dweck,

“Over a decade ago, I read an article about a book that you wrote titled ‘The
Psychology of Success.’ I was imprisoned at that time, serving a life sentence that I
incurred as a juvenile under the age of 18. I wrote you a letter about the book and
you responded by sending me a handwritten note with an autographed copy of the
book.
“I just wanted to inform you that I was instrumental in civically engaging with
the DC City Council and the Mayor to change its laws for juvenile lifers. Through the
enactment of the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act of 2016, I was released
on March 21, 2019, 15 days ago.
“I just wanted to contact you to let you know that I am home, I have published
eleven books, and I am doing the work in society for people to humanize and love
 A Growth Mindset about Intelligence 31

one another. . . . I have accomplished many things . . . thanks to the Psychology of

Success that you taught me in your book. Thank you for seeing me as human while
I was still inside of a cage!”

Overall, we would love to see more growth-­mindset philosophies embedded in the

world we live in. What if people’s Facebook postings were not just about their successes
and highlights but also about the challenges they are taking on, the goals they value and
are struggling to reach, or the admirable ways they are reacting to setbacks? What if oth-
ers provided helpful suggestions and support (and likes!) for these postings?
What if more books, television shows, and movies were less about creepy, dystopian
cultures or creatures from the abyss and more about people in interesting and challenging
situations working together to create self-­improvement and change, however difficult?
And what if political leaders could be helped to focus us more on how we could grow as
citizens and contribute to the common good rather than on who is competent or worthy
and who is not?
We see no more important issue today than supporting human potential, and we
hope to see growth-­mindset programs and practices play a key part in potential and its
fulfillment.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by the William T. Grant Foundation, the
Yidan Prize Foundation/Optimus Foundation, the National Science Foundation (Grant No.
HRD 1761179), and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant
No. 10.13039/100000071 R01HD084772-01 and Grant No. P2C-HD042849 to the Population
Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin). The content is solely the responsibility of the
authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health
and the National Science Foundation.

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 C H A P TE R 2

The Social‑Belonging Intervention

Gregory M. Walton and Shannon T. Brady

All students travel a social distance in coming to school. They leave behind families and
communities to enter new social spaces where they strive to build new friendships and
relationships with instructors while taking on challenging learning and achievement tasks.
In entering a new social space, people can readily wonder whether they will belong, but
particularly so when their social group is negatively stereotyped or underrepresented in
that space. In this state of belonging uncertainty, everyday challenges can seem to threaten
one’s belonging in the setting as a whole. To protect this sense of belonging, the social-­
belonging intervention represents the general truth that common challenges and worries
about belonging are normal in an academic transition and improve with time. Across a
dozen randomized field trials, the intervention, delivered as an interactive exercise lasting an
hour or less, has improved students’ integration into secondary and postsecondary school
communities and raised academic performance years into the future. Typically the greatest
benefits are observed for students from groups that are negatively stereotyped or under-
represented in the context. Here we review the origins of the social-­belonging intervention in
basic research; discuss its relationship to other psychologically “wise” interventions; review
outcome effects; discuss heterogeneity and processes over time; share materials to pro-
mote effective use; and discuss implications for psychological theory, education, and policy.

BACKGROUND

The roots of the social-­belonging intervention lie in both the sociocultural history of the
United States and the intellectual tradition of social psychology, especially research on
the experience of students who contend with negative stereotypes in school.
For African Americans, other people of color, and people from lower social class
backgrounds, too often the history of the United States has been a fight for acceptance.

36
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 37

In school, this battle has been waged in court battles for desegregation (e.g., Brown v.
Board of Education), in national law (e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964), in school district
(e.g., school busing) and university policy (e.g., affirmative action), in civil protests, and
in individual students’ and families’ lives (see Figure 2.1).
Simultaneously, students of color have had to contend with stereotypes that allege
the intellectual inferiority of their group. The early psychologist Lewis Terman (1916),
a prominent eugenicist, introduced IQ to America as a fixed constraint that justified the
exclusion of children from mainstream education: “Children of [low IQ] should be seg-
regated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They
cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for them-
selves” (p. 92). Moreover, Terman identified this inability with race: “It is interesting to
note that M. P. and C. P. [children with low IQ scores] represent the level of intelligence
which is very, very common among Spanish-­I ndian and Mexican families of the South-
west and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the
family stocks from which they come. . . . These boys are uneducable beyond the merest
rudiments of training” (p. 91).
As legal, social, and political pressure to integrate schools mounted, the formal
rejection of children of color has, to some extent, receded. Yet the legacy of exclusion
and negative stereotypes remains (e.g., Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). What is it like
to enter a school setting in which your group has been excluded, is stereotyped as less
able and less worthy, and may still be underrepresented? Could concerns about belong-
ing that arise from this circumstance contribute to educational inequality today? By
understanding the psychological consequences wrought by this legacy of injustice, can
we develop theory-based ways to mitigate inequality and better support today’s diverse
students?

FIGURE 2.1.  The 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. Reprinted from the
Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives.
38 I. Education

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES
Stereotype Threat
An important early observation in the development of the belonging intervention was that
inequalities in school achievement do not simply reflect differences in ability. Instead,
inequality reproduces at successive levels of education, even among students with the
same preparation (Steele, 1997; see also Walton & Spencer, 2009). For instance, even
with identical SAT scores and high school grades, Black college students earn worse
grades on average than White students, and women earn worse grades in math and sci-
ence than men. This “underperformance” is so common as to be termed “lawful” (Steele,
1997, p. 615). What in the college environment prevents equally well-­prepared Black
students and women from achieving at the same rates as Whites and men?
Claude Steele and colleagues (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002; Steele, 1997, 2010)
pointed to a psychological burden imposed by negative stereotypes. Specifically, Steele
and colleagues theorized that when a negative stereotype is on the table people can worry
that others could view them through the lens of that stereotype: “If I do poorly, people
could think the stereotype is true.” For a student invested in school, this extra pres-
sure, termed stereotype threat, can cause distraction and anxiety that undermines perfor-
mance, ironically seeming to confirm the stereotype. In seminal studies, high-­performing
Black college students scored worse than Whites on a test composed of items from the
Graduate Record Exam (GRE). But when the same items were represented as a laboratory
puzzle-­solving exercise—­and thus as nonevaluative and irrelevant to racial stereotypes—­
Black students did as well as Whites, controlling for baseline SAT scores (Steele & Aron-
son, 1995). Similar patterns emerged among women in math (Spencer, Steele, & Quinn,
1999), and in hundreds of studies (Steele, 2010). Moreover, research has identified key
mechanisms of this process, including distraction and a drain on executive functioning
and cognitive resources, which lowers performance (Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008).

Belonging Uncertainty
The fear in a testing situation that one could be seen in light of a negative stereotype may
be the tip of the iceberg. Students who face negative stereotypes or underrepresentation
may harbor a broader concern: “Can people like me belong here?” (Walton & Cohen,
2007; see also Goffman, 1963; Mendoza-­Denton, Downey, Purdie, Davis, & Pietrzak,
2002). It is this broader concern that is addressed by the social-­belonging intervention.
Worries about belonging in school are evident in stories told by many racial-­minority
and first-­generation college students. Former first lady Michelle Obama wrote in her
senior thesis, “I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. . . . It
often seems as if . . . I will always be Black first and a student second” (Robinson, 1985,
p. 2). Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she felt like “a visitor landing in an
alien country [in college] . . . I have spent my years since, while at law school, and in my
various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit” (in Lud-
den & Weeks, 2009).
We define a sense of belonging as a person’s perception of the quality of his or her
relationship with a valued school, work, or community context as a whole. This relation-
ship goes beyond personal ties to individuals in the setting. Instead, it is fundamentally
symbolic. It arises from events and experiences that represent to the person his or her
relationship with the setting itself (Walton & Brady, 2017).
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 39

Belonging uncertainty is distinct from a person’s level of belonging. A student

can generally believe that he or she belongs at his or her school yet still question this
belonging—­that is, still worry or feel unsettled about it (Walton & Cohen, 2007; see also
Mallett et al., 2011). The student may agree with both “I belong in my school” (belong-
ing) and “When something bad happens, I feel that maybe I don’t belong at [school
name]” (belonging uncertainty).
Uncertainty about belonging itself, often informed by an awareness of negative ste-
reotypes and underrepresentation, creates an important form of disadvantage: It shapes
the perspective from which people make sense of everyday experiences in a setting. When
people question their belonging, daily adversities can seem to mean that they, or people
like them, do not belong in general in the setting (Walton & Cohen, 2007).
The idea that uncertainty about belonging might shape the interpretation of social
events draws on classic research on hypothesis-­confirming processes, which finds that
evidence consistent with a person’s expectations stands out in perception to shape judg-
ments (Darley & Gross, 1983). Consistent with this theorizing, an early laboratory study
exposed Black and White college students to a subtle social cue: difficulty listing friends
who would fit in well in a field of study, in this case computer science. For White stu-
dents this experience had little effect. But it caused Black students’ sense of belonging
and potential in the field to drop precipitously (Walton & Cohen, 2007, Experiment 1).
Moreover, the event carried a racial meaning. When asked to advise peers interested in
pursuing computer science or another field, difficulty listing friends led Black students to
discourage a Black peer, but not White peers, from pursuing computer science. It was as
if they had inferred that “people like me” might not belong there.
Pointing to a similar conclusion, daily diary studies show that everyday challenges
can give rise to feelings of nonbelonging more so for Black than for White students at pre-
dominately White colleges (Walton & Cohen, 2007, 2011; see also Aronson & Inzlicht,
2004; Mendoza-­Denton et al., 2002; Murphy et al., 2020) and more so for women than
for men in male-­dominated quantitative fields (Walton, Logel, Peach, Spencer, & Zanna,
2015). Thus, if a first-year college student from a socially disadvantaged background
fails a midterm, fights with a roommate, feels homesick, or has her work criticized, she
may risk inferring that she does not belong in college in general. Crucially, the events that
signify a lack of belonging need not appear significant to a third party. In 2014, Michelle
Obama recalled her experience coming to college:

When I first arrived at school as a first-­generation college student, I didn’t know anyone
on campus except my brother. I didn’t know how to pick the right classes or find the
right buildings. I didn’t even bring the right size sheets for my dorm room bed. I didn’t
realize those beds were so long. So I was a little overwhelmed and a little isolated.

Despite decades of professional success, Obama still recalls her reaction to bringing the
wrong sheets to college. To her at that time, they were more than just ill-­fitting sheets, an
inconvenience to be remedied with a trip to the store. The event implied that the answer
to the implicit question she held—“Does a person like me belong here?”—might be “no.”
The need to belong is fundamental (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and closely linked to
health, well-being, achievement, and identity (Walton & Brady, 2017). If a student infers
that he or she does not belong in school, it can be exceedingly difficult to stay motivated
and engaged and build relationships in school. Thus, inferences of nonbelonging can
become self-­fulfilling. They can deprive students of the supports needed to succeed in a
40 I. Education

challenging academic environment. When doubts about belonging arise from disadvan-
tage, this process can perpetuate inequality.

How the Social‑Belonging Intervention Bolsters Belonging

One way to remedy inequality, then, is to provide students a legitimate and nonpejorative
narrative for understanding common adversities and challenges to belonging. Drawing
on classic attributional retraining interventions (Wilson, Damiani, & Shelton, 2002), the
social-­belonging intervention uses carefully written stories from diverse older students to
convey the truth that worries about belonging in a new school are normal or common at
first for students from all backgrounds and that these worries generally lessen with time
as students reach out to others and come to feel at home. That lens can forestall global,
threatening interpretations of negative experiences.
Typically, these stories are shared in written form. To drive home the key message, the
intervention uses powerful persuasive techniques. First, it leverages social norms: Chal-
lenges and feelings of nonbelonging are represented as typical and as typically improving.
Second, it uses social proof: Students are exposed to individual exemplars who illustrate
the treatment message through personal experience. Third, the exercise is interactive.
Students are asked to complete a saying- ­is-­believing exercise in which they describe how
the process of change portrayed has played out in their own experience so far and how
they anticipate it will play out going forward (Aronson, 1999). For instance, they might
write a letter to help future students with their transition. That way participating stu-
dents (1) actively engage with the ideas about belonging presented, deepening learning;
(2) apply abstract ideas to their own experience, increasing relevance; (3) advocate for
these ideas to others, a powerful means of persuasion; and (4) understand themselves as
helping others, not as receiving help, taking on an empowering rather than a potentially
stigmatizing role.
As a whole, the intervention aims to help students appreciate belonging as a process
that develops over time, in which challenges are normal and to be expected, and one they
can facilitate, rather than as a quality that a person simply has or does not have.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
The social-­belonging intervention has been evaluated in at least a dozen rigorous, ran-
domized controlled field experiments testing effects on core academic outcomes. Improve-
ments are observed most often for students who face negative stereotypes and underrep-
resentation in a school setting.
The seminal study delivered the intervention or active control materials to a small
sample of Black and White students in the first year at a selective, predominately White
university (N = 92). Delivery took place in hour-long one-on-one sessions. The interven-
tion raised Black students’ grades over 3 years, through senior year, with no change for
White students, halving the racial achievement gap over this period. It also improved
Black students’ confidence in their belonging, well-being, and self-­reported health at the
end of college (Walton & Cohen, 2007, 2011).
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 41

A second study adapted the intervention for women in engineering. Students in the
first semester of a selective engineering program (N = 228) took part in 45- to 60-minute
small-group sessions. In majors with a critical mass of female students, which averaged
33% women, there was no gender inequality in first-year grades and no treatment effect.
But in male-­dominated majors, which averaged just 10% women, the belonging inter-
vention raised women’s first-year grades, eliminating a large gender inequality. It also
improved women’s reported experience and confidence in their prospects of success over
the first year (Walton et al., 2015).
Later studies have examined ways to reach larger populations, including online
through college and university systems that incoming students complete before beginning
college. Yeager and colleagues (2016) created intervention modules, lasting ≅ 30-minute
each, and tested these in three different institutionwide samples (i.e., ≥90% of each popu-
lation). In the first, students graduating from urban charter school networks (N = 584)—
almost all Black and the first in their families to attend college—­completed online materi-
als in May of their senior year of high school. The social-­belonging intervention, adapted
for this population, raised the percentage of students who stayed full-time enrolled in
college over the next year from 32 to 43%. In the second, students entering a large public
university (N = 7,418) completed online social-­belonging, growth-­mindset, or control
materials in the summer before matriculation. Receiving either intervention increased
the percentage of negatively stereotyped minority and first-­generation college students
who completed the first year full-time enrolled from 69 to 73%, reducing the gap with
nonminority, continuing-­generation students by 40%. In the third, students entering a
selective private university (N = 1,596) completed either the social-­belonging interven-
tion, an intervention focused on critical feedback (see Yeager et al., 2014), one focused
on cultural fit, or control materials in the summer before matriculation. Receiving any of
the interventions raised first-year grades among negatively stereotyped minority students
and first-­generation White students, reducing the achievement gap with more advantaged
students by 31%. (In the latter two cases, the various treatments were equally effective.)
Not all trials have been effective, however, as another online, prematriculation trial did
not affect first-year academic outcomes (Broda et al., 2018).
The belonging intervention has also been scaled through first-year classes. Murphy
and colleagues (2020) adapted the intervention for a highly diverse urban broad-­access
institution and implemented it as a personal reading-­and-­writing exercise in an hour-long
session in first-year writing classes (N = 1,063). The intervention raised the percentage
of negatively stereotyped minority and first-­generation students who stayed enrolled over
the next 2 years from 64 to 73%. Binning and colleagues (2020), having observed gender
disparities in an introductory physics course and racial disparities in a biology course,
adapted the intervention for these classes and implemented it in class through story shar-
ing, personal reflection, and small-group conversation. The intervention eliminated each
disparity, raising course grades for women in physics and for non-White students in biol-
ogy.
Another study adapted the intervention for the transition to middle school and deliv-
ered it to Black and White students early in sixth grade over two 30-minute class ses-
sions (N = 137; Goyer et al., 2019, Experiment 2). The intervention reduced disciplin-
ary citations among Black boys through the end of high school by 65%, reducing the
disparity with White boys by 75%, and supported higher levels of belonging and fewer
worries about negative stereotypes through middle school. Another study tested the same
42 I. Education

materials with diverse sixth-grade students in 11 public middle schools across a district
(N = 1,304). Here all students benefited in sixth grade, including reductions in disciplin-
ary referrals, higher grades, reduced absences, and improved school attitudes (­Borman,
Rozek, Pyne, & Hanselman, 2019). A third study adapted the intervention for the tran-
sition to high school and found improvements in attendance, course passage rates, and
reduced discipline citations, especially for racial-­minoritized students (Williams, Hirschi,
Sublett, Hulleman, & Wilson, 2020). A final study, conducted in a German university,
found improvements in first-­semester grades for students with a migration background
(Marksteiner, Janke, & Dickhäuser, 2019).

Mechanisms
How does the belonging intervention foster lasting gains? Figure 2.2 depicts a process
model. Most proximally, the intervention aims to forestall global inferences of nonbe-
longing due to commonplace, everyday experiences in school (see Figure 2.2B). Consis-
tent with this, an early study found that, in the first week after delivery, the intervention
did not alter the kinds of challenges students reported on a daily basis. But it seemed to
prevent Black students from inferring on the basis of daily challenges that they did not
belong in school in general, thereby sustaining students’ sense of belonging on more
adverse days (Walton & Cohen, 2007). To illustrate, one day a Black student reported,

FIGURE 2.2.  How beliefs about belonging can affect students’ behavior and academic outcomes
in the transition to college. Adapted from Yeager et al. (2016) with permission from the authors.
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 43

“Everyone is going out without me, and they didn’t consider me when making their plans.
At times like this I feel like I don’t belong here and that I’m alienated.” The intervention
did not prevent adversities (the first sentence) but it mitigated the global inference (the
second sentence). Over this week-­long period, a tight relationship was found in the con-
trol condition between how much adversity Black students reported each day (how good
or bad their day was) and their level of belonging that night and the next afternoon: Fol-
lowing worse days Black students reported lower levels of belonging. That relationship
was not present for White students. And it was severed for Black students by the interven-
tion. This change in the construal of daily events statistically mediated the gain in grades
for Black students over the next 3 years, through graduation (Walton & Cohen, 2011; see
also Murphy et al., 2020; Walton et al., 2015).

Effects over Time
By protecting students’ sense of belonging in the face of adversity, the intervention helps
students stay engaged in school (see Figure 2.2C). Over the first week following treat-
ment in the original study, the intervention increased students’ reports of the extent to
which they e-­mailed professors, attended office hours, met with study groups, partici-
pated in class, and studied (Walton & Cohen, 2007). Later studies found the intervention
increased students’ likelihood to live on campus and seek out academic support services
during their first year of college (Yeager et al., 2016, Experiments 1 and 3). These behav-
iors help students integrate into the campus community (see Figure 2.2D). Indeed, the
intervention has been shown to help students develop close friendships on campus, to
become more involved in student groups, and to develop mentor relationships (Walton et
al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2016, Experiment 3). Similarly, in middle school, it can improve
cycles of interaction between Black boys and their classroom teachers (Goyer et al., 2019).
A follow-­up of the original belonging intervention illustrates the lasting benefits that
mentor relationships can confer to students. As noted earlier, students received the inter-
vention in the first year of college with no subsequent treatment. Seven to 11 years later,
at an average age of 27, Black participants who had received the intervention reported
greater life and career satisfaction (Brady, Cohen, Jarvis, & Walton, 2020). Statistically,
these effects were mediated by reports of greater mentorship during and after college.
Consider this report (Black, treatment condition):

“The first semester of my freshman year was very difficult for me. I was struggling
academically, didn’t feel like I fit in, and was unhappy with my major. . . . I began
to spend more time speaking with my freshman counselor. We really bonded, and
she helped me to realize that I did belong at [school]. Thanks to her, I was able to
connect better with my peers and perform better academically. We’ve kept in touch
ever since.”

These results are consistent with a model in which the intervention mitigated early wor-
ries about belonging to help students reach out and build mentor relationships, which
then empowered adult success (cf. Leitner, Ayduk, Boykin, & Mendoza-­Denton, 2018).
Thus, the intervention unlocks the potential of both students and school contexts.
Notably, this role of the intervention can be opaque to recipients. In the same sample,
participants could not recall at the end of college what they had learned in the interven-
tion and credited none of their success in college to it (Walton & Cohen, 2011). The
44 I. Education

intervention does not work through the salience of its central message. Instead, it helps
students make sense of their ongoing stream of social experience in more productive
ways, helping students build relationships of lasting benefit.

Heterogeneity
The social-­belonging intervention addresses a specific circumstance: People who want to
belong in a setting but who worry that they might not. The intervention is not designed
to promote a sense of belonging in general, for instance among people who have no desire
to belong in a setting. It will not help an artist with no interest in investment banking feel
that she fits in on Wall Street.
However, most people care about the school and work settings that define their lives
at least to some degree and want to belong and succeed in them. In such settings, the
intervention is generally most effective for people who face group disadvantage, such as
negative stereotypes or underrepresentation (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2007, 2011; Yeager
et al., 2016; cf. Borman et al., 2019). Benefits may also be greatest in specific circum-
stances that give rise to greater levels of group-based threat, such as science, technology,
engineering, and math (STEM) settings in which women are grossly underrepresented
(Walton et al., 2015) or where performance disparities are large (Binning et al., 2020).
To achieve lasting gains, the intervention further depends on affordance of the
school environment in which it is delivered, especially the degree to which the environ-
ment affords genuine opportunities for belonging (Walton & Yeager, 2020). If, instead,
group-based threats make belonging unrealistic (see Figure 2.1), the intervention may be
ineffective and inappropriate. Further, if students do not have access to adequate learn-
ing opportunities, financial aid, or other objective supports, no psychological exercise is
likely to improve long-term outcomes.
Thus, the intervention should be most effective for students who have reason to ques-
tion their belonging in a setting they care about but which nonetheless offers opportuni-
ties for belonging for them, including opportunities to develop positive relationships that
support lasting gains. Additionally, the intervention will be effective only when its central
message is not already present in the setting in impactful, genuine ways.

COUSINS

The belonging intervention is related to a number of other psychologically “wise” inter-

ventions, each of which addresses how students make sense of important aspects of the
school environment to improve relevant education outcomes.
First, it draws directly on classic attributional retraining interventions (Perry &
Hamm, 2017; Wilson et al., 2002), which likewise aim to change students’ attributions
for the causes of setbacks in academic transitions. Yet such interventions have focused on
academic struggles, discouraging stable, internal attributions (e.g., “I’m dumb”) in favor
of unstable, external ones (e.g., “It takes time to learn how to study in college”). These
interventions can raise achievement, especially for struggling students, but they focus less
on the belonging-­related doubts that arise from stereotypes and a history of disadvantage
and thus on mitigating group-based inequality.
Growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interventions also provide a hopeful narrative in
the face of setbacks. They communicate to students that intelligence is not fixed but can
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 45

grow with hard work, good strategies, and the help of others (Dweck & Yeager, Chapter
1, this volume), thus implying that, if you fail a math test, you are not “dumb at math”
but can improve with effort and a new approach. Like attributional retraining interven-
tions, growth-­mindset interventions focus less on social-­relational worries that arise from
negative stereotypes and thus on this source of group-based inequality.
Like belonging interventions, theory-­of-­personality interventions focus on students’
social experience in school and the possibility of improvement in the face of challeges.
However, they emphasize not belonging but the potential for individuals to change and,
in particular, the idea that bullies need not always be bullies and victims need not always
be victims (Yeager & Lee, Chapter 13, this volume). Among adolescents, this can reduce
aggression and increase prosocial behavior following ostracism, improve mental and
physical health, and raise academic achievement.
Value-­affirmation interventions share a common origin with belonging interven-
tions in research on stereotype threat. But rather than providing an adaptive narrative
for understanding adversities, affirmation interventions aim to protect people’s sense of
inherent worth and value to help them cope (Sherman, Lokhande, Müller, & Cohen,
Chapter 3, this volume; see also Garcia & Cohen, 2013). They do so by asking stu-
dents to reflect on values of enduring personal importance, which serve as unconditional
sources of worth and helps people confront threats more effectively. The processes initi-
ated by affirmation interventions can be both similar to and different from those initiated
by belonging interventions (see Cook, Purdie-­Vaughns, Garcia, & Cohen, 2012; Sher-
man et al., 2013; Walton & Brady, 2017). In the only direct empirical comparison, both
the belonging intervention and an affirmation-­training intervention (inspired by classic
affirmation interventions) improved women’s psychological response to daily events (e.g.,
confidence in handling daily adversities) and raised first-year grades in male-­dominated
engineering fields (Walton et al., 2015). Yet other processes differed. Whereas the belong-
ing intervention helped women develop greater friendships with male peers, affirmation
increased women’s identification with their gender group and promoted friendships with
other women. It was as though the former helped women experience a warmer climate in
engineering while the latter helped women develop personal resources to weather a chilly
climate.
Difference-­education interventions also address social challenges faced by students
from marginalized backgrounds coming to college but whereas the belonging interven-
tion emphasizes everyday challenges experienced by all students, difference-­education
interventions emphasize group-­specific challenges, such as those faced uniquely by first-­
generation college students (Stephens, Hamedani, & Townsend, Chapter 5, this volume).
However, both approaches convey that challenges are not specific to the self but normal
across a group of people and improve with time, and thus not evidence of a general lack
of belonging.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Belonging Guide
Complete materials from all published studies through 2017 we have coauthored, along
with annotations and guidance on customization, are available in the Belonging Guide
(Walton, Murphy, Logel, Yeager, & the College Transition Collaborative, 2017; see
Appendix 2.1 for annotated materials from Walton and Cohen [2011]).
46 I. Education

When and How Is the Intervention Delivered?

There are many opportunities to convey the basic idea in the belonging intervention, that
belonging is a normal process that develops over time. In college contexts, this can be
done from prior to the first year to during that year, from one-on-one sessions (Walton
& Cohen, 2007, 2011) to small-group sessions (Walton et al., 2015) to first-year classes
(Binning et al., 2020; Murphy et al., 2020) to online modules (Broda et al., 2018; Yeager
et al., 2016; see also Devers et al., 2016). These sessions generally last 30–60 minutes. In
middle school, the intervention has been delivered over two 30-minute class sessions early
in sixth and seventh grades (Borman et al., 2019; Goyer et al., 2019).

How Is the Intervention Represented?
Generally, the intervention is represented as an effort to learn from students about their
experience in the academic transition to benefit future students. Students are told they
will review conclusions and stories from older students and share their own experience
and expertise with future students to give them a better sense of what the transition will
be like. Thus, participants are represented as benefactors and co-­creators of an exercise
to help others, not as beneficiaries of an intervention or recipients of a persuasive mes-
sage.

Nuts and Bolts: Of What Does the Intervention Consist?

The intervention includes (1) summary information about the experiences of students in
the academic transition, which directly conveys the intervention message; (2) stories from
older students that illustrate this message from diverse perspectives; and (3) interactive
components that allow students to connect this message to their own experience and
articulate it for themselves. These materials convey two broad themes:

1. That it is normal to worry at first about whether you belong in a new school.
2. That these difficulties do not mean that you do not belong; rather, with time and
effort, most students typically come to feel at home in the school.

Stories
Most studies of college students have included six to nine stories (~100–150 words per
story); those of middle-­school students, three stories in each of two sessions (~85 words
per story). The stories are represented as typical of diverse students’ experience in the
transition at hand. They are best understood as parables. Each describes an individual
student’s trajectory, drawing on past materials and students’ experiences gathered in
interviews and focus groups with careful editing to address critical themes effectively. As
parables, they do not give advice, which could feel prescriptive, presumptuous, or inappli-
cable (cf. Eskreis-­Winkler, Fischbach, & Duckworth, 2018). Instead, they offer multiple
models for how a person’s experience could develop over time (Lockwood & Kunda,
1997). While they all convey the same theme, they also include some range to increase
the likelihood participating students find models who experienced challenges that relate
to their own circumstance and see diverse trajectories of growth from these challenges.
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 47

DESCRIBING CHALLENGES TO BELONGING

First, the stories articulate specific common worries and everyday negative experiences
many students have in an academic transition. Further, they voice the negative thoughts
and feelings a student can have in response to these challenges, including feelings of non-
belonging (e.g., “I thought professors were scary,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 3). They thus
represent experiences, thoughts, and feelings of nonbelonging as normal. These chal-
lenges can be attributed explicitly to the difficulty of the transition (e.g., “Still, I think the
transition to college is difficult, and it was for me . . . ,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 2). They
are not attributed to the school itself. Instead, negative content is placed within a positive
overall representation of the school appropriate for the setting (e.g., “I love [school name]
and I wouldn’t trade my experiences here for anything. . . . Still . . . ,” Appendix 2,1, B,
Story 2). Thus, the materials validate the pride students often feel in their school, even as
they acknowledge normative challenges and doubts.
The challenges described are appropriate to the context. In college, they may include
interactions with instructors (e.g., feeling intimidated, receiving critical feedback) and
peers in academic contexts (e.g., joining study groups), academic setbacks (a poor grade),
challenges making friends, and missing home or older friends. Importantly, the stories do
not raise negative experiences or doubts without resolving their implications for belong-
ing; the reader is not left to wonder whether the protagonist in fact does belong. They
also do not reify negative norms (e.g., “Everyone is depressed,” “Everyone gets drunk
all the time”) or attribute difficulties to enduring negative qualities of the school (e.g.,
“There’s a lot of pressure here”).
The stories are attributed to upper-year students whose seniority affords them a suffi-
ciently long vantage point on the transition, usually through a “tag” at the end of the story
that represents his or her identity (see Appendix 2.1). The students are diverse, including
both students who are more and less advantaged in the setting. To counter the stereotype
that only disadvantaged students question their belonging, the strongest characterization
of feelings of nonbelonging (e.g., feeling intimidated in class) are attributed to more advan-
taged students, such as to Whites in a predominately White college (Walton & Cohen,
2011) or to men in engineering (Walton et al., 2015). These “counterstereotypical” stories
render the intervention distinct from approaches that emphasize role models, in which
in-group members illustrate a path of growth for the self (cf. Lockwood & Kunda, 1997;
Stephens et al., Chapter 5, this volume). Instead, the emphasis is on feelings of nonbelong-
ing that arise from difficulties in the academic transition experienced by all students.

DESCRIBING IMPROVEMENT IN BELONGING WITH TIME

Second, the stories describe trajectories of improvement: How negative experiences and
doubts lessen with time, as students find communities and come to feel at home in the
school. This improvement is characterized by (1) behaviors that support belonging, such
as initiative a student takes to connect with others (e.g., attending office hours) or specific
activities or communities he or she joins (e.g., a student organization); (2) the development
of relationships that support belonging, such as with instructors or peers; and (3) psycho-
logical change that supports belonging. This psychological change includes both new, more
adaptive attributions for specific common challenges (e.g., “I had to remind myself that
making close friends takes time,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 6; “And I saw that even when
48 I. Education

professors are critical, or their grading harsh, it didn’t mean they looked down on me or
that I didn’t belong. It was just their way of motivating high-­achieving [school name] stu-
dents,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 3) and the broad belief system targeted by the intervention
(“Everybody feels they are different freshman year from everybody else, when really in
at least some ways we are all pretty similar. Since I realized that, my experience has been
almost one-­hundred percent positive,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 1). Thus, the exemplars
model new behaviors, new relationships, and new ways of thinking that support belonging.
Improvement is attributed both to the passage of time and to students’ efforts,
resourcefulness, and resilience. The role of time is significant, as belonging can improve
with time as a person gets used to a new place and is receptive to efforts initiated by
others. Stories should not emphasize fixed qualities of individuals (e.g., “You have to be
outgoing to succeed here”) or atypical help, luck, or specific formal resources that may be
unavailable to or inappropriate for other students. For example, in a story about feeling
intimidated by professors, it would not be helpful to say, “Then I met Professor X and he
made all the difference.” The stories should not depict saviors but the patience, effective
strategies, and persistence all students can use to build belonging (e.g., “I began to take
more initiative in going to office hours and meeting with professors. When I made the
effort, I found that my professors became quite warm and were invested in me and in my
doing well,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 4).
The timeline for improvement should be represented vaguely (e.g., “With time . . . ”);
otherwise students could worry that they have “missed the boat” if they lack a sense
of belonging at a specific future point in time. It could also be problematic to repre-
sent improvement in a specific distant future—­then challenges may seem insurmountable
or not worth waiting out. The stories may also validate challenges or doubts that are
on­going but represent these as not a fundamental threat to belonging (e.g., “Though I
still have doubts about myself sometimes they’re the kinds of things everybody feels on
occasion,” Appendix 2.1, B, Story 8).
Although the stories emphasize challenges experienced by all students, they may
also acknowledge group-­specific challenges (Stephens et al., Chapter 5, this volume). For
instance, interviews with upper-year students in engineering revealed that women some-
times felt excluded from male peer groups. A corresponding intervention story validated
this experience but curtailed its negative implications for belonging (Walton et al., 2015,
Story 7):

“ . . . I remember once in my first term having lunch with some other civil engineers.
They spent 90% of the time talking about hockey, about which I know next to
nothing. I felt like I didn’t belong. It was discouraging. But over time I got to know
my classmates better, individually and as a group. Once I remember talking about
the TV show Monster Machines, which I have to admit I love. We had a great time
sharing stories about the different episodes. Even though I don’t share their love
of hockey, I realized that we do have a lot in common—­an interest in how things
work—and that’s why we’re all engineers. . . . ”

DETAILS AND COHERENCE

As parables, the stories use specific details in symbolic or illustrative ways to high-
light both challenges (e.g., conversation about hockey) and improvement (e.g., Monster
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 49

Machines; “I realized that. . . . ”). These details should be ones that diverse participating
students can relate to, not individuating or specific to one person’s experience. Details
and language style should also be appropriate to the context at hand. And taken together,
each story should be internally consistent and coherent, and emphasize a clear theme.

ORDER AND TYPES OF STORIES

The ordering of stories is intentional. For college students, the first story dispels a form
of “pluralistic ignorance”—the perception that worries about belonging are specific to
oneself (see Prentice & Miller, 1993). Attributed to a member of the group the materials
are most designed to reach, such as a Black student at a predominantly White college, the
story simply describes a student learning the core idea in the intervention: that early wor-
ries and challenges to belonging, which had seemed unique to oneself, are in fact common
for all students (Appendix 2.1, B, Story 1). The story does not describe these challenges
in any detail. It just implies that whatever difficulties a student experiences are likely to
be more common than it might seem.
The next story or two feature counterstereotypical exemplars: students from more
advantaged groups, who might seem least likely to worry about belonging, but who
describe strong, specific experiences of nonbelonging and how these improved with
time (Appendix 2.1, B, Stories 2 and 3). These stories counter the assumption that only
members of disadvantaged groups face significant worries about belonging. Later stories
address other comon themes in a context, such as teacher–­student relationships, friend-
ships, imposter syndrome, and common goals (Appendix 2.1, B, Stories 4–9).
For middle school students, the themes are simplified and interwoven (Goyer et al.,
2019). Stories also may not be attributed to a student with a given social identity but pre-
sented alongside an array of images of students representing the diversity of the student
body, thus implying that the stories reflect the experiences of students in that community
as a whole.

Saying Is Believing
After reading the intervention summary and stories, students are asked to describe how
their own experience in the transition so far, and/or what they expect in the future, reflects
the experiences of the students they read about. These materials, students are told, may be
shared with future students to help them better understand what to expect in the transition.
In the original study, students wrote an essay describing their experiences of belonging,
rewrote this essay into a speech, and then delivered this speech to a video camera to cre-
ate footage that could be shared in first-year orientation the next year (Walton & Cohen,
2011). In other studies, students have written a personal letter to a future incoming student
(Walton et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2016). As noted earlier, saying-­is-­believing exercises can
promote learning and personalization (see Aronson, 1999; Walton & ­Wilson, 2018).

Control Conditions
Multiple active control conditions have been tested. These feature the same structure of
activities—­summary information, student stories, and saying-­is-­believing task—but lack
the critical focus on belonging. They have addressed instead how students (1) get used to
50 I. Education

the physical environment of a new school (e.g., generic information about the weather,
campus, and city; Walton & Cohen, 2011; Yeager et al., 2016), (2) develop study skills
(Murphy et al., 2020; Walton et al., 2015), or (3) become used to the school lunchroom
and interested in state politics (Goyer et al., 2019). Some studies have also included no-­
treatment control conditions (Walton et al., 2015). Others supplement randomized con-
trol groups with nonrandomized campuswide comparisons (Murphy et al., 2020; Walton
& Cohen, 2011; Yeager et al., 2016).

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS
Not Mostly about Friendships
One misconception is that the intervention focuses on purely social experiences, such as
close friendships or feelings of homesickness. To the contrary, the emphasis is on experi-
ences of belonging and nonbelonging within the core academic context of school—­in
classrooms, study groups, lab settings, and in interactions with classmates or instruc-
tors. The stories thus address worries about ability, about showing work to others, about
being evaluated, and about receiving critical feedback or poor grades. This focus arises
from the fact that it is the intellectual abilities and merit of racial-­minority students and
women in math and science that is most directly impugned by negative stereotypes, not
their likability (e.g., Glick & Fiske, 2001). In so doing, the materials seek to convey that
worries about belonging and being valued and respected within the core academic con-
texts of school are normal (experienced by many students) and improve with time.

Not Just Role Models

A second misconception is that the intervention is primarily a role model exercise and,
thus, that the most important materials are stories told by ingroup members whose expe-
riences are most relevant to participating students (see Lockwood & Kunda, 1997). To
the contrary, an important aspect of the intervention are counterstereotypical stories,
which show how majority-­group members also worry about belonging.

Acknowledgment of Difference
A third misconception is that the stories ignore group-based differences in students’ expe-
rience. They do not. They simply emphasize everyday worries about belonging that arise
from the difficulty of the transition for all students and how this improves with time.
Some variants also highlight group-­specific challenges (e.g., the hockey story described
above). The saying-­is-­believing exercise also provides participating students an oppor-
tunity to describe challenges they have experienced, including experiences of difference
involving one or more of their social identities.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

There are many ways that institutions can convey adaptive ways of thinking about
belonging and build a culture that supports this. Here we focus on implementation in
school contexts, where most research has been conducted, but similar efforts can and
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 51

have been undertaken in work contexts. We describe ways schools have found to convey
and embody the specific themes of the belonging intervention. These efforts comple-
ment broader efforts to promote belonging and inclusion, such as to promote diversity
among students, staff, and faculty; to represent and value this diversity; to counter bias,
prejudice, and sexual harassment; and to structure communities so people have genuine
opportunities to build relationships of value (see Murphy, Kroeper, & Ozier, 2018).
As with any psychological exercise, no implementation of the belonging intervention
will be effective if the materials are not delivered in an impactful way, such that recipi-
ents pay attention, engage, and connect the material with their lives (see Weiss, Bloom,
& Brock, 2014). Psychological interventions are not “a worksheet to be handed out or
a lesson to ‘get through’ ” (Yeager & Walton, 2011, p. 289) but a tool to engage people
substantively in thinking about themselves or their experience in a new way.
It is also essential to maintain the integrity of the critical message (see Dweck,
2016). Simply handing out school swag or assuring students, “You belong!” does not
help students see that everyday challenges are normal and improve with time. Addi-
tionally, although it may be helpful to hear adaptive messages about belonging mul-
tiple times from multiple sources, the message should always feel authentic, not false or
manipulative.

Online Materials: Reflection Modules and Belonging Videos

Online modules can reach thousands of students with high-­fidelity materials at low cost
(Yeager et al., 2016; see also Devers et al., 2016). As with other psychological interven-
tions, a challenge is to achieve impact at scale (Paunesku et al., 2015). There are two basic
risks. First, the content of the materials may be less relevant for larger and more diverse
populations. To address this, we discuss the customization of content below. Second,
students may engage with materials less seriously when they are delivered online rather
than in person. Thus, online sessions should be as attractive and interactive as possible.
For instance, all past studies include saying-­is-­believing components, which engage stu-
dents and invite them to reflect on how the intervention message is true for them. Some
also complement written materials with audio recordings of upper-year students reading
the critical intervention stories (Walton et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2016, Experiment 1).
Another scalable way to convey adaptive ideas about belonging is through online
videos. For the past few years, Stanford University has empowered outgoing senior stu-
dents to create a welcome video for incoming first-year students highlighting key themes
about belonging; new students receive this video in the summer before they enter college
(see http://tinyurl.com/pringle2017). Although this approach has not been formally eval-
uated, it provides an authentic and impactful means to establish adaptive norms about
belonging from the start for an entire cohort of students.

In‑Person Experiences
Institutions can also implement in-­person experiences to help students contend with chal-
lenges to belonging early on. This may involve structured reflections and small-group
discussion or specific assignments in first-year classes, each of which has been shown
to improve core academic outcomes (e.g., Binning et al., 2020; Murphy et al., 2020).
Residential programming offers another opportunity. Stanford created a credit-­bearing,
discussion-­based course, Frosh 101, to extend lessons introduced during new student
52 I. Education

orientation, including about belonging, into the first year. In a first session, facilitators
(more senior students) share challenges to and growth in belonging they experienced in
coming to college. First-year students then write anonymously about their own experi-
ence, describing why and how it is normal to worry at first about belonging in this transi-
tion and how this gets better with time. These writings are then collected and are read
aloud without identifying their authors. The group then discusses common themes. The
next week, students create mementos that reflect their discussion, such as a poem, a flier,
a painting, digital art, or a sculpture, to be displayed in the dorm.
Organizing such in-­person experiences may require greater coordination and be
more costly per student. There can also be challenges to maintaining the fidelity of the
intervention message. Yet they may help shift a school culture.

Customization
Past research testing the social-­belonging intervention has incorporated customized con-
tent among standard belonging stories in new contexts, under the assumption that dis-
tinct challenges to belonging arise in specific contexts.
The aim of the customization process is to understand the challenges to belonging
students experience in a particular environment and to identify adaptive and realistic ways
students can understand and respond to these challenges in that context. This process
generally involves user-­centered pilot research, including surveys, interviews, and focus
groups with the target population. For women in engineering, it led to the incorporation
of new stories addressing feelings of exclusion from male peer groups (the hockey story
above) and experiences of sexist disrespect on campus (Walton et al., 2015). For gradu-
ates of urban charter schools, pilot research identified a passivity in building belonging
in college among students leaving highly structured urban charter school contexts. Story
revisions reemphasized the active steps students need to take to build relationships with
peers and faculty in college (Yeager et al., 2016). For middle school students, customiza-
tion led to stories addressing worries about getting lost in a larger school, forgetting a
locker combination, how one’s stomach hurt the first few months, and a fear of talking
to teachers (Goyer et al., 2019).
This customization has typically been carried out within the structure of the inter-
vention outlined above, including the first story emphasizing pluralistic ignorance fol-
lowed by counterstereotypical exemplar stories. The Belonging Guide mentioned earlier
discusses why and how to include customized content (Walton et al., 2017). Doing so
may make materials more relevant, authentic, and impactful for a context. However,
the customization and writing process requires significant expertise and should not be
carried out casually. Effective belonging stories are deceptively complex and difficult to
write well. Moreover, basic themes and threats to belonging are often common across
diverse contexts—­thus, stories addressing core themes may be largely retained across set-
tings. Customizing some content does not imply that all content should be customized.

PRACTITIONER EXPERIENCES

Appendix 2.2 shares reflections from two practitioners who implemented the social-­
belonging intervention at their institution through the College Transition Collaborative
(http://collegetransitioncollaborative.org).
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 53

IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY

First, the belonging intervention illustrates how social-­psychological factors can per-
petuate inequality (see Steele, 1997, 2010; Sherman et al., Chapter 3, this volume). The
intervention does not expand learning opportunities. Nor does it increase students’ basic
capability (e.g., intelligence, self-­control) or motivation to learn, factors commonly cited
as causes of inequality (e.g., Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Instead, it shows that potent
social-­psychological processes follow from societal disadvantage in the form of pervasive
worries about belonging and how these reproduce inequality in school success.
Second, for theories of education, the belonging intervention highlights the untapped
capacity for better outcomes present in both many students from socially disadvantaged
backgrounds and many school contexts, yet how this potential can go hidden and unreal-
ized as a consequence of unaddressed feelings of nonbelonging (Walton & Spencer, 2009).
Third, the intervention highlights the causal role of social-­psychological processes
for lifespan development. Social psychology is often identified with the “power of the
situation,” which can seem to imply that people simply bend with the wind of every new
context (Ross & Nisbett, 1991). If so, social-psychological processes would not affect
life outcomes. Yet worries about belonging can become embedded in the structure of
people’s lives, forestalling the development of social resources that pay dividends over
the life course.
Fourth, for “wise” interventions, the belonging intervention provides a paradigmatic
example of how a brief psychological exercise at a key point in time can produce recursive
and, thus, lasting change. Here, the intervention, delivered early in college or in middle
school improved major life and school outcomes 7–11 and 7 years later, respectively
(Brady et al., 2020; Goyer et al., 2019). In each case it did so, it seems, by helping students
make sense of and respond to daily experiences more adaptively, improving patterns of
social interaction and helping students develop stronger and more trusting relationships,
reinforcing feelings of belonging (see Walton & Wilson, 2018).
Fifth, for psychology, the intervention highlights the centrality of belonging for both
sustained motivation and achievement (Carr & Walton, 2014; Walton, Cohen, Cwir,
& Spencer, 2012) and functioning generally. Although we have focused on academic
outcomes, the belonging intervention has also been shown to improve health, happiness,
and daily functioning (e.g., higher and more stable self-­esteem; Walton & Cohen, 2011;
Walton et al., 2015). Such findings suggest that belonging may serve as a psychological
“hub” for the self, essential to diverse outcomes (see Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Finally,
the intervention illustrates the close relationship between cognitive (attributional) and
affective (belonging) processes, and how an attributional approach can help people make
sense of their experiences in ways that support better affective outcomes (cf. Marigold,
Chapter 17, this volume).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

An important direction for future research involves better understanding heterogene-

ity in the effects of the belonging intervention. In some cases, it has not produced sig-
nificant gains where gains might be expected (Broda et al., 2018). With what kinds of
students and in what kinds of school contexts is the intervention most likely to improve
outcomes? What contexts provoke latent worries about belonging but nonetheless afford
54 I. Education

opportunities for belonging that students could pursue? We speculate that benefits will be
limited in contexts that are too toxic for students to reasonably belong or where genuine
opportunity for learning is limited. Such research will inform and potentially integrate
psychological and sociological theories of societal inequality.
As we noted, the belonging intervention can also improve health (Walton & Cohen,
2011). Where, for whom, and how do health benefits arise? Future research should
include specific health-­relevant physiological objective indicators, including measures of
both acute stress responses (e.g., cortisol) and functioning over time (e.g., the conserved
transcriptional response to adversity). Health and physiological outcomes may or may
not track with psychological and academic outcomes (cf. Miller, Cohen, Janicki-­Deverts,
Brody, & Chen, 2016)—or with each other (see Destin, 2018).
Another important question involves the best way to think about customization and
new contexts, both in school contexts and elsewhere. We do not yet understand as well
as we need to the contexts in which more or less standard belonging materials will be
effective, the contexts in which customization is helpful or necessary, and how to deter-
mine this. In many cases, it may be most effective to design high-­quality and engaging but
standard materials that can be presented to many people in a given kind of context (e.g.,
the transition to college), and to which recipients can flexibly respond by describing their
own experiences (through saying-­is-­believing prompts or group discussions; à la Walton
& Cohen, 2011; Walton et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2016). In other cases, standard mate-
rials may be modified or even replaced by a bottom-­up process in which participating
students begin by articulating, sharing, and discussing in safe ways their own challenges
to and growth in belonging (see Binning et al., 2020).
Finally, even as most research on the belonging intervention to date has focused on
school contexts, people also strive to belong in other achievement-­related settings, such
as work contexts, where doubts about belonging may also undermine outcomes (e.g., Fas-
siotto et al., 2016). Future research should examine the role of belonging uncertainty and
belonging interventions in such settings and how the intervention can improve outcomes
and reduce inequalities there.

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 58 I. EDUCATION

APPENDIX 2.1. Social‑ Belonging Intervention Materials

from Walton and Cohen (2011)

(A) Prelude and summary. (B) Annotated student stories. (C) Saying-is-believing essay prompt.
See Walton, Murphy, Logel, Yeager, and the College Transition Collaborative (2017) for experi-
menter script and more examples of materials.

(continued)
The Social‑Belonging Intervention 59

(continued)
60 I. EDUCATION
 The Social‑Belonging Intervention 61

APPENDIX 2.2.  Two Practitioners’ Experiences Implementing

the Social‑Belonging Intervention

We asked two practitioners who implemented the social-­belonging intervention on their

college campus in partnership with the College Transition Collaborative (CTC; www.­
collegetransitioncollaborative.org) to describe their experience.

Kurt A. Boniecki, PhD

Associate Provost for Instructional Support
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Central Arkansas

As a social psychologist by training, I have been excited to be involved in the application of

my discipline to solving the problems that I now face as an academic administrator. At my
institution, we’ve traditionally approached student success by providing academic support
services, such as tutoring, corequisite remediation, and supplemental instruction. Although
these services are effective, we were still losing nearly 30% of our incoming freshmen within
the first year. Understanding why and what we could do about it led us to explore mindset
approaches, such as the belonging intervention, that seek to address students’ self doubts
and their interpretations of the challenges they face in college. In 2014, we joined the Col-
lege Transition Collaborative and implemented the belonging intervention to two cohorts
of incoming freshmen. While it is still too early to determine the long-term effects of the
intervention, preliminary results so far are promising and show that disadvantaged students
are more likely to complete a full-time load of courses in their first term and first year. Of
course, we don’t expect the intervention to be a silver bullet that supplants our academic
support services, but compared to those services that involve significant training and per-
sonnel costs, the belonging intervention is relatively easy to administer and requires very
little in terms of resources. That’s a selling feature to university administrators on a tight
budget. Thus, we will continue to study the long-term effects of the intervention and explore
ways to improve it.
One area for improvement is the delivery of the intervention. Though easy to adminis-
ter online, we struggled with low response rates when using e-mail invitations. As a result,
we shifted from students being invited to complete the intervention on their own time to
requiring participation as part of students’ on-­campus summer orientation. That approach
has its potential drawbacks though, because students may not have the time or personal
space during a summer orientation program to genuinely reflect on and write about their
own doubts and how they might overcome them, which is a key component of the interven-
tion. Thus, we are exploring other means of delivery, such as embedding the intervention in
online orientation modules and early classroom assignments.
A side benefit of our participation in the CTC has been the awareness it has created
among academic support staff of students’ mindsets and how these affect their interpreta-
tion of academic struggle. We are questioning the idea that “tough love” messages really
motivate students to succeed and are recognizing that they are more likely to motivate them
to quit. As a result, we are changing how we communicate with students. From advising ses-
sions to probation letters, we are now more cognizant of what we say and how it can help
a student overcome a maladaptive mindset. Also, just like the intervention is changing stu-
dents’ mindsets, I believe our participation in the CTC is beginning to change the mindsets
that our staff and faculty have of our students. Many staff and faculty are abandoning the
belief that some students are not “meant” to go to college for the notion that all students
62 I. Education

can succeed under the right conditions. A key tenet of the CTC approach is that student
success is a process and that academic struggle is a normal part of college life. This idea
has influenced the development of other student success initiatives beyond the intervention.
For example, our university promotes a campuswide Fail Forward Week in which students,
staff, and faculty are encouraged to share their failures publicly. The hope is that students
will see their academic struggles as typical and will seek the help they need.

Jerusha Detweiler-­Bedell, PhD

Professor of Psychology
Director, Teaching Excellence Program
Lewis & Clark College

Lewis & Clark was the first liberal arts college to implement the CTC’s belonging inter-
vention. When the CTC team approached our college with this opportunity, a focus on
students’ sense of “belonging” was not yet part of the institutional fabric. Yes, we were
eager to understand better what kinds of students succeed at Lewis & Clark College, and
yes, we were attentive to the importance of growing the diversity of our student body. Yet at
that time we hadn’t considered the role we needed to play in discussing and normalizing the
challenges all undergraduates face in order to help our students not only persist but thrive.
Presenting the CTC’s plan to the community required bringing together a large number
of stakeholders, ranging from the dean’s office to student life staff to faculty to the advising
office and more. Initially, there was support for the basic idea, but a great deal of skepticism
about using an experimental design for the intervention. “If something like this seems prom-
ising, why not provide it to all students right away?” What was harder to understand was
the fact that this intervention had never been tested at a primarily undergraduate institution,
and even if it had been, our students may be different from those at other schools. We needed
to tailor the intervention to our own students and assess its effectiveness before putting the
resources into providing it to everyone. These early conversations not only helped members
of our institution to understand the wisdom of assessment prior to widespread implementa-
tion but also to spread the concept of belongingness throughout our campus community.
Early data demonstrated that our entering first-year students were being affected by the
belonging intervention. As one student described, “Through reading about other students’
experiences of coming to Lewis & Clark and becoming more comfortable over time, I have
recognized that all students are experiencing the same stresses that I am now. There is no
easy way to get around the discomfort of starting all over. The best thing to do is embrace
the opportunities Lewis & Clark offers and be outgoing. By doing this, I will find myself at
home in no time.” As data collection progressed and results for the tailored belongingness
intervention continued to be promising, Lewis & Clark was able to make an informed choice
to implement the intervention for all entering students.
Although there is somewhat of a chicken-­ and-the-egg problem here, campuswide
changes began to be put in place on the heels of the CTC’s intervention. For example, a new,
required first-year experience called the “Pioneer Success Institute” was initiated the year
after the CTC intervention began. At the same time, faculty began to focus more explicitly
on inclusive pedagogy and the ways students’ struggles in those first few semesters could be
normalized in order to make their classrooms more inviting places to be. And perhaps most
striking, our institution recently unveiled a new strategic plan, where one of the six key goals
echoes the CTC’s intervention. As Lewis & Clark’s president, Wim Wiewel, said in his inau-
gural address (October 5, 2018), “The overarching goal is to create an institutional culture
of belonging, where all community members can fully participate.”
 C H A P TE R 3

Self‑Affirmation Interventions

David K. Sherman, Mohini Lokhande, Tim Müller,

and Geoffrey L. Cohen

A theory-­based intervention known as “self-­affirmation” provides people with the opportu-

nity to affirm a sense of self-­integrity, a global image of moral and adaptive adequacy, at
moments of psychological threat. By assuaging threat, affirmations can allay stress and
defensive responding. The positive impact of self-­affirmations has been shown in many
domains where persistent threats to self-­integrity can impede adaptive outcomes. Affirma-
tions, by broadening the perceived bases of self-­integrity, render these threats less dire. The
focus of the present chapter is on affirmations in educational institutions. On the whole, affir-
mation interventions have been shown to be powerful yet conditional in their effects. They
have large and lasting benefits when people are under persistent psychological threat that
impedes adaptive outcomes, when the affirmation is well-timed to this threat and activates
the self-­affirmation process, and where other resources for positive change are available
and thus likely to be activated once psychological threat has been assuaged. To illuminate
theoretical and practical considerations, a case study is presented from researchers working
in a German school system with a large immigrant population; the successful application
of affirmation depended on being attentive to the underlying mechanisms and theoretical
moderators. In a final section, lingering theoretical and applied questions are discussed.

BACKGROUND

The motive to maintain a positive sense of self pervades social life. Dismissing evidence
that one is engaging in risky behavior, reacting defensively to good advice, feeling vigilant
and stressed in situations where one feels judged, and avoiding domains where one per-
ceives oneself to be failing seem like discrete phenomena. But they are similar at a psycho-
logical level. They all represent the mind’s attempt to deal with threats to the self. While
the different responses to threats in different arenas protect feelings of personal worth in
the short term, they can prove counterproductive in the long run. The attempts people

63
64 I. Education

make to protect themselves from threats to self-­integrity are understandable and in some
cases even adaptive. Given the pervasiveness of threats to self in the various arenas of life,
people would lose confidence and grit if their sense of self were constantly under assault.
But over time self-­protection can have costly effects in many domains, including health,
education, relationships, dispute resolution, and career success.
For over three decades, researchers and practitioners have applied self-­affirmation
theory to understand and change behavior in a wide range of domains. The theory begins
with the premise that people are motivated to maintain an image of themselves as “mor-
ally and adaptively adequate,” as good people who are able to control important outcomes
in their lives (Steele, 1988). Claude Steele, the creator of self-­affirmation theory, referred
to this need as a drive for “self-­integrity.” Applied to social problems, self-­affirmation
theory provides a lens for understanding why so many attempts at social and personal
change fail. It is because they can inadvertently threaten self-­integrity, evoking psycho-
logical mechanisms that can shield self-­integrity and also impede growth.
Self-­affirmation interventions are situational opportunities, sometimes brief, for
people to affirm their global self-­integrity. Most often they take the form of an oppor-
tunity for people to show their fidelity to a cherished value they hold. Because values
are central to people’s sense of self-­integrity, expressing one’s fidelity to them is a simple
and effective way to affirm self-­integrity. Self-­affirmation interventions have received the
most attention in the domain of education. Indeed, affirmations have been applied in
schools around the world. The United States, Germany, and England are three countries
where thousands of students and dozens of public schools have participated—­or are cur-
rently participating—­in large field studies evaluating the impact of self-­affirmation.
As Kurt Lewin (1951), the father of social psychology, stated, “There is nothing so
practical as a good theory.” Following his lead, we believe that the most useful interven-
tion of all is the theoretical wisdom that follows from self-­affirmation theory. Armed
with this theory, educators and other practitioners can craft situations that meet the core
needs of the people they serve. For this reason, we first review self-­affirmation theory.
Then we describe the successes and limitations of one of the most popular interventions
derived from this theory—­brief writing activities that encourage people to identify and
reflect on their cherished values.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Self‑Integrity Maintenance
The theoretical basis of self-­affirmation rests on the insight that people are motivated to
maintain a global sense of personal adequacy. They strive to be morally and adaptively
adequate (Steele, 1988; Cohen & Sherman, 2014). How do people maintain self-­integrity
in a world where it is continually under threat (Steele, 1988)?1 When Steele first proposed
self-­affirmation theory, the prevailing notion in social psychology was that people were
motivated to directly neutralize threats to the self. A smoker might defensively dismiss the
dangers of smoking. An employee might attribute a bad job outcome to an unfair boss. A

1 Although we briefly highlight the key theoretical and conceptual points related to self-­affirmation the-
ory, we recommend that any practitioner seeking to implement an affirmation intervention read a trio
of review papers to understand the intellectual history and empirical development of self-­affirmation
theory (Steele, 1988; Sherman & Cohen, 2006; Cohen & Sherman, 2014).
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 65

teacher might attribute the underperformance of students to their laziness or lack of abil-
ity. Of course, people might also protect their self-­integrity not only through cognitive
distortions but through behavioral change. The smoker quits. The employee or teacher
accepts a measure of personal responsibility and takes a more proactive role in improving
the situation. Yet people routinely engage in defensive distortions and biased judgments
in response to threats to the self. The “psychological immune system” gets activated and
shields people (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). Motivated reason-
ing (Kunda, 1987) can lead people to feel good about themselves but to deny important
information and feedback that could lead to better outcomes in their lives. Yet, self-­
affirmation theory suggests that denial and defense are not inevitable outcomes of threat.
People have flexibility in how they respond to threats to the self. They can do so
indirectly, and, when they do, this can provide them with the self-­protection they need
to accept and act on threatening experiences. The cardinal motive of the self-­system,
according to self-­affirmation theory, is global self-­integrity. If people feel reassured that,
on the whole, they are good, moral people, then they are better able to cope with threat-
ening situations without resorting to defensive justifications and other cognitive distor-
tions that protect self-­integrity at the expense of learning. This process likely starts early
in life; infants can be consoled by touching and cuddling even when these do little to
remedy the source of the distress. Later in life, people are consoled by prayer, religion,
and social support—­everyday “interventions” that reassure people they are “okay” even
while failing to resolve the provoking threat (Steele & Liu, 1983; Steele, 1988).
According to self-­affirmation theory, people have a range of creative solutions to the
problem of sustaining self-­integrity in any situation. A student who feels insecure about
her ability might act out in class in an effort to win approval from peers and thus reaffirm
self-­integrity. The employee who feels alienated at work might decorate his desk with pic-
tures of family and friends. People can create cognitive worlds, tailor-­made definitions of
success, that put their own qualities in a positive light. As research on the above-­average
effect shows, most people on average see themselves as “above average” on a range of
desirable traits (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989). They are able to do so, in
large measure, because they define what it means to be a good “leader,” “student,” or
“scientist” in a way that emphasizes their own idiosyncratic strengths and downplays
their weakness (Dunning, 2003; Dunning & Cohen, 1992), a tendency that is amplified
when their self-­integrity comes under threat (Dunning, Leuenberger, & Sherman, 1995).
The major insight of self-­affirmation theory is that people do not simply accept nega-
tive identities and stereotypes imposed on them in a situation but instead creatively find
ways to convey, in effect, “Even though it may not seem so in this situation, I am a person
of integrity.” The key practical insight of self-­affirmation theory is this: Practitioners
should think about the raw materials they can introduce into everyday situations at every
level—face-to-face encounters, relationships, and institutions—­that help people to main-
tain a sense of self-­integrity in constructive ways. To the extent that people have a range
of possibilities for protecting the self in a situation, they will have less need to defensively
distort or deny threatening experiences from which they could otherwise learn.
Threat is not intrinsically a bad thing. It is the mind’s alert signal that there is a
threat in the situation. Indeed, sometimes, as noted earlier, threat can motivate positive
behavioral change (see Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Ehret, LaBrie, Santerre, & Sherman,
2015; Walton & Wilson, 2018). For example, when people are made to feel badly for
failing to live up to their own professed values, such as practicing healthy behavior, they
may subsequently seize an opportunity to redeem themselves—­for instance, by making
66 I. Education

healthful choices (Stone & Focella, 2011). How people respond to threat, and whether
their response is adaptive or nonadaptive, depends on many factors but perhaps most of
all on the opportunities for course correction and self-­affirmation available in the social
environment.
Self-­affirmation theory offered a challenge to cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger,
1957) and its theoretical elaborations that posited self-­consistency as a primary motive
(Aronson, 1969). The earliest research in self-­affirmation theory showed that people
could absorb a psychological inconsistency, even when it implicated a valued self-­concept,
when their self-­integrity was bolstered in unrelated domains. For example, when people
affirmed their self-­integrity by reflecting on values that were important to them, they no
longer rationalized their actions—­for instance, by changing their attitudes to bring them
in line with regrettable behavior that they had subtly been pressured to engage in (Steele,
1988). This occurred even when the values were unrelated to the threatening action. A
person who asserts a love for art, for instance, might no longer need to rationalize smok-
ing behavior.
Research in self-­affirmation theory went on to assimilate many of the findings that
had previously been ascribed to basic motives for self-­consistency (Aronson, Cohen, &
Nail, 1999). One of the most heavily researched phenomena in cognitive dissonance was
the tendency to resist persuasive information contrary to long-held beliefs. In the health
domain, people often dismiss or rationalize away evidence that they are engaging in
behavior that puts their health at risk. For example, women who drank coffee were much
more critical of an article linking caffeine use with negative health outcomes than women
who did not drink coffee (Liberman & Chaiken, 1992). Such defensive processing or
“motivated reasoning” has long been a topic of study in psychology (Ditto & Lopez,
1992; Kunda, 1987) but the underlying motivation for it was unclear. Self-­affirmation
theory suggested it arose from the threat such information poses to global self-­integrity.
Thus, in one study, people were more open to threatening health information about their
unsafe sex practices when they had the opportunity to reflect on important values they
held in a different domain (Sherman, Nelson, & Steele, 2000). The opportunity to reflect
on the value of kindness or personal relationships, for example, led sexually active stu-
dents to acknowledge the risks of unsafe sex after viewing an acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome (AIDS) educational video, coffee drinkers to be more open to information link-
ing excessive caffeine intake to health risks (Sherman et al., 2000), and female alcohol
consumers to be more open to evidence linking alcohol consumption to breast cancer
(Harris & Napper, 2005). In the years since these original studies, there have been several
meta-­analyses (e.g., Epton, Harris, Kane, van Koningsbruggen, & Sheeran, 2015; Ferrer
& Cohen, 2019) and narrative reviews of self-­affirmation in the health domain (Ehret &
Sherman, 2014; Cohen & Sherman, 2014), as well as extensions into other domains, such
as intergroup conflict (Sherman, Brookfield, & Ortosky, 2017). Together the research
illustrates the impact of self-­affirmation on increasing openness to threatening informa-
tion and promoting positive behavioral change in a wide range of life arenas.

Stress Reduction
The experience of self-­threat is like a psychological alarm. It can be triggered by any
number of events. This includes exposure to counterattitudinal evidence, negotiations
with a political adversary, a mistake, an insult, and so on. There is, in other words, some-
thing vital at stake in many seemingly mundane social situations: one’s self (Goffman,
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 67

1978). Among the most important emotional symptoms of self-­threat is stress. The stress
response is an adaptive mechanism designed to mobilize the body’s resources for an
environmental challenge (Sapolsky, 2004). However, when too severe or too chronic,
stress can impair performance and well-being. Research on self-­affirmation demonstrates
that debilitating levels of stress can be forestalled by timely activities that reaffirm self-­
integrity. For example, when college undergraduates were given self-­affirmation activi-
ties to complete during winter break of the stressful first year of college, they reported
fewer visits to the health center (Keough & Markus, 1999). When people had the chance
to reflect on important values before having to give a stressful talk in front of a judg-
mental audience, they showed less of a spike in the stress hormone cortisol (Creswell et
al., 2005), and for those suffering from high levels of chronic stress, performed better
under the pressure (Creswell, Dutcher, Klein, Harris, & Levine, 2013). In a field study,
college undergraduates who engaged in a self-­affirmation exercise the week before their
most stress-­inducing midterm examination exhibited a less steep rise in urinary catechol-
amines, another biological marker of the stress response (Sherman, Bunyan, Creswell, &
Jaremka, 2009).

Defense of Social Identities
The research described so far shows the ubiquity of self-­threat and the self-­affirmation
process in social life. Another extension of self-­affirmation research is to show how the
motive to protect the integrity of the self is directly tied to the motive to protect our social
or group identities. Affirming or threatening the self affects the way people judge and
treat groups, including their own. After completing a self-­affirmation activity, people
were less likely to recoup lost self-­esteem by stereotyping outgroups as inferior (Fein
& Spencer, 1997; Badea, Binning, Verlhiac, & Sherman, 2017). They were more chari-
table when explaining why their sports team won or lost (Sherman & Kim, 2005). They
were more willing to acknowledge “hard truths” about the injustices perpetrated by their
country against minorities and competing nations (Adams, Tormala, & O’Brien, 2006;
ehaji-Clancy, Effron, Halperin, Liberman, & Ross, 2011; see Badea & Sherman, 2019,
for review). They were less likely to denigrate the “other side” in political debates as
biased (Binning, Sherman, Cohen, & Heitland, 2010; Cohen, Aronson, & Steele, 2000;
see also Binning, Brick, Cohen, & Sherman, 2015; Cohen et al., 2007).

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR SELF‑AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS

Self-­affirmation works not by giving people something that they lack but by allowing
people to manifest what they already have—what they stand for, the psychological com-
mitments that ground their sense of self-­integrity. An opportunity to assert one’s impor-
tant values, and to explain why they are important, is an opportunity to express com-
mitments that have been a lifetime in the making. A self-­affirmation, in this sense, is
a situational channel that facilitates the link between inner assets and their outward
expression. (We describe implementation of the intervention in a section below and pro-
vide annotated materials in Appendixes 3.1 and 3.2, respectively.) A critical point is that
people cannot always go it alone in the self-­affirmation process. They are constrained or
supported by the situation they are in. Thus, in virtually all of the studies described so
far, the self-­affirmation takes the form of a question, introduced by the experimenters,
68 I. Education

that prompts people to reflect on their values and why they are important to them at a
moment of threat. Without the question, people may be more constrained in how they
can affirm the self, though people can be taught to self-­affirm (Brady et al., 2016; Wal-
ton, Logel, Peach, Spencer, & Zanna, 2015). Naturally, there are individual differences
in how much a person can spontaneously self-­affirm (Harris et al., 2019).

Laboratory Outcomes
The range of outcomes along which self-­ affirmation effects have been documented
include (1) acceptance of threatening information in health and politics (Sherman &
Cohen, 2002); (2) behavioral compliance with threatening information, such as increases
in healthful eating and exercise frequency, and reductions in alcohol consumption among
at-risk adults (Harris & Napper, 2005; Ehret & Sherman, 2018; Falk et al., 2015; see
Epton et al., 2015; Ferrer & Cohen, 2019, for reviews); (3) reductions in stress, such as
stress arising from social evaluation or performance situations (Creswell et al., 2005,
2013); (4) reductions in self-­destructive coping behaviors, such as excessive eating (Logel
& Cohen, 2012; Logel, Kathmandu, & Cohen, 2019); (5) increases in intergroup under-
standing, as evidenced by less outgroup denigration (Badea et al., 2017), more compro-
mise in political conflict, and greater willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing on the part
of one’s group (ehaji-Clancy et al., 2011); (6) reductions in biased assimilation of new
evidence, as evidenced by evenhandedness in political partisans’ evaluation of presiden-
tial candidates’ performance in a debate (Binning et al., 2010); (7) acceptance of threaten-
ing changes at the workplace (Jiang, 2018; Wiesenfeld, Brockner, & Martin, 1999); (8)
reduction of ingroup favoritism in negotiation contexts (Sivanathan, Molden, Galinsky,
& Ku, 2008; Ward, Atkins, Lepper, & Ross, 2011); (9) reduction in self-­handicapping in
athletic and academic domains (Finez & Sherman, 2012; Siegel, Scillitoe, & Parks-Yancy,
2005); and (10) better performance under stress and social identity threat (Creswell et
al., 2013; Martens, Johns, Greenberg, & Schimel, 2006; Shapiro, Williams, & Hambar-
chyan, 2013). The scope of domains where affirmations have been shown to have ame-
liorative effects suggests that a similar psychological process, to some extent, underlies
them all.

Outcomes from Longitudinal Field Experiments

Although self-­affirmation theory has been tested in many contexts, we focus here on the
widespread application in schools. Schools are in many ways the ideal field setting to test
self-­affirmation theory. Many of the outcomes that self-­affirmation has been shown to
affect in laboratory studies—­performance, stress, health, openness to threatening infor-
mation, prejudice, and social conflict—­are priorities for schools throughout the world.
The initial self-­affirmation intervention studies in educational contexts were con-
ducted in middle schools, and in particular, with a racially diverse group of children
making the transition to seventh grade in a middle class school district. Adolescence is a
turbulent period of development (Eccles, Lord, & Midgley, 1991). Children go through
dramatic physical and psychological changes, and cope with multiple stressors, including
the challenge of forming their identity. The stressors can be especially acute for racial/
ethnic-­minority students, because they must contend with negative stereotypes about
their ability and belonging in school (Steele, 1997). Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, and Master
(2006) applied a self-­affirmation intervention in this context. They had middle school
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 69

teachers administer affirmation writing exercises (or control exercises) using a random-
ized experimental procedure in which teachers were kept unaware of both students’ con-
dition assignment and the hypotheses motivating the study. The writing exercises were
tailored to be intelligible and engaging for this age group and for the students at this
school. Samples of student responses to the values affirmation prompts in various studies
are provided in Table 3.1 (Sherman et al., 2013; Ehret & Sherman, 2018). In the original
studies, roughly half of the students at the school were of African American descent and
the remainder of European American descent. Academic performance was assessed as
grade point average (GPA) in core courses (English, math, science, and social studies),
obtained through students’ transcripts.

TABLE 3.1.  Examples of Affirmations That Students Have Written

in Experimental Studies
Middle school students (from Sherman et al., 2013, Study 2)
“Creativity is important to me because it allows variety and some fun in my everyday
life. This would be important to me when I am trying to think outside the box and
when choosing my outfits. Independence is very important to me because I am fairly
self-conscious and get very nervous. This would be important when making a speech or
doing independent activities. Finally, my relationship with friends and family is important
because my friends and family make my day better and better, and when I need some help
or confidence they will be there for me.”

“Athletic ability is my most important value. I love this value so much because sports
are my passion. I love football, baseball, and basketball. For all of these sports you need
athletic ability and be able to stay in shape. My second value is I have a sense of humor.
Humor is a great thing, it makes people laugh everyone has fun and there is nothing wrong
with humor. I love all different kinds of humor and that is why it is one of my values.”

“Creativity is important because I have to draw, sing, and, well, be creative! It’s fun to be
creative because you can see things in other ways as other people wouldn’t. I mean, it’s so
fun to be creative. My relationships with family and friends are EXTREMELY important.
Without them, who would I turn to? Who would make me smile and laugh and act how I
am today? My last value is a sense of humor because I love to laugh or make people laugh
and it just makes everything seem so much more fun.”

College students (from Ehret & Sherman, 2018)

“Family and friends I value the most because they are all I got at the end. My family has
been there for me every step of the way motivating me to do my best and pushing me to my
limits and brining me up when I’m down. Friends will come and go but for the ones that
stay are irreplaceable.”

“For me it is very important to live in the moment and not take life so serious. Often times
when I try to plan something out things do not go the way I wanted and I am just let down
and bummed out. By living in the moment and enjoying each day as it coms I have become
a much happier person I feel overall. Also I feel that life has a lot of ups and downs and a
lot of what happens can not be controlled, by accepting that I have less worries and find
myself less stress. I feel that this is a very important value to have in order to make you a
more stress free person, which allows you to focus on the more important things in life.”

“Athletics are the reason I go to such an amazing school like (school). Without them, I do
not know how much life would of turned out. They have kept my head on straight and
also caused me to excel in school. They have also helped me grow as a young man because
they have taught me life lessons that would of been hard to learn without sports.”

Note. See Appendix 3.1 for annotated version of standard prompt for middle school students. Material
from Ehret and Sherman (2018). Reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press.
70 I. Education

In three sequential studies, the self-­affirmation intervention significantly improved

the first-term grades of African American students, closing the racial achievement gap by
40% (Cohen et al., 2006; Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-­Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009).
The effect was not that evident on performance on the exams immediately after the
intervention (see Cohen et al., 2006) but rather emerged on cumulative performance
as measured by GPA. The affirmation’s effects took time to unfold. Small incremental
improvements in performance compounded into higher GPAs by the end of the term.
Consistent with this mechanism of compounding benefits, follow-­up observations found
that the effects of affirmation on GPA persisted for the remaining 2 years of middle
school. Later research replicated the same positive effects of affirmation among Latino
American students over middle school, with effects persisting into high school (Sherman
et al., 2013).
Research by independent teams of investigators have documented similar benefits of
affirmation among stereotyped groups. Borman, Grigg, Rozek, Hanselman, and Dewey
(2018) tested the effects of self-­affirmation in a large population of middle school students
across an entire school district, finding persistent benefits on minority students’ grades
that extended years later into high school. Affirmation interventions applied by other
research teams have found benefits among economically disadvantaged students—­in par-
ticular, students who are the first in their family to attend college (Harackiewicz et al.,
2014; Tibbetts et al., 2016), “further education” students in the United Kingdom (akin
to community college students in the United States) in a preregistered study (Schwalbe
et al., 2018, 2019), and female graduate students in business schools (Kinias & Sim,
2016). It is important to recognize that affirmations are not panaceas—­they do not work
everywhere and all the time. Null replications have been reported (Bratter, Rowley, &
Chukhray, 2016; Dee, 2015; de Jong, Jellesma, Koomen, & de Jong, 2016; Hanselman,
Rozek, Grigg, & Borman, 2017; Harackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Priniski, & Hyde,
2016; Protzko & Aronson, 2016), a point we return to in a section below on heterogene-
ity of affirmation effects. Still, there are enough positive results that the ultimate verdict
on this intervention, like even the most effective interventions and policies, is that it is
powerful but conditional: It has large and lasting benefits under certain conditions.
Also, when affirmation effects occur, they can last for a long time and have ripple
effects into other domains of functioning. In a follow-­up study to the original cohorts of
students in Cohen et al. (2006, 2009), African American students who were originally
assigned to the affirmation condition in seventh grade were more likely to attend college
years later, and more likely to attend the selective colleges that are key drivers of eco-
nomic mobility among the disadvantaged (Goyer et al., 2017). Highlighting the breadth
of self-­affirmation effects in school, a recent study demonstrated that the same interven-
tion lessened disciplinary infractions over students’ 3 years of middle school (Binning
et al., 2019). Acting out is sometimes, it seems, motivated by a desire to affirm the self.
When that motive is fulfilled through alternative routes, students are more likely to trust
their teachers and behave (Goyer et al., 2019).

MECHANISMS

Self-­affirmation interventions have far-­reaching and long-­lasting effects through two

sets of mechanisms: first, psychological processes that lead to enduring changes in how
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 71

people perceive social experience and, second, positive feedback loops between the self-­
system and the social system. 2 Several psychological responses occur as a consequence
of a self-­affirmation intervention (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Sherman & Hartson, 2011).
First, affirmations evoke a more expansive self-­conception (Critcher & Dunning, 2015).
Thinking about the value of religion, or the importance of relationships, for example,
helps people to realize that they have many sources of self-­regard. From this perspective,
a threatening event seems more surmountable. People can persist in the face of challenge
and resist temptations to which they would otherwise cave because they have a greater
confidence in their ability to cope (Burson, Crocker, & Mischkowski, 2012; Logel &
Cohen, 2012; Schmeichel & Vohs, 2009).
Beyond increasing the psychological salience of self-­resources, self-­affirmation inter-
ventions also give people a more expansive frame for viewing a specific threat, help-
ing them to “put it in perspective” (Critcher & Dunning, 2015; Sherman et al., 2013;
Wakslak & Trope, 2009). When people experience a threatening situation, they tend to
fixate on it, a state of vigilance in which the threat commands their attention (Cohen &
Garcia, 2008; Kaiser & Major, 2006; Murphy, Steele, & Gross, 2007). In the short term,
this kind of vigilance can be adaptive. However, in the long term, it can consume mental
resources that could otherwise be expended on learning. It can also undermine psycho-
logical and physical health by focusing attention on adversity rather than the “bigger
picture.” Evidence that self-­affirmation facilitates a more expansive view of situational
threats is provided by research on the process of “psychological untethering.” Under nor-
mal circumstances, people who face continual threat due to negative stereotypes, such
as African Americans in school, display a tethering between daily adversity on the one
hand and their sense of well-being and belonging on the other. They appear, on average,
to experience a bad grade or negative feedback not as an isolated incident but as a con-
firmation of the stereotype, and their well-being and belonging falter as a consequence.
However, when affirmed, this tethering is reduced and sometimes eliminated, such that
adversity no longer correlates with well-being and belonging (Cook, Purdie-­Vaughns,
Garcia, & Cohen, 2012; see also Walton & Cohen, 2011). Against the backdrop of a
broadened self-view, daily assaults to self-worth loom less large.
This untethering mechanism helps to explain how the self-­affirmation process prop-
agates through time, and for that matter how other psychological interventions do so as
well (Walton & Cohen, 2011). Although the intervention is objectively brief, its psycho-
logical effects are lived and relived in the encoding of social experience (Sherman et al.,
2013; Cook et al., 2012).
Longitudinal studies have assessed the untethering process as it plays out over time.
Cook and colleagues (2012) found that for African American students in the control
condition, feelings of belonging in school were tightly linked with academic performance.
They felt less belonging in school when they did poorly rather than well, whereas Euro-
pean Americans’ sense of belonging was relatively less conditional on their performance.
But for African American students who completed the affirmation, belonging was more
stable and relatively less tethered to their performance (Cook et al., 2012).

2 This section on mechanisms is not exhaustive, of course, and mechanistic questions can be addressed
at many other levels of analysis beyond what is discussed in this chapter. For example, research has
examined a neural reward-­related mechanism underlying self-­affirmation effects as evidenced by activa-
tion of the ventral striatum (Dutcher et al., 2016).
72 I. Education

In another longitudinal study, on days when nonaffirmed Latino American students

experienced greater daily stress and adversity, they reported feeling more judged in light
of their race. And on days when they felt more identity threat—­that they were judged as
a member of their group—­Latino American students in the control condition reported
feeling reduced belonging and academic self-­efficacy (Sherman et al., 2013).3 However,
among Latino American students who were affirmed, these links between daily adversity
and identity threat, and identity threat and academic fit (belonging and efficacy, respec-
tively) were eliminated (Sherman et al., 2013).
On the whole, these studies illustrate the experience of self-­threat in institutional
settings and how affirmation affects this experience. An individual who contends with
a threat based on his or her group identity, in effect, lives in a more symbolically threat-
ening world, where daily adversities can confirm a perception that “people like me”
do not belong. This perception can prime people to see their social world as even more
threatening, making them more vigilant to threat, in a repeating cycle (Rheinschmidt &
Mendoza-­Denton, 2014; Yeager et al., 2014). However, an interruption in this cycle, one
that expands people’s psychological perceptions beyond the threat at a key transition, can
have benefits that compound with time.

Effects over Time
The field research shows that the self-­affirmation process can perpetuate itself over time.
Brief self-­affirmations can have effects that persist for days, weeks, months, and years.
How? One way is through recursive processes—­that is, processes that recur, because they
feed off their own consequences (Cohen et al., 2009; Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Wilson
& Linville, 1985; Walton & Wilson, 2018). Feeling affirmed, a person performs better.
Performing better, the person feels more affirmed, in a repeating cycle (Cohen & Sher-
man, 2014; Cohen et al., 2009). The opportunity to initiate such a recursive cycle might
be especially great at key transitions, such as entry to middle school or college, when early
outcomes can have disproportionate effects on trajectories (Elder, 1998).
Another way that self-­affirmation processes propagate through time is through its
interaction with the social system, which may also be recursive. Self-­affirmed, a student
may perform better, and performing better, he or she may be recognized and rewarded
by teachers. The well-­documented effects of teacher expectancies (Rosenthal, 1994) may
then carry forward the effects of the affirmation. The student may be given more atten-
tion and the benefit of the doubt, held to a higher standard, and deflected into higher-­
expectation academic tracks, all of which may feed back to further affirm the student.
A formal model of this recursive and interactive change processes is presented in
Cohen and Sherman (2014; see also Cohen, Garcia, & Goyer, 2017; Ferrer & Cohen,
2019; Goyer et al., 2017). Figure 3.1 offers a diagrammatic model of a “cycle of adaptive
potential.” This model was developed to understand the process by which an interven-
tion, such as self-­affirmation, or any formative experience, can lead to long-term change.
3 Such studies, of course, are correlational, so there is uncertainty in the direction of the causal arrow.
Perhaps adversity causes a decrement in psychological well-being, perhaps the reverse path applies, or
perhaps some third variable explains the link. We suspect the relationships are bidirectional and mul-
tiply determined. On the whole, however, the tethering effect shows that there is an intercorrelation
among variables for those under threat that does not occur for those not under threat and that can be
severed through timely affirmation.
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 73

Cultural, Legal, and

Economic Systems

Self System

g a b h

e Adaptive Outcomes f

c d

Social System

FIGURE 3.1. Cycle of adaptive potential embedded within cultural, legal, and economic con-
texts. Affirmation effects can propagate themselves over time by leading to changes in the envi-
ronment that cycle back and augment changes in the self. A student who is affirmed (path A) may
perform better initially, and that initial performance may then feed back to the self (path B) such
that the student has two sources of affirmation: the original affirming event and the improved
performance at school (and the sense of personal accomplishment and efficacy that would create).
Doing better at school may lead the teacher to notice, give positive feedback or more challenging
material (path C), which then may feed back to the student by leading to further improved per-
formance (path D). The student, performing better and feeling more supported by the teacher or
school as a result of this positive social feedback, may then challenge him- or herself further, opt-
ing for more difficult courses—for example, leading to a change in his or her social system (path
E), which could, in turn, serve as further affirmation that the student belongs within the system
(path F). Finally, the entire cycle of adaptive potential between the student, adaptive outcomes, and
the social system is embedded in a set of cultural, legal, and economic systems that interact with
the other systems (paths G and H, and the four other paths not yet specified).

It is the interaction between psychological processes and social processes, many of which
can be recursive in nature, that drives outcomes through time.
From this perspective, an intervention like self-­affirmation is a “trigger,” the effects
of which are “channeled” by the social environment (Goyer et al., 2017; Pawson & Tilly,
1997; Ferrer & Cohen, 2019). Latino American middle school students who completed
a self-­affirmation earned higher grades, the short-term effects, but then they were also
placed into more challenging courses over the long term (Goyer et al., 2017). They were
also more likely to be enrolled by their school in an advanced college preparation pro-
gram. Another study found that some of the lasting effect of affirmation on middle
school African Americans’ later outcomes was driven by the fact that it deflected them
from the remedial track in high school (Cohen et al., 2009; Goyer et al., 2017). Without
the institutional channeling process, long-term effects of self-­affirmation may not have
been found.
74 I. Education

Heterogeneity
The evidence of positive affirmation effects seems to suggest the value of “scaling up” the
intervention to reach more students. One commentary urged “advancing values affirma-
tion as a scalable strategy for mitigating identity threats and narrowing national achieve-
ment gaps” (Borman, 2017). Indeed, this goal is the objective of the affirmation studies
in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as mentioned earlier. However,
we think that “scaling up” is not so much a matter of disseminating the same interven-
tion to as many students as possible. Rather it is a matter of targeting the intervention to
those contexts where it is most likely to be effective. As noted, several replication efforts
have turned up null results. As in medical science, interventions should ideally be tar-
geted to contexts where they are most likely to be effective. Indeed, in medical science, it
is increasingly clear that many interventions may have null results overall but still have
benefits for a small subgroup of superresponders (Mukherjee, 2015). How do we achieve
precise targeting? In short, through the identification of moderators, addressed in the
next section. Researchers and practitioners need to identify when, where, and for whom
wise interventions work best—an endeavor where much progress has been made and
still more, we suspect, awaits. The following section structures the review of moderators
around three factors: psychological threat, the presence of resources, and timeliness.

Psychological Threat
Most obviously, the effect of affirmation hinges on whether the target group in question
is under sufficient psychological threat to impede adaptive outcomes (Cohen & Sher-
man, 2014). The first affirmation studies were conducted with African American stu-
dents as the focal group. Virtually all their teachers were European American, creating
an awareness in these students that the stereotype could be used against them (Inzlicht &
Ben-Zeev, 2000; Sekaquaptewa & Thompson, 2003). African Americans in such an envi-
ronment were expected to be under consistent psychological threat due to the negative
stereotypes they contend with (i.e., stereotype threat; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002).
Thus, it was this group that was expected to benefit from the affirmation. Consistent with
theorizing, African Americans who were affirmed not only earned higher grades but also
exhibited significantly lower racial stereotype activation on a cognitive accessibility task.
Similar effects of affirmation on a negatively stereotyped ethnic group, with no effects
on European American students, were observed in field interventions conducted with
Latino Americans (Sherman et al., 2013). A study by Miyake et al. (2010) found that for
female students in an introductory physics course, self-­affirmation improved exam scores
for those who subscribed relatively more to the stereotype that “men are better at science
than women.” In short, one key moderator of affirmation effects is whether students are
under consistent psychological threat. These consistent psychological threats often arise
from the groups to which people belong and the stereotypes that are targeted at them.
Threat may vary not only with students’ characteristics but with features of the
institution. Researchers conducted an affirmation intervention across 11 middle schools
in Madison, Wisconsin (Borman et al., 2018; Borman, Grigg, & Hanselman, 2016).
Using the procedures from the original studies, they found that the African American
and Latino American students showed an improvement in GPA, with no effect on the
European American and Asian participants. Although the overall effect size was smaller
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 75

than that observed in the previous studies, it varied by school. The researchers found that
the improvement in eighth-­grade GPA among affirmed minority students was strongest
in schools that had more threatening contexts, with threat defined as the degree to which
minority students were underrepresented and the degree to which they underperformed
relative to their European American peers (see also Hanselman, Bruch, Gamoran, &
Borman, 2014).
Of course, there are limits to the level of threat an affirmation can mitigate. If the
environment is one of severe threat, where at every turn, racism or sexism is confronted,
it seems highly unlikely that affirmation will do much, if anything. Other steps will be
necessary. It is mainly where there is a low-level but consistent threat that is impeding
adaptive outcomes that affirmation is apt to be most effective. One potential benefit of
larger multisite studies is that they enable researchers to identify the ways institutional
settings vary in the degree of psychological threat present in them.
One strategy that practitioners and researchers can use to identify which individuals
are under consistent psychological threat in a given environment is to assess the degree
to which they underperform given their prior levels of achievement and preparation. Is
there an underperformance effect? A telltale sign of underperformance is the extent to
which a group of people performs worse than others even after prior indicators of success
are controlled (Steele, 1997). This suggests that “something else,” presumably something
in the environment of the school, may be suppressing students’ potential. Which group
underperforms may vary by context. In the United Kingdom, for example, low-­income
students display a particularly large underperformance effect. Moreover, a recent study
found that low-­income students who were in schools where they were mixed with high-­
income students showed dramatic benefits in academic performance as a result of self-­
affirmation (Hadden, Easterbrook, Nieuwenhuis, Fox, & Dolan, 2019). Another strategy
is to measure psychological threat using validated scales. For example, in Layous et al.
(2017), White men were found to have a relatively low level of belonging in school and
exhibited the greatest benefit of the affirmation.

Resources
Wise interventions can often be seen as the kick-start to a process that unfolds over
time and in a social context (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Cohen et al., 2017; Goyer et al.,
2017). But for that process to unfold, there must be institutional supports to carry it
forward. For example, a self-­affirmed student might perform better and be more will-
ing to seek out opportunities for learning. She might have the confidence to approach
a teacher for help, or to sign up for a more difficult course. What is critical here is the
availability of the social channels for the psychological currents, triggered by the affir-
mation, to keep moving forward. One study (Dee, 2015) found null effects of the affir-
mation intervention overall, but when examining classrooms that were more conducive
to cognitive growth (i.e., the ones that displayed large gains in test scores), affirmation
led to improved performance among minority students. What kinds of social resources
are needed to propagate the effects of self-­affirmation and other wise interventions?
More research is needed on this question—­we would categorize them into two types.
First, cognitive resources, in terms of objective opportunities for learning and continued
progress; and second, social resources, in the form of social reinforcement and valida-
tion (Cohen et al., 2017).
76 I. Education

Timeliness
A final key moderator of the benefits of affirmation is its timeliness. For maximal ben-
efit it must be timed to the emergence of threat and the availability of environmental
resources for change. In the health domain, Ferrer and Cohen (2019) demonstrate that
the timeliness of affirmation along these two dimensions predicts the degree of its ben-
efit. In school, affirmations should be timed to the emergence of threat, which, if unad-
dressed, might lead to deteriorating outcomes over time. Thus, in the original studies,
affirmations were timed to occur at the beginning of the school year and before exams
and at a key developmental milestone, the transition to middle school. One study found
that even a difference of 2 weeks in the timing of the affirmation—­the first week of mid-
dle school versus the third week—had a large impact, with earlier timing yielding greater
benefit on student grades (Cook et al., 2012). Indeed, the effect of timing in this study
equaled the effect of providing the affirmation intervention at all obtained in previous
studies. For practitioners and researchers, what matters is not just “what” intervention is
used, but also and importantly, “where” and “when.”
In summary, the key moderators of any psychological intervention can be distilled
into what we refer to as the “three T’s” (Cohen et al., 2017; Ferrer & Cohen, 2019). It is
targeted at the right person (one experiencing threat). It is tailored to the need (an affir-
mation might be effective at addressing threats to self-­integrity, but not a lack of skill).
And finally, the intervention is timely (given at a time and place where threat may hinder
access or use of institutional resources). It is the confluence of these three conditions that
predicts the positive impact of affirmation, as well, we suspect, of many interventions
(Ferrer & Cohen, 2019).

THEORETICAL COUSINS OF SELF‑AFFIRMATION INTERVENTIONS

The self-­affirmation intervention is related to several other interventions in the social

psychological literature. First, it is related to expressive writing interventions, as pio-
neered in the work of Jamie Pennebaker (Pennebaker & Evans, 2014). These interven-
tions illustrated the power of expressive writing: In particular, people who were encour-
aged to write about traumatic events, expressing their deepest thoughts and feelings, were
found to exhibit better outcomes, including along objective health indices (Pennebaker
& Chung, 2011). The affirmation intervention similarly leverages the power of expres-
sive writing but avoids confronting people with negative events. The benefit is that self-­
affirmation interventions do not cause the short-term decrements in mood sometimes
found in the standard expressive writing exercise. Interestingly, one study (Creswell et
al., 2007) found that much of the power of conventional expressive writing interventions
among breast cancer survivors derived from their ability to focus people on self-­affirming
thoughts and feelings (e.g., the importance of relationships in their lives). Still, there are
presumably contexts where expressive writing about traumatic events is a more effective
intervention than self-­affirmation. Every intervention has its time and place.
Another cousin (or perhaps aunt or uncle) of the self-­affirmation intervention comes
out of the seminal research by Rokeach (1973) on values confrontation—­research that
illustrated the power of values in people’s psychology. Rokeach found that when peo-
ple were led to confront a conflict between their values and their actions, it sometimes
led to large and lasting self-­change. People felt “self-­dissatisfied” and as a consequence
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 77

changed their actions to bring them in line with their values. The intellectual debt that
self-­affirmation research owes to Rokeach is the notion that values are a powerful source
of self-­integrity, and perhaps the basic unit of identity. Even in the harshest of circum-
stances, people can choose what they stand for.
Finally, self-­affirmation interventions have an intellectual connection to other inter-
ventions that tap into identity and self-­ perception. “Foot-in-the-door” interventions
encourage people to take a small initial step on behalf of a cause, and, under some cir-
cumstances, this has been found to increase their willingness to make later larger sacri-
fices (Freedman & Fraser, 1966; see Burger, 1999, for review). These interventions paved
the path for our understanding of how change can persist through time. An initial action
causes deep changes in identity and self-­perception, with the resulting changes carrying
the influence forward through time. A similar intellectual debt is owed to Wilson and
Linville’s (1985) classic research on attributional training, and their resurrection of the
notion of “exacerbation cycles” by Storms and McCaul (1976). The notion was that a
small initial change in psychology or behavior could propagate itself by interrupting a
negative feedback loop. The self-­affirmation field studies complement and go beyond
these classic studies by extending the temporal window of observation. Rather than sim-
ply stopping the study with the first dependent measure (e.g., the first behavior after an
intervention, or grades in the first term after the intervention), several of the field studies
featured in self-­affirmation research assess a chain of events that unfolds over a signifi-
cant portion of the life course (Borman et al., 2018; Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Goyer et
al., 2017; Tibbetts et al., 2016).

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

The implementation of any intervention should occur after careful pilot testing to deter-
mine the nature of the psychological threat, constraints in the context in which it is to
be administered (such as literacy level), and whether the materials are clear and impact-
ful for the target population. In our experience, this pilot testing period is also a time
to build trust with the teachers of the classrooms where the intervention is to be admin-
istered and with other key personnel within the school (principal, school psychologist).
The self-­affirmation intervention that was used in the middle school context in Cohen
et al. (2006, 2009) and Sherman et al. (2013) was deployed after such pilot testing. It
can be found in Appendix 3.1—the materials are annotated to call out important details
and their intent. While there are many inductions of self-­affirmation (see McQueen &
Klein, 2006, for review; see Napper, Harris, & Epton, 2009, for an alternative method),
the values writing exercise is the most commonly used manipulation of self-­affirmation.
In this activity, participants first read over a list of values and choose the value or values
that are personally most important to them (in the affirmation condition) or values that
are unimportant to them (in the control condition; several different control conditions
have been used). When several affirmations are given over a school year, the content of
the activities is varied in order for them to stay fresh for the students. But each one asks
participants questions that tap into self-­defining values. The writing activities typically
take about 10 minutes for students to complete.
There are several aspects to the implementation of the affirmation that, though
sometimes subtle, can make a difference. Here, we draw on the long tradition in social
psychology that emphasizes the importance of experimental manipulations that are
78 I. Education

immersive and impactful (Aronson, Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Gonzales, 1990; Ross, Lep-
per, & Ward, 2010). One of the distinctive qualities of social psychology is the attention
to detail that goes into the creation and implementation of any manipulation, including
an intervention. What is critical—­and what we are trying to create and duplicate—­is not
a physical experience of writing about a value but a psychological experience of feeling
affirmed.
For one, the affirmation activities are described as regular classroom activities and
are never presented as an intervention to help students (see Yeager & Walton, 2011). No
student is made to feel that he or she is in need of help, a message that may increase psy-
chological threat. Indeed, research suggests that when people are made aware that the
affirmation is designed to help them, its impact is attenuated (Sherman, Cohen, et al.,
2009). This is not to say that people cannot use affirmation as a personal coping strategy
if they are aware of its benefits. As long as they feel they have choice in the decision to use
it, they still benefit even when aware of its salutary effects (Silverman, Logel, & Cohen,
2013). Indeed, the lessons of self-­affirmation theory can be imparted to students with
positive results (Walton et al., 2015).
There are other implementation factors that are important. For example, we suspect
that some of the efficacy of the intervention comes from the fact that it appears to be an
activity that is from teachers or other institutional authorities. Students are thus led to
feel that teachers, or other institutional authorities, care about their values and how they
are important to them (cf. Bowen, Wegmann, & Webber, 2013). From the students’ point
of view, their values, and who they are and what they stand for, are welcome (see Walton,
Paunesku, & Dweck, 2012). This may help to explain why values affirmations bolster
students’ sense of belonging in school (Cook et al., 2012). Although speculative, one rea-
son replications may sometimes fail is that they are presented by outsiders rather than by
insiders or institutional representatives whose respect students care about (see Protzko &
Aronson, 2016). The key condition here is not at the literal or procedural level. It is at the
psychological level. Sometimes, it may not be possible to present the research activity as
a regular classroom activity (we describe one such instance below). What is important is
that students perceive that their values are respected by people who matter.
Another key detail related to an intervention’s implementation is the degree to which
it promotes student engagement. In the study in Wisconsin middle schools that featured
over 1,000 students, researchers coded the affirmation essays for student engagement,
which they operationalized as whether students selected an important value and then
discussed its personal importance (Borman et al., 2018). The vast majority (76%) of
the potentially threatened students in the affirmation condition were coded as having
engaged with the activity, and this group of students showed relatively larger gains. These
findings suggest that whether the implementation encourages student engagement, such
as by having the teachers convey its importance or by providing a quiet time for students
to complete it, is critical.
Implementation details may explain sometimes paradoxical results, as when the
affirmation works once but not a second time. When Borman and colleagues (Hansel-
man et al., 2017) sought to replicate their affirmation effects in the same 11 schools, they
found null effects. The authors consider a number of sources for this change, many of
them relevant to implementation. The teachers may have been less excited about partici-
pating in the study the second time around; the fact that they were on strike may have
played a role (see Borman, 2017, for discussion).
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 79

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

We see self-­affirmation interventions as an example of a psychologically wise intervention

(Walton, 2014). They target the underlying processes that shape the way people think and
feel about their social situation, including themselves, and specifically, their sense of per-
sonal adequacy (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Cohen et al., 2017, Lewin, 1951; Steele, 1997;
Walton & Wilson, 2018). Unlike many interventions, wise interventions tend to work not
by adding new forces but by activating or unleashing forces that are already present in
the situation but dormant. Students’ abilities may be inhibited by psychological threat.
Lessening that threat, the intervention allows abilities to more fully express themselves.
One common misconception about affirmation interventions is that because they are
relatively brief and low cost, the causes of the social problems they ameliorate are small
and simple. Health epidemics and illnesses, while caused by the smallest of entities—­
germs and viruses—­are heavily influenced by sanitation, nutrition, biological vulner-
ability, stress, and so on. Likewise, almost all social problems arise from multiple forces.
Achievement gaps based on race, class, or gender are the product of a complex web of sys-
temic, historical, institutional, cultural, and economic factors (see, e.g., Gandara & Con-
treras, 2009; Mitchell, Ream, Ryan, & Espinoza, 2008; Neal, 2006; Rothstein, 2005).
Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers must never lose sight of the important
structural factors leading to achievement, such as poverty and unequal distribution of
economic and educational resources (Reardon, 2011), immigration policies (Gandara &
Contreras, 2009), parenting practices and limitations in English literacy (Lopez, 2009),
class size, school demographics, educational policies (Jencks & Phillips, 1998), individual
discrimination (Ready & Wright, 2011), and institutional racism (e.g., Voigt et al., 2017).
All of these are causes of achievement gaps that must be addressed.
Showing that a psychological intervention lessens the achievement gap does not
imply that it has exclusively psychological sources (see Ikizer & Blanton, 2016). It implies
that, under some circumstances, psychology can be a key valve through which the influ-
ence of cultural, systemic, historical, and institutional forces flow. As we suggested ear-
lier, structural and psychological inequalities can reinforce each other, as when social
inequality causes psychological threat in the classroom, which causes underperformance,
which in turn propagates social inequality (see also Claro, Paunesku, & Dweck, 2016).
Likewise, any psychological intervention, in the absence of structural supports for suc-
cess, would have little if any effect. Cognitive, social, material, and emotional supports
available to students in a social environment will determine whether the spark introduced
by a self-­affirmation kindles into a lasting change.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: ADAPTING AFFIRMATION

INTERVENTIONS FOR AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

We now review a case study that illuminates how many of the considerations laid out
above make a practical difference in the field. Whenever researchers and practitioners
apply a psychological theory to a novel context, they need to be aware of how the process
they seek to intervene on plays out in the specific setting they hope to change. The para-
graphs that follow address how two researchers, Mohini Lokhande and Tim Müller, took
on this challenge in the German educational system.
80 I. Education

Various steps were taken in order to (1) simplify the intervention materials so that
they would be understood by students with lower literacy skills; (2) make the affirma-
tion task more engaging so that students would put sufficient effort into thinking about
important values in their lives, such as embedding the value activity in an interactive
comic strip; (3) make the activity more concrete with specific references not to abstract
values but to specific activities (e.g., “spending time with family and friends” instead of
“valuing family and friends”); (4) include values that resonate in Germany; (5) break down
the essay-­writing task into simple steps to make the writing process easier; (6) encour-
age students to focus on intrinsic values like feelings of belonging rather than extrinsic
ones like prestige; and (7) trigger a positive recursive cycle, while accommodating to data
protection regulations, by having the researchers provide growth-­oriented feedback to
students after they completed the initial intervention.
It was necessary to consider who, in this context, was vulnerable to psychological
threat. Previous interventions featuring affirmation had been conducted in the United
States and were designed to alleviate the stereotype threat that racial minorities feel in
school (Cook et al., 2012; Walton & Cohen, 2007). By contrast, in contemporary Europe,
the primary stigma centers on immigration. Immigrant students may feel as though they
do not even belong in their country, let alone in the classroom, a state of “belonging uncer-
tainty” that has befallen immigrants worldwide (see Walton & Cohen, 2007). Moreover,
there exists a fairly pronounced achievement gap between immigrant students and their
native peers in Germany (Gebhardt, Rauch, Mang, Sälzer, & Stanat, 2012). The Expert
Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration, a nonpartisan advisory
council on whose behalf the study was conducted, sought to address this gap. The purpose
of the study was to generate concrete lessons for future educational reforms in Germany.
As the self-­affirmation intervention was translated into this new context, there were
several implementation details to consider. Attempts were made to retain many of the pro-
cedures used in the original interventions, but adjustments had to be made. Knowing the
key theoretical considerations, however, made adjustments possible without undermining
psychological impact. See Lokhande and Müller (2019) and Müller and Lokhande (2017)
for a detailed description of the procedure and results.
The study took place in lower secondary schools (age range 12–13 years) in the state
of Berlin. These schools are usually attended by students with lower academic ability and
from socially disadvantaged families. Moreover, most schools were ethnically diverse.
About two-­thirds of the students spoke a language other than German at home. Many
had a Turkish, Arabic, or Eastern European background. The research was designed as a
large-scale replication study in 11 schools (N = 820). Because ethical guidelines and data
protection requirements are strict in Germany, it was not possible to present the study as a
regular classroom exercise. Instead, we designed a cover story that integrated the interven-
tion into the classroom as a supportive exercise for all students that, though initiated by
outside researchers, was supported by the school. This way, we increased the chances that
a key psychological element of the affirmation experience—­the sense that “my values” are
being recognized and respected by institutional authorities—­would be preserved.
The timing and context of the intervention were considered carefully. It was decided
to implement the intervention in a mathematics class where psychological threat was
expected to be most acute and debilitating (Borman et al., 2016). To interrupt the emer-
gence of recursive cycles, the intervention was administered at the beginning of the new
school year and, for seventh graders, right after the transition from primary to secondary
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 81

school. Also, an exam was administered immediately after the first affirmation, and then
8 weeks later. This way, the effect of the initial affirmation might be immediately chan-
neled into better performance, which might then facilitate better performance on subse-
quent exams (Cohen et al., 2009). To facilitate this recursive process, students across all
conditions received feedback on each of the two exams that emphasized their capacity
for growth (see Yeager & Dweck, 2012; all materials can be obtained from the authors
upon request).
The intervention was implemented by trained research administrators rather than
teachers. On the positive side, this facilitated treatment fidelity, ensuring maximal con-
trol over the implementation was obtained. On the negative side, this element of the
procedure might undercut certain key psychological elements from the experience. Stu-
dents might be less engaged by the activity because it was being delivered by outsiders.
Accordingly, innovative procedures were introduced to support student engagement. For
instance, one novel procedural element was the use of an appealing interactive comic strip
to increase students’ motivation to write an essay. In the story, an alien wants to learn
more about young people on Earth and asks students several questions related to their
values. (The annotated and translated materials can be found in Appendix 3.2.) As in the
original studies, students were told to write down their thoughts and feelings and told
that the assignment was nonevaluative.
Additionally, several prompts focused students on the intrinsically rewarding nature
of their values (Schimel, Arndt, Banko, & Cook, 2004). Students answered yes/no ques-
tions about different statements related to their two chosen values, such as “When I think
about [value x, value y], . . . I’m happy and content.” This element was designed to focus
students on the intrinsic rationale for their values (Schimel et al., 2004) and on emotional
experiences associated with these kinds of rationales (e.g., joy, contentment, lack of anxi-
ety; Rheinberg & Eser, 2018).
Replicating previous results, the affirmation interventions improved the perfor-
mance of students from an identity-­threatened group (Lokhande & Müller, 2019). A
significant interaction effect between affirmation condition and ethnic background was
obtained. On the first exam, there was a positive effect of the affirmation on the math
achievement of immigrant students, though this was confined to Turkish immigrants and
did not occur for students of Arabic descent. Eight weeks later, however, both immigrant
groups performed significantly better on the second math test. Echoing results of previ-
ous studies, no significant effect of the affirmation was found for the nonimmigrant
group. Overall, the achievement gap between immigrant and nonimmigrant students was
reduced by approximately 40%.
The experience of adapting the value-­affirmation procedure to the German context
highlights the importance of attention to psychological detail and meaning (see Lee &
Luykx, 2005). After the publication of the results (Müller & Lokhande, 2017), many
teachers showed an interest in using the intervention materials in their own classrooms.
But many thought that it would be a simple matter of handing out the comic strip and,
once completed, students would “magically” improve (cf. Yeager & Walton, 2011). As
the case study illustrates, implementation fidelity requires the creation of a positive psy-
chological experience, and this requires careful consideration of the meaning that every
procedural element will have for students. Implementation fidelity also requires setting
the stage so that any initial psychological effects of the intervention can be channeled,
sooner rather than later, into performance and the experience of progress.
82 I. Education

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

The research reported in this chapter demonstrates the pervasive power of self-­integrity
in mediating responses to many experiences in social life: confronting threats to one’s
social identity in social contexts, such as school, coping with regrettable actions, process-
ing medical and political information, and dealing with intergroup divides. When people
are able to affirm self-­integrity by drawing on alternative self-­resources, they are able to
tolerate, and even grow, from threatening experiences in their lives. The consistency of
affirmation effects across these diverse domains suggests a psychological unity.
Additionally, self-­affirmation research has shown how “psyche and structure” inter-
act, propagating outcomes through time (Cohen et al., 2017; Cohen & Sherman, 2014;
Goyer et al., 2017). Psychological processes interact with processes in the social environ-
ment in recursive feedback loops. Rather than psychologize social problems—­or sociolo-
gize them—the perspective offered in self-­affirmation research suggests that the action is
in the interaction between these levels of analysis.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

There are many questions to be answered. Three form the focus of our concluding sec-
tion:

1. Under what conditions can self-­affirmations have negative effects?

2. How does the self-­affirmation process unfold spontaneously, when there is no
intervention to trigger it?
3. What are the specific pathways through which the self-­affirmation process inter-
acts with the social environment through time?

First, self-­affirmations can have negative effects. One type of situation in which this
is the case are those where threat has positive effects (Rokeach, 1973; Stone & Focella,
2011), and affirmation could short-­circuit that process. In situations where self-­protective
responses have proved adaptive, affirmation may have negative consequences (e.g., Jes-
sop, Ayers, Burn, & Ryda, 2018). Affirmation is not a panacea. For instance, when people
persist on a task because they are motivated to protect their self-­integrity, an affirmation
could lead to disengagement. After repeated failure on a task where there is little oppor-
tunity for improvement, affirmation has been shown to lead people to disengage (Vohs,
Park, & Schmeichel, 2013). If a person is persisting on a task because of psychological
threat (e.g., “I don’t want to look dumb”), affirmation might lift this self-­evaluative con-
cern and lead the person to give up.
Another situation where affirmations may backfire is in the absence of psychological
threat. For example, in educational contexts, for the most part affirmation intervention
studies have had null or negligible mean effects on the academic performance of non-­
identity-­threatened students. In a few studies, however, there appears to be some evidence
of negative trends for these groups, at least on the focal outcome (e.g., Brady et al., 2016;
Kizilcec, Saltarelli, Reich, & Cohen, 2017). Researchers do not yet know how robust
these effects occur or, to the extent that they occur, why (Binning & Browman, 2020).
One possibility, however, is that when an individual is not under consistent identity
 Self‑Affirmation Interventions 83

threat, a self-­affirmation may introduce alternative processes. For example, perhaps self-­
affirmation leads people to feel more like an individual than a member of their group;
this may lead non-­identity-­threatened students to benefit less from “stereotype lift,” the
psychological boost they get from being on the upside of negative stereotypes (Walton &
Cohen, 2003). Additionally, insofar as some degree of threat or stress helps performance,
perhaps affirmation might lower it to suboptimal levels for some groups (Zajonc, 1965).
In research on persuasion, affirmation in nonthreatening contexts has increased self-­
confidence, causing resistance rather than openness to change (Briñol, Petty, Gallardo,
& DeMarree, 2007).
A second question for future research is the spontaneity of the affirmation processes
(see Harris et al., 2019). An affirmation intervention—­or any wise intervention—­is but
a spark for a psychological process. That process can occur even without an intervention
to trigger it. Some people may engage the self-­affirmation process spontaneously (Harris
et al., 2019). Indeed, it may be possible to train people to activate the self-­affirmation
process on their own. Brady and colleagues (2016) examined the self-­affirmation process
as it occurred spontaneously, by asking people to write down their thoughts after a stress
induction. They found that people do indeed differ in the extent to which they spontane-
ously self-­affirm. A strong predictor of this tendency was high self-­esteem.
Another study taught female engineering students how to self-­affirm spontaneously
through a short slide show (Walton et al., 2015). Female students who worked in pre-
dominantly male fields of engineering earned higher grades as a result of this training.
Harris and colleagues (2019) have also examined individual differences in spontaneous
self-­affirmation through the use of a self-­report measure. Spontaneous self-­affirmers
exhibit open-­mindedness to threatening health information akin to those who complete
experimental affirmations (see also Cornil & Chandon, 2013; Ferrer et al., 2015). This
research highlights an important new frontier in self-­affirmation research: How the pro-
cess of self-­affirmation unfolds spontaneously and how differences in people’s ability to
spontaneously marshal the self-­affirmation process may explain individual differences in
resilience, self-­esteem, and perhaps clinical outcomes.
A third direction for affirmation research involves further exploring the interactions
between the self-­affirmation process and the social environment. For example, some-
times a psychological process may have effects on the larger social environment. In one
study (Powers et al., 2016), classrooms with a higher proportion of minorities who had
been self-­affirmed performed better on the whole. The benefits of the self-­affirmation
intervention did not end with minority students but spilled over to affect the entire class-
room. How the environment changed was unclear, but one possibility is that the class-
room became more orderly and positive (Binning et al., 2019), enabling teachers to reach
a greater number of students, especially low-­performing students who might have other-
wise been overlooked.

FINAL WORDS

Self-­affirmation theory has had a long evolution. It began as a basic theory of how people
maintain the integrity of self. It has grown into a theory with applications to a wide range
of applied arenas, including education, health, and conflict. On the one hand, the effects
of affirmation interventions can be powerful and long lasting. On the other hand, these
84 I. Education

effects are conditional. They do not occur for all people and in all contexts. “Powerful
but conditional” is an apt way to describe them and many other wise interventions. A
large dose of humility is thus needed whenever scientists or practitioners apply them. To
adapt an intervention to a new context, it is important to understand whether and how
psychological threat plays out, for whom, and when. It is important to adapt the interven-
tion so that it is engaging and actually affirming. With these caveats acknowledged, we
can also be excited about the range of domains where self-­affirmation can be applied—­
many of which are still yet to be imagined.

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 APPENDIX 3.1.  Annotated Self-Affirmation Materials
Name _________________________________Date ________Teacher_____
ÅName
signifies self and importance; teacher signifies that the authority
is taking students’ values seriously.

ÅThis
prompt conveys that it is not evaluative, and encourages a broad
WHAT ARE YOUR PERSONAL VALUES?
perspective.
In this assignment you will be answering several questions about your ideas, your ÅFor
younger or less literate students, prompt was simplified because
beliefs, and your life. It is important to remember while you are answering many did not know what the term value means: “Remember that there
these questions that there are no right or wrong answers. are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. Please read
Please read carefully over this list of personal values and think about each of the
this list carefully. Then circle the TWO or THREE things that are MOST
values. Then circle the two or three values that are MOST important to you. We important to you.”
understand that all of these values may be important to you. Even if you feel that ÅPicking
two or three things gives students the opportunity to focus on
many of the values are important, please pick only TWO or THREE of them to circle. more than one value if they want, so that they don’t feel as though they
The most important values to me are: (circle two or three)
are leaving one out that is important to them.

Athletic Ability
Being Good at Art

92
Creativity
Independence
Living in the Moment
Membership in a Social Group
(such as your community, racial group, or school club)
Music ÅAlthough
not typically considered a “value,” calling music a “value”
imbues it with a higher meaning.
Politics
ÅThis
list was originally developed through research with U.S. college
Relationships with Friends or Family
students about what matters most to them and then adapted to the
Religious Values middle school context; studies done in different cultures should identify
Sense of Humor core values/topics that resonate.
ÅThe
list of values typically excludes the domain most relevant to the
threat, school, or academics, at least for the first intervention.

ÅClip
art chosen to appeal to seventh graders, not used for college
student affirmations.
(continued)
Used in Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, and Master (2006); Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-Vaughns, Apfel, and Brzustoski (2009); and Sherman et al. (2013).
 Directions:
1. Look at the values you picked as most important to you.
2. Think about times when these values were or would be very important to you. ÅStudents
are encouraged to think about concrete instances when
3. In a few sentences, describe why these values are important to you. Focus on these values served as resources.
your thoughts and feelings, and don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or how
ÅInstructions
emphasize nonevaluative nature.
well written it is.
_______________________________________________________________________
ÅAmple
space provided for expressive writing, but not so much space
_______________________________________________________________________ that students feel intimidated.
_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

93
_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________ (continued)
 Again, look at the values you picked as most important. List the top two reasons why
ÅBased
on theories of ease of retrieval, participants asked for a limited
these values are important to you: number of reasons why value was important (Schwarz et al., 1991).
ÅResearch
suggests that focusing on “why” rather than “how” a
value is important is more self-affirming (Schmeichel & Vohs, 2009).
1. This prompt provides another opportunity to focus students on the
rationales for their values.
2.

Make a check mark to show how much you agree with each of the following
statements:

1. These values have influenced my life.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

94
ÅThese
statements were constructed to be easy for students to agree
2. In general, I try to live up to these values. with and to reinforce the writing that they did earlier.
Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly
Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

3. These values are an important part of who I am.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

4. I care about these values.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
(continued)
 Name _________________________________Date ________Teacher_____

WHAT ARE YOUR PERSONAL VALUES? ÅControl

condition designed to appear identical to affirmation
condition so that students looking at one another’s desks could not
In this assignment you will be answering several questions about your ideas, your detect differences easily.
beliefs, and your life. It is important to remember while you are answering
these questions that there are no right or wrong answers.

Please read carefully over this list of personal values and think about each of the
values. Then circle the two or three values that are LEAST important to you. Even if you
feel that several of the values are not very important, please pick only TWO or THREE
of them to circle.

The least important values to me are: (circle two or three)

Athletic Ability
Being Good at Art

95
Creativity
Independence
Living in the Moment
Membership in a Social Group
(such as your community, racial group, or school club)
Music
Politics
Relationships with Friends or Family
Religious Values
Sense of Humor

(continued)
 Directions:
1. Look at the values you picked as least important to you.
2. Think about times when these values would be important to someone else ÅSeveral
different control conditions have been used. The purpose of
(like another student at your school or a person you’ve heard about). this control condition is to have participants engage in values-related
writing that is not self-relevant.
3. In a few sentences, describe why these values would be important to someone
else (like another person at your school or a person you’ve heard about). Focus
on your thoughts and feelings, and don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or how
well written it is.
_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

96
_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________ (continued)
 Again, look at your least important values. List the top two reasons why someone
ÅThe
control condition is designed to take a similar amount of time and be
else (like another student at your school or a person you’ve heard about) would pick equally engaging, but to not make salient personally important values.
these as their most important value:

1.

2.

Make a check mark to show how much you agree with each of the following
statements:

1. These values have influenced some people.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

97
2. In general, some people try to live up to these values.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

3. These values are important to some people.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

4. Some people care about these values.

Strongly Disagree Somewhat Somewhat Agree Strongly

Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
 APPENDIX 3.2.  Annotated Extracts from the Comic Strip in the Intervention Study Conducted in Germany

ÅThe
character’s name is Nari. Nari is introduced as an
alien visiting Earth, whose task it is to interview the kids
for Nari’s (extraterrestrial) school newspaper. An alien
character was chosen in order to serve as an identity
figure for children from all ethnic or social backgrounds.
Nari is not human and therefore does not resemble any
existing ethnic/racial group, nationality, or religion. In
order for boys and girls to identify equally, Nari also lacks
any fixed gender.
ÅThe
value affirmation task was strongly simplified in order
to match a target group with high variation in literacy
skills. Pretests showed that a longer and more complex
task led to students being easily bored or unwilling to
write a substantial essay.

98
ÅThe
notion of “values” was not adopted here, since it
was regarded as a little too abstract for the age group
(12–13 years). Furthermore, writing essays about
personal values (as opposed to concrete experiences)
is a less common task in German schools. We aimed
to paraphrase values as concrete actions or things of
importance.
ÅThe
items were adopted to the German context. In
comparison to the U.S. original, we added “building or
fixing technical stuff” and “helping others” to the list.

Used in Müller and Lokhande (2017). Translated from German. Source: SVR Research Unit/Christian Müller. (continued)
 ÅThe
writing task was broken down into several steps to
facilitate the writing process, enhance engagement with the
task, and support a deeper processing of the chosen items.

ÅThe
students are first asked to repeat their chosen items
and to generate seven words that describe why the two
things are important.

99
ÅIn
the essay task, the students are then asked to include as
many of the previously generated words as they can.
 C H A P TE R 4

The Utility‑Value Intervention

Chris S. Hulleman and Judith M. Harackiewicz

The utility-­value intervention is an interactive, classroom-­based assignment designed to help

students make connections between the content they are learning and their lives. Across
numerous randomized field trials, the intervention has increased learning outcomes, includ-
ing course-­specific performance and interest, and longer-­term outcomes, such as course
taking and persistence in a major. The intervention has proved to be particularly effective for
students at risk for poor performance, including students with a history of low performance,
less confidence that they will do well in the course, and students from traditionally margin-
alized groups. In this chapter, we review the origins of the intervention, which is grounded
in the expectancy-­value framework of achievement motivation and the real-world experi-
ence of educators who are trying to increase student motivation and engagement in their
courses. We review the seminal studies demonstrating the effectiveness of the intervention,
consider variations of the intervention—­including versions created with and implemented by
teachers—­and discuss implications for theory, research, and practice.

BACKGROUND

In most schools in the United States, educators decide what happens in the classroom.
They control the content, the learning activities, which students are in the classroom,
and how students interact with one another. Although there are many good reasons for
this, including making learning developmentally appropriate and sequenced, instructor-­
centric environments can rob students of opportunities to engage in learning that is
meaningful and interesting to them. For example, nearly every student has wondered at
some point, “Why are we learning this?!” Decades of research in educational psychology
have revealed that students are more motivated to engage in learning, persist longer, and
learn more when they find some type of value in what they are learning (Eccles et al.,
1983; Wigfield, Rosenzweig, & Eccles, 2017). One study revealed that 90% of middle
school teachers reported that one of the top barriers for student motivation was a lack
of value for learning (Hulleman & Barron, 2013). This problem might be particularly

100
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 101

pronounced for students already at risk of underperforming, whether due to a lack of

confidence, lower levels of prior achievement, or because their cultural backgrounds dif-
fer from the educators who have designed the learning context.
Such was the experience of one of us (Hulleman) during his time as an introduc-
tory statistics graduate teaching assistant. Most of the students were aspiring psychology
majors who could not see why they needed to know statistics to help people. Our intrepid
teaching assistant sought to engage students during his weekly discussion sections. He
drew on his research focus—­motivation—­to help his students find value in what they
were learning. The expectancy-­value framework (Eccles et al., 1983) highlighted three
sources of value that helps motivate students: finding an activity enjoyable (i.e., intrinsic
value); important to one’s identity (i.e., attainment value); and useful, either now or in
the future (i.e., utility value). Within the span of a 15-week semester, Hulleman decided
to focus on helping students find utility value, connecting what they were learning in
the class and their lives. Through the same trial-and-error process that instructors have
employed for decades, he developed a series of activities that encouraged students to con-
nect statistics to their lives. He began by encouraging students to look for examples of
statistics in popular magazines or online media (e.g., Redbook, Sports Illustrated, CNN.
com, ESPN.com). He began by setting aside 3–5 minutes each week for students to share
their examples. Students struggled at first to make connections, with their lack of con-
fidence in their statistics skills being exacerbated by a lack of value for statistics. But by
the end of the semester, students were taking up nearly half the class period talking about
the statistics examples they were finding in the popular literature. Students seemed more
engaged, confident, and willing to ask questions. The critical insight of this initial work
was that students needed to make their own connections between what they were study-
ing and their lives, rather than trying to internalize a message delivered by the instructor.
These personally meaningful connections enabled students to find the course content
more relevant to their lives, which would energize their learning.
With the help of his colleagues, including his dissertation advisor (one of us: Harack-
iewicz), these assignments formed the inspiration for what is now known as the utility-­
value intervention. The utility-­value intervention was first formally studied in the lab,
where undergraduate students (N = 107) learned a new mental math technique (Hul-
leman, Godes, Hendricks, & Harackiewicz, 2010, Study 1). Students were randomly
assigned to generate examples of how the technique applied to their lives (utility-­value
condition) or summarized the technique they just learned (control condition). Students
who wrote about the utility value of the new math technique reported more interest in
learning additional mental math techniques, with strongest findings for students who
reported low confidence that they could learn the technique.
We then returned to the classroom to test the intervention in introductory psychology
(N = 318; Hulleman et al., 2010, Study 2). Students either wrote a letter to a significant
other (e.g., friend, relative) about how something they were learning in class was relevant
to the significant other’s life or found an example of how a topic they were studying was
used in popular media. Both activities prompted students to create their own connections
between course material and their lives rather than simply telling them how the course
is useful. Initially low-­performing students who completed either the letter or the media
assignment were more interested in psychology at the end of the semester compared to
students in the control condition, who lost interest over the semester (Harackiewicz, Hul-
leman, & Pastor, 2009).
102 I. Education

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Utility Value
As outlined in the original (Eccles et al., 1983) expectancy-­value framework, perceiving
any type of value in an activity is likely to increase motivation to perform the activity.
Reflecting on personal connections between course content and students’ lives is expected
to increase perceptions of utility value, which subsequently increases the likelihood that
students will engage in course-­related tasks like studying for an exam. To instigate that
utility value, students’ responses to the intervention need to have three characteristics.
First, connections need to be personal. Intervention activities are most empowering
when students are able to create their own connections rather than being told about why
they should value material (Canning & Harackiewicz, 2015; Durik & Harackiewicz,
2007; Durik, Schechter, Noh, Rozek, & Harackiewicz, 2015; Hulleman, 2007). Second,
connections need to be specific. Just as specific goals (e.g., “I want to set a detailed bud-
get by June 1”) are more likely to lead to goal attainment than general goals (e.g., “I want
to spend less”; Locke & Latham, 2002), specific connections between course content
and everyday life is more likely to spur motivation and adaptive outcomes. Prior studies
suggest that specific examples in intervention essays partially explain intervention effects
(Harackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Prinski, & Hyde, 2016; Rozek, Hyde, Svoboda, Hul-
leman, & Harackiewicz, 2014). Third, connections need to be content-­relevant. If the
goal of utility-­value interventions is to support learning in a specific class, then the con-
nections that students make to their lives need to be relevant to current course content.
Figure 4.1 outlines how an exemplar quote is personal, specific, and content-­relevant;
these are the types of responses researchers or practitioners would ideally scaffold stu-
dents toward in utility-­value interventions.

Intervention Prompt
I would like you to think about how what we have been learning about in this class is
important to your life in some way. What connection can you find between one of the topics
we have been studying and something that is important in your life? Write a few sentences
about that connection below:

Exemplary Quote
It is personal and specific and is content-relevant.
“Playing hockey and friction are connected because in hockey while passing or shooting
the puck it slides on the ice which causes friction, slowing down the puck. Friction could be
important to my life because I can better understand how much force I need to get the
puck to move with the friction moving against it.”

Personal: A personal pronoun is used to reference something specific to the student’s

interest, hobbies, or goals.
Specific: Discusses how friction impacts a specific action in hockey.
Content-relevant: Indicates a linkage to a specific topic in the course in an accurate way.

FIGURE 4.1.  Exemplar student quote for utility-­value-­intervention mechanisms. Data from Hul-
leman, Hulleman, et al. (2018).
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 103

Other Psychological Processes
As listed in Figure 4.2, these intervention processes instigate the cascade of psychological
processes, beginning with perceived utility value, that lead to the beneficial effects of the
utility-­value intervention. Although utility value was originally hypothesized to be the
key psychological process instigated by utility-­value interventions, our recent research
has revealed two related aspects of motivation from expectancy-­value theory that utility-­
value interventions also affect. First, when students become engaged in a learning activity
in a way that allows them to realize their knowledge of the content, their confidence in
their ability to learn in the course is likely to increase (i.e., success expectancies). Sec-
ond, as students perceive value in a course, particularly a content area that is difficult to
master, their perceptions of the negative consequences of being in the course are likely to
decrease (i.e., perceived costs). Decades of research based in the expectancy-­value frame-
work of achievement motivation in education (i.e., Eccles et al., 1983) has revealed that
students’ success expectancies and perceived utility value are positively related to learn-
ing, whereas perceived cost is negatively related to learning (e.g., Barron & Hulleman,
2015).

MECHANISMS

Psychological Mechanisms
Motivation researchers have investigated several psychological mechanisms that could
explain the effects of utility value on motivation: identification, involvement, and inter-
est. For example, perceiving the relevance of an activity to one’s life or future goals may
lead an individual to identify with the activity (identification), become more actively
involved in learning (involvement), and develop an enduring interest in the topic (e.g.,
Dewey, 1913; Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Hidi & Renninger, 2006). First, perceiving utility
value in a topic may lead to an increase in the perceived importance of an activity in gen-
eral, and eventually to the identification of the activity with the individual’s self-­concept
(e.g., attainment value: Eccles et al., 1983; identified regulation: Deci & Ryan, 1985). For
example, finding an application for an activity (e.g., quadratic equations and engineer-
ing) opens up the possibility of making connections to things that are personally impor-
tant to the individual (e.g., a career as an engineer). Once these connections have been
made, repeated engagement in the activity can lead to the activity becoming incorporated
into the individual’s self-­concept (i.e., identification). Second, perceiving utility value
in a topic may promote active task engagement. For example, perceiving a connection
between geometry and life may energize an individual to become more actively involved
in geometry class by seeking out learning opportunities, putting forth more effort, and
becoming more engaged. When students are active contributors to the learning process,
then they are more likely to feel in control (deCharms, 1968), self-­determined (Deci &
Ryan, 1985), and efficacious (Bandura, 1997). Rather than being passive recipients of
education, students perceive that they are active participants and become absorbed in
the learning process (Harackieiwicz & Sansone, 1991). Third, students are more likely
to engage in activities that they find important, and perceiving utility value in a topic can
increase their willingness to seek out the activity over time. Repeated engagement facili-
tates the acquisition of activity-­related skills and knowledge, and enhances the experience
 Mechanisms

Psychological
Identification
Processes
Involvement
Interest
Intervention Fidelity Psychological Outcomes
Utility-Value Personal Perceived Utility Value Grades

104
Intervention Specific Success Expectancies Persistence
Content-Relevant Perceived Cost Career Intentions
Behavioral
Engagement
Performance

FIGURE 4.2.  The utility-­value-­intervention logic model.

 The Utility‑Value Intervention 105

of positive affect. Repeatedly working on an enjoyable, self-­relevant task that leads to

skill development perfectly defines the necessary antecedent conditions for the develop-
ment of interest (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). This triad of psychological mechanisms may
be particularly empowering when students generate their own examples and connections,
because they are personal (instead of regurgitated examples from textbooks and teachers;
Dewey, 1913; Hulleman, 2007). Discovering how math applies to life may be especially
effective in getting students involved in their learning, and even fostering a sense of iden-
tification with the activity, because it supports their autonomy in the classroom. This
process may be less likely to occur if the usefulness of the activity is simply explained by
a teacher or parent. Furthermore, it’s not just that more direct approaches may be less
effective; in fact, some research finds that direct approaches may even be counterproduc-
tive. In one study, Canning and Harackiewicz (2015) found that experimental utility-­
value manipulations that emphasized the relevance of a math activity for everyday activi-
ties and future careers undermined the interest of students with low ability perceptions.

Behavioral Mechanisms
Co-­occurring with the psychological mechanisms outlined above, students who per-
ceive increased utility value are more likely to demonstrate behavioral engagement and
increased performance in the activity. In the classroom, behavioral engagement includes
things like increased attendance, homework completion, and work quality. Increased
performance includes proximal measures of competence development, such as perfor-
mance on quizzes, tests, and oral presentations. These behavioral mechanisms work in
tandem with the psychological mechanisms. For example, increased attendance can lead
to increased learning, which results in increased positive affect toward school. When
repeated over time, this can lead to the development of interest. Conversely, experiencing
identification with the activity—­such as when a student connects learning biology to his
or her interest in becoming a paramedic—­can lead to an increased interest in classroom
activities, which enables the student to complete his or her homework at a higher level.
This then leads to better performance on quizzes and tests.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
Since the original intervention studies (Hulleman et al., 2010), the utility-­value inter-
vention has been replicated across of a variety of high school and college courses. In a
recent meta-­analysis of utility-­value interventions (Hulleman, Wormington, Tibbetts, &
Phillipoom, 2018), we found 33 field studies where 12,478 participants were random-
ized to a utility-­value or control condition. Our meta-­analytic results indicated that, on
average, the utility-­value intervention boosted learning outcomes—­such as exam scores,
end-of-­semester course grades and pass rates, and interest in the topic—by a quarter
of a standard deviation (d = 0.24). Table 4.1 presents a representative sample of pub-
lished utility-­value intervention studies. For most of these studies, intervention effects
were most pronounced for students most likely to experience adverse learning outcomes,
such as students with histories of lower achievement (e.g., Hulleman, Kosovich, Barron,
106 I. Education

TABLE 4.1.  Representative Utility-Value Intervention Randomized Field Experiments

Sample age Sample
Study and context size Student moderators Outcomes
Hulleman & Harackiewicz High school   262 Success expectations Grades, interest
(2009) general science
Hulleman, Godes, Hendricks, 4-year college   318 Initial exam Utility value
& Harackiewicz (2010) psychology performance interest
Gaspard et al. (2015) High school 1,916 Gender Utility value
math interest
Harackiewicz, Canning, 4-year college 1,040 Prior achievement, Grades
Tibbetts, Priniski, & Hyde biology success expectations,
(2016) underrepresented
group membership
Hulleman, Kosovich, Barron, 4-year college   359 Gender, initial exam Final exam scores
& Daniel (2017) psychology performance
Rosenzweig, Wigfield, & 4-year college    99 Initial exam Grades
Hulleman (2019) physics performance
Kosovich, Hulleman, Phelps, 2-year college   180 Gender Pass rates
& Lee (2019) math

Total 4,174

Note: For a comprehensive review, see a recent meta-analysis of utility-value interventions (Hulleman, Wormington,
Tibbetts, & Philipoom, 2018).

& Daniel, 2017), lower success expectancies (e.g., Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009), or
from traditionally underrepresented groups in higher education (e.g., Harackiewicz et
al., 2016).
Two sets of follow-­up studies are important to highlight. In our first follow-­up study,
we implemented the intervention in 30 high school science classrooms taught by 10 dif-
ferent teachers (N = 262; Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). The writing activities were
shortened to make them developmentally appropriate and to fit into a 45-minute class
period. Students randomized to the utility-­value condition were simply prompted to write
one to two paragraphs about how a topic they were studying in science related to their
lives. Students randomized to the control condition were prompted to write a one- to
two-­paragraph summary of a topic they were studying in class. Students completed the
writing activities two to five times per semester depending on the teacher. We found that
the intervention enhanced both course grades and subsequent interest in science for low-­
performing students in the utility-­value condition compared to the control condition.
For example, less confident students increased their semester grade in the course by over
three-­quarters of a grade point on a 4-point scale (d = 0.50).
In a second set of follow-­up studies, Harackiewicz and colleagues (2016; Canning
et al., 2018; Priniski et al., 2019; Rosenzweig, Harackiewicz, et al., 2019) implemented
a utility-­value intervention within a two-­semester introductory biology sequence at a
research-­intensive university. The basic paradigm was the same for all four studies. For
each of three units across the semester, students were randomly assigned to receive either
a utility-­value writing assignment, in which they explained why course material was
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 107

useful to them personally (or wrote a letter to a friend or family member about how the
course material was relevant to them), or a control assignment, in which they summa-
rized course material. These assignments were part of the course curriculum and were
graded for credit by biology graduate students blind to condition. In the first published
study, Harackiewicz et al. found that the utility-­value intervention had an overall, small
positive effect on course grades for all students. They also found that the intervention
had a more positive effect for students with a history of lower success expectations in
the course (replicating the effects of Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009), and for under-
represented students, specifically students who were both first-­generation and members
of underrepresented minority groups.

Effects over Time
Most of the utility-­value intervention studies have examined intervention effects in a
single semester. This is because the intervention was designed to promote motivation
and engagement within a specific learning context; therefore, it seems unlikely that the
intervention should have long-­lasting direct effects (Harackiewicz & Priniski, 2018).
However, it if promotes performance in foundational courses, it may influence broader
outcomes indirectly, by helping students succeed in these classes. It is also possible that
the intervention might promote identification processes that have implications for subse-
quent academic choices. Only two published studies have looked at results in subsequent
semesters, both in college biology. In the first study (N = 577; Canning et al., 2018), stu-
dents in the utility-­value condition earned higher grades in the course, were more likely to
enroll in the second course of the biology sequence, and were less likely to abandon their
science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) major, than students in the control
group. In the second study, Hecht, Harackiewicz, et al. (2019) followed students in the
original Harackiewicz et al. (2016) study for 2 years after the intervention and examined
whether they continued to the next course in the biology sequence and persisted in a bio-
science major. They found that the utility-­value intervention promoted persistence in the
biomedical track for students who entered the introductory biology course with higher
levels of confidence in their ability to perform well in the course. In other words, these
researchers found a direct effect on long-term persistence, although the pattern of the
interaction was different from that observed many times on shorter-­term outcomes, such
as interest (Hulleman et al., 2010) and course performance (Harackiewicz et al., 2016).
Moreover, this effect was mediated through different processes, showing the complexity
of understanding long-term effects of a task-­specific intervention.
In addition to investigating the extent to which utility-­value interventions last over
time, and which outcomes are impacted, it is essential to consider how the interven-
tion can have an effect over time. How do the short-term mechanisms translate into
broader effects? We can glean some insight from Harackiewicz and colleagues’ (2016)
college biology intervention. Hecht, Harackiewicz, et al. (2019) found that the process
through which the utility-­value intervention influenced persistence was distinct from the
process through which it promoted course grades. Engagement with the course mate-
rial was related to course grades, whereas making personal connections to the mate-
rial was related to persistence in the biology major. These findings suggest that the
utility-­value intervention may initiate two distinct processes that align with involvement
and identification, respectively: (1) helping underperforming students to engage with
108 I. Education

course material, thereby improving performance, which had a significant indirect effect
on persistence in the major; and (2) increasing reflection on the personal relevance of
course material, thereby helping confident students see why pursuing that domain may
be important.

Heterogeneity
At present, the majority of published utility-­value intervention studies have found that
the intervention works best for students who are traditionally underrepresented, under-
served, or underprepared in the learning context (e.g., students with lower prior achieve-
ment, first-­generation college students, racial/ethnic minorities; see Table 4.1). Our initial
hypothesis was that concerns about academic performance impeded students’ capacity
to perceive value through a narrowing of attention (Durik & Harackiewicz, 2007; Hul-
leman, 2007), and that prompting students to make those connections gave them the
opportunity they needed to make some initial connections. However, our more recent
research demonstrates that for some students, particularly those students who perform
poorly early in the course, the utility-­value intervention boosts their success expectan-
cies (Hulleman, Kosovich, et al., 2017; Rosenzweig, Wigfield, & Hulleman, 2020). Stu-
dents who perform poorly initially tend to be more disengaged from the course. As a
result, nudging them to see the value in the course by completing utility-­value interven-
tion activities may spark them to reengage with course material. Furthermore, students
whose values are not aligned with those of the learning context might feel disconnected
from the learning context from the beginning (Stephens, Hamedani, & Destin, 2014;
Harackiewicz et al., 2016). For example, students from groups traditionally underrep-
resented in higher education, such as students who belong to a racial/ethnic-­minority
group, tend to value interdependent and communal goals more than independent and
agentic goals (Diekman, Brown, Johnston, & Clark, 2010). The utility-­value intervention
provides these students an opportunity to identify their own values rather than being told
to connect to goals that are not their own (e.g., more independent than interdependent).
An important reason why moderator effects might vary across learning contexts
is that utility-­value interventions provide an opportunity for students to articulate how
their personal goals and values might align with learning in a specific context, rather
than being told to connect to goals that are not their own (e.g., more independent than
interdependent). This aligns with the core aspects of the Eccles et al. (1983) expectancy-­
value framework that explicates how student motivation is dependent upon the learning
context. Our current corpus of research makes it difficult to test this context-­salient
hypothesis because interventions have been implemented in contexts with very few tra-
ditionally underrepresented students, which makes it difficult to fully examine students’
intersectional identities. For example, Harackiewicz and colleagues (2016) needed to col-
lect data across four semesters to have sufficient numbers of first-­generation students
and racial/ethnic-­minority students to conduct their analyses. Testing interventions in
new and diverse learning contexts will provide the opportunity to determine whether
the intervention logic model and our hypotheses about intervention moderators hold up.
Second, variation in the social context of learning could influence intervention
effects. One way of looking at this is by institutional context. Although the interven-
tions have been tested across different types of institutions (e.g., high school, community
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 109

college, and research-­intensive universities) and subject areas (e.g., math, psychology,
biology), our meta-­analytic review of utility-­value interventions did not show significant
heterogeneity in intervention effects by context (d’s from 0.19 to 0.31). Unfortunately,
large studies that include many different learning contexts in a single study have not
yet been published with the utility-­value intervention. Such studies have the potential to
uncover important variations in learning context that could contribute to heterogeneity
in intervention impacts (cf. Yeager et al., 2019).

COUSINS

The utility-­value intervention is related to several other social-­psychological interven-

tions, each of which focuses on how students make meaning of themselves in school.
First, it draws on the saying- ­is-­believing aspect of many other social-­psychological
interventions, including growth mindset (Dweck & Yeager, Chapter 1, this volume), social
belonging (Walton & Brady, Chapter 2, this volume), and values affirmation (Sherman,
Lokhande, Müller, & Cohen, Chapter 3, this volume). The saying-­is-­believing aspect
of these interventions involves asking students to reflect on the intervention message
without having to explicitly endorse it as their own (Aronson, 1999; Walton & Wilson,
2018). This reduces reactance and increases the likelihood that students might be open to
internalizing some of the intervention message for themselves.
Second, the utility-­value intervention is similar to other interventions designed to
help students connect their motives for learning with what they are learning in school.
The communal- ­value intervention asks students to reflect on how their communal val-
ues, such as helping others, might connect with doing research in biology (Brown, Smith,
Thoman, Allen, & Muragishi, 2015). The prosocial purpose intervention prompts stu-
dents to think about how getting an education will enable them to help other people or
make a difference in the world (Yeager et al., 2014). Instead of focusing on one type of
value, the utility-­value intervention allows students to make the choice about how the
course connects to their lives. In this way, the utility-­value intervention offers students
more flexibility in terms of what type of utility value they will perceive in the learning
content, whereas the communal and prosocial interventions focus students on those spe-
cific aspects of utility value.
Third, the utility-­value intervention inspired us to develop a parent intervention.
We developed materials for parents of high school students that highlighted how STEM
courses were related to the students’ current and future lives, and provided guidance on
how parents could talk to their teens about these connections. This intervention enabled
parents to have more nuanced and supportive conversations with their teen about how
math and science related to his or her current interests and potential future educational
and career pathways, and it increased parents’ positive attitudes about the importance of
STEM, the number of conversations they had with their teen, and most importantly, the
number of STEM courses students took in high school and college (e.g., Harackiewicz,
Rozek, Hulleman, & Hyde, 2012; Rozek, Svoboda, Harackiewicz, Hulleman, & Hyde,
2017).
Fourth, the relevance affirmation intervention is a combination of the utility-­
value intervention and the value-­affirmation intervention (Kizilcec & Cohen, 2017). In
110 I. Education

relevance affirmation, students first affirm their core values (by circling their top values
from a list), and then they write an essay about how their current educational pathway
connects to those core values. The relevance affirmation intervention does not target spe-
cific learning content like the utility-­value intervention but instead activates more global
values that serve to affirm a student’s identity, which makes it similar to the prosocial
purpose intervention (Yeager et al., 2014).
Fifth, the utility-­value intervention is similar to interventions that personalize the
learning context. In these context-­personalization interventions (Cordova & Lepper,
1996), the learning content and tasks are customized for the individual student by using
personal details, such as the student’s name, or preferences, such as the student’s favorite
music group. Context-­personalization interventions do not provide students the oppor-
tunity to actively make connections but instead makes the connection for the student by
imbuing the learning context with customized personal details and preferences.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Versions
Basic Writing Prompt
The original version of the intervention (see Figure 4.3) involved a simple prompt for
students to select a topic they are currently studying and write about how it connects
to something in their lives (Hulleman et al., 2010, Study 1; Hulleman & Harackiewicz,
2009). This version clearly puts the student perspective as the driver of making con-
nections that are personal and specific to that student. The challenge is that, for many
students, making strong connections is difficult without appropriate scaffolds, which is
why additional variants of the intervention have been developed. As presented in Figure
4.4, a modified version of the basic prompt was developed for college biology students
(Harackiewicz et al., 2016).

Letter
As described previously, the letter version prompts students to write a letter to a sig-
nificant other—­parent, sibling, friend—­about how what the student is learning in class
could be relevant to his or her significant other’s life (i.e., self–other overlap; Aron, Aron,
Tudor, & Nelson, 1991). This allows students to endorse a utility value for the material
without having to completely endorse it for themselves. It also offers the students an
opportunity to become a benefactor of a message intended to help others, instead of being
passive recipients of information.

Quotations
Gaspard and colleagues (2015) developed the first version of the utility-­value inter-
vention that provided sample quotes from students who had already taken the course.
Instead of the instructor explicating the potential value of math, quotations from near-
age peers provide a scaffold for students to find their own value. Since their first version
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 111

Reflecting on Your Purpose for Learning

Now that we have reviewed the main topics and concepts from this unit, it is time to reflect on one
specific topic or concept.

Part A: Pick one of the topics or concepts that we have covered in this unit and briefly summarize the
main parts.

Part B: Apply this topic/concept to your life, or to the life of someone you know. How might the
information be useful to you, or a friend/relative, in daily life? How does learning about this topic apply to
your future plans?

You can either: 1) write about it in at least 5 sentences, 2) draw a concept map with a description, or 3)
draw a sketch with a description. If you do a concept map or a sketch, be sure to describe it well enough
so that the reader can understand it.

For example, if you were studying nutrition, you could choose a topic such as how food is digested.
Briefly summarize the digestive process – how foods are broken down in the mouth, stomach, and
intestines to make energy. Then you could write about how this applies to your own life. For example,
eating healthy foods helps your body produce energy to play your favorite sport or study for exams.

You could also draw a concept map of how your knowledge of digestion applies to your life. An example
is provided below. Remember that you would also need to add a brief written description with a concept
map or diagram.

Mouth
Sports

Healthy Digestive
Stomach Energy
Foods System

Studying
Intestines

FIGURE 4.3.  The basic utility-­value-­intervention prompt for high school science. From Hulle-
man and Harackiewicz (2009). Reprinted with permission from the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.

of quotations was implemented with ninth-grade math students in Germany, Hulleman,

Kosovich, and colleagues (2017) have developed quotation interventions for numerous
learning contexts, including high school biology, algebra, and geometry, and community
college math. Generally, students read four to six quotations, and then rate the quota-
tions for personal relevance and interest. The major difference between these approaches
is that the German version had an additional component where students first participated
in an interactive discussion with a researcher about the relevance of math in their lives
before engaging with the intervention materials individually. Figure 4.5 presents some
sample intervention quotes from a community college math intervention (Kosovich, Hul-
leman, Phelps, & Lee, 2019).
112 I. Education

Writing Assignment #1
Objective: Writing about scientific principles and phenomena is an increasingly important skill in
the 21st century. This assignment is designed to help you understand a major concept covered
in this unit while also helping you develop your science writing skills. One key to effective science
writing is explaining how science can be used in everyday life. You’ll do this in a 500–600 word
paper. You should:
1) Formulate and answer a question Sample questions
Select a concept that was covered in lecture • What is gene expression and how is it
and formulate a question. Use this question as applied in medical research?
the title of your essay. • What are mutagens and why are they
potentially harmful to DNA?
2) Explain how this applies to your life Examples of applications
Write a 500–600 word essay answering this • Medical researchers study gene expression
question, and discuss how the information patterns to diagnose and treat conditions
could be useful to you in your own life. Be caused by genetic variants. In your own
sure to include some concrete information that life, you will have access to more effective
was covered in this unit, explaining why the treatments for any serious illnesses you
information is relevant to your life and useful develop, thanks to these advances.
for you. Be sure to explain how the information • Farmers use artificial selection to produce
applies to you personally and give examples. plants and animals with the most desirable
traits, which can make crops more resilient.
Access to cheaper and more abundant crops
can save you money on groceries in your
own life.
• UV light is a mutagen that damages DNA
by causing thymine mutations, which can
lead to cancer. You can reduce the chances
of damaging your DNA in your own life, by
applying sunscreen when in the sun.
3) Structure your essay as suggested below
State your question in the title.
• 1st section: Give an overview of the answer to your question.
• 2nd section: Provide the scientific details of the answer to your question. Be sure to select the
relevant information from class notes and the textbook.
• 3rd section: Make it personal. Explain why this information is relevant to your life or useful for
you and give examples.
Since you will be writing about science from a personal perspective, you can use personal
pronouns (I, we, you, etc.).

FIGURE 4.4. The basic writing prompt for college biology. From Harackiewicz, Canning,
­Tibbetts, Priniski, and Hyde (2016).
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 113

Community College Math

“As a firefighter/paramedic I use algebra “My major is computer arts animation

almost every work day. Be it for a patient’s so it requires a considerable amount of
weight and drug calculations, or weights mathematics. I use algebra to show the way
when it comes to building materials. For any that an object is rotated and shifted and
job that deals with medicine, you need math made larger and smaller—all major actions
to save lives! I've had to apologize to all my in animation. For example, let’s say you want
math teachers for complaining that I would your Fortnite character to move naturally and
never use this stuff!” —Robin, 22, Firefighter/ realistically. You would have to use a simple
Paramedic set of equations to work out how the character
moves in relation to the background and
other characters in the game.” —Dylan, 19,
Computer Arts Animation Major

High School Geometry

“I used to think Geometry was sort of useless outside of math class, because I want to be a
graphic designer and definitely not go into any job where you use a lot of math. But, when I work
for a long time on a painting and realize that the whole thing won’t fit on the canvas, it really
messes up the whole day. Geometry is actually really important for art or graphic design because
it can help scale different shapes to avoid making things that are too big.” —Omar, 18, high
school senior

High School Biology

“As a high school athlete I knew that lifting “During August of last year, I suffered an injury
weights and eating right would help my in my right eye. If I didn’t go to the doctor, I
performance, but why? I would lift weights would have lost my vision. After my surgery,
without knowing what was actually happening my parents and I went to many doctor visits.
to my muscles. Learning about what my Having learned about vision and the anatomy
muscles need to get stronger really helped of the eye helped me a lot. I was able to better
me. I started eating the right food like spinach understand what happened to my eye and
and broccoli. It made me feel healthier and how the surgery helped me. I was even able to
improved my performance.” —Rick, 20 explain to my parents what exactly happened
to me. They seemed really confused, and it felt
good to be able to help them understand!” —
Sarah, 19

FIGURE 4.5. Sample utility-­value-­intervention quotations for community college math, high

school geometry, and high school biology. Data from Kosovich, Hulleman, Phelps, and Lee (2019);
Rosenzweig, Hulleman, Barron, Kosovich, and Wigfield (2019); and Hulleman, Kosovich, Barron,
and Daniel (2017).
114 I. Education

Instructor Version: Build Connections
We designed the Build Connections activity so that teachers could have an activity that
they could lead and be engaged in that would instigate similar psychological processes as
the original utility-­value intervention. This allows teachers to be the scaffold for learn-
ing, and to leverage the social dynamics of the classroom. The Build Connections mate-
rials and support guide are freely available online (https://characterlab.org/activities/
build-­connections-­for-­classrooms) and Figure 4.6 presents an example completed Build
Connections worksheet. By putting student interests and goals as the first activity, the
Build Connections activity is driven by instructors developing deeper relationships with
students. Once they get to know student interests better, and how students are trying to
make connections to the material, then instructors can be better equipped to support
students in connection making as new material is introduced.

Implementation Factors
There are five important implementation factors for utility-­value intervention that have
received some level of empirical support in the research literature: participant responsive-
ness, timing, dosage, length, and choice/variety. However, each of these factors is in need
of additional testing across different contexts and student groups.

FIGURE 4.6. The Build Connections intervention exercise for middle school and high school
teachers. From Character Lab (2019). Reprinted with permission.
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 115

Participant Responsiveness
Several studies show that how responsive students are to the intervention prompts is
related to student outcomes. Hulleman and Cordray (2009) found that high school sci-
ence and college psychology students who made more specific, personal connections in
their writing reported more utility value in the course than either students in the utility-­
value condition who made fewer specific and personal connections, or those in the control
group. Nagengast et al. (2018) replicated this finding in their sample of ninth-grade math
students in Germany who were randomized to a utility-­value or control condition. Har-
ackiewicz et al. (2016) found similar results in their introductory biology sample, such
that students who wrote longer essays benefited more from the intervention. Not only did
they find that students who made more personal and specific connections were likely to
perform better in the course but they also found that students who were more engaged
in the activity (as measured by the number of words written) benefited more from the
intervention. In addition, two studies (Gaspard et al., 2019; Hulleman & Cordray, 2009)
found that teacher engagement in the intervention also influences intervention outcomes.

Timing
The original thinking was that the utility-­value intervention is best delivered at the mid-
way point of the course and beyond. Because not all topics are equally relevant or easy
to connect to students lives, waiting until midsemester allows students to have learned
enough course content so that they can make personally meaningful connections. How-
ever, we have subsequently learned that waiting that long has drawbacks, as some stu-
dents begin to disengage from the learning context early in the semester. In college
biology, early assignments are particularly effective for students with a history of poor
performance (Canning, Priniski, & Harackiewicz, 2019). As a result, we now implement
the intervention as early as the second or third week of the semester.

Dosage
The utility-­value intervention is not a one-shot intervention. Rather, it can take repeated
experiences for students to appreciate the utility value of course material. Hulleman and
Cordray (2009) found that high school science teachers who offered the intervention
more times during the semester had better intervention outcomes than teachers who
offered it fewer times in the semester. In college science courses, it can be difficult for stu-
dents to write personal essays because the norms of scientific writing discourage the use
of personal pronouns, and multiple assignments provide opportunities for feedback and
practice reflecting on connections. For example, Canning et al. (2018) found that three
utility-­value assignments were more effective than a single assignment. Anecdotally, we
have seen teachers try to implement a brief utility-­value reflection once a week, with the
result that students quickly grew tired of the exercise.

Length
The amount of time one intervention implementation takes students varies based on a
host of student factors, including age and reading and writing skills, as well as design
116 I. Education

constraints of the classroom context. Interventions have ranged from brief homework
assignments that take as little as 5 minutes (average of 7 minutes in an online math class-
room in Rosenzweig, Hulleman, Barron, Kosovich, & Wigfield, 2019), 15- to 20-min-
ute in-class assignments (e.g., Kosovich et al., 2019), 90-minute sessions that include
a 45-minute lesson by an instructor followed by completion of an individual activity
(Gaspard et al., 2015), or homework assignments that take several days or weeks to com-
plete (Harackiewicz et al., 2016; Hulleman et al., 2010; Hulleman, Thoman, Dicke, &
Harackiewicz, 2017).

Choice/Variety
Choice and variety are known to have powerful effects on motivation and performance
(Patall, Cooper, & Wynn, 2010), but these features have only recently been tested in the
utility-­value intervention paradigm. Utility-­value assignments have differed in terms of
assignment type (i.e., essay, letter, quotes), but they can also differ in terms of assignment
structure (e.g., whether students are exposed to a variety of assignments, whether stu-
dents are given choices about which assignments to complete). These issues are relevant
to consider when there are multiple assignments across a semester. Of course, the utility-­
value interventions are imbued with choice—­students decide what topic to write about
and what connections to draw—but the experience of choice can be further enhanced
by giving students choices among assignment types. Indeed, many early studies gave stu-
dents choices (e.g., Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). In the college biology context, we
found that higher levels of choice had positive effects on perceived utility value, interest,
and performance (Priniski et al., 2019; Rosenzweig, Harackiewicz, et al., 2019), and that
having a variety of utility-­value assignments enhanced course performance (Priniski et
al., 2019).

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Teach It, Don’t Preach It

Helping students perceive utility value, and therefore benefit from the intervention, is
about allowing students the opportunity to discover the connections between what they
are learning and their lives that is most meaningful to them. Instead of forcing students
to see specific ways in which course material might be useful in some students’ lives, they
need to be given the opportunity to see it for themselves. This means that instructors
should think about the intervention as providing just enough scaffolding for students to
make their own personal and specific connections, and no more.

Content Matters
If we want students to be motivated within a specific learning context, then the connec-
tions students make need to be specific to the topics they are learning in that context.
This means the intervention needs to activate content that is being learned. This usu-
ally requires work with instructors to decide on the proper scaffolds, such as sample
quotes, and timing the intervention so that there has been enough content learned to
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 117

make informed connections. College students and students who are more advanced in
the content area may need different scaffolds—­and even less scaffolding—­than students
who are younger and less skilled.

It’s Not a Stand‑Alone Exercise

Unlike some other social-­ psychological interventions, this intervention needs to be
explicitly connected to the learning objectives of the course. Ideally, students will receive
some type of course credit to complete it, and the instructor will provide a rationale
for why the utility-­value activity is being completed. Example rationales include offer-
ing students an opportunity to think more deeply about the course, and the assignment
being a part of the instructor’s ongoing interest in improving the classroom experience
for students. Without providing a compelling rationale for engaging in the activity, stu-
dents are likely to disengage and/or not complete the activity. For college classes in
particular, the assignments need to be on the syllabus and part of the curriculum. It’s
critical that they be perceived as an integral component of their curriculum. As one math
instructor commented:

“You need to come in with the attitude that this is not a superfluous activity. If you
don’t buy in, then your students won’t buy in. You have to value it and make it
important. At the beginning, I wasn’t as sure what the [utility-­value intervention]
was. I administered it as extra credit in my classes at first. But with a better under-
standing of the activities, I made it more of a mandatory part of the course. Now
every year, it’s just built into my grading.”

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

The effectiveness of the utility-­value intervention suggests that educational contexts

can become better contexts for learning by increasing the potential for students to see
personal value in what they are learning. In essence, such interventions are a promis-
sory note that if instructors can make substantive, structural, and pedagogical changes
to classrooms, then motivation and learning will increase. Here are some key supports
instructors will need to make those changes.

Instructor Support
Online Materials
If instructors want to change what they do to help students make more connections, then
we need to provide them with ideas and activities that can help. The Build Connections
activity is one such activity that is designed for instructors to use with their students, and
is freely available online (Character Lab, 2019). There is also supporting documentation,
including implementation dos and don’ts (see Figure 4.7). If instructors are interested in
providing sample quotations for students, where will they get the quotes? One important
resource would be to build a repository of quotations with the help of practitioners, and
share them widely.
118 I. Education

1 Acknowledge feelings of frustration or boredom with school.

Affirm that students might not find every moment of school relevant, interesting, or
exciting.
2 Create an autonomy-supportive environment.
Help students explore and think about how school connects to their life instead of the
teacher’s life. Avoid telling them why they “must learn this.” Instead, encourage them to
consider how it might connect to different aspects of their life (classroom, family, daily
life, careers, helping others).
3 Provide examples of possible connections.
Students may need help initiating examples, so be ready with some ideas of your own
connections, or share connections made by other students.
4 Ask follow-up questions.
Students may start with vague connections (“Learning this will help me in the future.”).
Be prepared to ask questions that encourage students to be specific (“Tell me about the
skills needed for your hobby.” “What else do you know about this topic?” “Do you know of
any examples of anyone else using this in their life?”).
5 Provide knowledge of the topic.
Students need to have enough exposure to and information about a topic in order to
make high quality connections. Allow students to refer to materials they have used or
created in class (study guides, notes, etc.) to help them think more deeply about the
topic and spark ideas.

FIGURE 4.7.  Implementation tips for helping students find utility value in learning.

Training
We can make utility-­value intervention materials available to instructors, but how will
they know what kinds of scaffolds their students need? Should they use the writing version,
the quotes version, or a combination? We need to offer online and in-­person training on
how to make the design decisions needed to develop effective interventions, and meaning-
fully integrating activities into the curriculum without overburdening either instructors
or students. Ultimately, instructors will need to change some of their practices—­beyond
simply implementing a utility-­value intervention—­in order to best help their students find
personal value and meaning in learning. Figure 4.8 shares some reflections of middle
school teachers after implementing the Build Connections activity with their students.

Other Institutional Opportunities
Although the utility-­value intervention was designed to be used by classroom teachers,
there are other educators who could make use of the intervention or its variants. For
example, academic advisors could use a version of the intervention to learn more about
how students are thinking about the connection between the courses they are taking in
a semester and their major or career interests. College access counselors could use a ver-
sion of the intervention to help students make connections between the colleges they are
interested in and their future goals. We already have evidence that the Build Connections
activity is being used in both of these ways in high schools and community colleges.
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 119

Build Connections Helped Teachers Make More Meaningful Connections

“I think I acknowledge more mathematical connections in my everyday life and in turn discuss
these connections with my students. Additionally, I do not just discuss connections at the
beginning or end of a unit. I try to incorporate connections throughout each unit and then spiral
back to these connections throughout the year.” – 7th-grade math teacher
“Prior to this, I did try to point out connections to the students’ lives, but I wasn’t trying to get them
to make the connection. Now, I like to ask them about what they are interested in, or what new
show they are watching, or new game they are playing, etc., and see if there is a connection. Some
topics are way harder than others to find something they can personally relate to, and sometimes
I have to do a little research of my own to learn about what the kids are doing to help them find a
connection.” – 7th-grade science teacher

Build Connections Helped Teachers Understand Their Students’ Interests

“I was surprised about some of the interests of my students and things that they are involved in.
Seeing the things they are involved in helped me form more conversations and interests with
students.” – 7th-grade science teacher
“I usually connect skills of reading and writing to what they’ll be doing in future EDUCATION
classes. This is a good reminder to link it to things they’re interested in and will do for the rest of
their life.” – 9th-grade civics teacher

Build Connections Helped Teachers Make More Meaningful Connections

“My teaching has changed in that I am more intentional in looking for the opportunities to draw
connections with content materials and its real-life implication. There are times in which the
content materials have pretty clear real-life relevance. There are other times when I feel myself
struggling to find real-life connections.” – Middle school resource teacher

FIGURE 4.8.  Teacher feedback on using Build Connections. Data from Hulleman, Hulleman,
et al. (2018).

Providing students with a variety of opportunities to find value at different points of

their educational journey increases the possibility that they can leverage their education
in ways that maximize their motivation and learning outcomes.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

For the field of psychology, the utility-­value intervention serves as an example of the
importance of taking a theoretical construct—­one found to be predictive of learning out-
comes in many longitudinal, correlational studies—­and building an intervention based
on that construct that is then tested in an applied context. Despite decades of research
on the role of motivation in education (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000), our ini-
tial studies (Hulleman et al., 2010; Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009) provided the first
experimental tests of an educational intervention designed to leverage perceptions of util-
ity value to increase student learning outcomes. Although many educators have based
practice on the tenets of expectancy-­value theory, the lack of rigorously tested applica-
tions of the central constructs is distressing, particularly given the press for researchers
to provide explicit recommendations for practitioners based on their findings. In the
case of utility-­value interventions, one implication of the correlational research was that
120 I. Education

instructors needed to emphasize the relevance of the learning content to students’ lives.
However, our early research demonstrated that communicating utility value directly can
lead to unintended negative consequences for some students (Durik, Hulleman, & Har-
ackiewicz, 2015), and that allowing students to generate their own connections is likely
to be much more effective, particularly for students at risk of academic underperfor-
mance. If psychology is to achieve its potential to positively impact society, researchers
will need to increasingly conduct applied tests of their theories in the real-world contexts
that they desire to improve so that their recommendations are based on causal evidence
rather than identifying psychological phenomena that merely co-occur with desired out-
comes (Hulleman & Barron, 2016).
Second, the original insight of the utility-­value intervention is that students need to
discover value in the learning material that matters to them. This led to structuring the
intervention so that individual students have a choice about what aspects of the course
content to connect to their lives, and which aspects of their lives to connect to the course
content. This autonomy-­supportive approach to operationalizing the construct of utility
value has led to the development of variations of the intervention intended to provide
more and different scaffolding so that students can make the most personal and specific
connection possible. This work has deepened the definition of what it means to find
learning content useful, and how perceiving utility value can lead to increased learning
outcomes. The original conceptualization of utility value was considered to be closer to
extrinsic motivation, whereas the operationalization of utility value in our intervention
is more autonomous. In this way, this operationalization of the utility-­value intervention
has instigated a theoretical question about whether or not utility value needs to be identi-
fied as internal to an individual’s self-­definition, or if utility value can be related to more
external motivations, such as wanting to obtain rewards or avoid punishments.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

First, although the original intent of the intervention was to boost learning outcomes
for students in a specific course, due to the demonstrated efficacy of the intervention
it is now imperative to consider how these effects might translate into broader changes
in students’ educational pathways. However, this leads to the question of how do we
get from the perception of value in a very specific context to broader change? It is not
clear that we would necessarily expect an intervention that is so context specific to have
continued effects beyond that context unless further prompting occurred in the future.
Instead, it is more likely that the broader effects of the intervention occur by changing
immediate course outcomes—­such as performance and interest—­which then translate
into additional course taking and better performance in those courses. Indeed, many of
the intervention studies to date have found significant effects on performance in gateway
courses. Improved performance in these foundational courses may initiate recursive pro-
cesses through which students develop confidence and/or identification with the domain,
and then continue to perform better in other courses in the discipline (Cohen & Sherman,
2014; Hecht, Harackiewicz, et al., 2019). In addition, improved course performance
may open up new possibilities, such as research experiences and admission to advanced
courses that continue to foster engagement, performance, and persistence in the field
 The Utility‑Value Intervention 121

(Hecht, Priniski, & Harackiewicz, 2019; Goyer et al., 2017). Although we reviewed some
of our initial insight into the pathway of broader effects in the “Empirical Evidence” sec-
tion, much work remains to follow students in intervention studies as they move through
their education pathways. We may gain insights that help us design variants of the utility-­
value intervention that leverage initial reflections on utility value so that they have the
potential to carry over beyond the initial learning context.
Second, as we continue to learn about the role that perceptions of value play in moti-
vating students, emerging findings demonstrate that some types of value are more moti-
vating for some students than others (Diekman et al., 2010; Thoman, Brown, Mason,
Harmsen, & Smith, 2015), and that different learning contexts differentially provide the
opportunity to find different types of value. For example, Thoman and colleagues have
found that research labs in the biomedical sciences tend to highlight individual achieve-
ment and accomplishment as the goals of the work, which represent more independent and
agentic types of values. In contrast, students from traditionally underrepresented groups
in higher education tend to be motivated by careers that highlight more interdependent
and prosocial values, like helping others. Thoman et al. have found that this value mis-
match partially explains the reasons why students from underrepresented groups choose
not to persist in STEM majors, even when controlling for academic performance. These
findings encourage us to consider whether utility-­value interventions might be more effec-
tive for underrepresented students if they were structured in a way so that students were
encouraged to make connections between the course content and their interdependent
goals (e.g., Yeager et al., 2014; Tibbetts, Harackiewicz, Priniski, & Canning, 2016), or if
having the choice would be more effective. In our ongoing community college math work,
we have developed interventions prompts that provide sample quotations from students
that emphasize both independent and interdependent motives, and we are examining
whether students’ backgrounds influence the type of connections they make.
Third, there are a variety of implementation factors that we have identified as impact-
ing the effectiveness of the utility-­value intervention, including timing, dosage, length,
choice, and variety, among others. We have also reviewed different types and structures
of utility-­value interventions that have evidence of effectiveness, including writing- and
quotations-­based versions. However, very few studies have been designed as experiments
where participants are randomly assigned to different implementation factors or design
features of the utility-­value intervention (cf. Priniski et al., 2019). Future studies also
need to examine whether any of these factors vary as a function of level of education,
student demographic characteristics, or other aspects of the learning context. How much
customization is necessary in order to implement an effective utility-­value intervention in
a new context?
Fourth, as we transition the implementation of the utility-­value intervention from
researchers to instructors and other educational practitioners, how do we adapt and test
these utility-­value practices while still instigating the targeted psychological processes?
For example, although Build Connections was designed based on the efficacy evidence
from the utility-­value intervention, we still need to test whether this variation works,
and whether it works without direct researcher involvement. Clearly, collaborating with
practitioners from beginning to end of the translation process will be essential, both to
provide supports for implementation and to capture learnings on what does and does not
work.
122 I. Education

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 C H A P TE R 5

Difference‑Education
Improving Disadvantaged Students’ Academic
Outcomes by Changing Their Theory of Difference

Nicole M. Stephens, MarYam G. Hamedani,
and Sarah S. M. Townsend

This chapter provides an overview of difference-­education: a wise intervention designed

to help disadvantaged students overcome the psychological obstacles (i.e., a lack of fit
and empowerment) that can negatively impact their opportunity to succeed in college. The
defining feature of difference-­education is that it teaches students about the contextual
nature of social group differences through the stories of successful students from diverse
backgrounds. This chapter explains what difference-­education is, describes how it can
reduce educational disparities, and provides an overview of strategies to implement it effec-
tively. First, we provide an overview of the difference-­education intervention approach and
describe the literatures that we drew on to develop the methods and theorizing that underlie
this approach. Second, we discuss the psychological processes through which difference-­
education produces its effects and provide an overview of supporting research. Third, we
review how difference-­education interventions have been implemented in college settings,
explain some nuances and misconceptions, and describe potential directions for future
research.

Difference-­education is a wise intervention designed to help college students who are

disadvantaged by mainstream educational settings overcome psychological obstacles that
can undermine their opportunity to succeed in college. The defining feature of difference-­
education is that it teaches students about the contextual nature of social group differ-
ences through the contrasting narratives or stories of successful students from diverse
backgrounds. We use the term social group differences to refer to variation in the experi-
ences, opportunities, and/or outcomes of diverse social groups. The stories that students
are exposed to during a difference-­education intervention convey a contextual under-
standing of social group differences by illuminating how students’ current experiences in
college can vary as a function of their different backgrounds. By being exposed to these

126
 Difference‑Education 127

stories, intervention participants learn that social group differences are contextual—that
is, they are a product of students’ diverse life experiences and backgrounds. This critical
insight can help students understand that their different backgrounds are not a deficiency
that holds them back but rather can be a source of strength that they can leverage to fit in
with the college community and find their own path to success. As described in this chap-
ter, we designed the first wave of difference-­education interventions to examine whether
it was possible to use this contextual understanding of social group difference to improve
the academic outcomes of first-­generation college students (Stephens, Hamedani, & Des-
tin, 2014; Townsend, Stephens, Smallets, & Hamedani, 2018).

BACKGROUND

Even after first-­generation college students (i.e., students who do not have parents with
4-year college degrees) defy the odds to gain admission to college, they still confront
obstacles to success that continuing-­generation students (i.e., students who have at least
one parent with a 4-year college degree) face less often. Beyond having fewer economic
resources and academic skills (e.g., Horn & Nuñez, 2000; Terenzini, Springer, Yaeger,
Pascarella, & Nora, 1996), first-­generation students also confront an additional set of
psychological or cultural obstacles, such as a lack of fit or empowerment (Astin & Ose-
guera, 2004; Goudeau & Croizet, 2017; Sirin, 2005). We use the term fit to refer to the
feeling of being accepted, recognized, welcomed, and included within a setting, such as
the college community (e.g., Stephens, Brannon, Markus, & Nelson, 2015).1 We use the
term empowerment to refer to (1) the psychological experience of efficacy, ownership,
and control; and (2) the resulting willingness to enact the strategies needed to make the
most of one’s experience. Together these obstacles fuel a persistent social class achieve-
ment gap, such that first-­generation students earn lower grades and more often drop out
compared to continuing-­generation students (Astin & Oseguera, 2004; Sirin, 2005).
One especially important cultural obstacle is the mismatch between the largely
middle-­class culture of higher education and the working-­class beliefs, norms, and values
that many first-­generation students bring with them to college (e.g., Stephens, Fryberg,
Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012). For example, many colleges and universities
expect students to pave their own path and express their personal opinions (Fryberg
& Markus, 2007), while many working-­class students are instead socialized to follow
the rules and adhere to socially accepted norms of behavior (e.g., Kohn, 1969). First-­
generation students are guided by more interdependent norms and may not feel fully
comfortable expressing their ideas or opinions in class, or attending office hours to ask a
professor for clarification on an assignment or to explain a grade. This cultural mismatch
can lead first-­generation students to feel excluded from these educational settings and
lead them to question whether they fit or belong in college (e.g., Covarrubias & Fryberg,
2015; Ostrove & Long, 2007; Walton & Cohen, 2007). First-­generation students can

1 We use the term social fit, rather than belonging, to emphasize the relationship between a person’s
psychological experience and its congruence with a particular context, setting, or environment. This
term derives from decades of prior work on cultural fit, as well as person–­environment, person–­culture,
or person–­organization fit (e.g., Chatman, 1991; Dawis, 1992; Edwards, Cable, Williamson, Lambert,
& Shipp, 2006; Fulmer et al., 2010).
128 I. Education

also be unfamiliar with the “rules of the game” that lead to success in higher education,
such as how to relate to professors or how to choose a major. This lack of familiarity
can undermine their sense of empowerment and efficacy (e.g., Housel & Harvey, 2010;
Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2009). These obstacles can systematically disadvantage first-­
generation students and further fuel the social class achievement gap.

Intellectual History
In the first wave of studies, difference-­education was designed to reduce the social class
achievement gap by helping first-­generation students gain a sense of fit and empowerment
in college. Difference-­education builds on the wise intervention literature in social psy-
chology by using the methodological strategy of changing students’ construal or under-
standing of their experience (Walton & Wilson, 2018)—in this case, their experience of
difference. This research area leverages the strategy of changing students’ lay theories
about ability and achievement to foster success in school (e.g., Wilson, 2011). A lay the-
ory is a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and social world that
shapes how people interpret and respond to their experiences (Molden & Dweck, 2006).
For example, one popular lay theory intervention provides an understanding that intel-
ligence or ability is malleable and can change over time (e.g., Blackwell, Trzesniewski, &
Dweck, 2007). Likewise, we theorize that changing students’ lay theories about social
group differences—­in particular, teaching them a contextual theory of difference—­can
improve their academic outcomes.
To explain why a contextual theory would improve disadvantaged2 students’ academic
outcomes, we drew from diverse literatures in psychology and education that typically do
not “talk” to one another. Research in social psychology, on the one hand, has identified
two prominent theories of difference—­an essentialist theory and a contextual theory—­and
examined their consequences for intergroup relations. This literature does not examine the
effects of a contextual theory on academic outcomes, but instead focuses on its effects on
intergroup outcomes. Research in education, on the other hand, theorizes about the aca-
demic benefits of teaching students about social group differences, but does not directly
isolate or test the causal effects of a contextual theory on these academic outcomes. As such,
both literatures provide complementary evidence for our theory, but do not formulate nor
test it directly. Below, drawing on the social psychology literature, we first provide an over-
view of these two lay theories and explain how they can shape the meaning of social group
difference and affect intergroup outcomes. Second, we draw on the education literature to
provide an overview of research in multicultural and social justice education, which sup-
ports the claim that a contextual theory can benefit disadvantaged students academically.
Research in social psychology identifies the meanings and consequences of essen-
tialist versus contextual theories of social group difference for intergroup outcomes. An
essentialist theory defines social group differences as biologically rooted and therefore
relatively fixed or unchanging essences or attributes of individual people or social groups

2 The term disadvantaged refers to students who are typically disadvantaged by the mainstream culture

of higher education—­t ypically students who are first-­generation, low-­income, and/or underrepresented
racial or ethnic minorities. This term is meant to highlight how institutional environments can nega-
tively impact students’ learning experiences and chances for success, not that their backgrounds them-
selves are deficits.
 Difference‑Education 129

(Gelman, 2004; Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000; Prentice & Miller, 2007). In the
United States, the essentialist theory of social group differences is the most common way
of understanding difference (e.g., Markus, 2008).
Throughout history, an essentialist theory of social group difference has been used
to stigmatize social group differences and to downwardly constitute certain groups as
deficient or inferior (Markus, 2008; Markus & Moya, 2010). This essential view of dif-
ference means that a social group’s differences are likely to be interpreted as an indication
of their lower value in society, and this rationale can be used to justify their subjugation
and mistreatment. For example, if working-­class Americans were to receive lower scores
than middle-­class Americans on an intelligence test, an essentialist theory would suggest
that this difference is an indication of working-­class people’s inherent inferiority, which
could be used to rationalize the act of withholding educational resources from them.
Indeed, throughout history, this logic has been used to justify prejudice and discrimina-
tion and to exclude, oppress, and withhold opportunities from a wide range of social
groups. It has been used to justify the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement
of African Americans, and a wide range of discriminatory policies that excluded immi-
grants throughout U.S. history (e.g., Markus & Moya, 2010; Omi & Winant, 2015). As a
result, an essentialist theory of difference links social group differences with largely nega-
tive meanings and stigma, and shapes people’s experiences accordingly. When people use
this essentialist theory to make sense of social group differences, they often experience
differences as a threat, a source of deficiency, or a weakness.
An essentialist perspective contrasts sharply with another way of understanding
social group difference: a contextual theory. Well represented in the academy and among
the social sciences, this theory asserts that social group differences are not essential
but instead socially constructed (e.g., Markus, 2008; Markus & Moya, 2010; Omi &
Winant, 2015). According to this theory, social group differences come from the nor-
mal process of participating in, adapting, and responding to the diverse sociocultural
contexts that people inhabit throughout their lives.3 Further, considering the contextual
origins of difference, this theory implies that differences can change over time with new
contextual experiences (see Markus, 2008, for related arguments). The contextual view
means that social group differences are normal—­that is, they stem from people’s different
life experiences, rather than some kind of inherent inferiority. As such, these differences
can no longer be used to justify the mistreatment of those who are different. For example,
if working-­class Americans were to receive lower scores than middle-­class Americans on
an intelligence test, a contextual theory suggests that this difference is an indication of
working-­class students’ disparate levels of preparation or opportunities in schools. This
interpretation could then be used to rationalize the act of giving working-­class students
more resources to develop their skills and abilities. As a result, a contextual theory des-
tigmatizes and normalizes the experience of difference, and shapes people’s experiences
accordingly. Therefore, when people use a contextual theory to make sense of social
group differences, they can experience differences positively, as an asset or strength.
Consistent with this idea, research in psychology suggests that exposure to a con-
textual theory can improve the quality of intergroup relations. Specifically, research has

3 The term sociocultural context refers to a socially and historically constructed environment that con-
tains a set of culture-­specific ideas, practices, and institutions (Markus & Hamedani, 2019; Stephens,
Markus, & Fryberg, 2012).
130 I. Education

shown that a contextual theory compared with an essentialist theory leads to decreased
stereotyping and race-based categorization (Bastian & Haslam, 2006; Chao, Hong, &
Chiu, 2013; Keller, 2005); more identification and perceived similarity across different
groups (No et al., 2008); and higher levels of intergroup trust and desire for intergroup
contact (Kung et al., 2018; Williams & Eberhardt, 2008). For example, when confronted
with a social problem relevant to race, Williams and Eberhardt found that exposing
diverse participants to the idea that race is socially constructed led them to report greater
emotional engagement (based on a self-­report measure of their mood) than those who
were exposed to the idea that race is essential.
Second, research in education—­particularly work on multicultural and social justice
education—­suggests that learning about the contextual nature of social group difference
has the potential to foster disadvantaged students’ academic engagement and improve
their performance in school (e.g., grades). Most of this interdisciplinary research in edu-
cation is not designed to isolate or test the causal effects of a contextual theory in the way
that experimental social psychologists would. Instead, the research tends to examine the
effects of multidimensional educational experiences, which typically include a contextual
theory as one part of many different ideas and practices. Although this research area does
not provide direct causal evidence of the benefits of a contextual theory, it suggests that
a contextual theory has the potential to benefit disadvantaged students.
Ethnic studies courses are one example of multicultural and social justice educa-
tion. They encourage students to view social groups, including their own, as socially and
historically situated, and highlight how contextual factors, such as institutions, policies,
and practices, can shape students’ experiences and life outcomes. Research examining
the effects of ethnic studies courses demonstrates that these learning experiences are
correlated with a variety of academic benefits (see Sleeter, 2011, for a review; see also
Bowman, 2010; Cole, Case, Rios, & Curtin, 2011; Denson, 2009; Nelson Laird, 2005).
These courses are often associated with improved academic performance and empower-
ment of disadvantaged students (e.g., Cabrera, Milem, Jaquette, & Marx, 2014; Sleeter,
2011). For example, one study of San Francisco high schools suggested that taking an
ethnic studies course in ninth grade led to an increase in ninth-grade attendance, grade-
point average (GPA), and credits earned (Dee & Penner, 2016).
Taken together, research from both psychology and education suggests that provid-
ing disadvantaged students with a contextual theory of difference could help destigmatize
social group differences and therefore help students understand their meanings in a new,
more positive way. That new understanding, in turn, could help improve their engagement
and performance in school (e.g., grades). In sum, research in psychology helps explain
why a contextual theory is likely to yield positive effects relative to an essentialist theory,
and education research provides initial evidence to support the idea that more positive
responses are likely to translate into improved academic outcomes.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

A contextual theory of difference has the potential to change how students make sense
of and respond to their own and others’ social group differences. Indeed, upon entering
college, students often experience challenges or obstacles associated with social group
differences. Research in psychology and education demonstrates the college environment
 Difference‑Education 131

often fails to foster a sense of fit and empowerment for first-­generation students (e.g.,
Ostrove & Long, 2007; Stephens, Brannon, et al., 2015). Illustrating a lack of fit, a first-­
generation student at Vanderbilt University recounted, “Never before had I truly felt such
an extreme sense of estrangement and alienation. . . . I quickly realized that although I
may look the part, my cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds were vastly different
from those of my predominantly White, affluent peers. I wanted to leave” (Riggs, 2014,
para. 2). Describing the experience of feeling disempowered upon entering college, one
first-­generation student at Cornell University said, “I had no road map for what I was
supposed to do once I made it to campus. . . . Aside from a check-in with my financial aid
officer . . . I was mostly keeping to myself to hide the fact that I was a very special kind
of lost” (Capó Crucet, 2015, para. 15).
A contextual theory of difference can help first-­generation students understand their
social group differences in a new, more positive light—as a strength, resource, or asset,
rather than as a stigma, weakness, or deficiency. Specifically, as shown in Figure 5.1,
viewing differences as contextual should change the meaning of difference and help first-­
generation students gain a sense of fit and empowerment.
Learning that difference is contextual can decrease the stigma attached to difference,
and therefore foster disadvantaged students’ sense of fit in the college setting. Provid-
ing a contextual theory of difference should increase students’ sense of fit by conveying
that their challenges are informed by their backgrounds and prior experiences, rather
than indicating their deficiency as individuals. In other words, the contextual theory
should convey the message that “differences are a normal part of the college experience.”
For example, a first-­generation student should understand that having parents without
a college education means that it will likely be harder to get advice from one’s parents
about college (e.g., how to choose a major), and they may need to go to a trusted advisor
instead. Accordingly, students should then gain a sense of fit from learning that “my dif-
ferences will not prevent me from finding my path.”
Likewise, learning that difference is contextual can imply that one’s experiences of
difference are malleable rather than fixed, and therefore foster disadvantaged students’
sense of empowerment in college. Providing a contextual theory should help students

Lay Theory Psychological Process Outcomes

of Change

Contextual Fit Improved

theory of social academic
“My differences will not
group difference prevent me from finding
performance
Difference is normal. my path.”

Difference is malleable. Empowerment

“I can overcome my
challenges and be successful.”

FIGURE 5.1. Psychological processes by which a contextual theory of social group difference

improves academic performance.
132 I. Education

better understand that their challenges are due to experiences in different contexts (e.g.,
they attended a less rigorous high school), rather than some individual deficiency. In
other words, the contextual theory should convey that “differences are malleable” and
can be changed in the future. For example, when confronting background-­specific chal-
lenges, a first-­generation student should understand that struggling in one’s classes could
be a result of having less preparation in a low-­quality high school, rather than less ability
to succeed. This should help students feel more efficacious and in control, and also foster
their willingness to take full advantage of the resources available to them. Accordingly,
students should then gain a sense of empowerment from learning that “I can overcome
my challenges and be successful.”

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
In an initial set of studies conducted at selective colleges, we delivered and tested difference-­
education in an effort to improve the academic outcomes of incoming first-­generation col-
lege students. These interventions exposed students to a contextual theory of social group
difference during the transition from high school to college by sharing contrasting stories
of senior college students from diverse social class backgrounds. The systematic varia-
tion in these stories showed intervention participants vivid examples of how their prior
social class contexts could inform their experiences in college. As of the publication of
this chapter, the intervention has been delivered in two ways: (1) through a student panel
that intervention participants attended in person (Stephens et al., 2014), and (2) through a
scalable version that intervention participants completed online (Townsend et al., 2018).
Both of these interventions were delivered early on in students’ first quarter or semes-
ter (see Yeager & Walton, 2011). We examined the outcomes of difference-­education
by following intervention participants throughout their time in college, obtaining their
official grades from the registrar’s office, and conducting a series of surveys and an in-­
person laboratory study (Stephens et al., 2014; Stephens, Townsend, Hamedani, Destin,
& Manzo, 2015; Townsend et al., 2018).
Across both the in-­person and online interventions, the primary goal was to improve
first-­generation college students’ academic outcomes. First, we examined the impact of
the intervention on students’ grades. For the in-­person intervention, an analysis of stu-
dents’ official first-year grades revealed that first-­generation students in the difference-­
education condition earned higher GPAs during their first years in college than their
counterparts in the control condition (Stephens et al., 2014), thereby reducing the social
class achievement gap by 63%. In the scalable version in which students read older stu-
dents’ stories online, we examined students’ GPAs during the first 2 years of college. This
study showed that difference-­education improved first-­generation students’ cumulative
GPA throughout their first 2 years of college (Townsend et al., 2018).
We also examined whether students learned the contextual theory of difference that
the intervention sought to convey. If the intervention communicated the theory effec-
tively, we reasoned that participants should be able to articulate some of the insights they
gained. They should also be able to use the theory to make sense of and respond to social
group differences in a more positive way. We explored both of these possibilities.
 Difference‑Education 133

First, we asked participants to write about what they learned from the student stories
that they had listened to in the panel or read about online. Based on our coding of themes
that emerged in participants’ open-ended responses, we found evidence consistent with
the idea that participants learned a contextual theory of difference. Specifically, both
first- and continuing-­generation participants in the difference-­education condition com-
pared to the control were far more likely to report that they had learned about how stu-
dents’ different backgrounds can matter in college (Stephens et al., 2014; Townsend et al.,
2018). For example, illustrating her understanding of how someone’s background shapes
the college experience, one intervention participant said, “People from different back-
grounds have different expectations of college.” Demonstrating a similar understanding,
another intervention participant said, “Everyone comes from such a different background
and has different motives for doing well.”
Second, we examined whether participants were able to use the theory to make sense
of and respond to social group differences in a more positive way. Consistent with the
idea that learning a contextual theory of difference conveys a relatively positive mean-
ing of difference, we found that participants in the difference-­education condition com-
pared to the control condition reported greater appreciation of difference (e.g., valuing
diversity as part of college; Stephens et al., 2014). Furthermore, at the end of the second
year in college, we also examined participants’ comfort with social group difference in
the course of their interactions with other college students (see Stephens, Townsend, et
al., 2015, for detailed methods). Specifically, we asked participants from the in-­person
intervention study to deliver a speech to a college student peer (i.e., a research assistant),
focusing on the topic of how their backgrounds could matter in college, and to complete
a series of stressful academic tasks. We then coded the content of the speech and also
obtained participants’ physiological responses. In the course of the speech, difference-­
education (vs. control) participants showed a greater willingness to talk about the impact
of their different background contexts (e.g., family and friends from home), and also were
more comfortable while doing so, as indicated by their physiological responses (Stephens,
Townsend, et al., 2015). This finding suggests that difference-­education encouraged par-
ticipants to understand and respond to difference in a new, more positive way compared
to participants in the control condition.

Mechanism
We theorized that the difference-­education intervention improves students’ academic per-
formance (e.g., GPA) by helping them to understand that their social group differences
are contextual in nature, rather than essential features of people or social groups. Specifi-
cally, as explained previously, we theorize that learning a contextual theory of difference
should help students to experience not only a greater sense of fit as part of the college
community but also a greater sense of empowerment to more fully take advantage of
campus resources (see Figure 5.1).
Broadly consistent with our theorizing, we found that difference-­education increased
both fit and empowerment across the in-­person and online interventions. In the in-­person
study, we found that both first- and continuing-­generation students in the difference-­
education condition reported greater fit than those in the control condition. In the online
study, however, we found that greater fit only emerged among first-­generation students
in the difference-­education versus control condition.
134 I. Education

As for experiences and behaviors related to empowerment, in the in-­person study,

we found an increased tendency among first-­generation students to take advantage of
the campus resources they needed to succeed at their university (e.g., seeking help from
professors; Stephens et al., 2014). In the online intervention, we found evidence of a com-
plementary but somewhat different process: first-­generation students reported a greater
sense of feeling empowered as learners, and also reported higher levels of efficacy, con-
trol, and preparation (Townsend et al., 2018). Taken together, and drawing from the
literatures reviewed above, we theorize that the intervention increased students’ sense
of empowerment—­the psychological experience of being empowered (e.g., efficacious),
coupled with the willingness to take the actions (e.g., seeking resources) necessary to
succeed.
When we examined the mechanism through which difference-­education produces
academic benefits (e.g., improved grades), we found that empowerment—­but not fit—
helps to explain these effects. In the in-­person intervention, seeking campus resources
served as one process by which difference-­ education improved first-­ generation stu-
dents’ grades. Similarly, in the online intervention study, the psychological experience
of empowerment served as one process by which difference-­education improved first-­
generation students’ grades.

Effects over Time
As described above, we observed benefits for students’ academic outcomes that persisted
throughout the first 2 years in college in the online difference-­education intervention
(Townsend et al., 2018). We are currently examining whether the grades benefits persist
throughout the duration of college in both interventions. We theorize that these aca-
demic benefits will persist throughout college because of the ways in which a contextual
theory initiates a positive, self-­reinforcing cycle of experiential and behavioral change
(e.g., Miller, Dannals, & Zlatev, 2017; Yeager & Walton, 2011). For example, when a
first-­generation student confronts a background-­specific challenge (e.g., difficulty choos-
ing a major), a contextual theory can help her change how she makes sense of her dif-
ferent experiences in college. Instead of interpreting this challenge as an indication of a
fixed deficiency, she can view it as a normal part of coming from her background (e.g.,
not having college-­educated parents to advise her). This interpretation should help foster
a sense of fit with the college community. Moreover, using a contextual theory to make
sense of her experience should convey that her challenge is not fixed, and that there
are steps that she can take to overcome this background-­specific challenge and improve
her outcomes in college. This interpretation should help foster a sense of empowerment.
In turn, these psychological experiences of fit and empowerment should foster positive
behavioral changes that have a number of downstream benefits. For example, this stu-
dent may be more likely to seek help or develop relationships with teachers, which can
amplify her psychological experiences of fit and empowerment and also improve her
academic performance.

Heterogeneity
Designing an effective psychological intervention requires considering a number of con-
textual and individual factors. For any psychological intervention to have a positive
 Difference‑Education 135

impact, the people targeted must first have the opportunity (i.e., enough resources or
skills) to achieve better outcomes. For example, college students must have enough food
and reliable housing to be able to focus on academic pursuits, and they must also have
the necessary academic skills so that increased academic effort (e.g., spending more time
studying) will translate into better academic outcomes (e.g., Stephens, Markus, et al.,
2012). In the case of difference-­education, we theorize that providing a contextual theory
improves students’ academic performance by fostering a greater sense of fit and empow-
erment. According to this logic, this intervention should be most effective when psycho-
logical obstacles play a role in undermining students’ performance. In other words, the
intervention should be most helpful when people already have a foundation of material
resources and academic skills, but are not performing up to their potential because of a
lack of fit or empowerment.
Beyond giving students the opportunity to succeed, it is also important to consider
the different academic contexts and groups with which the intervention can have the
most impact. There is nothing about difference-­education that limits it to the context of
higher education, nor to the particular focus on first-­generation college students. Though
future research should explore potential boundary conditions, we expect that difference-­
education would be effective across different settings and with different social groups
(e.g., women or racial or ethnic minorities). The general methodological strategy of
difference-­education should be the same: the intervention would seek to change people’s
experiences, behaviors, and outcomes by providing a contextual theory of difference.
However, as is the case in any intervention, context matters, and it is critically important
to take both the local context and the particular social group into account. In practice,
researchers and practitioners must work to understand the existing views and challenges
that a particular disadvantaged group faces in a setting, and tailor intervention methods
and content to address those particular views, challenges, and identity-­based concerns.
In the case of different social groups, an intervention designed to address race or
gender (vs. social class) would need to take into account how people’s existing views
about race and gender may differ from those about social class. Because existing views
about race or gender (vs. social class) in the United States are likely more well-­defined or
more essentialized, and thus more difficult to change (e.g., Destin, Rheinschmidt-­Same,
& Richeson, 2017), an intervention that seeks to provide a contextual theory about racial
or gender differences would need to be tailored to counteract people’s existing narratives
about race or gender (e.g., as biological features of people). Moreover, since discussions
about race and gender (vs. social class) may also be more fraught, these discussions may
require additional steps to render them inclusive and empowering, rather than threaten-
ing. For example, ethnic studies courses rely on highly trained instructors to talk about
these difficult topics, and they typically engage students in these conversations over an
extended period of time (e.g., a semester).
Future research should also examine in what kinds of social contexts and with whom
the intervention is most likely to be effective. Because we theorize that a difference-­
education intervention improves students’ outcomes by providing a contextual theory of
social group difference, we expect that the intervention could be effective in any setting
where a contextual theory would represent a significant change in how people would
otherwise make sense of their experiences. Specifically, we expect that a difference-­
education intervention would be far more effective in contexts where essentialist theories
are the default understanding of social group difference than in contexts where people
136 I. Education

are already well versed in a contextual theory. For example, in a given college or univer-
sity, it is important to consider what diversity efforts are already being implemented. If
students have previously engaged in various discussions about the contextual nature of
difference (e.g., through an orientation program, a seminar, or an ethnic studies course),
they are less likely to benefit from a difference-­education intervention.

COUSINS

Difference-­education focuses on changing how students construe the meaning and nature
of social group differences, which in turn helps improve their academic experience and
performance. This focus on changing how people construe their experiences is similar to
many other approaches in the wise intervention literature (Dittmann & Stephens, 2017;
Walton & Wilson, 2018). Among these interventions, difference-­education is perhaps
most similar to belongingness interventions in terms of the specific methods used to
deliver the message (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2007). Belongingness interventions seek to
change construal by having intervention participants learn from the stories of other suc-
cessful students at their university. Similar to these methods, difference-­education inter-
ventions also seek to change construal by exposing intervention participants to student
success stories. Belongingness and difference-­education diverge, however, in the content
of the student stories and thus the nature of the particular lay theory that they provide.
Belongingness interventions focus on changing students’ lay theory of adversity by signal-
ing that these experiences are shared in common with other students and will improve
with time (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2007). In contrast, difference-­education focuses on
changing students’ lay theory of social group difference by helping them to understand it
as contextual. Compared to belongingness, difference-­education therefore more explicitly
shows how students’ different backgrounds shape their different experiences in college.
Beyond the methodological similarity to other lay theory interventions in social psy-
chology, the key message in difference-­education is most similar to Gurin’s work on inter-
group dialogue learning experiences (Gurin & Nagda, 2006; Gurin, Nagda, & Zúñiga,
2013).
Intergroup dialogues are weekly discussion sessions in which students from diverse
backgrounds meet in groups and talk about their commonalities and differences. They
are encouraged to critically reflect with other students about the source, nature, and
impact of social group differences (Gurin & Nagda, 2006; Gurin et al., 2013). They also
discuss topics such as power, inequality, and privilege. These discussions of social group
difference make visible how important sociocultural contexts systematically shape peo-
ple’s life experiences and outcomes—­that is, the contextual nature of difference (Gurin
et al., 2013, p. 155). Indeed, Gurin and colleagues theorize that the dialogues “allow
a larger, social truth to emerge between and among individuals in which everyone rec-
ognizes themselves as social selves rather than autonomous beings” (p. 78). Participat-
ing in these dialogues has been shown to produce psychological tendencies associated
with intergroup skills, such as intergroup empathy, perspective taking, and intergroup
collaboration (see Gurin et al., 2013). Like intergroup dialogues, difference-­education
also educates students about the contextual nature of social group differences. However,
unlike intergroup dialogues, difference-­education provides a more focused message that
seeks to isolate the effects of a contextual theory without the more comprehensive learn-
ing experience.
 Difference‑Education 137

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION:

HOW DIFFERENCE‑EDUCATION CONVEYS A CONTEXTUAL THEORY

To assess the benefits of difference-­education, we randomly assigned half of the partici-

pants to attend a difference-­education intervention and the other half to attend an active
control intervention. In both conditions, incoming students either listened to or read the
stories of senior students who discussed how they adjusted to and found success in col-
lege. To make this educational experience relevant to everyone, and to also avoid stigma-
tizing disadvantaged students, the incoming intervention participants and senior students
sharing their stories included both first- and continuing-­generation students.
In the difference-­education intervention, the students’ stories linked their social
class backgrounds to different experiences they had in college. In particular, their stories
revealed how students’ different backgrounds can inform their experiences in both posi-
tive and negative ways, shaping (1) the challenges or obstacles they were likely to con-
front, as well as (2) the strengths and strategies they leveraged to be successful. Because
part of learning a contextual theory is understanding that social group differences can be
positive, it was critical to convey that students’ diverse backgrounds could be a source of
not only challenges but also strengths.
For instance, to highlight how different social class backgrounds can negatively shape
the college experience, one first-­generation student said, “Because my parents didn’t go to
college, they weren’t always able to provide me the advice I needed, so it was sometimes
hard to figure out which classes to take and what I wanted to do in the future.” This story
conveys a contextual understanding of difference by linking his previous social class
context (i.e., not having college-­educated parents) to an obstacle he faced in college (i.e.,
not knowing which classes to take). Similarly, after previously mentioning her parents’
graduate-­level degrees, one continuing-­generation student said, “I went to a small private
school, and it was great college prep. We got lots of one-on-one attention, so it was a big
adjustment going into classes with 300 people.” Like the first-­generation student’s story,
the continuing-­generation student’s story links her social class background (i.e., having
highly educated parents) to a college obstacle (i.e., having less attention and support in
college than in high school).
The intervention also exposed students to examples of how their diverse social class
backgrounds can shape the strategies and strengths they use to succeed in college. First-
and continuing-­generation stories discussed how they worked to address and overcome
the particular challenges that they confronted. For instance, after the first-­generation
student in the example above described the challenge of not being able to get specific
advice about college and careers from his parents, he said, “There are other people who
can provide that advice, and I learned that I needed to rely on my advisor more than other
students.” In contrast, after the continuing-­generation student described the challenge of
being overwhelmed in large classes, she explained, “I felt less overwhelmed when I took
the time to get to know other students in the class.”
To further convey how one’s background can positively shape the college experience,
the student stories described how their backgrounds afforded them particular strengths.
For instance, one first-­generation student said, “I’ve been through a lot in my life. . . .
It gave me perspective that made [university name] a lot easier to tackle. Midterms and
papers seem hard, and they are, but at the same time they just seem like another drop
in the bucket, and I love that perspective.” This first-­generation story links the student’s
social class background (i.e., overcoming adversity due to coming from a family without
138 I. Education

college education) to a strength (i.e., having a broad perspective), emphasizing the contex-
tual nature of her positive experiences in college. Likewise, after describing her parents
as having obtained college degrees, one continuing-­generation student said, “My choice
to attend [university name] really was supported by everyone in my family. There was no
sort of imposition by my parents [saying], ‘You need to go to the [school name]’ or any-
thing like that. It was like, ‘Wherever you want to go we’ll fully support you in any way
that we really can,’ and so they were very open with it.”
As in the first-­generation story, the continuing-­generation story links the student’s
social class background to a background-­specific strength. In this case, having parents
who are both college educated and financially secure means that those parents are more
likely to be open and supportive about a student’s college choices.
Students in the control intervention, in contrast, were exposed to similar stories that
also included obstacles, strategies, and strengths. However, these stories did not commu-
nicate a contextual theory of difference—­that is, the stories did not include background-­
specific information about how students’ social class backgrounds shaped their college
experiences. Using the same intervention format, incoming students learned from suc-
cessful senior students’ personal stories about their experiences in college—­in particular,
the challenges they faced and the strengths and strategies they leveraged to be successful.
One story mentioned an obstacle that a student faced in college (e.g., the coursework was
difficult) and then suggested a strategy for success, “Go to class, and pay attention. If you
don’t understand something or have a hard time with the material, meet with your teach-
ing assistant or professor during office hours.” As in the difference-­education condition,
participants in the control condition learned about students’ different experiences in col-
lege, including the challenges they faced (e.g., a student found coursework to be difficult),
and the strengths and strategies that they learned to be successful (e.g., a student found
it helpful to meet with a professor). Notably, across both conditions, participants learned
the same types of strategies for success, such as seeking help from peers and professors.
The key difference between the conditions was that students in the control condition did
not learn how their own and others’ backgrounds could inform their college experiences
(i.e., their obstacles, strengths, or strategies for success).

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

By providing a contextual theory of social group difference, difference-­education has

the potential to improve disadvantaged students’ academic achievement throughout col-
lege. Yet, given the many challenges that come with addressing social group differences,
what are some nuances that practitioners and researchers should consider when deliver-
ing a difference-­education intervention? In the section that follows, we briefly describe
some research-­based strategies that can help ensure that difference-­education is effective.
Although these strategies have not been tested directly in the context of social psychologi-
cal interventions, a wide range of research findings support their importance.

Avoid Stereotyping
It is critical to avoid stereotyping people based on their social group memberships when
discussing social group difference. Intentionally or unintentionally stereotyping students
 Difference‑Education 139

will produce feelings of threat and exclusion, and ultimately undermine their engage-
ment, motivation, and performance (e.g., Major, Spencer, Schmader, Wolfe, & Crocker,
1998; Steele, 2010). Instead, research suggests the importance of recognizing the inter-
section of multiple identities that is unique to each person, as well as the importance of
intragroup variation and diversity (e.g., Cole, 2009; Crenshaw, 1991; Markus & Conner,
2014; Rosenthal, 2016).
In a difference-­education intervention, multiple strategies can be used to avoid ste-
reotyping students or communicating limiting characterizations of their social groups.
First, it is important to demonstrate variation in students’ experiences both across and
within social groups; signal that these social differences are tendencies or patterns, rather
than one-to-one relationships; and show that social differences can evolve and change
with new experiences. We designed the difference-­education stories to differ not only
across students’ social class backgrounds but also within their particular social class
background. For example, first-­generation students’ stories included similar, but not
identical, content about their experiences in college. Another strategy is to maintain stu-
dents’ sense of individuality by showing them how the diverse sociocultural contexts of
their lives matter in ways that are unique to their particular backgrounds and identities.
For example, students’ social class, race, gender, and/or other backgrounds can shape
their experiences in distinct ways. Although the stories in difference-­education focused
primarily on social class, they also acknowledged intersectional identities (e.g., being an
African American, male, first-­generation college student).

Acknowledge Both Negatives and Positives

It is important to acknowledge both negative and positive realities of social group differ-
ence. On the one hand, teaching positive content alone (e.g., pride in one’s group or iden-
tity) would fail to prepare students for the background-­specific challenges they are likely
to face in college (e.g., Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007; Gurin et al., 2013). On the other
hand, focusing on negative content alone (e.g., discussing stereotypes about one’s group)
would likely be highly demotivating for students (e.g., see Ben-Zeev et al., 2017). For
example, research on “wise feedback” shows that negative feedback is motivating only
when paired with “an invocation of high standards and by an assurance of the student’s
capacity to reach those standards” (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999, p. 1302).
In a difference-­education intervention, it is therefore important to provide stu-
dents with opportunities to learn about how social group differences can impact their
life experiences and outcomes in both positive and negative ways. In the difference-­
education interventions described above, we balanced students’ discussion of the nega-
tive background-­specific challenges they faced with a discussion of the positive strengths
and strategies (e.g., seeking help from professors) that can provide a path to success. For
example, after the stories described students’ challenges (e.g., choosing a major), they
then discussed ways to overcome them, empowering participants with strategies they can
use to be successful.

Make Difference Relevant to Everyone

It is also important to make the experience of learning about social group differences
relevant to everyone—­both advantaged and disadvantaged students (see Moss-­Racusin
140 I. Education

et al., 2016; Sleeter, 2011). For disadvantaged students, seeing that difference is also rele-
vant to advantaged students can help normalize the experience of difference and reassure
them that they are not being singled out (e.g., Hummel & Steele, 1996). At the same time,
including advantaged students in discussions of social group difference can help ensure
that they will experience the topic of social group difference as self-­relevant and impor-
tant for their own lives and experiences, while also reducing the likelihood that they will
perceive difference as a threat (e.g., Dover, Major, & Kaiser, 2016; Plaut, Garnett, Buf-
fardi, & Sanchez-­Burks, 2011; Wilkins, Hirsch, Kaiser, & Inkles, 2016).
In a difference-­education intervention, one strategy to help all people see differ-
ence as self-­relevant is to include the contrasting stories of both advantaged and disad-
vantaged students. In the difference-­education interventions described above, the stories
of the senior students, as well as the intervention participants, included both first- and
continuing-­generation students. The contrast between these stories of students from dif-
ferent social class backgrounds can help all students learn how their backgrounds and
prior life experiences shape who they are. Including individuals from diverse backgrounds
also makes it possible to frame the intervention as a general (rather than group specific)
program that can help everyone adjust to a new setting.

Give Voice to Underrepresented Narratives

Giving voice to underrepresented narratives—­that is, student stories that are typically
excluded from the mainstream—­is crucial for fostering a sense of fit and inclusion, as
well as the empowerment to find a path to success (e.g., Delgado & Stefancic, 2000;
Duncan-­ A ndrade & Morrell, 2008; Mitra, 2004). These narratives should provide
diverse perspectives that can help to recognize and validate the life experiences of disad-
vantaged students.
In a difference-­education intervention, it is important to give voice to these under-
represented narratives in two key ways. First, students’ stories should enable participants,
especially those who are disadvantaged by the setting, to recognize themselves in these
stories. In the difference-­education interventions described earlier, we presented students’
stories in a way that illuminated their diverse experiences and paths to success. Second,
it is critical to choose narratives that convey comfort and self-­acceptance, rather than
discomfort or embarrassment. In the difference-­education interventions described above,
students discussed difficult topics, but at the same time demonstrated an understanding
and acceptance of their own experiences. For example, as one first-­generation student
confidently shared, “Once I came to [university name], I realized that I didn’t have to
be strong all of the time and that most people had no expectations of me besides trying
my best and putting in effort in classes. After that, I realized that there was no shame in
struggling or asking for help.”

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

We believe that various behind-­ the-­

scenes strategies are critical to ensuring that a
difference-­education intervention will be successful. Key strategies include (1) adapting
intervention content to the context of the study, (2) conducting the intervention during
a period of transition, and (3) ensuring that participation is voluntary. Although these
 Difference‑Education 141

strategies are relevant to all interventions, they can be applied specifically to difference-­
education interventions.
First, it is critical to adapt the stories to reflect students’ actual experiences in a
given college or university setting. To do so, we begin by talking to administrators and
interviewing students to better understand the financial, academic, and psychological
obstacles they face. We then adapt our intervention materials (i.e., the student stories) so
that they reflect the actual experiences of students in that setting. For example, if a vast
majority of students are Latinx, then it is critical to ensure that Latinx students’ perspec-
tives are well represented in the stories. Beyond representation, the stories should also
highlight the common experiences, challenges, activities, and campus resources available
there. For example, in a high-­ranking university where first-­generation college students
are frequently a very small minority, these students are likely to confront more questions
about belonging than they would if they were attending a lower-­ranking university or
community college where first-­generation students are more highly represented. Student
stories should be carefully adapted to include the most common and relevant issues.
Second, it is critical to conduct the intervention during a transitional moment. When-
ever possible, we deliver the difference-­education intervention at the beginning of the aca-
demic year, typically within the first month of the fall semester. We believe that the inter-
vention content is likely to have the greatest impact in changing students’ construal when
they are still making sense of their experiences in this new setting. For example, when
they are still learning about what it means to come from a different background or to
have a different experience than other students. This meaning-­making process could per-
sist for different lengths of time depending on the context. After students have adjusted
to a new setting for many months or years, their understandings of themselves and their
experiences may be more difficult to change.
Third, whenever possible, it is critical to ensure that participation in difference-­
education intervention is voluntary, at least to some extent. As is the case in all interven-
tions, it is important for participants to feel like they have a choice. When students choose
to participate, particularly in middle-­class U.S. contexts, they are more likely to be fully
engaged and motivated to learn (see Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). Research sug-
gests that forcing students to participate (e.g., in a mandatory program) is more likely to
produce reactance and decrease engagement (see Dobbin & Kalev, 2013; Dobbin, Kim,
& Kalev, 2011).

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

At first glance, a review of research in mainstream social psychology might suggest that
helping disadvantaged students succeed requires avoiding discussions of social group dif-
ference altogether. Stemming from the essentialist view of difference, the topic of social
group differences is often represented as stigmatizing and a potential threat to avoid.
Markus (2008) argues that viewing difference in this negative light permeates much of
social psychology. For example, the literatures on intergroup relations, implicit bias,
social categorization, and social identity threat reflect this perspective on difference.
According to research in these areas, when social group differences become salient, they
have the potential to produce negative consequences, such as stereotyping, bias, and dis-
crimination (Brewer & Miller, 1984; Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000; see Gurin & Nagda,
142 I. Education

2006; Gurin et al., 2013, for discussion). For example, in the face of negative, essential-
izing stereotypes about one’s group, disadvantaged students are likely to underperform
on achievement tasks (e.g., Steele, 2010).
In contrast to this commonly held negative view of “difference as a threat,” research
in cultural psychology and the literatures on multicultural and social justice education
suggest that acknowledging social group difference need not create the experience of
threat. Instead, when viewed from a contextual perspective, social group differences have
the potential to serve as an important source of meaning, identity, and motivation (see
Markus, 2008; see also Brannon, Taylor, Higginbotham, & Henderson, 2017). Consis-
tent with these perspectives, the difference-­education intervention presented here sug-
gests that consequences of social group difference hinge on how students construe the
meanings of difference and how it relates to their experiences as students. Indeed, as
we argued throughout this chapter, when difference is represented and understood as
contextual—­that is, a product of people’s ongoing participation in particular sociocul-
tural contexts over time—it has the potential to be experienced positively and to help
students find a path to success that takes their differences into account.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This chapter explains what difference-­education is, how to implement it effectively, and
why it can be an effective approach to reducing educational disparities. Yet, a number
of important questions remain unanswered. As is the case with other successful social
psychological interventions, future research on difference-­education interventions should
further specify the necessary and sufficient components that drive the intervention’s ben-
efits. One important question is whether role models with similar backgrounds are neces-
sary for students to gain a contextual understanding of difference. For example, would
intervention participants need to listen to the stories of successful senior students, or
could they simply read a research article about the contextual sources of social inequal-
ity?
Future research should also investigate the specific ways in which interventions that
provide a contextual theory can catalyze psychological and behavioral changes in a recur-
sive cycle over time (see Miller et al., 2017; Yeager & Walton, 2011). Based on previous
work on multicultural and social justice education, as well as the difference-­education
studies presented here, we suggest that fit and empowerment are two key processes that
explain how a contextual theory changes behavior (e.g., seeking resources) and improves
academic performance.
However, further work is needed to unpack precisely how these psychological
changes work in both directions to sustain long-term behavioral changes (and vice
versa). For example, in one direction, how might the psychological experiences of fit and
empowerment work together to initiate key behavioral changes, such as seeking campus
resources or developing a relationship with a mentor? And, in the other direction, how do
these behavioral changes impact and sustain students’ psychological changes over time as
they progress through college and encounter new experiences? Research is also needed to
better understand when the psychological benefits of fit and empowerment emerge only
for the disadvantaged group targeted by the intervention versus when they occur for all
students—­both disadvantaged and advantaged.
 Difference‑Education 143

Beyond fit and empowerment, research should consider other possible complemen-
tary processes through which learning a contextual theory of difference could catalyze
psychological or behavioral change. Although we have shown that difference-­education
participants are more comfortable discussing their differences with a peer (Stephens,
Townsend, et al., 2015), future work might also consider whether students who learn a
contextual theory of difference become more culturally intelligent or competent—­that
is, able to more effectively navigate across different cultural contexts (e.g., Ang & Van
Dyne, 2008; Earley & Ang, 2003; Leung, Ang, & Tan, 2014). Likewise, research could
ask whether students develop metacognitive skills about how cultures work and how
people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions can be shaped by their cultures (e.g., Leung, Lee,
& Chiu, 2013; Mor, Morris, & Joh, 2013).
In addition, future research should also consider how such a theory might be used to
drive cultural change at an institutional level. As in other social psychological interven-
tions (Yeager & Walton, 2011; Wilson, 2011), difference-­education focuses on providing
a new lay theory (i.e., a contextual theory of social group difference) to change students’
psychological experiences (e.g., increase their fit and empowerment) and academic out-
comes. We believe that these individual-­level changes are not a panacea and may fail to
support long-term change if they are not built into and reinforced by the larger college
culture. To maintain and support these individual-­level changes over time, we must also
change institutional-­level policies, practices, and resources (e.g., Markus & Conner, 2014;
Markus & Hamedani, 2019; Stephens, Markus, & Fryberg, 2012; Walton & Wilson,
2018). For example, universities could communicate a contextual theory of difference in
diversity courses; dorm programming or first-year programs or via shared cultural prod-
ucts, such as university websites or student guidebooks. At the same time, because people
can shape their cultures (Markus & Hamedani, 2019), providing a contextual theory at
an individual level also has the potential to change institutions. Increasing individual-­level
awareness and understanding of difference has the potential to create a more inclusive and
accepting environment in which students are empowered to effect change.
In conclusion, even the most academically prepared first-­generation students con-
front particular psychological obstacles that can fuel the social class achievement gap in
higher education. This chapter provided an overview of how difference-­education can
help disadvantaged students overcome these psychological obstacles and find a path to
success that takes their different experiences into account. The research reviewed here
suggests that the difference-­education approach has the potential to improve the aca-
demic outcomes of disadvantaged students by communicating a contextual theory of
social group difference. When students learn that their differences are a product of con-
textual experience, rather than essential features of people or groups, they should expe-
rience greater fit and empowerment in college. In turn, their improved experiences in
college can help them more fully engage in and take advantage of the resources available
to them and ultimately improve their opportunity to succeed.

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 C H A P TE R 6

The Pathways Intervention as a Model

to Design Broader Systems
of Equitable Student Support

Mesmin Destin and Ivan A. Hernandez

The pathways intervention is built upon the images that young people have of the type of
people they might become in the future. Studies related to the pathways intervention dem-
onstrate the importance of guiding students to perceive the path to their desired futures as
open or within reach and to develop strategies that will help them progress toward desired
future identities. For students from lower-­socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds and
racial/ethnic-­minority groups, the pathways intervention is particularly well suited to increase
the likelihood that they genuinely envision higher education as a part of their future, which
helps to support academic motivation through challenges. The pathways intervention and
related studies have led students to imagine future identities that are connected to educa-
tion and have increased students’ expected academic performance and planned effort on
school tasks. In its full implementation, the intervention has shown significant positive effects
on students’ academic outcomes and well-being that persisted through a 2-year follow-­up
period. In this chapter, we describe the theory behind the pathways intervention and related
experiments, in addition to empirical evidence for its effects on a variety of outcomes and
implications for psychological theory, research, and policy.

BACKGROUND

Students in the United States have very high aspirations for educational and lifetime
success, in general. When asked how far they plan to go in school, the vast majority of

148
 The Pathways Intervention 149

students express that they want to complete a college degree or beyond, regardless of
their socioeconomic background (Mickelson, 1990; Oyserman & Lewis, 2017; Schnei-
der & Stevenson, 1999). In reality, though, students from families with fewer financial
resources are less likely to reach college than students from wealthier families (Ma,
Pender, & Welch, 2016). This is in large part due to the many ways that having more
family financial assets affords students with better-­resourced schools, more enriching
academic experiences, and increased access to future opportunities (Jackson, Johnson,
& Persico, 2016; Lafortune, Rothstein, & Schanzenbach, 2018; Lovenheim, 2011). For
example, a student who attends a high school in a wealthy neighborhood is more likely
to have regular access to guidance counselors and college preparatory curriculum than
a student who attends a school in a segregated, lower-­income community (see Corwin,
Venegas, Oliverez, & Colyar, 2004; Gamoran & Hannigan, 2000; Kanno & Kangas,
2014). One reason why these resources matter for academic outcomes is that they signal
to students what is actually likely for their futures and either reinforce or weaken stu-
dents’ visions of their lives to come. These images of the future, which are sometimes
called possible selves or future identities, help to guide students’ everyday behaviors and
their motivation to engage and persist in school tasks that can lead to reaching high aca-
demic goals. The pathways intervention involves a series of activities that are designed
to bolster students’ developing future identities and their understanding of the path to
reach their goals. As a result, pathways helps to support students’ school motivation
even in contexts that do not otherwise consistently reinforce the images that they have
for their futures.
Before offering greater depth regarding the theory, evidence, and application related
to the pathways intervention, there are two important caveats or considerations to keep
in mind. First, the core issue that pathways aims to address originates at a level that is sit-
uated beyond the individual student or psychological processes. The access to resources
that students encounter in their schools and neighborhoods provides the foundation for
how they imagine their futures and pursue school goals. Ideally, acknowledging and
addressing the root manifestations of economic inequality that young people experience
should be part of any large-scale effort to improve academic outcomes through future
identities. At the very least, though, efforts at psychological intervention should leverage
the messages that students receive from their surrounding contexts (e.g., peers, parents,
teachers, schools, neighborhoods) in order to amplify the potential effects of individual,
student-­targeted intervention.
Second, the idea of psychological intervention, itself, can carry certain assumptions
that do not always align with the broader goal of increasing educational equity. Psycho-
logical intervention can inherently situate the researcher—­who is often from a dominant
racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and/or cultural background—­as the savior, and the student
as the target of the problem without expertise and agency. As described, the pertinent
target of intervention rests at a higher level than just the individual student. However,
psychological studies can provide strong evidence for how environments and experiences
shape people’s outlooks, and this evidence can be used to inform the development of sys-
temic interventions that go beyond the individual. Despite these considerations, the term
intervention is used to describe pathways research for simplicity and consistency with
other chapters in the book.
150 I. Education

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

There are three primary psychological processes theorized to underlie the pathways inter-
vention. The foundation for the pathways intervention and the establishment of these
processes were derived from early work detailing the core postulates of identity-­based
motivation theory, which builds from ideas including the working self-­concept, situated
cognition, and possible selves (see Markus & Nurius, 1986; Markus & Wurf, 1987;
Miller, Brickman, & Bolen, 1975; Smith & Semin, 2007).

Dynamic Construction
Although people often tend to think about their identities as stable over time when
describing themselves, there are many important aspects of how individuals view and
express themselves that are shaped heavily by the environment in real time. People often
automatically bring to mind parts of themselves that are relevant to interacting with
the situation at hand (Markus & Wurf, 1987), and the basic ways that our minds pro-
cess information vary depending on aspects of the environment (Smith & Semin, 2004,
2007). These identities that are constructed and cued in context guide how it feels to
engage in particular behaviors, how situations are interpreted, and what behavior seems
relevant. The pathways intervention provides students with opportunities to elaborate
upon their current and possible future identities that are connected to education in a way
that increases their salience across environments and over time (Oyserman, 2015).

Action Readiness
Building upon dynamic construction, when a particular identity is brought to mind, it
accompanies a greater likelihood that a person engages in behaviors associated with that
identity (Oyserman & Destin, 2010). Specifically, people who articulate images of them-
selves reaching, or even failing to reach, a desired future (i.e., future identities) are more
effective in pursuing their educational and health goals than people who do not bring those
possible future identities to mind (Hoyle & Sherrill, 2006; Ruvolo & Markus, 1992). If a
student’s identity that is connected to education is not cued in context, then engaging in
behavior that is relevant to that identity (e.g., schoolwork, studying) does not feel fluent in
the moment. The pathways intervention enhances this connection between student identi-
ties and specific school behaviors that are relevant to reaching academic goals.

Interpretation of Difficulty
Finally, identities shape how people interpret and respond to experiences of difficulty
when pursuing identity-­relevant goals (Fisher & Oyserman, 2017; Oyserman, Elmore,
Novin, Fisher, & Smith, 2018; Smith & Oyserman, 2015). More specifically, when a task
feels connected to a salient and valued identity, people are likely to interpret difficulty
during that task as a sign that they are working on something that has meaning and
importance. When important identities feel connected to academic achievement, then
everyday academic challenges are interpreted as meaning that school tasks are impor-
tant rather than impossible (Fisher & Oyserman, 2017; Smith & Oyserman, 2015). On
the other hand, when a task feels disconnected from any valued identity, encountering
 The Pathways Intervention 151

difficulty is more likely to signal to a person that the task is impossible for them and that
they should relent. For example, lower-SES students who encounter evidence that there
are robust opportunities for socioeconomic mobility to reach their desired futures are less
likely to interpret academic difficulty as a sign that a school task is impossible (i.e., are
more inclined to persist when faced with academic difficulty) than those who encounter
evidence that there is not much opportunity to ascend the socioeconomic ladder (Brow-
man, Destin, Carswell, & Svoboda, 2017).

How the Pathways Intervention Fosters Motivation

From a psychological perspective, resources and a supportive environment matter because
contexts shape the ways that people view themselves and their possible futures, the cor-
responding actions that they take, and the ways that they respond to difficulty and set-
backs (Oyserman & Destin, 2010). For example, a seventh-­grade student who grows up
in a neighborhood surrounded by people with many different career pathways and edu-
cational backgrounds is likely to vividly imagine pursuing a desirable future career and
education, which helps provide meaning to everyday school tasks. For a context to fully
support these future identities, it must consistently reinforce self-­relevant goals that are
connected to school and achievement (Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006).
The pathways intervention aims to increase the likelihood that people’s aspirations
translate into the effective pursuit of their future identities by targeting the connections
among the contexts, identities, and behaviors described above. Students are more likely
to focus sustained effort on educational tasks (e.g., class work, studying) when contexts
reinforce their aspirational future identities, including a focus on both the objective and
the path to get there. When identity-­based motivational processes are activated to sup-
port positive student outcomes, the following experiences occur: (1) school-­related future
goals that are relevant to one’s identity come to mind in the academic context (e.g., “I
want to graduate from college”); (2) these goals feel within reach and congruent with
other important aspects of identity in ways that inspire action (e.g., “Other people from
lower-SES backgrounds effectively work toward and succeed in college”); and (3) aca-
demic difficulties that are experienced along the way are interpreted as meaning that an
education-­dependent future is important (e.g., “Studying for this test is difficult, so it
must be important for me to do well at it”), not impossible.
The pathways intervention provides students with the opportunity to elaborate upon
the images of the types of adults they might like to become in the future (e.g., financially
secure adult). The pathways intervention also guides students toward perceiving that the
path to their desired futures is open and that there are resources and strategies that will
help them reach their desired (and avoid undesired) future identities (Destin, 2017; Destin
& Oyserman, 2009). Students who have more elaborate and strategic behavioral plans
to reach their goals are more likely to effectively pursue their future identities than those
with less concrete strategies (Oyserman, Johnson, & James, 2011). Further, generally
emphasizing the idea of education as a journey helps to support school-­focused motiva-
tion (Landau, Oyserman, Keefer, & Smith, 2014). As described in more detail below, the
pathways intervention also shifts students’ tendencies toward interpreting obstacles and
difficulties in reaching their desired futures as normal and important, while simultane-
ously strengthening connections between their social identities and images of their pos-
sible future identities.
152 I. Education

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
The pathways intervention and related randomized controlled field experiments have
shown positive effects on the academic motivation of students, with most studies focusing
on students from lower-SES backgrounds and racial/ethnic-­minority groups. The seminal
implementation of the pathways intervention was delivered to 264 middle school students
from predominantly low-­income backgrounds and racial/ethnic-­minority groups (Oyser-
man et al., 2006). Students in this sample were randomly assigned to either a control con-
dition or an intervention condition where they participated in 11 different sessions that
were each completed during a single class period. Students in the intervention showed a
significantly better trajectory in their academic motivation, standardized test scores, and
grades compared with students in the control group. Further, the positive effects of the
intervention extended to outcomes including reductions in student absences, misbehav-
ior in school, and depression (Oyserman et al., 2006). These positive effects persisted
through a 2-year follow-­up period. The pathways intervention effects persist because they
aim to shift the way that people view themselves in relation to academic contexts and
opportunities, congruent with a wise intervention approach (Walton & Wilson, 2018).
In addition to the main intervention study, smaller-­scale field experiments have
tested specific aspects of the pathways approach. One series of studies, for example, dem-
onstrated the positive effects of need-based college financial aid information designed
to make the pathway to future opportunities feel open rather than closed. Ninety-­six
seventh-­grade students in urban middle schools from predominantly low-­income, Black,
and Hispanic/Latinx backgrounds were randomly assigned to receive either the experi-
mental materials about financial aid or materials about the costs of college that might
act as a barrier or close the path to future goals. The experimental or control materials
were delivered during a single class session. The experimental treatment increased stu-
dents’ expected grades and planned effort on homework, studying, and reading (Destin
& Oyserman, 2009).
Another randomized controlled field experiment related to the pathways interven-
tion demonstrated the effects of thinking about desired future economic success as con-
nected to education. A sample of 295 seventh-­grade students (59% African American or
Latinx; 61% of middle school students qualified for free or reduced lunch) were randomly
assigned to an experimental treatment condition where they received evidence of the con-
nection between higher education and higher income and a control condition that drew
attention to high-­earning careers that were not connected to education (e.g., athletes,
entertainers, musicians). The experimental or control materials were delivered during a
single class session. Students in the experimental treatment condition planned to expend
more effort on homework and studying and were more likely to turn in an extra-­credit
assignment the day after the experiment than students in the control condition (Destin
& Oyserman, 2010).
An additional field experiment related to the pathways intervention included a more
diverse sample of 156 seventh-­grade students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds
and racial/ethnic groups. Once again, the materials about need-based financial aid that
were designed to make pathways to opportunities feel open had positive effects, this time
in comparison to a control group that did not receive any such materials. The materials
 The Pathways Intervention 153

were delivered during a single class session, and students from lower-SES families who
were randomly assigned to the experimental treatment condition showed an increase in
their plans to engage in schoolwork compared with those in the control group (Destin,
2017). These studies offer evidence that the pathways intervention has positive effects on
students, and that they support academic motivation through the shared mechanism of
identity.

Mechanisms
The pathways intervention improves student outcomes by providing students with the
opportunity and support to elaborate upon their motivating identities, with a particular
emphasis on their developing future identities. In the main intervention study, future
identities are measured as possible selves, or written descriptions of who students hope to
become or avoid becoming in the future. Participating in pathways led students to articu-
late future identities that were connected to education and more detailed, plausible, and
linked to everyday strategies than control group students, which all activate the processes
of identity-­based motivation and mediate positive effects on academic achievement. Simi-
larly, the field experiments related to the pathways intervention also activated students’
future identities in connection to education in order to support academic motivation.
Some experiments directly activated the mechanism by leading students to think about
desired successful futures as connected to education (Destin & Oyserman, 2010). Other
studies indirectly activated the same mechanism through an emphasis on resources that
open the pathway to desired future identities connected to education (Destin & Oyser-
man, 2009). In a direct test of this theoretical pathway among a sample of lower-SES
students, those who were randomly assigned to an experimental condition focused on
resources and an open path were more likely to envision future identities that were con-
nected to education than similar students who were randomly assigned to a comparison
condition (Destin, 2017). The increased salience of a future identity connected to edu-
cation mediated positive effects of the experimental treatment on student motivation.
Students planned to devote more effort toward their long-term academic goals if they
envisioned a salient future identity that included a college education. The experimental
manipulation shifted students’ perceptions of potential economic barriers and encour-
aged students to envision a desired future that was likely to include education. In all of
these studies, when students from lower-SES backgrounds engage with pathways materi-
als during early adolescence, they are more likely to imagine higher education as a part of
their future, which leads to increased academic motivation (see Figure 6.1).

Effects over Time
The majority of the field experiments related to the pathways intervention were not
designed to examine long-term effects. In most of the studies, students completed outcome
measures immediately after experimental manipulations materials were made salient.
However, the most robust evidence of the longitudinal impact of the pathways inter-
vention comes from the seminal implementation among students from predominantly
low-­income backgrounds and racial/ethnic-­minority groups (Oyserman et al., 2006).
These students participated in multiple sessions that reinforced key processes (see below
for more details). Students in the intervention displayed greater academic motivation,
154 I. Education

Identity-based
motivation

Pathways Academic
intervention outcomes

FIGURE 6.1.  Identity-­based motivation as the primary mechanism of the pathways intervention.

standardized test scores, grades, and also displayed reductions in absences, misbehavior
in school, and depression (Oyserman et al., 2006) compared with students in the control
group. These positive effects were mediated by shifts in identity and persisted through a
2-year follow-­up period.

Heterogeneity
The processes related to identity-­based motivation can apply across demographic groups,
but the pathways intervention and related experiments tend to be most relevant and effec-
tive for students from lower-SES backgrounds and racial/ethnic-­minority groups. They
are designed to counteract contextual cues that students from these nondominant groups
encounter (e.g., financial barriers to higher education) that can weaken identities and
motivation. More generally, the pathways intervention matters most for students who
perceive barriers to their desired futures or who see a certain social identity as incompat-
ible with that desired future (see Debrosse, Destin, Rossignac-­M ilon, Taylor, & Rogers,
2018; Debrosse, Rossignac-­M ilon, Taylor, & Destin, 2018).

RELATED APPROACHES (“COUSINS”)

The pathways intervention is related to a number of other social psychological interven-

tions. Self-­affirmation interventions, for example, also involve reflections on the self.
Further, just as pathways allows students to individually bring to mind and articulate
a genuinely valued identity, a key aspect of affirmation studies is that content is self-­
generated and tailored to tap into each student’s particular valued identity (Cohen &
Sherman, 2014). However, these two interventions are quite different. Self-­affirmation
interventions aim to improve student outcomes by shifting their perspectives in ways that
alleviate potential psychological threats to achievement (e.g., stereotype threat; Steele,
1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995). In the typical paradigm, students select, reflect upon,
and write about personally important values (see Sherman, Lokhande, Müller, & Cohen,
Chapter 3, this volume; Steele, 1988), which bolsters students’ sense of worth, helping
to alleviate potential psychological threats to achievement. The pathways intervention,
on the other hand, is tailored to activate a more broadly applicable motivational pro-
cess by linking the individual’s present self with future identities. When identity-­based
motivational processes connect the present self with future identities, individuals engage
in important behaviors that facilitate the pursuit or avoidance of that future identity,
 The Pathways Intervention 155

whereas affirmation interventions can sometimes disengage people from their goal pur-
suit (e.g., Vohs, Park, & Schmeichel, 2013).
Utility- ­value interventions may activate similar motivational processes to those
activated by the pathways intervention and identity-­based motivation. Both perspectives
emphasize the ways that goal-­related tasks, like schoolwork, are related to students’ per-
sonal lives. Utility-­value experiments ask students to consider how course material or
knowledge is useful and relevant for goals or aspects of their life outside of school (Har-
ackiewicz, Canning, Tibbetts, Priniski, & Hyde, 2016). Although related, the pathways
intervention is more likely to target students’ construal of the social context (e.g., per-
ceived financial barriers to college) that influences the development of their identities,
whereas utility-­value experiments focus more directly on the construal of the students’
schoolwork itself. After making more connections between the course material and their
lives, students display greater course achievement expectations, continuing interest in
the course, and value the course material more (Hulleman, Kosovich, Barron, & Daniel,
2017). One distinction between utility-­value and pathways interventions is that the path-
ways intervention is more likely to start by invoking students’ broad images of their lives
in the future and then narrow to specific goal-­related content. Utility-­value approaches
are more likely to first invoke students’ specific goals or work on specific tasks that might
then broaden to be considered as part of a more complete image of their life in the future.
In other words, pathways often starts by asking, “Who do I want to become?,” while
utility value often asks, “How is this course content relevant to me?”
Growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interventions, like the pathways intervention and a
number of other notable interventions (e.g., social-­belonging interventions; see Walton
& Brady, Chapter 2, this volume), also target outcomes related to academic motivation
and achievement by providing students with new ways to make sense of and respond to
their academic experiences. Growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interventions might address
the question “Am I smart enough to do the work in college?” They often impart in
students the belief that they can learn, change, and develop particular skills or traits,
such as intelligence. These beliefs alter the way students interpret and respond to aca-
demic difficulties, usually leading them to be more resilient and persistent in the face
of challenges (e.g., Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Yeager & Dweck, 2012).
Growth-­mindset interventions directly convey that struggle is an opportunity for growth
and learning (see Paunesku et al., 2015). Similarly, social-­belonging interventions help
students perceive challenges in their educational experiences as normal and evolving
over time. However, social-­belonging interventions target the question “Can I come to
belong in college?”
The pathways intervention, on the other hand, conveys the meta-­message that the
schoolwork they are currently engaging in is relevant to both who they are currently
and who they can become in the future, indirectly leading school challenges to be seen
as important to reaching their desired identity. Other related work directly disrupts stu-
dents’ misperception that experienced difficulties in an academic domain imply that they
will never be able to succeed in that domain or that they should pursue a different future
goal or identity (Lin-­Siegler, Ahn, Chen, Fang, & Luna-­Lucero, 2016). Much of this work
has been influenced by earlier attributional-­retraining interventions (e.g., Wilson & Lin-
ville, 1982, 1985). The pathways intervention, instead, directly increases the likelihood
that students imagine education as a part of their future and guide students to perceive
the path toward their desired futures as open, expanding students’ perceptions of what is
156 I. Education

possible for them. When schoolwork feels connected to that salient and valued identity,
students interpret difficulty in school as something meaningful and important.
The pathways intervention is concerned with students’ successful pursuit of attain-
ing a desired future outcome. As such, pathways is also related to a family of other
goal-­setting interventions. For example, proximal goal interventions guide students who
are disinterested and displaying significant challenges in math to set proximal goals (vs.
distal goals) to accomplish, which leads them to display greater math self-­efficacy and
actual mastery of mathematical operations (Bandura & Schunk, 1981). Additionally,
implementation-­intention interventions guide students to set “if–then” plans that tar-
get the execution of the preset goal intentions, which significantly increase the likeli-
hood that individuals successfully attain their goals (see Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006, for
meta-­analyses and review). Similar to the pathways intervention, these interventions link
present behaviors to goal pursuit. However, pathways implements a combination of long-
term goals, but with an emphasis on an individual’s long-term identity. In the pathways
intervention, personal and unique goal setting is also very important. However, goal
proximity is a crucial distinction between these two approaches.
Whereas proximal goal interventions are designed to lead students to set short-term
small goals that build on one another, the pathways intervention starts by focusing on
distal futures (e.g., an adolescent thinking about an aspired adult career) and linking
them to more immediate action. Additionally, the pathways intervention shapes students’
perceptions about what is possible for them and people like them in the future, whereas
proximal goal interventions might more directly target current self-­efficacy in a specific
domain (e.g., math). Further, whereas implementation intentions are intended to facilitate
goal pursuit by setting strategies to overcome obstacles, for example, pathways targets
the congruency between the current action and one’s future identity (e.g., “If I am to be
a college graduate, then completing this extra-­credit assignment is congruent with that
identity, and therefore, is meaningful in the moment”). There are a number of other
related social-­psychological interventions that space here does not allow for comparison
(see also Bryan, Walton, Rogers, & Dweck, 2011; Miller et al., 1975; Yeager et al., 2014).

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

The pathways intervention may be implemented over several weeks and consists of a
series of workshops. The seminal pathways intervention was delivered during 11 different
sessions that are each completed during a single class period. Each session had a specific
purpose, built on the previous session, and reinforced the primary aims over a 7-week
period (see Oyserman, 2015). The goals were to guide students to reflect on and identify
their desired adult identities and to describe strategies to attain them. The intervention
established a connection between students’ future identities and strategies to attain them,
shifted the way they interpreted difficulty to focus on the importance of their setbacks
in attaining their future identities, and created a link between their social identities and
possible futures.
The first two sessions include interactive activities leading students to identify their
adult possible selves and to increase their salience and congruence with their social iden-
tities. The third session focuses on identifying the role models and people who might
be negative forces in their lives. During the fourth session, students draw timelines
 The Pathways Intervention 157

connecting their current life to their future, including potential obstacles and different
opportunities that might arise along the way. The fifth, sixth, and seventh sessions incor-
porate skill building as students generate strategies that would help them reach their
desired futures and avoid their undesired futures. This includes activities and opportu-
nities for students to internalize the idea that difficulty is a normative experience. The
final sessions allowed students to reflect on all that they learned, apply that knowledge
in small groups, and to discuss each session with a focus on reinforcing the main ideas.
The main ideas, or meaning-­making meta-­messages, include “We all care about school,”
“We all want a good future,” “Everyone faces obstacles and difficulties,” and “Failures
and setbacks are normal.” Throughout the intervention, facilitators establish a structure
where students can learn and consistently communicate the meta-­messages and underly-
ing themes that permeate every activity that the students complete. The intervention is
also designed to convey messages in a manner that will be understood and that is devel-
opmentally appropriate. An implementation manual for the pathways intervention can be
found in Oyserman (2015).
In addition to the full pathways intervention implementation, several related field
experiments have tested specific aspects of the broader intervention during a single mid-
dle school class session. These experiments have taken place in homerooms and subject
classrooms during the academic term, as well as during summer programs. They differ
in content and length but target the same core processes as the main pathways inter-
vention. In the classroom, the teacher introduces the members of the research team as
visitors from a local university providing career-­related information to young students,
and the materials are distributed on paper, including relevant text and figures. These
materials include real information, such as current figures of adult earnings without
using any form of deception. Students are then asked to complete a brief questionnaire
that is ostensibly a separate general survey, which contains the outcome measures and is
completed in class.
In one example of a field experiment related to the pathways intervention, students
randomly assigned to the treatment condition are introduced to the concept of need-
based financial aid and economic resources available to support the pursuit of higher
education (see Destin, 2017). The information included statements from sources like the
College Board indicating that “there is more financial aid available than ever before—­
over $154 billion. . . . The financial aid system is based on the goal that anyone should
be able to attend college, regardless of financial circumstances. Here is how the system
works: Students and their families are expected to contribute to the cost of college to the
extent that they are able. If a family is unable to contribute the entire cost, financial aid is
available to bridge the gap.” In order to increase the likelihood that resources feel within
reach, students also learn that more information is available on the Free Application for
Federal Student Aid website (www.fafsa.gov). Students randomly assigned to a compari-
son condition, on the other hand, read information about the actual (at the time of the
study) costs of attending local universities. The statements include “At 4-year public insti-
tutions, tuition costs average $7,605 per year” and “At 4-year private institutions, tuition
costs average $27,293 per year.” Students then receive examples of what it would cost to
attend specific universities in the area. Some versions of the experiment also include a no-­
information control condition. Students in all conditions complete short writing activities
that ask them questions to verify their comprehension of the material before completing
subsequent measures of identity and motivation in the moment.
158 I. Education

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

The pathways intervention generates significant excitement among educators because it

resonates with intuitive ideas about how to motivate students. This helps in developing
school partnerships, building school buy-in, and in potentially leading school partners
to implement lasting changes and programs. However, the intuitive nature of the path-
ways intervention can also lead researchers and practitioners to overlook the important
psychological intricacies and nuance necessary to consistently activate these motivational
processes with fidelity. Two key aspects of the pathways intervention that can be easily
neglected during implementation are that (1) the students must individually bring to mind
and articulate a genuinely valued identity, and (2) the identity and related processes must
receive some form of social recognition, reinforcement, or validation.
In studies that ask students to think about their past experiences in certain ways or
to imagine particular future possibilities, the most effective prompts provide them with
the space and time to draw from their own meaningful experiences and ideas. After they
think about a particular challenge that they faced or career that they hope to reach, then
more guidance is provided to help them elaborate on that unique core image in a man-
ner that is informed by psychological science. It can be tempting, however, to implement
these interventions by telling students what types of past experiences to think about or
what types of futures to imagine and pushing the process along. This rushed and deper-
sonalized implementation is far less likely to truly engage individual students or shift the
ways that they think about themselves (see Canning & Harackiewicz, 2015).
Once an identity is genuinely brought to mind and then cultivated in a way that sup-
ports motivation, it must be strategically reinforced by social interactions or the social
context as a whole in order to generate lasting positive effects. As articulated by identity-­
based motivation theory, identities are constantly reconstructed based on the environ-
ment. So, one meaningful shift in how students think about themselves may have an
important effect on motivation during key moments, but it might also dissipate if the
school, neighborhood, or social environment do not include cues and affordances that
reactivate and reinforce that identity. One way to foster social reinforcement is to include
small-group activities into the intervention. When students share their ideas with one
another, it conveys the message and social norm that they have common experiences with
their peers and that their perspectives are valued by others around them. In addition to
including peers, a deeper inclusion of parents and teachers into facilitation and imple-
mentation provides opportunities for continued reinforcement of motivating identities.
It is important to note, though, that identities and motivation are just one step toward
positive academic outcomes, and students require opportunities for substantive learning
experiences in order to fully express their motivation.

FROM INTERVENTION TO SYSTEMIC CHANGE:

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Perhaps the greatest promise of the pathways intervention is in its potential implications
for practice across multiple levels of a student’s environment, rather than only as an
individual intervention. As shown in Figure 6.2, an individual student’s identity, psycho-
logical processes, and motivation are embedded within multiple systems of contextual
 The Pathways Intervention 159

influence (see Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1979). From the peer to teacher to parent to broader
institutional climate, these various levels of contextual influence provide different oppor-
tunities to translate pathways into a variety of other practical programs to support aca-
demic equity. Several experiments have begun to systematically show how specific types
of actions and programs at each of these levels can support positive student outcomes.
At the peer level, a recent experiment built from the pathways intervention to train
high school student near peers as mentors for eighth-­grade student participants (Destin,
Castillo, & Meissner, 2018). In a cascading mentorship model, a random group of high
school student near-peer mentors completed five sessions of training by college student
research assistants. The randomly selected high school student mentors prepared to facili-
tate a series of discussions and activities with eighth-­grade participants that were modi-
fied from the pathways intervention (Oyserman, 2015; Oyserman et al., 2006). After
the 5 days of training, the high school student mentors were each matched with a small
group of eighth-­grade student mentees. For the next 5 days, they facilitated the pro-
gramming focused on topics including images for the future, timelines and obstacles,
and encountering and responding to difficulty, similar to the approach detailed in the
pathways “Intervention Content and Implementation” section. Before and after the 5-day
program, eighth-­grade student mentees completed key measures of motivation. Eighth-­
grade students who were randomly assigned to participate in the near-peer identity-­based
mentoring showed increased academic persistence at the end of the sessions compared
with a control group that were instead randomly assigned to receive basic homework
help from high school tutors (Destin et al., 2018). The experiment demonstrated that
peers can influence identity-­based processes that shape motivation and provided insight
for the development of programming that expands on the original pathways interven-
tion. Although not evaluated in this study, other studies have also demonstrated positive
effects for high school or college student mentors themselves (e.g., Schreier, Schonert-­
Reichl, & Chen, 2013).

Institutional
climate

Faculty
interactions

Peer
interactions

Individual
student

FIGURE 6.2.  Examples of levels of context with potential for programs that expand the path-
ways intervention and influence identity-­based motivational processes.
160 I. Education

The key insight from the near-peer experiment is that taking the effort to connect
adolescents with those who are slightly older than them can be beneficial. The high
school students and eighth-­grade students attended different schools in the same commu-
nity. This allowed the high school students to facilitate vivid and authentic conversations
about their lives and possible futures. It is important to note, however, that simply con-
necting students with one another without mentorship guidance was not as beneficial, as
shown by the homework-­help tutoring condition. Instead, relevant, identity-­based guid-
ance is necessary. Further, the experimental demonstration had immediate effects on
student motivation and indirect effects on their grades, but there were no direct effects on
their academic performance. It is likely that sustained interactions with near-peer men-
tors can lead to sustained positive effects on academic outcomes.
One level of contextual influence that does include more sustained interaction is
the teacher level. In another recent study that expanded on the pathways intervention,
researchers provided all participating teachers with a 2-day training in identity-­based
motivation (Horowitz, Sorensen, Yoder, & Oyserman, 2018). This study included several
rigorous checks to evaluate the extent to which trained teachers delivered the content of
the intervention with fidelity. The content was well received by teachers and students, and
fidelity reached high levels. Importantly, surpassing fidelity thresholds in facilitation of
the content predicted important student outcomes, including higher grades and reduced
course failure. The study was not a randomized controlled trial designed to test causal
effects but rather demonstrated the potential of the pathways intervention to inform the
training and development of teachers as a way to shape this extremely influential aspect
of student context.
In addition to teachers, parents can also be a consistent level of contextual influence
for students. In a parent-­focused experiment expanding on the pathways intervention,
researchers recruited parents of current eighth-­grade students to participate in a study
where they would observe a panel of parents whose students had already progressed
beyond eighth grade in the same community (Destin & Svoboda, 2017). The parents who
served as panelists provided predetermined answers to a series of questions about their
own children’s journeys, how they helped their children think about different aspects of
their possible futures, and how they responded to their children’s experiences of academic
difficulty. The intervention was implemented toward the beginning of the school year.
Participants observed the rich discussion and completed an evaluation at the end of the
panel that included some key measures of attitudes and behavioral intentions. After the
panel, parents of current eighth graders planned to talk with their children sooner about
certain aspects of the future and they interpreted academic difficulty as a greater sign of a
task’s importance compared to parents in a control group. Further, the grades of students
whose parents were randomly assigned to observe the panel increased significantly over
the course of the school year compared with students whose parents were in the control
group. Similar to the teacher study, this parent study demonstrated the enormous poten-
tial in expanding the pathways intervention to strategically reaching adults who regularly
interact with students. The study also demonstrated the power of including the stories
and insights of actual community members into the pathways intervention to influence
student outcomes.
Finally, a higher and somewhat more abstract level of contextual influence where the
effects of the pathways intervention can be expanded comes from the school or institu-
tional climate that students encounter. Institutional climate can be especially influential
 The Pathways Intervention 161

for students from groups that are nondominant in society or who are the minority within
a particular setting (Cheryan, Plaut, Davies, & Steele, 2009; Murphy, Steele, & Gross,
2007). One series of lab experiments demonstrated the effect of the institutional climate
in higher education on the identities and motivation of students from lower-SES family
backgrounds (Browman & Destin, 2016). College students from diverse backgrounds
were randomly assigned to encounter information that led them to perceive the institu-
tional climate as “warm” or “chilly” toward socioeconomic diversity. In the warm condi-
tion, information focused on how the institution is proud and supportive of its socioeco-
nomic diversity as exemplified through its commitment of various financial resources.
In the chilly condition, information focused on how the institution is generally content
to be a wealthy community as exemplified through its network of large donors and stu-
dents who are able to pay full financial aid. Lower-SES students felt more motivated and
more likely to succeed after encountering the warm climate compared with the chilly
climate (Browman & Destin, 2016). These types of cues within educational settings and
institutions (e.g., in their programming, resources, and everyday messaging) can comple-
ment the pathways intervention to influence the success of students from lower-SES back-
grounds and other nondominant groups in society.
The pathways intervention and processes related to identity-­based motivation theory
are well situated to inform the development of many different types of programs focused
on student outcomes because of the inherent link between various levels of context and
individual identities. As described, existing evidence provides specific guidance at the
peer, teacher, parent, and institutional climate levels. These studies, however, provide just
a few examples of how the pathways intervention can inform the development of efforts
to influence various levels of an individual student’s context.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THEORY

The pathways intervention and related work demonstrate the importance of young peo-
ple’s views of themselves and their possible futures in shaping their current school engage-
ment and outcomes. The studies also show the inherent malleability of these influential
identities and the many different types of experiences and social forces that play a role
in how young people come to see themselves from moment to moment. Importantly, the
identities that students articulate in the studies remain self-­generated because the explicit
imposition of a particular life path by researchers would likely weaken genuine student
motivation. The pathways intervention illustrates a need to provide the resources, oppor-
tunities, and supports for students to explore, express, and elaborate upon ideas about
themselves and their futures.
As mentioned at the outset, another implication is that studies related to the path-
ways intervention should not be considered interventions simply because they aim to
influence outcomes for participants from diverse and often underserved backgrounds
or because they are conducted in field settings. The idea of intervention can sometimes
inherently imply that researchers unlock the definitive answer to solving some persistent
social issue or fixing misguided behaviors of individuals or groups. Instead, the pathways
intervention and related studies contribute to theory building in a similar manner to stud-
ies including members of more dominant and privileged groups in society. They often,
however, also have a more externally valid conceptualization of context and the results
162 I. Education

can have more directly applicable implications. The results of these studies, though, have
the greatest implications in how they can inform broader efforts to reduce inequality
rather than as independent interventions that are not included in systematic initiatives to
influence multiple levels of context.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The study of other possible levels of context, such as the neighborhood level, in addition
to the potential effects of multiple coordinated efforts spanning different levels of con-
text, can continue to advance insight in this area of research. In other words, there may
be ways that approaches at certain levels can supplement approaches at other levels. For
example, parent or teacher programming might be coordinated with a direct-­to-­student
approach. Similarly, an attempt to shift institutional climates might be meaningfully
paired with a neighborhood-­focused initiative. By increasing the likelihood that students
receive congruent messages that reinforce one another, their identities that support moti-
vation may develop in a more stable, cohesive, and integrated manner. Future work may
study how the effects of a traditional pathways intervention may expand when linked to
systemic changes and supports.
Another way to advance this area of work is to systematically test the specific types
of financial and learning resources that are necessary to maximize the potential positive
effects of interventions that target various levels of context. Further, a movement toward
intervention characterized by more systemic and coordinated efforts opens the possibili-
ties to more holistically evaluate the ways that contexts and identities influence a wider
range of outcomes for individuals, including health and well-being, across the lifespan
(Destin, 2019).
Finally, perhaps the most important area for continued advancement is greater inter-
face with social and public policy (Destin, 2018). Policies have the potential to shape
aspects of the broader overarching context in addition to specific aspects of the lives
of students and their families. On the positive end, researchers can provide tools and
frameworks to help policymakers think about the various ways that policies can influ-
ence broader contexts with implications for the identities and lives of individuals. On
the negative end, if researchers fail to interface with policy, individual programming and
intervention will remain inherently limited in its ability to reduce systemic and persistent
inequities. Insight from the pathways intervention can guide the development of a wide
range of policies, practices, and individual interactions that support students in drawing
deeper connections between their aspirations and real-life circumstances.

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Child Development, 78(1), 246–263.
 The Pathways Intervention 163

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 C H A P TE R 7

The Strategic Resource

Use Intervention

Patricia Chen

Improving learning is not just about working harder, but also about how effectively learn-
ers direct their efforts. Many learners fall short of achieving their potential, not necessarily
because they are unable or unwilling to put in the effort but because they are not strategic
in the way they use their learning resources to build mastery. We showed that an online,
self-­administered “strategic resource use” intervention, which guided learners to self-­reflect
on how they would effectively use their resources to study for their exams, significantly
improved academic performance. The intervention guided them through the psychologi-
cal process of strategizing what to use and why (for what purpose), and planning when,
where, and how to learn effectively. Carrying out such reflection was related to more effective
resource use reported during learning, and in turn, to better academic performance. Our
research brings together principles from self-­regulated learning theory, effective goal pursuit,
and wise intervention methods to demonstrate the important causal relationship between
strategic resource use and academic achievement. More consequentially, we show that this
psychology can be changed in a scalable way to empower many learners.

I keep six honest serving-­men

   (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
   And How and Where and Who.
—Rudyard K ipling (1902)

BACKGROUND

Every year, millions of dollars are spent by governments worldwide on improving educa-
tion through the provision of new or better-­quality resources for learners (Organisation
for Economic Co-­operation and Development, 2018; World Bank Group, 2018). These
might include, but are not limited to, textbooks, course pack readings, workbooks with

166
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 167

practice problems, online encyclopedias, discussion forums, practice exam questions, sup-
plementary or remedial classes, workshops on study skills, and more. In schools, teachers
and school administrators never stop finding ways to create, evaluate, and choose educa-
tional resources to support student learning. Because of all these efforts, many learners
in our developed world today have excellent learning resources at their fingertips (or at
least attainable with some initiative on their parts). However, providing students with
resources does not directly improve mastery. Instead, students have to select and use the
resources wisely when learning to reap the pedagogical benefits that they bring.
The problem is that many students do not exercise such self-­regulation in their learn-
ing (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991; Zimmerman, 2011; Zimmerman &
Martinez-­Pons, 1988). For example, when I asked two undergraduate students of mine to
describe the way that they generally studied for exams, one answered, “How do I prepare
for my exams? I just take out my textbook and start reading.” Another described the
process of studying as “You just take out your notes and the textbook and . . . start look-
ing through them.” The process of studying for exams, it seems, is often construed by
these students as a passive, unplanned activity that one begins without much forethought
or strategizing. This is in stark contrast to the way teachers and researchers conceive of
effective, self-­regulated learning as an active process of trial and self-­reflection (Bembe-
nutty, 2011; Chen, Ong, & Coppola, 2019).
When students do not approach their learning strategically—­or in a self-­reflective
and goal-­directed manner—­they may not learn or perform to their potential. As psy-
chologists, educators, school administrators, members of government, and parents, it
behooves us to do something to help maximize, rather than waste, our society’s human
potential.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS

Metacognition
How can we help our learners use the resources available to them to learn effectively?
A key is the psychological process of “metacognitive self-­regulation,” or “metacogni-
tion” for short—­defined as thinking about one’s approaches to learning (Pintrich, 2002;
Pintrich et al., 1991). Exercising metacognition goes beyond being aware of and know-
ing how to execute specific study skills (such as elaboration and organization)—it also
involves changing the way learners think about and approach their learning (Pintrich,
2002; Zimmerman, 1989). This involves strategizing what approaches might be appro-
priate to the task, monitoring how effective these approaches are, fine-­tuning and chang-
ing approaches when unproductive, and reflecting on feedback (Chen, Chavez, Ong, &
Gunderson, 2017; Chen, Powers, Katragadda, Cohen, & Dweck, 2020; Pintrich, 2002;
Pintrich et al., 1991). Importantly, practicing metacognition during learning relates to
many important learning processes and outcomes, including greater self-­efficacy, higher
levels of motivation, more effective learning strategies, higher exam performance, and
even better academic trajectories over time (Chen et al., 2017; Chen, Ong, et al., 2019;
Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1993; Pintrich & De Groot, 1990).
To date, metacognition has been widely applied to many learning processes—­
including how learners assess the extent of their learning, estimate the ease or difficulty
168 I. Education

of a new learning task, and switch cognitive strategies when in error (Dunlosky & Bjork,
2008; Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009; Fleming & Frith, 2014). However, a comparatively
understudied, albeit immensely important, part of the metacognitive process is how
learners manage their resource use in a self-­reflective and purposeful manner. This has
been called “resource regulation” or “resource management”—and it is the psychological
process that I refer to when I describe people as being strategic in their resource use (Chen
et al., 2017; Chen, Ong, et al., 2019; Pintrich et al., 1991).

Resource Regulation
Resource regulation involves knowing what resources are available, but also the condi-
tional knowledge about when and how to use them effectively (Pintrich, 2002; Pintrich
& Garcia, 1994). Students who are not strategic in their resource use may be aware of
the various resources available to them, but they might not think about which specific
resources could be more or less conducive to learning for particular subjects and exam
formats; they might not deliberately think about the purpose for which they would use
each resource; or they might not be planful about how they could use each resource effec-
tively. Learners who practice strategic resource use, on the other hand, tend to consider
what they are expected to know when taking the exam, they strategize which resources
they should use to make their learning effective, they know the purpose for which they
intend to use each resource, and they are intentional and planful about how to use each
resource effectively. Although resources broadly encompass both internal (e.g., motiva-
tion levels, emotions, attention) and external resources (e.g., books, online websites,
classmates, discussion forum members, teachers, academic advisors), in this chapter
and in our strategic resource use intervention, I focus on students’ use of their external
resources during learning.
Prior work on students’ self-­regulation of external resources has generally measured
resource regulation through retrospective self-­reports of how they use their study time,
how strategically they select their study environments, how well they stick to their study
schedule, and whether they seek help appropriately (Bergin, Reilly, & Traynor, 2005;
Karabenick, 2003; Pintrich et al., 1991). For example, students respond to items such
as “I make good use of my study time for this course” and “I usually study in a place
where I can concentrate on my coursework” on scales from 1 (Not at all true of me) to
7 (Very true of me). Such research on resource regulation has mostly been correlational
in nature (e.g., Bergin et al., 2005; Chen, Ong, et al., 2019; Pintrich et al., 1991, 1993;
Valle et al., 2008). Importantly, the findings show that students who report being more
strategic in their resource use tend to be more intrinsically motivated, and they perform
better in their classes (Karabenick, 2003; Pintrich et al., 1991). However, they leave open
questions about causality—­whether promoting more strategic resource use can causally
enhance learning and academic performance.

Promoting Resource Regulation with the Strategic Resource

Use Intervention
Our research aimed to test whether an intervention that targets this process of resource
regulation can causally improve students’ academic performance. To this end, we
designed the strategic resource use intervention to guide people to be more metacognitive
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 169

about how to make effective use of their resources when studying for an exam (Chen et
al., 2017). The intervention has been represented as a survey on student learning in the
class, and presented as a series of short messages and questions that students answer on
their own before they start studying for an exam. It prompts students to ask themselves—­
and to answer for themselves: “What am I expected to master by the upcoming exam?”;
“What kinds of resources are available to me?”; “Which resources should I use to study
effectively, and which resources may not be as helpful?”; “Why will each resource I have
chosen to use be useful for my learning?”; and “How should I plan to use the resources
to study?”
In other words, the intervention does not teach students study strategies, tell them
how they should be studying, or prescribe what resources they should use—­instead, it
guides students through the process of self-­reflection by providing questions that encour-
age metacognition and model answers to scaffold their responses. This way, students are
empowered to take ownership of their strategies and plans (Janis & King, 1954; Walton
& Cohen, 2011; Wilson, 1990).
The strategic resource use intervention approach resonates with the “wise interven-
tion” approach in social psychology, because it targets how students make sense of their
learning process to improve how effectively they leverage their resources when learning
(Walton, 2014; Walton & Wilson, 2018). Our approach is also consistent with the spirit
of self-­regulated learning, which involves a self-­directed, agentic process of shaping one’s
own learning (Zimmerman, 2002).

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
So far, two classroom experiments have tested the strategic resource use intervention
and yielded promising results (Chen et al., 2017). Two double-­blind, randomized, con-
trolled experiments were conducted in an introductory college statistics course of a large,
public Midwestern university. Each experiment recruited separate cohorts of students,
1 year apart. Students took the intervention (or a control) online as part of a survey
on student learning in the class, which took about 15 minutes to complete. They were
invited to do this about a week before each of their two class exams. Upon accessing the
online survey, students were randomly assigned to receive either the strategic resource
use intervention (treatment condition) or a control message (control condition). Those in
the control condition read a “business-­as-usual” exam reminder, which informed them
about their upcoming exam in the way that their class instructor usually announced
exam reminders (and also consistent with the way that other instructors at that university
generally reminded their students about upcoming exams). Students randomly assigned
to the treatment condition also received that exam reminder and then completed a short
exercise that prompted them to strategize and plan out their resource use for their upcom-
ing exam (see the “Intervention Content and Implementation” section for more details).
Students in both conditions were comparable on their prior achievement levels (i.e., high
school grade-point average [GPA] and college GPA), their desired grades on each exam,
their levels of motivation to achieve their desired grades, how important these grades
were to them, and their confidence in attaining their desired grades.
170 I. Education

In both experiments, students who were randomly assigned to the treatment con-
dition outperformed their peers in the control condition on both class exams, and by
an average of one-third of a letter grade in the class. In Experiments 1 and 2, respec-
tively, there was an average difference of 3.64 and 4.21% in students’ final course grades
between those randomly assigned to the treatment and control conditions (Chen et al.,
2017). To illustrate this in practical terms, students who would have otherwise achieved
a B in the class instead performed at the level of a B+ if they were randomly assigned to
the intervention condition, and students who would otherwise have gotten a B+ instead
attained an A– in the intervention condition.
These intervention effects were not significantly moderated by students’ academic
achievement levels prior to starting the class, gender, race, or class standing. Although a
lack of moderation might seem surprising in light of other social-­psychological interven-
tions that tend to target and benefit one group of students more than another, there was
no reason for us to believe a priori that different groups of students in that class were
already carrying out self-­reflective resource use to different extents. Our findings (cor-
roborating observations of students in the class before the study) seem to suggest that the
self-­reflective process our intervention targeted is one that many students were generally
unaware of or not practicing optimally on their own, at least with this student popula-
tion in this class context. Thus, the strategic resource use intervention had the potential
to benefit many learners in this class.

Mechanisms
What mechanisms might explain the intervention effects? The strategic resource use
intervention was designed to prompt students to self-­reflect on how to approach their
learning effectively, so that they would direct their resource use in a more effective man-
ner when studying. We assessed these hypothesized mechanisms of self-­reflection and
effective resource use. We measured self-­reflection at the end of the class (to prevent prim-
ing these ideas among the control group midway through the class) with items such as
“As I studied for the class, I kept monitoring whether or not the way I was studying was
effective” and “I actively evaluated how well certain study techniques were working for
me in this class.” Through postexam surveys administered after each exam, we measured
students’ reports of how effective their resource use was when studying, and averaged this
across both exams to compute a proxy for how effectively they were using their resources
over the course of the class, on average.
Consistent with the psychological process described earlier, we found that students
in the treatment group reported being more self-­reflective about their learning during
the class, compared to those in the control group. In other words, they reported actively
tailoring how they studied to the class context, monitoring how effectively they were
studying, changing the way they were studying when unproductive, and reflecting on
their performance during the class at a greater frequency, compared to controls. The
more students exercised such self-­reflective learning, the higher the reported effectiveness
of their resource use, which in turn, related to better overall class performance (see Figure
7.1; Chen et al., 2017).
In addition to making students more self-­reflective, we found that the strategic
resource use intervention also reduced negative feelings that students had about their
upcoming exams and increased their perceived control over their exam performance
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 171

Total Effect: b = 3.94, 95% CI = [1.68, 6.28]

Direct Effect: b = 3.75, 95% CI = [1.52, 6.05]

FIGURE 7.1. Modeling the process by which the intervention affects students’ final course per-
formance, mediated by their self-reflections on learning and the reported effectiveness of their
resource use when studying. Condition is coded as follows: control = 0, treatment = 1. CI repre-
sents the confidence interval. Residual error terms are not included in this figure. Reprinted with
permission from Chen, Chavez, Ong, and Gunderson (2017).

(Chen et al., 2017). Although not the main hypothesized mechanisms of the intervention,
these additional motivational effects of the intervention are worth noting, given that
exam-oriented negative affect (such as math anxiety) and perceptions of controllabil-
ity contribute to student achievement (Ashcraft, 2002; Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001; Skinner,
Wellborn, & Connell, 1990).
Importantly, the intervention did not just make students use more resources—in
fact, students in the treatment condition reported using fewer resources, on average, than
those in the control condition (Chen et al., 2017). This suggests that students in the
treatment condition were using their resources more effectively by reflecting on how
to approach their learning, rather than just using a greater number of resources. These
results are consistent with our goal of making learners more strategic (i.e., self-reflective
and goal directed)—not just getting them to study harder in a thoughtless, ineffective
manner.

The Role of Strategizing and Follow-Through

To further understand the effects of the intervention, we addressed two additional ques-
tions: Out of all the resources that students reported using, how much did it matter if
they had purposefully selected these resources in the intervention ahead of time? To what
extent was it important that students followed through with their plans, beyond just
making plans?
Among those in the treatment condition (these data were not available for those in
the control condition), we found that it was indeed important for students to strategi-
cally select the resources that they were to use ahead of time: The number of resources
that students had selected in advance and used (“planned-and-used” resources) positively
related to their exam performance, whereas the number of resources that students had
used but not strategized a priori (“unplanned-and-used” resources) was unrelated to their
performance in the same model. At least among those in the treatment condition, these
findings underscore the importance of exercising strategic forethought in carefully select-
ing one’s learning resources. When it came to planning, our results also highlighted that
172 I. Education

follow-­through mattered. Only the number of resources that students had planned to
use and reported using (“planned-­and-used” resources) positively related to their exam
performance, but not the number of resources that students had planned to use but did
not follow through with (“planned-­but-did-not-use” resources). The takeaway is that
students should make practical plans about their resource use in advance, and also make
it a point to follow through with their plans.
Taken together, our two field experiments demonstrated that promoting strategic
resource use can causally enhance learning and performance, and our findings provide
evidence for the psychological process by which it does so.

Effects over Time
Currently, the intervention design has focused on preparing students for their upcoming
exams within a particular class. At least within the same class context, the intervention
seems to work well. But can we create a version of the intervention that might enable
students to generalize the psychological process of resource regulation beyond the class
in which it was administered? This could involve asking students how they would apply
this psychological process to their other classes, or asking them how they might use this
in other domains of learning outside school (e.g., learning how to play a musical instru-
ment or a new sports skill). Our ongoing research is looking into how we might be able
to adapt the current intervention design to encourage transfer.

Heterogeneity, Moderation, and Durability

The strategic resource use intervention is meant to complement—­ but not replace—­
existing measures that many educational institutions and government policies have
in place to provide resources to learners. In fact, our intervention is predicated on the
assumption that the necessary resources for learning are available to learners. After all,
many student-­centered interventions, like this one, depend on the availability of learn-
ing resources (e.g., mentors, peer study groups, and academic support services) in the
environment for students to leverage (Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006; Paunesku
et al., 2015; Walton & Wilson, 2018; Yeager et al., 2016, 2019). Certainly, if a basic rep-
ertoire of resources is not even available, then providing that should be the priority. Once
learners do have access to the learning resources, however, the next important step is to
ensure that they use these resources effectively. For example, this second step can be a
challenge for many college freshmen, who often feel overwhelmed and unsure about how
best to prioritize and utilize the many, varied resources available on their university cam-
puses. The goal of the strategic resource use intervention is to inculcate the psychological
process of strategic resource use, so that people can be more thoughtful about how they
might leverage the various resources available to them effectively.
To reap the full benefits of the intervention, students need to engage in the self-­
reflective process of strategizing and planning their resource use. Our findings suggest
that they should especially craft strategic plans that are (1) focused on maximizing mas-
tery, (2) tailored to the upcoming exam format, and (3) concrete about when and how
they will use the resources to study (Chen et al., 2017). These were the key ingredi-
ents of students’ open-ended responses to the intervention that were positively (and reli-
ably) related to their class performance across our experiments. Our results suggest that
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 173

students who do not pay attention to or engage with the intervention in these meaningful
ways may not receive as much benefit as those who do. Future iterations of the interven-
tion could emphasize even more than we have previously done on how students might
include these psychological elements as they self-­reflect on their resource use.
Because the intervention targets students’ self-­reflection about their resource use, it
is plausible that the intervention confers more benefits to those who do not already carry
out this metacognitive process on their own. Although we did not measure this in our
previous studies, this could be an important moderator of the intervention effects that
future studies should assess.
Learning to proactively self-­reflect on one’s resource use could be especially relevant
during developmental transitions that involve moving from learning in a more struc-
tured environment to an environment that requires greater independence and autonomy,
or changing from a familiar context to a new context that requires different strategies
to be effective. One such example is the transition from high school, where learning is
generally more structured and guided by the teacher, to college—­a new learning environ-
ment where students are expected to navigate multiple, varied resources, to manage their
time on their own, and to figure out how to master the content independently. Another
example is the transition from school to the workforce, where many supervisors expect
employees to be resourceful and autonomous in picking up the necessary skills to get the
job done well. During these transitions, old ways of doing things may no longer work as
well in the new contexts. Hence, many people often feel overwhelmed by the experience
that their familiar methods are no longer as effective, by the number and variety of new
options to try, by the lack of structured guidance, and by the fact that there may not
always be a clear best way to learn. It is in these very moments that the strategic resource
use intervention might be especially useful.
Although we did not explicitly test this, I believe that students should want to invest
the effort to learn for the intervention to be effective. Without at least a basic amount
of motivation to try, neither strategizing nor planning how to use one’s resources for
learning might be fruitful. This is related to the idea of follow-­through described earlier,
where the number of resources that students planned and followed through mattered
for performance, but not the number of resources that they planned but did not see
through. Specifically, this intervention is not targeted at motivating unmotivated stu-
dents to study—­instead, it helps students who already have some motivation to learn to
channel their efforts productively. It is conceivable that pairing this intervention with one
that boosts motivation, such as a growth mindset intervention, a purpose intervention,
or a utility-­value intervention (e.g., Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Hulleman
& Harackiewicz, 2009; Yeager et al., 2014), might better help students who lack self-­
reflection and who also need some motivating.

COUSINS

The strategic resource use intervention differs in a number of ways from most traditional
study skills interventions that focus on telling students what learning strategies (e.g., high-
lighting, rehearsal, elaboration, organization, self-­testing) are more or less effective for the
average learner (Hattie, 2009; Wingate, 2006). First, training cognitive learning strate-
gies, which increases learners’ awareness of various study strategies and how to execute
174 I. Education

them, is generally considered skill building, whereas the strategic resource use interven-
tion is a self-­reflection exercise that walks learners through the metacognitive process of
strategizing and planning out how to maximize their resource use to learn (Chen et al.,
2017; Pintrich, 2002). The self-­regulated learning literature clearly contrasts this meta-
cognitive process of “planning, monitoring, and regulating” learning (Pintrich, 2002,
p. 220) against just having the knowledge about various learning strategies. Second, while
many study skills interventions are often prescriptive in nature, the strategic resource
use intervention avoids telling students how they should study, but rather, guides them
through a process of effective strategizing and planning. Third, study skills interventions
in many schools are often taught in a general manner that is divorced from specific sub-
ject knowledge (Wingate, 2006), but the strategic resource use intervention is designed to
teach metacognitive principles through application within a specific class context.
The strategic resource use intervention belongs to a family of social-­psychological
interventions that change the way people think about their goals and how they pursue them
(Walton & Wilson, 2018). Specifically, the intervention helps learners reflect on how they
might use the resources available to them in a purposeful, effective manner to achieve their
academic goals. Other interventions of this kind engage people in active reflection about
the goal pursuit process by asking them to commit to when, where, and how they would
take a desired action, or by having them anticipate obstacles that they might encounter
and describing what they would do to overcome these obstacles when working toward
their goals (Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997; Oettingen & Gollwitzer,
2010). Such interventions have been effective at increasing the likelihood that people actu-
ally carry out the desirable behaviors, and also effective at producing significant gains in
goal achievement (Duckworth, Grant, Loew, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2011; Duckworth,
Kirby, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2013; Gollwitzer, 1999). The strategic resource use inter-
vention leverages this wisdom by getting people to commit to when, where, and how they
will take action on their goals. However, it is also unique in asking people to reflect on
which specific resources would be effective for their goal pursuit and why.
The strategic resource use intervention is similar to growth mindset of intelligence
interventions in that both focus on orienting people toward generating and employ-
ing effective strategies that are associated with internal and controllable attributions.
Growth mindset interventions focus on changing students’ beliefs about their intelligence
by teaching them that intelligence is controllable and malleable through hard work, effec-
tive strategies, and help from others (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002; Blackwell et al.,
2007; Paunesku et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2019). These growth mindset interventions
have been very effective at changing learners’ beliefs about intelligence and improving
their academic achievement trajectories. The strategic resource use intervention and the
growth mindset interventions, however, differ in their main goals and mechanisms. By
changing people’s beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, growth mindset interven-
tions incline people toward a mastery orientation in their learning. This focus on mastery
orients people toward searching for effective strategies and greater persistence in times of
challenge or difficulty. The strategic resource use intervention, however, does not aim to
change people’s beliefs about their intelligence, but it targets their metacognition about
their resource use. Specifically, this intervention prompts people to reflect and plan what
strategies to employ, monitor their strategies as they learn, and switch strategies if they
are ineffective.
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 175

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Context and Timing
To date, we have published two randomized, controlled experiments on the strategic
resource use intervention that was conducted in an introductory statistics course at a
large, public Midwestern university (Chen et al., 2017). The statistics course was an
important prerequisite course to many majors in the natural sciences, social sciences,
business school, and premedicine track, and it additionally satisfied a quantitative skill
requirement at the undergraduate level. Therefore, students enrolled in the class generally
took their learning and performance seriously. All students in the class were taught by
the same instructor during the spring semesters when we conducted our studies, ensur-
ing that the instructional content and style were consistent across all our participants.
Students who consented to participate were randomized via the survey software to either
a treatment condition (where they would receive a business-­as-usual exam reminder, the
strategic resource use intervention exercise, and survey questions) or a control condition
(where they would receive the same business-­as-usual exam reminder and survey ques-
tions, but not the intervention).
The intervention was distributed online via “preexam surveys” to students in the
class about 10 days before each of their two class exams, with a participation deadline of
about 7 days prior to each exam. We chose this timing for this specific class context with
the instructor because students in the class during the spring semester typically started
studying about a week before their exams. Distributing the intervention at this time gave
students the opportunity to think about how they would approach their studying before
most of them actually started studying. It was also not too far in advance of their exams
so as to render the self-­reflection exercise irrelevant to them.

Representation
We represented our intervention as a survey to understand student learning in the class.
The online intervention interface was modeled to look like a generic survey about stu-
dents’ goals, motivations, and feelings about the exam, along with an exam reminder and
open-ended questions about students’ study plans. It took about 15 minutes to complete
online.

Intervention Content
Overview
The survey began with an exam reminder that all students in the class typically received
from the instructor: “Your exam is coming up on [day and date]. You might want to start
preparing for it.” Students then completed our brief strategic resource use intervention
exercise where they were prompted to actively think about their upcoming exam format;
select which resources out of the many available to them they would use to study effec-
tively; explain why each resource would be useful to their learning; and plan out when,
where, and how they would use the resources. Next, I describe more details about each
of these components of the intervention exercise.
176 I. Education

Details
The strategic resource use exercise started with a message emphasizing scientific findings
that high-­achieving students use their resources strategically when preparing for exams.
Students were then prompted to consider the kinds of questions that they expected on
their upcoming exam, and to think through what resources (including study materials
and people who can help them) would help them prepare for the exam most effectively.
These brief messages were meant to motivate them to engage in the intervention and to
initiate their self-­reflection in an open-ended way, before the scaffolding that followed.
Following these general messages, students received more specific questions about
strategizing and planning out their resource use within their given class context. Students
were presented with a comprehensive checklist of all the class resources available to them,
and they were asked to select the resources out of this checklist that would help them
prepare for their upcoming exam effectively. For example, some resources that students
in the statistics course had were lecture notes, practice exam questions, past homework
problems, textbook readings, yellow formula card, online problem-­solving applet, dis-
cussions with other students in the class (e.g., peer study groups), office hours held by the
lecture instructor, and office hours held by the graduate student instructor (i.e., teaching
assistant). This means that students had to reflect on which resources would be effec-
tive for developing mastery and which resources might not be so effective for their own
learning, thereby prioritizing their resource use. We generated this comprehensive list
of resources through discussions with the class instructor and teaching assistants, focus
groups with students who had previously taken the class, and student surveys.
After making their selections, students were asked to describe why they thought each
resource they selected would be useful for their exam preparation. Prompting students to
consider and make explicit the purpose for which they will use each of the resources they
had chosen is an important step in the self-­reflective process, because it helps them bet-
ter channel their resource use more effectively toward those specific goals when they are
studying. This reflection may also make students aware of when they may not be using
a resource for its intended purpose. However, not all students may know how to give a
thoughtful answer to the question “Why do you think these resources would be useful for
your exam preparation?” without some guidance, even when they might be motivated to
self-­reflect. Thus, immediately after students read the question, they were given a model
example to scaffold their responses:

“Doing practice exam questions will allow me to practice on problems similar to

what I will encounter on my exam. While doing the problems, I will look out for how
I am expected to apply my knowledge. This will give me an idea of what material I
should review in the lecture notes and how to apply the formulas I learn.”

The model example guided their responses by showing them how they might think
through the purposes for which they would use the various resources chosen (Collins,
Brown, & Holum, 1991; Schunk, 1981).
We observed from students’ responses that they indeed seemed to be using the model
examples provided to scaffold their own thought processes and responses to the prompt.
Here is an example of one student’s answer:
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 177

“Lecture notes, past HW problems, practice exam questions: these will be helpful for
me because I can see the steps necessary for completing a problem and I can practice
doing the problems with a guide (my lecture notes) and follow the steps on those
until I can do them without using my lecture notes.
“Discussions, private tutoring: These will help me to verbally talk through my
problems so that I can make sure I know what I am talking about when I do the
problems on my own.”

The final step was planning when, where, and how they would use their resources.
The purpose of this planning component was to increase the likelihood that students
would actually follow through with their proposed strategies, rather than just building
castles in the air that they never implement (Leventhal, Singer, & Jones, 1965; Gollwit-
zer, 1999). As Ross and Nisbett (2011, p. 227) aptly put it, concrete planning helps to
“(facilitate) the link between positive intentions and constructive actions.” Students were
asked to plan out how they would use their resources to study, and again, they were given
a model example to guide their planning that showed specific, concrete plans of when,
where, and how a student might use their resources:

“Wednesday, 3/18, 3:00 P.M.–5:00 P.M., Library: Practice exam questions from 1 past
exam.”
“Friday, 3/20, 1:00 P.M.–3:00 P.M., Home: Read lecture notes for 2 topics.”

Here is an example of a student’s plan, which clearly shows in its structure and content
that they used the model example to guide their own response:

“Sunday 5/25—home: relistening to lectures I had trouble with and looking over
lecture notes.”
“Monday 5/26—home: look over old homework and listen to more lectures, start
HW 3.”
“Tuesday 5/27—library: finish HW 3 and do problem roulette.”

Importantly, this plan includes concrete descriptions of when, where, and how the stu-
dent intends to use the resources to study.

Control Condition
In each of the two published experiments (Chen et al., 2017), we compared the students
who were randomly assigned to the treatment condition to their peers who were ran-
domly assigned to the control condition. The control presented students with a business-­
as-usual exam reminder that students typically received. After this, students filled out
survey questions. They were not exposed to any of the active ingredients of the strategic
resource use intervention in their surveys. We designed the control to be as close to busi-
ness as usual in the class, making sure that we did not take away anything from the class
that the instructor or students would normally do if the study had not been conducted. As
178 I. Education

mentioned earlier, students randomly assigned to the control condition were comparable
to those assigned to the treatment before the intervention.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Not Just Awareness of Resources

Although the intervention provides students with a list of the learning resources avail-
able to them, it is unlikely that the effects in our experiments were primarily due to
increasing the accessibility of the resources available to students. In the statistics class
where our intervention was tested, students were given frequent reminders by the instruc-
tor about the various resources available to them. In fact, they received a weekly “Get
Things Done” list via e-mail, which reminded them about their deadlines for that week
and included a list of the class resources they had. Therefore, within this class context,
it is more likely that students in the treatment condition benefited from the intervention
because they were prompted to self-­reflect, rather than because they were exposed to one
or two more reminders about the resources available.

Not Just about Studying More

Importantly, our intervention does not just tell students to study more or to use a larger
number of resources to study. Our strategic resource use intervention focused on guiding
students to be more self-­reflective and goal-­directed—­and therefore effective—­in their
resource use, rather than just encouraging them to use more resources. While some stu-
dents can benefit from studying harder, the active psychological ingredient in our inter-
vention is to study more strategically. As described earlier, students in our intervention
treatment group reported using fewer resources to study, on average, than students in the
control group (Chen et al., 2017). This resonates with findings from research on study
time, which suggest that it is usually not the duration of time spent studying that matters
most for performance, but what really matters is how effectively students spend their
study time (Plant, Ericsson, Hill, & Asberg, 2005; Schuman, Walsh, Olson, & Etheridge,
1985).

Not Just Planning
Although the strategic resource use intervention does involve a planning component, it
is not just another planning intervention. First, the mechanisms of the strategic resource
use intervention involve increasing students’ self-­reflection on their learning and, in turn,
more effective resource use. Traditional planning interventions do not target these mech-
anisms (e.g., Gollwitzer, 1999; Oettingen & Gollwitzer, 2010). Second, we found that
the active psychological ingredients in students’ responses to the intervention, which were
positively related to their final course grades, went beyond planning: The more strategi-
cally students chose their resources (1) by taking the format of the upcoming exam into
consideration, and (2) by focusing on the goal of maximizing mastery, the better they
performed in the class. Our findings underscore that the psychology of our intervention
goes beyond committing to a plan of action.
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 179

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

The efficacy of the strategic resource use intervention is testimony to the wisdom that
learning is more effective when it is carried out in a strategic (rather than a passive or
an unregulated) manner. This is wisdom that many educators and psychologists already
have; yet it is also an idea that is sometimes challenging to convey to students in a way
that they can execute on their own. The strategic resource use intervention is one bite-
sized, online, and self-­administered approach that educators and students can use to
empower learners.

Administration Format
Because of its brief, online, and self-­administered nature, the strategic resource use
intervention can be conveniently disseminated to many students. Students access the
intervention via a survey link, or through an online learning platform (e.g., Electronic
Coach [ECoach] learning platform; Huberth, Chen, Tritz, & McKay, 2015). This online
administration makes the intervention easily scalable and it also caters to the preferences
of many learners among today’s Internet-­savvy generation. Although we have not tried
implementing the intervention through pen-and-paper format, it is possible that adminis-
tration through this means could also be effective if the core components of the interven-
tion are retained.

Customization
When applying the intervention to a new class context, it is important to retain the key
psychological ingredients of strategic resource use, while also tailoring the intervention
content to be relevant to the class. Table 7.1 summarizes the key parts of the intervention
and provides examples of answers that exemplify the metacognitive process each part
targets. These are important parts of the psychological process that should be concep-
tually replicated in the new class context. At the same time, the details of the resource
checklist and model examples in the intervention should be tailored to make sure that
they are relevant to students’ learning within the specific class. This class-­specific tailor-
ing also applies to the exam reminder that precedes the strategic resource use exercise.
For instance, the following is part of the planning model example that we tailored for a
different college chemistry class in ongoing, unpublished research (Cheng et al., 2019):

“Saturday, 10/7, 1:00 P.M.–3:30 P.M., Home: Redo tough problems in lab section and
write-ups, do extra practice problems on Canvas.”
“Sunday, 10/8, 3:00 P.M.–5:30 P.M., Library: Do timed practice exam, try to find
other examples of questions that I got stuck on.”
“Monday, 10/9, 10:00 A.M.–11:30 A.M., Chemistry Gazebo: Attend office hours with
the problems I had difficulty with.”

As this example illustrates, the dates, times, study locations, resources, and their use
are specific to the chemistry course and relevant to the timing of the students’ upcom-
ing exam. In short, designing the intervention involves integrating general principles of
180 I. Education

TABLE 7.1.  Summary of Key Components of the Strategic Resource Use Intervention
Examples of answers that exemplify the
Components Key self-reflective questions psychological process
1.  Clarify goals. “What grade am I aiming “I am aiming for an A on this exam, which
for?” means a score of 90 or higher.”
“For the exam, what am I “I am expected to master the topics from
expected to know and do Chapters 1 to 6.”
well?”
“How is the exam formatted “I need to explain the processes of
and what kinds of questions geological formations in open-ended essay
will I expect on the exam?” questions.”

2.  Consider all “What are all the resources • Textbook

available resources. that are available to me?” • Lecture notes
• Teacher’s office hours
• Dictionary
• Online search engine
• Discussion forum
• Peer study group
• Homework problems
• Practice exam questions

3.  Identify and commit “Which resources should • Textbook

to resources that I use to master the content • Homework problems
would make effectively?” • Practice exam questions
learning effective. • Discussion forum
• Teacher’s office hours
• Peer study group

4.  Explain the purpose “Why would each resource “Trying the practice exam under timed
for which each be useful to my learning?” conditions will give me practice on problems
resource is used. similar to the kind that I will encounter on
my actual exam and also practice answering
them within the 75-minute time limit. As I
do the exam, I will look out for how I am
expected to apply my knowledge, so that I
know what content I should review later.”
“For what purpose do “I will do the extra practice assignments,
I intend to use each as well as the online practice problems,
resource?” especially for topics that I find difficult.
This will help me solidify my confidence
to handle the kinds of problems that I find
most challenging.”

5.  Plan concretely how “When, where, and how “This Wednesday between 4 P.M. and 6
to use the resources. will I use each resource?” P.M. in the library, I plan to finish reading
Chapters 5 and 6 of my textbook. That same
day after dinner between 8 P.M. and 10 P.M.,
I will then meet with my study group in
the dorm study room to try practice exam
questions for Chapters 5 and 6. We will try
the questions independently and then discuss
those that each of us got wrong.”
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 181

strategic resource use with the concrete, class-­specific application of these principles to
make sure that the intervention is relevant.

Previous Mistakes in Implementation

Previously, we have shared the intervention materials with educators and researchers who
were interested in trying it out in their own classes. From observing the way that some
administer the intervention, I have noticed a few issues in the implementation of the inter-
vention that can be avoided. These generally occurred in cases where people modified
parts of the intervention without sufficiently anticipating how students might respond to
the questions or without fully understanding the psychology behind the intervention. For
example, one implementation required students to fill out the “why useful” open-ended
question for each resource separately, rather than giving them the flexibility to group
resources by function. This caused a few problems that the designer had not foreseen:
first, it penalized students for choosing more rather than fewer resources, and second, by
separating students’ answers to each resource, it did not encourage students to consider
how the resources would work together synergistically.
In another (suboptimal) implementation, the designer asked students to plan out
when, where, and how they would study with each resource, but only offered them an
interface where they were expected to respond to each resource separately (e.g., “For
resource X that you selected, please indicate when, where, and how you will use this”
and “For resource Y that you selected, please indicate when, where, and how you will
use this.”). This approach makes it difficult for students to plan how they might use vari-
ous resources within the same study session. For example, as students study in a study
group, they may read their textbook, refer to their notes, and discuss among themselves
questions about the content that arise. When students plan their study time, they rarely
ask themselves “When, where, and how should I use my textbook?,” followed by “When,
where, and how should I use my homework assignments?,” and so on, which is how
the ineffective implementation of the planning question forces students to plan. Instead,
effective students often consider what they want to accomplish in a particular study ses-
sion, then decide when and where that session might be and what resources they should
use during that session. A third issue with this approach is that it penalizes students who
select more resources to use. Some students who were faced with a long list of open-ended
response boxes actually stopped responding after a few boxes.
By contrast, the strategic resource use intervention asks students to plan out how
they would prepare for their upcoming exam, provides them with a model example, and
offers them an open-ended box to freely describe their plans. This directs students to
structure their plans like the model example, which includes when, where, and how to
use various resources, and it also allows students the freedom to write as lengthy or as
concise plans as they wish, without overwhelming them with a multitude of open-ended
response boxes. If necessary, future iterations of the intervention could be even more
explicit about asking students to include the when, where, and how components of plan-
ning.
These aforementioned problems—­and many others—­can be avoided by consider-
ing the psychology of the intervention and how it is meant to improve learning. Table
7.1 provides a schematic that summarizes the psychological process and the kinds of
exemplary responses that we are trying to move students toward as they learn on their
182 I. Education

own. Having said this, some mistakes are inevitable during the trial-and-error process of
designing and testing any new intervention. As we further develop the strategic resource
use intervention and test it in new class contexts, we can expect to make some mistakes
that we might not have foreseen; but importantly, we can all sensibly learn from such trial
and error along the way.

Testing Scaling and Distribution

At the end of the day, interventions are designed and tested to be made available to educa-
tors and learners to benefit learning. Our goal is aligned with supporting learners’ effec-
tive self-­regulation of their own learning. Naturally, we are interested in understanding
how and how effectively learners would make use of the intervention on their own if it
is freely available to them and presented as an effective tool that they could use (rather
than couched as a survey from researchers about their class experiences). We also want to
know how students would make use of this intervention if it were sourced and authored
centrally in the university, rather than represented as coming from their instructors—­as
this would be a practical way to scale this to many students at a school in the future. To
this end, we have started actively testing how students make use of the intervention when
it is freely available as an exam preparatory tool through an online platform that is widely
distributed at a large, public university.
My research team has worked with designers and programmers to incorporate the
strategic resource use intervention as an “Exam Playbook” in an ECoach platform at the
University of Michigan (Huberth et al., 2015). Students who access the online platform
have access to a range of educational tools, including the strategic resource use interven-
tion, that they can freely choose to use (or not). ECoach is now available to students in
multiple science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes across the university,
and it has over 10,000 student users to date. It includes personalized reminders to stu-
dents that resources are available to them. For example, it might remind a student in a
physics course that her midterm exam for the class is coming up in 2 weeks’ time, and
that she might want to check out the Exam Playbook to help her prepare for her exam.
These timely messages function as reminders and encouragements to facilitate students’
own decision making about their learning—­they do not force students to use the online
tools but present the tools as beneficial resources that students could tap into if they
choose to. This research collaboration offers an excellent opportunity to monitor and
evaluate how students are using the strategic resource use intervention out of their own
initiative, when the intervention is released “in the wild” (so to speak).
Although we have yet to finish analyzing or to publish the data from these ongo-
ing research efforts, I am keen to share some anecdotes from student users that we have
collected so far. User experience design testers conducted focus groups at the end of the
semester with students from various classes in which ECoach was made available. Feed-
back from the user experience testing team indicated that students seemed to find the
Exam Playbook helpful to their learning: “The Exam Playbook was mentioned in nearly
every interview as the students’ most useful and memorable feature in ECoach”—for
example, “[David1] really appreciated the reflection component of the Exam Playbook.

1 Thereal identities of students have been replaced by fictitious identities in brackets, to protect their
anonymity.
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 183

He said this was the first time he ever really took a step back and thought seriously about
his study habits and why he’s using particular resources.” These preliminary feedback
seem to suggest to us that students do make use of the Exam Playbook, and that they find
it helpful. Such feedback has been encouraging to us, as we continue to seek teacher and
school partners to further test, refine, and distribute the intervention.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Goal Pursuit Occurs in the Context of Resources

The effectiveness of our strategic resource use intervention provides causal evidence that
strategic resource regulation—­an important yet understudied part of the metacognitive
learning process—­promotes achievement (Chen et al., 2017). Importantly, our findings
underscore that goal pursuit does not take place in a vacuum. As people pursue their
goals, they are often surrounded by resources that are either already available or that can
be sought out with some initiative (e.g., forming study groups, looking for a coach). The
more people are able to recognize the resources that are relevant to their goals, strategize
which resources are useful to them, and commit to using these resources effectively, the
more empowered people will be to achieve their goals. I hope that this research will
springboard more work on the psychological process of resource regulation, which is
evidently important in helping people pursue their goals effectively.

Strategy: The Neglected Attribution
Our research places the spotlight back on an attribution that has been well studied
among learners in cognitive and educational psychology, but relatively neglected in social
psychology: strategy. The takeaway here is not about the importance of raw intellect or
sheer effort (e.g., how many hours a student studies or how many resources a student
uses)—although these are certainly important. Instead, our findings focus on the impor-
tance of self-­reflective and goal-­directed resource use during learning. Regardless of how
capable and effortful they may be, students may still not perform to their full potential
if they do not approach their learning strategically. The good news is that guiding the
average learner to become more strategic empowers them to learn more effectively and
to perform at a level higher than what they otherwise might be able to achieve (Chen et
al., 2017).

Complementing Growth Mindset Messages

Relatedly, nurturing students to be more strategic on their own could complement growth
mindset messages. Growth mindset of intelligence interventions often teach learners that
they can grow their intelligence through effort and effective strategies (Paunesku et al.,
2015; Yeager et al., 2019). These interventions convey that students can continually
develop themselves as learners over time, and offer suggestions about how they might do
so. Similarly, the strategic resource use intervention represents learning as an evolving,
controllable process: It prompts students to generate their own strategies for learning,
to monitor their strategy use, and to change strategies when unproductive, empowering
184 I. Education

them to take control of and manage their learning. Given these complementary self-­
regulatory processes, one might imagine that students might benefit all the more from
marrying a growth mindset message with guided prompts that encourage them to gener-
ate their own ways of investing effort strategically.

The Student’s Perspective
To date, education research has made giant strides in enhancing curriculum and peda-
gogy, especially from the perspective of the teacher or administrator (e.g., “How can
we teach better?”; Hattie, 2009). However, quite a significant portion of work on the
psychology of the student focuses on individual differences (e.g., personality, intelligence,
conscientiousness, working memory capacity), prior educational background, and demo-
graphic differences (Hattie, 2009). While these are valuable research directions, have we
been neglecting what learning means and how learning occurs from the perspective of
the student?
As students learn, develop, and encounter challenges as they grow, many of them
inevitably ask themselves questions such as, “Does this matter?” (e.g., Hulleman & Har-
ackiewicz, 2009; Yeager et al., 2014), “Am I dumb?” (e.g., Molden & Dweck, 2006;
Paunesku et al., 2015), and “Do I belong here?” (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2011). Social-­
psychological interventions address how frequently students are asking these questions,
and just as important, how they are answering them (Walton, 2014; Walton & Wilson,
2018). However, when it comes to managing their own learning, many students are not
asking themselves self-­reflective questions about their learning enough—­for example,
“How will I learn this subject?” (e.g., Zimmerman, 2002), “How should I plan my study
time?” (Gollwitzer, 1999), and “How will I study effectively for this upcoming exam?”
(Chen et al., 2017). The strategic resource use intervention aims to encourage more of
such self-­reflection in students, and to scaffold their answers to important questions like
these.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Although we know that the strategic resource use intervention was effective for many
learners in one class context, there is still much to do to better understand the generaliz-
ability of its effects to different kinds of students and other learning contexts. For now,
we cannot yet conclude how well the effects of the intervention generalize to other types
of students (e.g., students of different ages, education levels, or cognitive abilities), sub-
jects (e.g., an English literature class vs. a statistics class), class structures (e.g., multiple
smaller tests rather than a few big exams, curved grading systems vs. noncurved grading
systems), exam formats (e.g., multiple-­choice tests vs. open-ended essay questions), or
teaching styles (e.g., teaching students to study in a tightly structured manner vs. giving
students more autonomy over their own learning). Research in these areas will be valu-
able for building a better understanding of the possible heterogeneity of the intervention
effects and its boundary conditions. Importantly, we will also learn how to tailor the
current intervention design to better cater to different students and learning contexts.
Another exciting question for this area of research is: How can we adapt the interven-
tion to facilitate transfer of these self-­regulatory principles? With the current class-­specific
 The Strategic Resource Use Intervention 185

design, we might not expect students to naturally generalize this metacognitive process
on their own to other learning contexts. The challenge is to teach resource regulation in a
way that concretely relates to students’ learning in their classes, but that at that same time
comes across as applicable to their learning more broadly. The good news is that we have
started thinking about ways to adapt the current intervention design to promote transfer.
As aforementioned, we are trying out methods such as asking students to apply the same
strategic planning process to another challenging class of theirs, asking students to teach
strategic resource use in a way that is applicable to another student who is learning a
different skill (e.g., music or sports), and instilling a mindset that orients people toward
being metacognitive more generally (Chen et al., 2020). This question about transfer is
important to pin down if we want to make scientifically informed judgments about the
dosage and design of the intervention to foster extensive, long-­lasting benefits for learn-
ers.
Another future direction is to lower the barriers for teachers to customize the inter-
vention for their students. At present, customization involves a close partnership between
the researchers and instructors to produce a comprehensive resource checklist, to identify
how students are typically reminded to study for their exams in the class, and to edit the
model examples if they are not as relevant. The time and effort involved in this collabo-
ration might be a barrier to some teachers offering the intervention to their students. If
we can find ways to lower these barriers—­such as by making the model examples more
generalizable, offering teachers a tool that allows them to easily self-­customize the inter-
vention and distribute it to their classes, or creating a general version of the intervention
that is not specific to a subject or class—we might be able to make this more accessible
to teachers and students.
In our studies, we found that the intervention did not only boost self-­reflection but
it also decreased students’ negative affect toward their upcoming exams, and increased
their perceived control over their exam grades. Might there be other effects of the inter-
vention that we have not measured or considered? It would be fruitful for future studies
to examine how the intervention might affect students’ classroom behaviors (Are they
engaging with their homework assignments, laboratory exercises, and class discussion
forums differently?), their motivation to learn (Are they more inclined toward a mas-
tery orientation in their learning?), their growth mindset (Does the intervention change
their fundamental beliefs about intelligence?), and their interactions with their peers and
teachers (Are they seeking help from others in a more effective manner?). These and other
factors are theoretically plausible, but unexplored, mechanisms of the intervention that
could contribute to students’ learning and academic performance across class contexts
and in an enduring manner.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The fact that so much is being done by so many—­including teachers, parents, schools,
governments—­across the world is testimony to how much we all value learning. We can-
not afford to waste all these efforts to improve students’ learning on mindless, ineffective
resource use. My hope is that, with more research and interventions like the strategic
resource use intervention, our psychological science will keep finding new and better
ways to help our learners use their resources wisely and effectively to learn.
186 I. Education

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 PA R T II

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

 C H A P TE R 8

Happiness Interventions

Kristin Layous

The content of happiness interventions ranges widely (e.g., expressing gratitude, performing
kind acts, focusing on one’s strengths), but all variations seek to address the same underly-
ing potential—­that people can increase their own happiness. Across dozens of experiments,
happiness interventions have successfully boosted well-being, often via changes in how
people perceive themselves, their situations, and their relationships. Here I review empirical
evidence demonstrating the efficacy of happiness interventions, the conditions that make
happiness interventions more or less effective (e.g., person-­activity fit), the instructions for
particular happiness interventions, and some of the nuances and misconceptions surround-
ing their implementation. In addition, I discuss the process by which happiness interventions
may affect long-term changes in happiness and other outcomes, as well as the potential for
happiness interventions to contribute to broader psychological theory.

Happiness interventions are brief, often self-­guided, reflective or behavioral activi-

ties designed to boost people’s happiness (i.e., their overriding sense of emotional and
cognitive well-being) by prompting them to mimic the thoughts and behaviors of natu-
rally happy people. Researchers often use the terms positive psychology interventions
(PPIs) or positive activity interventions (PAIs), with the former being an umbrella term
that includes happiness interventions performed in the context of group- and individual-­
level therapy, as well as self-­guided formats, and the latter being a term specific to the
self-­guided format. By self-­guided, I mean that a person receives activity instructions
(maybe from a researcher, website, app, or book) and then engages in the activity with-
out therapeutic supervision. Lyubomirsky and Layous (2013) also use the term positive
activities instead of positive activity interventions to refer to the naturalistic practice of
happiness-­promoting activities outside the context of an experiment.

BACKGROUND

Across the globe, people report happiness as an important goal for themselves (Diener,
2000) and their children (Diener & Lucas, 2004). Extensive research demonstrates that

191
192 II.  Health and Well-Being

happiness is not only a pleasant emotional and cognitive experience, but is also predictive
of and causally related to positive outcomes in relationships, career, and physical health
(Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). Thus, happiness aids success in important life
domains, which likely feeds back into one’s happiness in a virtuous recursive cycle.
Therapists have been attempting to relieve patients’ psychological suffering by modi-
fying maladaptive thoughts and behaviors since the late 1800s (see Smith & Glass, 1977,
for the efficacy of therapy), but a direct focus on increasing happiness, rather than sim-
ply alleviating distress, is relatively new (Seligman & Csiksentmihalyi, 2000; but see
Fordyce, 1977, 1983). Critics of happiness pursuit warned that “trying to be happier is
as futile as trying to be taller” (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996, p. 189), but, in their seminal
work, Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade (2005) refuted this and other sources of pes-
simism regarding happiness pursuit. They argued that, despite relatively stable influences
on happiness like genetics and life circumstances (estimated to explain about 50 and 10%
of individual differences in happiness, respectively), a large proportion of happiness is left
unexplained by these factors and is likely subject to change by altering how one behaves
and how one perceives him- or herself and his or her social world. Indeed, during the
last two decades, research on happiness interventions has burgeoned, demonstrating that
increasing happiness is possible, even with brief and cost-­effective strategies (Bolier et al.,
2013; Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009).
To explore ways to promote happiness, Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et al. (2005) analyzed
the thought patterns and behaviors of naturally happy people (see also Fordyce, 1977,
1983). For example, past research has demonstrated that happy people think gratefully,
perform kind acts, and strive for personally meaningful goals, so Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et
al. (2005) reasoned that prompting people to engage in these types of thoughts or behaviors
might boost their well-being. They demonstrated that instructing people to think gratefully
or perform kind acts increased happiness relative to a control group (see also Emmons &
McCullough, 2003; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005, for concurrent happiness
intervention studies). These findings provided proof of their concept that engaging in certain
types of thoughts and behaviors—­which can be under one’s control—­boosts happiness.
Thus, initial happiness interventions were empirically, not theoretically, driven—­
researchers explored whether the correlates of happiness could be packaged and admin-
istered to cause increases in happiness. That said, Walton and Wilson (2018) offer a
helpful theoretical framework to understand why these happiness interventions work.
They propose that “wise interventions” are psychologically wise to the way people see
themselves, other people, or a particular situation, and use precise theory- and research-­
informed strategies to alter these meanings. They reason that almost every situation is
open to some type of interpretation and it is the inferences that people draw that most
proximally drives behavior. Thus, if meanings can be changed, so can behaviors and,
ultimately, changes in objective life circumstances may follow.
Happiness interventions can readily be interpreted through this wise intervention
framework. First, happiness interventions are wise to the particular thoughts and behav-
iors that promote happiness. Second, via structured reflection exercises or the enactment
of new behaviors, happiness interventions help people make meaning of themselves and
their social world in ways that promote happiness. Third, although the initial change
within a person is subjective (i.e., they view themselves, their relationships, or their cir-
cumstances more positively), this altered state may lead to changes in behavior that builds
on itself in a self-­enhancing recursive cycle.
 Happiness Interventions 193

In contrast with other wise interventions in this volume, happiness interventions

are quite varied in content, focusing on different behaviors or thought processes entirely
(e.g., gratitude, kindness, optimism). Nevertheless, all happiness interventions seek to
address the same underlying potential—­that people can increase their own happiness. In
this chapter, I highlight some unifying threads among happiness interventions, as well
as specific information about two types of interventions with strong empirical support:
those that focus on gratitude and kindness.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Walton and Wilson (2018) argue that, in order to alter potentially problematic ways of
viewing the self and the social world, researchers need to consider three basic motives that
underlie people’s meaning-­making processes: the need to understand oneself and one’s
surroundings (including their social relationships), the need for self-­integrity, and the
need to belong. Promoting psychological need satisfaction may be particularly important
in the context of happiness interventions because psychological need fulfillment relates
directly to happiness, which is the primary desired outcome of happiness interventions
(Ryan & Deci, 2000).

The Need to Understand

People have a fundamental need to make sense of themselves and others and they do their
best to make inferences that match their own experiences and the information available
to them (Walton & Wilson, 2018). For example, if parents, mentors, or friends tell a child
that happiness is determined at birth, the child may hold the perception that happiness is
fixed—there is no use trying to live a happier life. In this instance, trusted sources have
informed the child how to understand happiness and this belief may hold long after the
child remembers how the belief was initially instilled. Thus, a happiness intervention that
conveys the knowledge that happiness is malleable, rather than fixed, could drastically
change a person’s meaning-­making process around happiness. Indeed, those who hold a
growth mindset toward happiness (a belief that happiness can grow through effort) are
happier than those who hold a more fixed perspective (Van Tongeren & Burnette, 2018).
In a causal test of the effect of growth mindset on happiness, participants randomly
assigned to receive information about the malleability (vs. the stability) of happiness
reported higher growth mindsets toward happiness, which in turn related to greater hap-
piness (Van Tongeren & Burnette, 2018). Thus, altering the understanding of happiness
as malleable rather than fixed promotes greater happiness.
In addition, due at least partially to individual differences in inborn personality
traits (Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991) or learned tendencies from parents who model emotion
regulation (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), people are predisposed to view
the world and respond to it in ways that either promote or detract from their happiness
(Lyubomirsky, 2001). As noted by Walton and Wilson (2018), almost every situation is
open for interpretation and some people interpret the situation in a way that promotes
their happiness, whereas others do not. Happiness interventions redirect people’s atten-
tion to the positive in their lives and help them view themselves and their social world
in happiness-­promoting ways. Thus, even if people are predisposed to view situations in
194 II.  Health and Well-Being

a way that undermines their happiness, happiness interventions can alter these thought
processes and behaviors.
For example, happiness interventions focused on gratitude, such as listing what one
is grateful for (in a journal-­t ype framework; Emmons & McCullough, 2003) or writing
a letter of gratitude to someone who has done something for you (e.g., Lyubomirsky,
Dickerhoof, Boehm, & Sheldon, 2011), amplify people’s recognition and appreciation of
the good things they already have, helping them construe their lives as more positive than
they did before.
Emmons and McCullough (2003) provided the following examples from people’s
gratitude lists: “waking up this morning,” “the generosity of friends,” “for wonderful
parents,” “to the Lord for just another day,” and “to the Rolling Stones.” None of these
blessings were new positive events happening to participants, but the gratitude activity
helped them actively appreciate aspects of their lives they likely take for granted on most
days. Although this initial change in perception is subjective, over time, this shift in per-
spective may help people take action that leads to more enduring changes in their objec-
tive circumstances (more on this in the “Effects over Time” section).
Similarly, when writing a gratitude letter, people actively appreciate the influential
relationships they already have (or have had in the past). Common themes include close
others giving letter writers unconditional love or social support in times of adversity, as
well as believing wholeheartedly in their ability to succeed. These letters also often reveal
a drive to work hard to prove that their benefactor’s efforts were not wasted, which may
point to ways in which gratitude can affect future behavior. Below are two excerpts from
letters that were representative of many written by college students (unpublished excerpts
from the Layous, Lee, Choi, and Lyubomirsky [2013] study).

Dear [High School Teacher],

If it wasn’t for your [English] class in high school, I probably wouldn’t be the person I
am today. I feel that after I took your class I grew up so much more. I became a better
person in regards to forming my own opinions about life. You were a strict teacher,
you pushed us to our limits, but never did you ever tell us we couldn’t handle it. I know
that you pushed us to our limits because you had so much confidence in us. You had so
much belief in us as individuals and that you pushed us because you wanted us to know
that we are capable of becoming the best that [our school] had to offer. . . . Thank you
for believing in my capabilities. Thank you for pushing me to my limits. Thank you for
making me believe in myself. Thank you for teaching me to like myself for who I am.
Thank you for changing my life for the better.
Sincerely,
Student

Brother,
I wanted to write to you to let you know how grateful I am for everything you have done
for me. You are an amazing brother and mentor, someone who I look up to. I hope one
day I can come close to achieving the goals you have hoped I accomplish. You did not
have to be there for me like you were when we were younger. With mom and dad always
being gone, you raised me and [our other brother], something that would not be easy for
anyone to do, you only being 9 years old when I was born. I will never forget the nights
you stayed home to help me with my homework instead of being a typical teenager who
 Happiness Interventions 195

enjoyed the life with friends, parties, and living carefree. . . . Every day I go to school
knowing I have to work hard, and then work harder, not to let you down. You have
never placed worry or pressure on me to succeed in life, but I know deep down, that that
is all you want. I look at you not only as a brother, but as a role model, a father figure,
and one of my best friends. I refuse to mess up my life, and make unforgettable mistakes,
knowing you sacrificed so much just for me to be able to do so. I am forever in debt to
you, in the most loving way possible. I want to do well in school, personal relationships,
work and in life, so I can make myself proud, and you proud. I don’t think I have ever
written out on paper just what exactly you have done for me, or how thankful deep
down I really am. So thank you [brother], thank you so much. If it weren’t for you, I
honestly don’t know what I would be doing. I promise I won’t let you down, [we’re] so
close to accomplishing our life dreams.
I love you . . . [you’re] an amazing brother and you will be an amazing father one day.
Your sister

One study clearly illustrated the ability of happiness interventions to change people’s
construal of their life events. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two happiness
interventions or a control condition (Dickerhoof, 2007). In all three conditions, people
were asked to write down personally satisfying experiences from the week (e.g., “I went
on a job interview, and I got the job on the spot!”) and then participants and independent
coders rated how satisfying the experiences were. Participants in the happiness interven-
tion conditions reported that their experiences were becoming marginally more satisfying
over time compared to participants in the control group. Alternatively, independent cod-
ers actually rated participant experiences as becoming less satisfying over time, indicat-
ing that participant perceptions of increased satisfaction were not objective—­they were
due to improved construal of these situations. This perception of satisfaction mediated
the relationship between condition and well-being, indicating that an important way in
which happiness interventions boost well-being is by improving people’s perception of the
events in their lives. Importantly, this altered view of one’s experiences is likely to lead to
altered behavior—­perhaps trying new activities or taking on new challenges—­that feeds
back into one’s happiness is a recursive cycle. The altered understanding of one’s life is
just the first step to changing cycles of unhappiness.

Need for Self‑Integrity
People also have the need to view themselves as capable, competent agents in the world—­
morally and adaptively adequate (Bandura, 1997; Cohen & Sherman, 2014). The grati-
tude letter examples demonstrate that people often write to close others who have believed
in them. Although the gratitude letter prompt does not explicitly ask participants to write
about others who have made them feel worthy, implicit in the activity is writing to some-
one who has invested in the letter writer, thus demonstrating the target’s view of the letter
writer as worthy.
Whereas gratitude interventions prompt reflection as a first step, kindness interven-
tions first prompt a behavior and then leave it up to the participants to reflect upon the
meaning of that behavior. One way in which performing acts of kindness boosts happi-
ness is likely by fostering a sense of accomplishment in the performer (e.g., he or she feels
like a good person). For example, across three experiments, participants prompted to help
196 II.  Health and Well-Being

others increased in positive self-­evaluations relative to those who did not help (William-
son & Clark, 1989). The self-­evaluations included a variety of personal characteristics
that may make up one’s sense of self as morally and adaptively adequate (e.g., successful,
helpful, trustworthy, considerate, useful, and kind). In one specific type of kindness inter-
vention, participants were randomly assigned to “make someone else happy” throughout
the week for 4 weeks (excerpts from Layous, Kurtz, Margolis, Chancellor, and Lyu-
bomirsky [2018] included below). A consistent theme across these entries was the person
performing kind acts feeling proud of him- or herself for investing in others.

“I chose to make my boyfriend happier last week. I made him dinner and tried to be
nicer to him and not be so critical of him. I chose this person because he’s the per-
son I spend most of my free time with. I knew treating him nicely would make him
happy because a lot of times when I’m stressed I take it out on him. He was much
more appreciative toward me. I was very proud of myself that I could make him as
happy as I did.”
“This week I chose one of my friends and housemates. During the week we don’t have
much time to hang out, so this weekend I made sure we did. We went out together
Friday night and had a movie night the next night. I chose [friend] because we’ve
been friends for a long time, and I knew she was someone I really cared about. I
knew just spending time with her would make her happy. She was excited when she
realized I wanted to spend so much time with her. I felt proud of myself that I took
time away from doing things only for myself. I think I was successful in making her
happy.”

Need to Belong
People also have the fundamental need to belong—­to feel close and connected with oth-
ers (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Importantly, people’s relationships
with others are also open for interpretation with people pondering questions such as
“Does my significant other truly love me?” or “Does this social group really care if I’m
here?” (Walton & Wilson, 2018).
Both gratitude and kindness interventions highlight positive relationships in one’s
life. Gratitude journaling is a private activity, but people often bring to mind their valued
social relationships. Similarly, although gratitude letters often go undelivered in experi-
ments to isolate the effect of simply writing the letter, the activity brings to mind impor-
tant others in one’s life and highlights the investment of others in the letter writer’s life.
Whereas gratitude activities typically simply bring to mind positive social relationships
(but see Walsh & Lyubomirsky, 2018, for the additional benefit of delivering the gratitude
letter), kindness interventions prompt people to behave in positive ways toward others:
strangers, acquaintances, or close others. Not surprisingly, both gratitude interventions
and kindness interventions boost people’s sense of connectedness to others (e.g., Kerr,
O’Donovan, & Pepping, 2015). Research suggests that even interactions with strangers,
like your coffee shop barista, promote belonging and happiness (Sandstrom & Dunn,
2014), and investing in close relationships provides even more of a boost in happiness
than investing in acquaintances (Aknin, Sandstrom, Dunn, & Norton, 2011), perhaps
because of the potential to trigger a positive feedback loop in your close relationships.
 Happiness Interventions 197

Importantly, performing kind acts and expressing gratitude may work in tandem to
promote positivity in one’s relationships. In the above excerpt, the person who invested
time into making her boyfriend happier noted how appreciative he was of her efforts. Past
theory and research has demonstrated that those who feel grateful toward their partner
are more likely to engage in behaviors that strengthen the relationship (e.g., spending
quality time with one’s partner; Algoe, 2012). Thus, the initial kind act from Partner A
may trigger gratitude in Partner B, which stimulates Partner B to invest further in the
relationship, triggering an upward spiral of gratitude, positive relationship behaviors, and
relationship satisfaction in Partner A and Partner B (Algoe, 2012). Although a great deal
of gratitude research has taken place in the context of romantic relationships, research
has also demonstrated the positive effects of gratitude in close friendships (e.g., Lambert
& Fincham, 2011), indicating that gratitude has a role across relationship type, promot-
ing fulfilling relationships (Algoe, 2012). Given people’s inherent need to feel close to
others, it is no surprise that activities that promote positive relationships also contribute
to happiness.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
The primary outcomes of happiness interventions are subjective well-being and depres-
sion. In the tradition of Diener (1984), subjective well-being includes three primary com-
ponents: positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction—­sometimes reported sepa-
rately and sometimes reported as part of a composite with negative affect reverse-­scored
(Busseri & Sadava, 2011). In the literature, subjective well-being and “happiness” are
used interchangeably, and subjective well-being is often used as an umbrella term that
subsumes measures that ask participants directly about their happiness (e.g., Lyubomir-
sky & Lepper, 1999). Sometimes researchers also measure participants’ eudaimonic well-
being—their sense of purpose and meaning in life—but research suggests that subjective
and eudaimonic well-being have so much overlap that differences between the two are
more conceptual than empirical (e.g., Disabato, Goodman, Kashdan, Short, & Jarden,
2016). Thus, for simplicity, I focus mainly on the subjective well-being and depression
results.
Two meta-­analyses have investigated the efficacy of happiness interventions. The
first included 51 studies and found that the effect of PPIs is moderate on subjective well-
being and depression (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). With stricter inclusion criteria (e.g.,
only peer-­reviewed publications, only studies with randomization to condition), the sec-
ond meta-­analysis included 39 studies and found that the effect of PPIs is small but
significant on subjective well-being and depression at postintervention, with the small
effects on subjective well-being persisting 3–6 months later (Bolier et al., 2013).
Recent papers also explored the effects of gratitude and kindness interventions spe-
cifically. A meta-­analysis of gratitude interventions included 38 studies with 282 effect
sizes from various outcome variables and comparison conditions (Dickens, 2017; see also
Davis et al., 2016). Compared to a neutral control condition, people who engaged in a
gratitude intervention reported higher quality of relationships, grateful mood and dispo-
sition, life satisfaction, positive affect, happiness, well-being, and optimism, and lower
198 II.  Health and Well-Being

depression at postintervention, with all effect sizes being small to moderate. The differ-
ences between the gratitude and control conditions remained at follow-­up for well-being,
happiness, positive affect, and depression, with the follow-­up period varying from 2
weeks to 6 months. A meta-­analysis of kindness interventions included 27 studies with 52
effect sizes comparing the effect of performing kind acts versus various controls. Collaps-
ing across comparison condition types and various indicators of subjective well-being,
the effect of kindness interventions on the well-being of the actor was small to medium
(Curry et al., 2018).
In addition to boosting subjective well-being, happiness interventions also have posi-
tive effects on relationships, work, and physical health either directly or via increases
in happiness. As mentioned before, happiness interventions promote feelings of connec-
tion with others (Dickens, 2017; Kerr et al., 2015) and may trigger positive feedback
loops within one’s relationships (Algoe, 2012). People induced into a positive mood are
also better workers in a variety of ways—they set higher goals, persevere at challenging
tasks longer, complete a greater amount of work with no decline in quality, and come up
with more mutually beneficial solutions in negotiations (Walsh, Boehm, & Lyubomirsky,
2018). In addition, happiness is related to physical health (Pressman, Jenkins, & Mos-
kowitz, 2019), and people who engage in happiness interventions have reported fewer
symptoms of physical illness (Burton & King, 2008; Emmons & McCullough, 2003,
Study 1), and even fewer visits to the doctor (Burton & King, 2004; King, 2001) than
comparison groups.
Research on happiness interventions suggests potential pathways by which happiness
may affect physical health. Specifically, participants who engage in happiness interven-
tions (vs. various comparison conditions) have reported greater sleep duration (Emmons
& McCullough, 2003, Study 3) and sleep quality (Jackowska, Brown, Ronaldson, &
Steptoe, 2016), decreased diastolic blood pressure (Jackowska et al., 2016) and inflam-
mation (Redwine et al., 2016), and healthier eating (Fritz, Armenta, Walsh, & Lyubomir-
sky, 2019). Thus, happiness interventions may improve physical health by increasing the
healthy cardiovascular profile associated with positive emotions (Boehm & Kubzansky,
2012) and by promoting healthier behaviors (e.g., better eating and sleep habits).

Mechanisms
To understand how happiness interventions can affect long-term changes in well-being,
we must first explore the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of people directly following
their engagement in a happiness intervention. In the “Psychological Processes” section
of this chapter, I focus on the potential for happiness interventions to change the way
people construe themselves, their relationships, and their circumstances in general, which
likely feed back into greater happiness over time in a recursive process. Here I focus on
some evidence of these proximal changes in the way people understand their current
circumstances and relationships (need to understand), feel about themselves (need for
self-­efficacy), and feel connected to others (need for belonging).
Immediately following a gratitude expression activity, participants felt more grateful
(Lambert, Fincham, & Stillman, 2012; Layous et al., 2017), more positive overall (Lay-
ous et al., 2017; Watkins, Woodward, Stone, & Kolts, 2003), more connected to others
(Layous et al., 2017), and more emotionally and cognitively engaged at school (King
& Datu, 2018) than comparison groups. Directly after performing an act of kindness,
 Happiness Interventions 199

participants felt more positive overall and evaluated themselves more positively on a vari-
ety of personal characteristics (e.g., successful, trustworthy) than participants who did
not perform an act of kindness (Williamson & Clark, 1989). Importantly, participants
reported these feelings directly after the activity—­there had been no time for objective
life circumstances to change. This means that participants’ construal of themselves, their
relationships, and their circumstances had changed to view their life in a more positive
light. These immediate shifts in construal, positivity, and psychological need satisfaction
likely drive longer-­term changes in well-being (Fredrickson, 2013; Layous & Lyubomir-
sky, 2014; Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013).
Another possibility ripe for future exploration is that happiness interventions drive
immediate changes in behavior (i.e., not just construal), which then feed back into happi-
ness. For example, people induced into a grateful state are more likely to perform acts of
kindness (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006), a behavior that also leads to higher happiness (see
Miller, Dannals, & Zlatev, 2017). More research needs to explore the proximal changes
in feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that promote happiness change well after the initial
intervention.

Effects over Time
Theoretically, happiness interventions may affect long-term well-being and related out-
comes (e.g., relationship closeness, workplace success, and physical health) via two non-
mutually exclusive pathways: recursive processes and continued practice. Regarding
recursive processes, the broaden-­and-build theory of positive emotions states that posi-
tive emotions broaden people’s attention and prompt engagement in approach-­oriented
behaviors (e.g., playing, exploring, learning, engaging with new activities or people;
Fredrickson, 2013). Although the boost in positive emotions is temporary, this broad-
ened, exploratory state allows people to take actions that may lead to durable changes in
well-being. For example, if a woman engages in a happiness intervention and feels more
positive as a result, she may feel energized to attend a gym class. While at this gym class,
she may meet someone with common interests who becomes a friend and an enduring
source of social support. Thus, the initial positive state promoted actions that created an
objective and stable happiness-­promoting change—­a new friend (see Fredrickson, Cohn,
Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008, for empirical evidence).
Fredrickson (2013) focuses on positive emotions as the fuel that drives these
happiness-­promoting actions, but based on the psychological processes and mechanisms
discussed earlier, I posit that other mediators are also at play (e.g., construal, psychologi-
cal need satisfaction, or positive behaviors). Regardless of the precise mechanism, a hap-
piness intervention may trigger a series of events that promotes sustained happiness (see
also Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Yeager & Walton, 2011; Walton & Wilson, 2018, for a
discussion of recursive processes). Although possible, the above scenario relies on a chain
of fortuitous events that may not happen—­perhaps no one is particularly friendly at the
gym that day and therefore the upward spiral of positivity (i.e., the recursive process) is
not triggered. Indeed, Walton and Wilson (2018) note the importance of a receptive envi-
ronment for recursive processes to unfold.
This is where the second pathway, continued practice, comes into play. If, instead
of engaging in a happiness intervention only once—or only during a prescribed inter-
vention period (e.g., over 6 weeks)—a person decides to continue his gratitude practice
200 II.  Health and Well-Being

indefinitely, he increases the chance that this gratitude practice will set off a chain of
positive events in his life, thus sustaining his happiness. Whereas at first, the gratitude
intervention may only have changed his subjective construal of his life, eventually, this
subjective construal leads to positive actions that will improve objective circumstances
(e.g., more high-­quality social relationships) when met with a receptive environment. An
objective circumstance like more high-­quality social relationships would itself promote
greater happiness.
Another possibility is that the continued practice itself reinforces happiness by help-
ing people actively appreciate their lives as they are. Indeed, happiness researchers have
posited that continued practice is necessary to sustainably boost happiness and therefore
if the gratitude practice stopped, so would the associated gains in well-being (Lyubomir-
sky, Sheldon, et al., 2005, but see Cohn & Fredrickson, 2010). Researchers also theorize
that if continued practice is sustained long enough, the practice may become habitual,
thus sustaining boosts in well-being without effortful practice (Lyubomirsky, Shedon, et
al., 2005). Thus, for example, someone who practices gratitude over time may eventually
have his or her immediate response to a situation be one of gratitude rather than dismay.
This person may then resemble people who are naturally grateful due to personality or
early learned tendencies. No research has been conducted yet to determine whether hap-
piness interventions can become habitual after a certain amount of time and therefore
sustain boosts in well-being.
More research also needs to explore evidence for whether recursive processes, con-
tinued practice, or both drive long-term changes in well-being. If continued practice is
necessary, you may expect longer intervention periods (e.g., 10 weeks vs. 4 weeks) to have
similar (or even perhaps greater) gains in well-being than shorter interventions. Indeed, a
meta-­analysis found that interventions that were longer had larger effect sizes than those
that were shorter, but this finding was confounded by the fact that many of the longer
interventions also took place in group or individual therapy, another factor that boosted
efficacy (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). In my own work, I have seen evidence of a quadratic
effect whereby the intervention boosts well-being out to a certain point (e.g., 3 weeks in),
but does not sustain the boosts for everyone out to the end of the intervention (e.g., 6
weeks in; Layous, Kurtz, Wildschut, & Sedikides, 2020). Thus, continued practice alone
does not seem to maintain boosts in well-being.
Some studies have measured the degree to which people continue to practice the
intervention of their own free will after the prescribed intervention period and found that
continued practice was related to sustained increases in well-being (Dickerhoof, 2007;
Proyer, Wellenzohn, Gander, & Ruch, 2015; Seligman et al., 2005; Sheldon & Lyubomir-
sky, 2006). Unfortunately, most of these studies do not provide enough information to
know whether the continued practice was necessary to maintain sustained well-being
increases, or were merely additionally beneficial.
Complicating matters, most of the evidence on continued practice is correlational,
so the relationship between continued practice and sustained well-being could be due to
other factors. For example, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2006) found that continued prac-
tice was related to participant self-­reports of self-­concordance with their activity (e.g.,
the degree to which they enjoyed the activity and identified with its importance vs. felt
forced to engage in the activity by external forces or guilt). Similarly, Cohn and Fredrick-
son (2010) noted that those who continued their happiness-­promoting practice were also
the ones who reacted more strongly in the initial weeks of the intervention. This early
 Happiness Interventions 201

reactivity could be an indication of fit between the person and the happiness interven-
tion. Thus, quite rationally, those who felt the intervention working for them were more
likely to continue practicing it beyond the prescribed intervention period and those who
were slower to react (not reaping benefits until near the end of the intervention and reap-
ing fewer benefits overall) stopped the practice when the study stopped. Nevertheless,
Cohn and Fredrickson noted that what little gains the noncontinuers reaped in the initial
intervention were sustained at the follow-­up, indicating continued practice may not be
necessary because it is possible the intervention helps the person build other sources of
positivity in their lives that sustain well-being regardless of continued practice.
All of this is to say that more research needs to be conducted to explore the degree
to which continued practice is necessary and under which conditions (e.g., under optimal
person-­activity fit) continued practice is most beneficial. Following recommendations by
Miller and colleagues (2017), more research also needs to measure behavioral changes
following happiness interventions and how those behavioral changes may sustain boosts
in well-being in a recursive process.
Adding to the difficulty of exploring the “how” of well-being change over time,
many happiness interventions include either no follow-­up after the intervention or a rela-
tively short follow-­up (e.g., 1 month). Given how difficult behavior change is, longer fol-
low-­up periods are needed to know whether and how the changes instigated by happiness
interventions stick beyond the prescribed intervention period. Nevertheless, some articles
point to the potential longevity of these effects. Bolier and colleagues (2013) found nine
happiness interventions that examined follow-­up effects from 3 to 6 months after the
intervention and found a small but significant effect of the interventions (vs. control) on
well-being at the follow-­up.

Heterogeneity
Theory and research proposes various aspects of the happiness intervention (e.g., its dos-
age) and the people practicing it (e.g., their personality) that moderate the degree to which
the activity works to increase well-being (Layous & Lyubomirsky, 2014; Lyubomirsky &
Layous, 2013). For example, one study found that a gratitude exercise was more effective
if performed once per week rather than three times a week and another study found that
a kindness intervention was more effective if all kind acts were done in 1 day during the
week rather than spread out across the week (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et al., 2005). The
authors later reasoned that both studies suggest that happiness interventions performed
once per week are most effective, perhaps because many cultural routines are performed
weekly (e.g., church, television programs; Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013). Although the
authors cannot be sure why these patterns of implementation were the most effective, at
the very least, these studies point to the dosage of the intervention affecting its efficacy.
Lyubomirsky and Layous discuss various other aspects of happiness intervention imple-
mentation that may affect its efficacy (e.g., variety, built-in social support).
In addition, research points to aspects of the person that might make him or her
more likely to improve in well-being following a happiness intervention. For example,
in one study, people who were relatively more extraverted gained more in well-being
from happiness interventions indicating the role of personality (Senf & Liau, 2013). Past
research has demonstrated that extraverted people consistently experience more positive
emotions than their more introverted counterparts (Costa & McCrae, 1980), perhaps
202 II.  Health and Well-Being

because they react more positively to similar daily events (Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991).
Thus, it seems that extraverted people are predisposed to construe events as positive and,
when given overtly positive material like a happiness intervention, they benefit more than
their peers. Lyubomirsky and Layous (2013) discuss other characteristics of people that
may affect their likelihood of gaining in well-being following a happiness intervention
(e.g., how motivated they are to boost their happiness, how much they believe that hap-
piness interventions can increase well-being).
Importantly, the optimal dosage of a happiness intervention (i.e., how often it is
practiced) may vary by person, and whether particular personality profiles (i.e., extraver-
sion) gain more in well-being from a happiness intervention may depend on the happiness
intervention itself. Thus, perhaps more important than the main effects of activity or
person characteristics is the fit between a particular person and a particular activity (i.e.,
person-­activity fit; Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013). For example, giving random acts of
kindness to complete strangers may not be the best intervention for introverted people
(Pressman, Kraft, & Cross, 2015). Indeed, participants who indicate that an activity
feels relatively more natural and enjoyable to them are more likely to increase well-being
over time (Dickerhoof, 2007) and to continue practicing the intervention beyond the pre-
scribed period (Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). Similarly, people who indicate a good fit
with the happiness intervention are more likely to sustain benefits to well-being (Proyer et
al., 2015; see also Cohn & Fredrickson, 2010). More research needs to address the issue
of person-­activity fit to best maximize well-being benefits for happiness seekers.

COUSINS

Happiness interventions incorporate a broad range of activities, both inside (e.g., Fava &
Ruini, 2003; Seligman, Rashid, & Parks, 2006) and outside (e.g., Seligman et al., 2005)
of therapy, so I am not able to discuss all of them here. The activities mentioned below
(and the gratitude and kindness activities already mentioned) are similar in that they all
help people view themselves, their relationships, or their environments in ways that pro-
mote happiness, but they are different in the exact way they focus attention.
Various interventions—­broadly classified as savoring interventions—­direct people’s
attention to the positive in their past, present, or future experiences. Some researchers
characterize savoring as an umbrella term that encompasses gratitude, with gratitude
being a specific type of savoring in which one recognizes and appreciates a direct benefit
received from the goodwill of another person (Adler & Fagley, 2005). Many savoring
interventions have successfully boosted positive emotions by prompting people to remem-
ber positive experiences from their past (e.g., Burton & King, 2004; Sedikides et al.,
2015). Perhaps unsurprisingly given the fundamental need for humans to feel connected
to others (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995), the two most frequent subjects of these posi-
tive memories is close others and momentous events (e.g., weddings, graduations) during
which close others are an important part (Wildschut, Sedikdies, Arndt, & Routledge,
2006). Following this theme, the boost in positivity following the recollection of positive
memories was predicted by an increased sense of connectedness to others, as well as an
increased sense of meaning in life, self-­esteem, and self-­continuity (one’s sense that they
are connected with their past and that their personality has remained the same across
time; Sedikides et al., 2015).
 Happiness Interventions 203

Other savoring interventions attempt to direct people’s attention to the positivity

in their present experience by engaging in activities like taking pictures of their sur-
roundings in a thoughtful way (i.e., looking for and appreciating beauty; Kurtz, 2015)
or sharing positive news with a significant other (Gable, Reis, Impett, & Asher, 2004).
Counterintuitively, many savoring interventions induce a sense of scarcity to promote
present savoring—­either by having people mentally subtract someone important from
their lives (Koo, Algoe, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008) or by framing time as scarce in a
given location (i.e., at their college campus; Kurtz, 2008; Layous, Kurtz, Chancellor, &
Lyubomimrsky, 2018; see also Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999). In one study,
inducing a sense of time scarcity boosted feelings of psychological need satisfaction
in the moment (feelings of autonomy, competence, and connectedness) that predicted
boosts in well-being over time (Layous, Kurtz, Chancellor, et al., 2018). Thus, imagin-
ing time as scarce made people construe their current environments as more fulfilling
than they previously had.
Anticipating positive future events also boosts happiness (Quoidbach, Hansenne, &
Mottet, 2008). In a specific type of positive future anticipation, people “visualize their
best possible future self,” imagining that everything in their lives has gone as well as it
possibly can, and then write about what they envision (King, 2001). Common themes
that arise in these essays are job success, self-­improvement, marriage and family, and
home ownership—­success in career and social relationships. Researchers also adapted
the “best possible self” activity into a multiweek intervention, with each week focusing
on a specific domain of life (e.g., family, friends, career, or health; Boehm, Lyubomirsky,
& Sheldon, 2011; Layous, Nelson, & Lyubomirsky, 2013). Although the “best possible
self” intervention is often viewed as a self-­oriented activity compared to more socially
oriented activities like expressing gratitude (e.g., Boehm et al., 2011), when discussing
their ideal future life, people spontaneously bring up close others, indicating their cen-
tral importance to visions of future success (King, 2001). Indeed, participants randomly
assigned to a “best possible self” condition not only reported greater positive affect than
a control condition but also marginally greater connectedness (Layous, Nelson, et al.,
2013).
Another happiness intervention often viewed as self-­oriented assesses participants’
strengths with the Values in Action Inventory (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and then
prompts participants to use one of their top strengths in a new way (Seligman et al.,
2005; Senf & Liau, 2013). Importantly, on this particular strengths assessment, many
of the strengths that participants may have are inherently socially oriented, like grati-
tude, kindness, love, social intelligence, or teamwork, so this activity may not actually
be as self-­focused as it may seem on the surface. Past research has shown that this activ-
ity is effective in boosting happiness and decreasing depressive symptoms (Seligman et
al., 2005; Senf & Liau, 2013), but more research needs to be conducted to explore the
exact mechanisms of the effect. For example, do the socially relevant strengths drive
the effect on well-being or can focusing solely on individualistic strengths also benefit
well-being?
Meditation has also been found to boost happiness. Many meditation programs are
meant to boost mindfulness—­a nonjudgmental present awareness of one’s experience
(Kabat-Zinn, 2003). Mindfulness-­based meditation practices do not focus on boosting
positivity—­they are meant to adjust people’s inherent tendency to evaluate each experi-
ence as good or bad. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that mindfulness-­based meditation
204 II.  Health and Well-Being

practices not only reduce negativity, but also boost positivity (Davidson et al., 2003).
Other meditation practices directly focus on boosting positivity. For example, loving-­
kindness meditation prompts participants to direct love and compassion toward them-
selves, loved ones, acquaintances, strangers, and all living beings, and increases positive
emotions, mindfulness, meaning in life, perceptions of social support, and perceptions of
physical health (Fredrickson et al., 2008).
A theme in all of the above interventions is the importance of social relationships
for happiness. Many other wise interventions also focus on helping people view their
relationships in a positive light, although not typically with the primary goal of increas-
ing personal happiness. For example, across multiple studies, the social-­belonging inter-
vention has helped students construe their challenges as normal and temporary, not as
a sign they do not belong in their educational setting (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2011). The
primary goal of the social-­belonging intervention is to improve academic achievement
among marginalized groups, but it also boosts happiness and physical health (Walton
& Cohen, 2011). Thus, a common theme across wise interventions, including happiness
interventions, is the focus on positive social relationships.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Happiness interventions within therapy can be quite intensive (Fava & Ruini, 2003;
Seligman et al., 2006), but the self-­guided variety are often brief and typically performed
once per week for about 6 weeks (although 6 weeks is an arbitrary time frame to permit
completion of a study during a school term). Writing activities (e.g., gratitude) are often
scheduled for as few as 2 minutes (Burton & King, 2008) to as many as 15 minutes
(Lyubomirsky et al., 2011), whereas kindness activities can take much longer with par-
ticipants often reporting spending quality time with loved ones.
Gratitude interventions typically focus on either keeping a gratitude journal (e.g.,
“counting blessings” or “three good things”; Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Seligman
et al., 2005) or writing gratitude letters (e.g., Layous, Lee, et al., 2013; Lyubomirsky et
al., 2011).
Typical instructions for keeping a gratitude journal are as follows: “There are many
things in our lives, both large and small, that we might be grateful about. Think back
over the past week and write down on the lines below up to five things in your life that
you are grateful or thankful for” (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). This activity prompts
participants to reflect upon and appreciate aspects of their lives that they may take for
granted, giving them an opportunity to extract positivity from mundane experiences that
they otherwise would have taken for granted.
Typical instructions for a gratitude letter writing activity are as follows:

“Please take a moment to think back over the past several years of your life and
remember an instance when someone did something for you for which you are
extremely grateful. For example, think of the people—­parents, relatives, friends,
teachers, coaches, teammates, employers, and so on—who have been especially kind
to you but have never heard you express your gratitude. Although you should try to
write your letter of gratitude to a new person each week; if you prefer, you can write
another letter to the same person you wrote to previously.”
 Happiness Interventions 205

Then, participants are given a list of more specific instructions (abbreviated):

(1) Write in a letter format, (2) Do not worry about perfect grammar or spelling, (3)
Describe in specific terms why you are grateful to this individual and how the individual’s
behavior affected your life, and (4) Describe what you are doing now and how you often
remember their efforts. Participants are also reminded that their letter will be completely
confidential. Although the typical instructions ask the participant to write in a letter
format, research suggests that simply writing about the person in a nonletter format is
equally effective (Layous et al., 2017). In many gratitude letter writing interventions, the
letter is not shared with the target to isolate the causal effect of the gratitude expression
itself, but recent research suggests that delivering the gratitude letter boosts well-being
more than simply writing it and, as an added bonus, also boosts the well-being of the
recipient (Walsh & Lyubomirsky, 2018).
Kindness interventions prompt participants to perform three (e.g., Layous, Lee, et
al., 2013; Nelson, Layous, Cole, & Lyubomirsky, 2016) or five (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon,
et al., 2005; Nelson et al., 2015) acts of kindness during the week, all in 1 day (Lyubomir-
sky, Sheldon, et al., 2005). Typical instructions are as follows (with the last sentence
undoubtedly coming from the Institutional Review Board):

“In our daily lives, we all perform acts of kindness for others. These acts may be large
or small and the person for whom the act is performed may or may not be aware of
the act. Examples include helping your parents cook dinner, doing a chore for your
sister or brother, helping a friend with homework, visiting an elderly relative, or
writing a thank you letter. During one day this week (any day you choose), please
perform five acts of kindness—­all five in one day. The acts do not need to be for the
same person, the person may or may not be aware of the act, and the act may or may
not be similar to the acts listed above. Next week you will report what acts of kind-
ness you chose to perform. Please do not perform any acts that may place yourself
or others in danger.”

Asking people to report the kind acts they performed (i.e., the kindness check-in)
has two purposes. The first purpose is to hold people accountable. Researchers do not
want participants to blow off the activity, so they remind them that they will report their
kind acts the following week. If participants do not perform kind acts, they can leave the
kindness check-in blank and the researcher can decide whether to include them in the
analyses. That said, even if participants did not purposely perform kind acts during the
week, they likely still did nice things for others that they might report. Research suggests
that recounting the kindnesses one has performed throughout the day boosts well-being
(Kerr et al., 2015; Otake, Shimai, Tanaka-­Matsumi, Otsui, & Fredrickson, 2006). Thus,
the second purpose of the kindness check-in is to give participants one more chance to
benefit. Kindness interventions that ask people to go out and intentionally do kind acts
cannot be sure that participants actually did anything additional to what they usually do,
but, by asking participants to report their kind acts, they can be sure that participants
who report their kind acts are becoming more aware of the kindnesses they perform.
For a comprehensive list of happiness-­promoting activities, visit the Greater Good
in Action website (https://ggia.berkeley.edu), part of the Greater Good Science Center
at the University of California, Berkeley, which houses 58 research-­tested practices for
boosting well-being.
206 II.  Health and Well-Being

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Research has found that valuing happiness to an extreme degree actually undermines
it, so there seems to be a risk in people endorsing statements like “If I don’t feel happy,
maybe there is something wrong with me,” and “I am concerned about my happiness
even when I feel happy” (Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, & Savino, 2011). Alternatively,
research also suggests that simply prioritizing positivity as an important part of daily life
(e.g., “A priority for me is experiencing happiness in everyday life”) is predictive of well-
being (Catalino, Algoe, & Fredrickson, 2014). Thus, Catalino et al. demonstrate that the
explicit intention to pursue happiness is likely positive, but Mauss et al. demonstrates that
overvaluing happiness is distinct from a simple intention and can be detrimental. These
two different approaches to thinking about happiness and their distinct relationships
with well-being inform the administration of happiness interventions.
Indeed, most happiness interventions do not focus participants directly on their own
happiness (e.g., “Go make yourself happy”) but instead prompt participants to engage
in activities that take the focus off of their personal happiness (e.g., write a gratitude let-
ter, perform kind acts). A person engaging in these research-­tested practices is obviously
showing signs of prioritizing positivity by seeking out happiness-­promoting strategies,
but, when engaged in the activity itself, will not be thinking about their own happiness in
an “Are we there yet?” unhealthy way. Indeed, in general, self-focus is related to negative
affect, particularly when that self-focus involves ruminative thoughts like “Why do I feel
the way I do?” (Mor & Winquist, 2002). Thus, happiness interventions like gratitude and
kindness often take the focus off the self and direct it to others. This is a nuance of hap-
piness interventions that has not been discussed much, but I think may be an important
part of their success—­happiness interventions do not typically focus directly on happi-
ness.
Simply telling people to make themselves happy without giving them efficacious
happiness-­promoting activities may not work because people often do not know what
will make them happy. For example, many people engage in retail therapy to boost their
mood, but research has shown that experiential purchases promote greater happiness
than materialistic ones, likely because experiential purchases are more open to positive
reinterpretation and contribute to social relationships (Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003;
see also Kasser & Ryan, 1993). In another experiment, participants randomly assigned
to perform kind acts for others reported greater flourishing than those assigned to per-
form kind acts for themselves (Nelson et al., 2016). Presumably, the self-­kindness group
engaged in activities meant to boost their well-being, but they were unsuccessful in doing
so. Thus, people may want to pursue happiness, but they may not know what will actu-
ally make them happy.
Although people may not know exactly what to do to pursue their happiness, theory
suggests that their intention to pursue happiness is important to their success, as happi-
ness pursuit takes at least some effort (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et al., 2005). In one test
of this theory, researchers advertised their study as either a “happiness intervention” or a
“cognitive exercises” study (Lyubomirsky et al., 2011). Researchers thought that partici-
pants who signed up for the happiness intervention study were likely motivated to pursue
their own happiness and had the intention of doing so, whereas participants who signed
up for the cognitive exercises were less motivated and had no explicit intention to pursue
their happiness. Regardless of how participants initially entered the study (via happiness
 Happiness Interventions 207

intervention or cognitive exercises title), all were randomly assigned to complete one of
two happiness interventions or a control activity weekly for 6 weeks. Participants who
were motivated to improve their happiness and were assigned to one of the happiness
interventions reported greater increases in well-being than those who practiced happi-
ness interventions but were not motivated, or the control groups. Researchers concluded
that participants needed both a will (i.e., motivation/intention to pursue happiness) and
a proper way (i.e., an efficacious happiness-­promoting activity) to increase well-being
(Lyubomirsky et al., 2011; see also Ferguson & Sheldon, 2013, for a replication with a
completely experimental design).
The positive effects of intention during happiness pursuit is interesting compared to
other wise interventions in which the purpose is rarely made explicit to participants. For
example, some research suggests that making the purpose of self-­affirmation interven-
tions known undermines their effect (Sherman et al., 2009), but upon further examina-
tion, the awareness may only be detrimental if the activity is viewed to be externally
imposed rather than internally chosen (Silverman, Logel, & Cohen, 2013). I further dis-
cuss the importance of intrinsic motivation later in this section.
One reason intention to pursue happiness may predict higher happiness following a
happiness intervention is because intentional happiness seekers may put more effort into
happiness-­increasing activities. Lyubomirsky and colleagues (2011) had independent cod-
ers rate the degree to which participants put effort into completing their assigned activi-
ties (either the happiness interventions or the control activity). Regardless of whether
participants self-­selected into the happiness activity or not, those who put more effort
into the happiness interventions (but not the control activity) saw greater increases in
well-being. This again supports the “will and proper way” logic—­participants needed
to put effort into an efficacious activity. Unfortunately, Lyubomirsky and colleagues did
not report whether those who self-­selected into the happiness intervention study also put
forth more effort. Possibly, anyone who puts effort into happiness-­promoting activities
will reap the benefits, with or without the explicit intention to become happier.
The Ferguson and Sheldon (2013) and Lyubomirsky and colleagues’ (2011) studies
suggest that intentionality is an important component of benefiting from a happiness
intervention, but many questions remain. For example, can the effect of intention and
effort be disentangled and, if so, which is more important? What exactly needs to be
intentional—­the pursuit of happiness more generally or just intentionality toward the
practice of a specific happiness-­promoting activity (e.g., intentionally practicing grati-
tude or kindness)? I suspect that the latter would be just as effective as the former, but no
research to my knowledge has disentangled these effects. At what stage in happiness pur-
suit is intentionality necessary? In light of the potential for recursive processes to unfold,
maybe intentionality is only necessary at the beginning of a happiness pursuit, but ceases
to become necessary when activities either become habitual or trigger other positive pro-
cesses that contribute to happiness. Finally, even at the beginning of a happiness interven-
tion, is intention truly necessary, or is it merely helpful? I suspect if a group of nonhappi-
ness seekers (i.e., people who do not have the goal of improving their happiness) started
writing in a gratitude journal weekly, at least some of them would experience improve-
ments in well-being, indicating that the initial intention to pursue happiness was not
necessary for some. Similarly, in an experiment described earlier, participants randomly
assigned to read information about happiness being malleable (vs. fixed) reported higher
happiness despite never expressing any intention to pursue happiness (Van Tongeren &
208 II.  Health and Well-Being

Burnette, 2018). Thus, although initial theory suggested that intentionality is necessary
for happiness pursuit (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et al., 2005), many questions surround the
exact nature of this intentionality.
Another nuance is that, as much as possible, happiness interventions need to be
autonomy supportive (see also Silverman et al., 2013; Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Shel-
don, & Deci, 2004). People need to engage in happiness interventions because they want
to and because the activities feel natural and enjoyable to them (intrinsically motivating).
Even if people hold personal happiness as an intrinsically motivated goal because it feels
good in and of itself, the way one pursues happiness (e.g., via gratitude expression or
prosocial behavior) could start to feel unnatural or forced. Similarly, if people hold hap-
piness as a goal only because others seem happier than they do or because society expects
them to be happy, happiness pursuit may also feel mandated by extrinsic forces or by
one’s own guilt or shame (cf. Crocker & Park, 2004). Thus, as much as possible, people
need to come to happiness pursuit on their own terms and the happiness interventions
themselves need to underscore this autonomy. One experiment randomly assigned both
U.S. and South Korean students to perform kind acts or focus on their academics (the
control group) and then either provided autonomy-­supportive messages from a peer who
purportedly completed this study previously (e.g., “Just wanted to let ya know that where
u do these acts and who u do them for is totally up to u. Feel free to do this however u
want! :) ”), or just provided the other instructions with no peer support messages (i.e., no
autonomy support; Nelson et al., 2015). Regardless of culture, the autonomy-­supportive/
kindness group showed greater linear improvements in well-being over the 6-week inter-
vention than the other three groups, indicating that autonomy support boosted the effi-
cacy of the kindness activity, but not the control group.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Happiness interventions are quite scalable, as online versions of interventions have

showed comparable results to in-­person versions (Layous, Nelson et al., 2013) and pre-
liminary results from a multicomponent happiness intervention program show that the
online version was even more successful than the in-­person version (Heintzelman, 2018).
Similarly, an iPhone application called Live Happy features various happiness-­promoting
strategies and has shown increases in mood and global happiness in users, particularly
those who engaged more frequently with the application and tried more of the activities
(Parks, Della Porta, Pierce, Zilca, & Lyubomirsky, 2012). Given the self-­guided, non-
clinical nature of many happiness interventions, they are easy to implement in a variety
of settings.
That said, one potential cause for concern about the implementation of happiness
interventions in the public is whether particular activities could backfire among particu-
lar people (Fritz & Lyubomirsky, 2018). For example, one study found that a subset of
participants actually decreased in happiness following a kindness intervention (Press-
man et al., 2015). This kindness intervention was highly public—­participants spent 90
minutes performing kind acts for strangers (e.g., giving a compliment, holding the door
open, offering to carry something). Qualitative evidence revealed that participants who
decreased in happiness reported being shy and uncomfortable engaging with strangers
or reported being sad when they did not receive a positive response to their kind acts.
 Happiness Interventions 209

The majority of kindness interventions give participants a choice in how they perform
their kind acts, thus the likelihood of person-­activity fit and autonomous motivation is
higher. Researchers and practitioners need to consider the participants in their happi-
ness interventions and what type of complications they may experience, as well as leave
enough flexibility in their administration as to give participants control and choice in
their implementation.
In another example of a backfiring effect, one study found that writing gratitude let-
ters actually decreased well-being among mildly depressed participants (Sin, Della Porta,
& Lyubomirsky, 2011; see also Layous, Lee, et al., 2013, for the null effect of gratitude
letters among South Koreans). The authors reasoned that writing a letter of gratitude
might have been too taxing for depressed participants. Indeed, in casual conversations
with clinical psychologists, they caution that some of their patients with depression find it
difficult to think of people in their lives who care about them, or, alternatively, if they can
think of someone, patients quickly feel guilty about their family and friends wasting time
on them (see also Layous et al., 2017). In a clinical setting, therapists can guide patients
into a different way of thinking, but if people with depression are completing the grati-
tude letter activity by themselves, they may not have the proper support or wherewithal
to benefit from the activity. Over half of happiness seekers on the Internet qualify as clini-
cally depressed (Parks et al., 2012), so researchers need to be careful about which activi-
ties they recommend and which caveats they may place. In one successful customization,
researchers adapted the “visualize your best possible self” instructions for chronic pain
patients by acknowledging their pain in the instructions (Peters et al., 2017). Thus, par-
ticipants were asked to imagine their good life in the future “despite their pain.” This
small customization may have made participants feel understood and may have made the
activity feel less unreasonable given their current difficult circumstances.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

First, happiness interventions inform the degree to which a relatively stable and geneti-
cally influenced aspect of one’s personality—­happiness—­can be meaningfully and sus-
tainably changed through intentional practice. Although the heritability of happiness is
well established at about 40–50%, empirical evidence indicates that even identical twins
can have substantially different well-being trajectories due to nonshared environmental
influences (which could include intentional practice; see Layous, 2018, for a review).
Many view heritability estimates to be concrete and deterministic, but they are highly
influenced by nongenetic factors, like variability in the environment and variability in
the trait across people in the sample. Even if happiness was 100% heritable, improv-
ing environmental factors could still raise happiness in an entire population, boosting
people’s well-being relative to their own levels. For example, in one multiweek happiness
intervention among identical and fraternal twins, the average well-being across the whole
sample improved even though the estimates of the genetic effects on happiness remained
consistent across the study (Haworth et al., 2016). Genetically sensitive designs with an
experimental intervention component can continue to help researchers understand the
interplay between genes and environment on happiness and other personality processes.
Second, intervening to improve happiness among people in different cultures helps
psychologists learn about processes of well-being that are culturally specific and those
210 II.  Health and Well-Being

that might be more universally important. For example, although gratitude interventions
consistently boost well-being among Western samples, one study found that gratitude
letters were not effective in boosting well-being in a South Korean sample (e.g., Lay-
ous, Lee, et al., 2013). On the other hand, kindness interventions have been equally
effective among Eastern (South Korean) and Western (U.S.) samples (Layous, Lee, et al.,
2013; Nelson et al., 2015), suggesting a universality not characteristic of gratitude letters.
Exploring what activities do or do not boost happiness among different cultures, and the
psychological processes by which they do so, can promote theory development surround-
ing what leads to thriving in different cultures.
Lastly, intervening to improve happiness could develop theory in clinical psychology
by pointing to the role of positive affect in the manifestation and treatment of mental
illness. Currently, treatment for depression largely relies on drug therapy or cognitive-­
behavioral therapy, approaches that have been successful, but perhaps incomplete and
not a fit for all patients. Researchers have speculated that drug therapy, cognitive-­
behavioral therapy, and happiness interventions act on different neural circuitry (Layous,
Chancellor, Lyubomirsky, Wang, & Doraiswamy, 2011). A three-arm randomized trial
comparing changes in brain functioning among depressed patients undergoing happiness
interventions, cognitive-­behavioral therapy, or drug therapy could reveal whether the
theorized neural circuitry is supported. Future studies could also test the combination of
one or more of these therapies to explore whether addressing multiple neural circuits at
once has an additive effect on depression outcomes.
In addition, adding happiness interventions to existing therapeutic approaches could
address limitations of current treatment. For example, it takes several weeks for patients
to respond to drug therapy, but, on average, people respond to happiness interventions
quickly, showing immediate boosts to mood (e.g., Seligman et al., 2005). Thus, happi-
ness interventions may complement slower-­acting drug therapies. Similarly, happiness
interventions help focus people’s attention on the positive in their lives, so may be a good
complement to cognitive-­behavioral therapy’s focus on reducing maladaptive thoughts
(e.g., Beck, 2011). More research will further our understanding of the neural circuitry
surrounding depression and the way that happiness interventions could be incorporated
into existing treatment plans or even act as an effective stand-alone treatment (e.g., Selig-
man et al., 2006).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The late Chris Peterson, a prominent thought leader in positive psychology, summarized
positive psychology with three words: “other people matter” (Peterson, 2006). Although
the happiness interventions reported in this chapter have leveraged the perception of
positive relationships with others to increase personal happiness, very few have explored
the effect of happiness interventions on relationships and functioning in closed networks
like workplaces and schools (but see Chancellor, Margolis, Jacobs Bao, & Lyubomirsky,
2018; Layous, Nelson, Oberle, Schonert-­Reichl, & Lyubomirsky, 2012). Theoretically,
improving perceptions of relationships within a closed network could trigger positive
recursive processes that build upon each other quickly, reaping immediate relational
and well-being benefits. Thus, a ripe area for future research is intervening to improve
happiness among closed networks and exploring the cumulative effects on individual or
 Happiness Interventions 211

group-level happiness, as well as other important outcomes, like academic achievement

or workplace productivity.
Another important future direction in happiness intervention research is for more
studies to include longer follow-­ups. So far, the literature as a whole has demonstrated
promising short-term gains in well-being, even out to 6 months (Bolier et al., 2013), but
longer periods are needed to truly claim stable changes. Similarly, more research needs
to explore the process of long-term change to consider the role of recursive processes and
continued practice in promoting durable changes in happiness, as well as the downstream
consequences of these changes.
Happiness intervention researchers should also measure objective outcomes that
may result either directly or indirectly from happiness interventions. Researchers of
other wise interventions (e.g., belonging and self-­affirmation) have done an excellent job
demonstrating their intervention’s effect on important objective outcomes like grade-
point average, whereas happiness interventions thus far have been more likely to focus
on subjective changes (e.g., self-­reports of happiness, but see Burton & King, 2004;
King, 2001).
Lastly, given the importance of fit between the happiness seeker and the happiness-­
promoting activity (i.e., person-­activity fit), I think the most promising direction of future
happiness intervention research lies in the exploration of the types of activities that work
for different types of people, as well as ways to predict best-­fitting practices to individu-
alize interventions for maximum efficacy. A truly wise intervention would be one that
hits the right lever for the right person at the right time, setting off a promising upward
trajectory toward greater well-being.

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 C H A P TE R 9

The Stress‑Mindset Intervention

Alia J. Crum, Isaac J. Handley‑Miner, and Eric N. Smith

The substantial body of research depicting the damaging effects of stress has spurred a
decidedly negative cultural narrative around stress. There is also considerable evidence,
however, that stress can improve people’s health, well-being, and performance. In this
chapter, we detail an intervention designed to shift people’s mindset about stress from the
prevailing mindset that stress is debilitating to the mindset that stress can be enhancing. We
describe several lab- and field-based studies that demonstrate improvements in health, well-
being, and performance from this mindset intervention via attentional, affective, motivational,
and physiological mechanisms. Situating this intervention in the wise intervention framework,
we detail the structure and content of the intervention, outline important considerations for
implementing the intervention, and discuss the intervention’s contribution to existing psycho-
logical theory.

BACKGROUND

Hans Selye, often referred to as the “father of stress,” began his career as a medical
student in Prague in the 1920s. During his medical training, he noted a specific sickly
appearance of his patients; regardless of their diagnosis or circumstance, they all dis-
played the same haggard quality. These observations inspired his experimental work with
rats at McGill University in the 1930s and 1940s, leading to his exploration of the stress
response, or “Selye’s syndrome,” as he sometimes referred to it (Jackson, 2014; Selye,
1974). Selye notes in his seminal 1936 letter to the editor in Nature—considered by many
historians as the inception of modern research on the biological and psychological effects
of stress—­that the experience of stress triggered by “non-­specific nocuous agents” (e.g.,
physical injury, extreme amounts of exercise, exposure to cold) causes rats to undergo a
consistent and predictable physiological response (p. 32). He describes this “general adap-
tation syndrome” as consisting of three stages: an alarm reaction as the body prepares to

217
218 II.  Health and Well-Being

defend itself, a period of resistance as the body begins adapting to the heightened alarm
state, and, ultimately, exhaustion as the body can no longer sustain the taxing effects
of the alarm state (Selye, 1936, p. 32). Selye’s work, documented in the roughly 1,500
articles and 32 books he authored over his lifetime, came to dominate the field of stress
research (Jackson, 2014; Szabo, Tache, & Somogyi, 2012).
Although stress can be defined neutrally as the experience or anticipation of chal-
lenge or threat in one’s goal-­related efforts, much of the research following in the wake of
Selye’s depiction of stress documented damaging physiological and psychological effects
of stress. For example, research has demonstrated that chronic stress can lead to memory
loss (Sapolsky, 1996), posttraumatic stress disorder (Lupien, McEwen, Gunnar, & Heim,
2009), and depression (Hammen, 2005). Stress has also been linked to greater suscep-
tibility to upper respiratory viruses, faster progression of HIV to acquired immunodefi-
ciency syndrome (AIDS), and higher incidence of cardiovascular disease (Schneiderman,
Ironson, & Siegel, 2005). Spurred by this research, popular media outlets have enthusi-
astically saddled up for the war on stress with headlines declaring, “Even the Youngest
of Us Need to Learn to Battle Stress” (Newsweek, 2018) and “Work-­Related Stress Can
Kill, Study Finds” (Kahn, 2008).
The notoriety of these research findings and the media attention they inspired have
spawned the rigid cultural perspective that stress is bad. Accompanying this attitude,
scores of stress management programs have cropped up, promising to help people miti-
gate stress and its negative effects. The idea of stress management can be attributed in
part to the critical insight that the outcomes of stress are not driven only by the sheer
amount of stress one experiences but also by how one copes with that stress—­in other
words, the manner in which people appraise stress and mobilize cognitive and behav-
ioral resources to combat stress (Billings & Moos, 1981; Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub,
1989; Folkman & Lazarus, 1980; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Penley, Tomaka, & Wiebe,
2002). Yet, stress management programs all too often focus solely on reducing stress,
and while a few stress management programs have shown promising results (e.g., the
mindfulness-­based stress-­reduction program; Creswell, 2017), many of them have failed
to produce reliable benefits (Somerfield & McCrae, 2000).
A stress-­reduction approach has several practical shortcomings. First, some stress
may be too significant or variable to be effectively reduced though coping mechanisms.
Poverty, for example, is notoriously difficult to escape and can sprout a host of additional
stressors and cognitive demands (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013), rendering the stress
associated with it a poor candidate for “reduction” techniques. Second, a life of avoid-
ing stress would likely leave one without much of what people treasure most—­getting
an education, pursuing a career, maintaining strong friendships, and raising children,
among other meaningful goals; all generally involve experiencing some degree of stress.
Last, the irony of the stress-­reduction movement is that it may be inadvertently adding
to the stress many people experience. Experiencing stress, while being bombarded with
the message that stress is bad, can cause people to worry about the negative effects of
that stress (Brady, Hard, & Gross, 2018), and similar types of recurring and intrusive
thoughts, and the cognitive resources they take up, have been shown to have negative
outcomes (e.g., Logel, Iserman, Davies, Quinn, & Spencer, 2009; Schmader, Johns, &
Forbes, 2008). McGonigal (2015) captures this stressed-­about-­stress phenomenon in the
book The Upside of Stress: “When a friend of mine was pregnant with her first child, she
saw a study online that put her in a panic. The headline warned that a mother’s stress
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 219

during pregnancy is passed on to the baby. My friend was under a lot of pressure at work,
and she began to worry. Was she permanently harming her baby by not going on early
maternity leave?” (p. 43). This “meta-­stress” is an ironic and unfortunate by-product of
well-­intentioned attempts to help people reduce their stress.
What has come of this negative portrayal of stress in our culture? We spend vast
amounts of money on stress management programs, but people’s stress levels do not
seem to be improving (Gallup Daily: U.S. Mood, 2018; Saad, 2017). Of course, there are
a multitude of ecological, societal, and cultural factors influencing stress levels, but we
have little encouraging evidence that our current stress-­reduction culture is living up to
its promise. Furthermore, by focusing on the negative outcomes of stress, we have inad-
vertently created a culture that is now stressed about stress.

A “NEW” PERSPECTIVE ON STRESS

It stands to reason that Selye’s early work would have focused on the negative conse-
quences of stress. As a medical student, Selye observed sick people day after day, and the
people he saw regularly were those who remained patients. What perspective might he
have adopted had he continued to observe the people who made swift recoveries from the
same conditions that plagued those still bedridden in his hospital? Or what about those
who never entered his hospital?
Later in his career, Selye (1976) recognized another form stress could take: eustress,
or “good” stress. Selye noted the importance of distinguishing between eustress and
distress—“the former being agreeable or healthy, and the latter, disagreeable or patho-
genic” (p. 54)—and even attributed his own health and well-being to eustress: “What is
important is to live so that one’s distress is converted into eustress. In any event, that is
what has kept me healthy and happy” (p. 55). Despite Selye’s endorsement, public atten-
tion around eustress was far outpaced by that around distress. As the concept of eustress
faded to academic obscurity, stress and distress soon became synonymous for most prac-
titioners and consumers of stress research.
There is a strong body of research demonstrating the beneficial effects of stress as
Selye’s distinction suggests. Stress has been linked with enhanced cognitive performance,
personal initiative, and emotional stability (Dienstbier, 1989; Epel, McEwen, & Ickov-
ics, 1998; Fay & Sonnentag, 2002). Stress can promote physiological thriving, facilitat-
ing the healing response and enhancing immunity (Dienstbier, 1989; Epel et al., 1998).
Research on “posttraumatic growth” has even shown that severe bouts of stress triggered
by traumas, such as life-­threatening illness or military combat, can, in some instances,
have positive outcomes, such as improved relationships, greater appreciation for life, and
enhanced perceptions of personal strength (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).
This research on the benefits of stress does not render the research illustrating the
harmful effects of stress any less important or real. Rather, it suggests that the effects
of stress are paradoxical: stress has the capability to either help or harm our health,
well-being, and performance. The question then is: What is the distinguishing factor
that determines whether the stress we experience will manifest in positive or negative
outcomes?
This chapter reviews the manner in which mindset serves as a moderating factor in
determining the stress response. In the tradition of wise interventions (Walton & Wilson,
220 II.  Health and Well-Being

2018), the stress-­mindset intervention was designed to change the subjective meaning
people ascribe to stress in order to influence how stress affects their health, well-being,
and performance. Specifically, this intervention educates people about the ways in which
stress can have enhancing effects in their daily lives in order to shift people’s mindsets
from the prevailing view that stress is harmful (a “stress-­is-­debilitating mindset”) to the
view that stress can be beneficial to health, well-being, and performance (a “stress-­can-­
be-­enhancing mindset”).

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

The core psychological process theorized to underlie this intervention is shifting

mindsets—­beliefs or theories about the nature and workings of things and processes
in the world (Dweck, 2006). The world is complex and inherently subjective; mindsets
serve organizing, orienting, and activating purposes, guiding people’s attention, motiva-
tion, affect, and physiology, sometimes in ways that lead to self-­fulfilling effects (Crum,
Salovey, & Achor, 2013).
A plethora of research demonstrates that the mindsets people hold influence health
and behavior in numerous domains. Our work on stress mindset was inspired by research
on mindsets about intelligence. In this work, students who are encouraged through inter-
vention to adopt the mindset that intelligence is malleable—­something that can be grown
and developed—­are more likely to take steps toward building their intelligence, such as
choosing more challenging tasks (Yeager et al., 2016) and seeking out and attending to
feedback (Mangels, Butterfield, Lamb, Good, & Dweck, 2006). Furthermore, it appears
that certain mindsets can directly affect physiology without measurable changes in behav-
ior. For example, a group of hotel room attendants who adopted the mindset that their
work was good exercise lost weight and had lower blood pressure 4 weeks later (Crum &
Langer, 2007). In another study, participants who were told a milkshake they drank was
“decadent” (e.g., containing lots of fat, sugar, and calories) experienced a greater drop
in the hunger hormone ghrelin compared to those who believed the same milkshake was
“sensible” (e.g., containing minimal fat, sugar, and calories; Crum, Corbin, Brownell, &
Salovey, 2011).
A core feature of mindset research, as is core to wise interventions more broadly
(Walton & Wilson, 2018), is that mindset interventions do not need to alter the objective
qualities of people or situations in order to promote benefit. This suggests that improving
people’s response to stress does not require changing or reducing the amount of stress
they are experiencing or equipping them with an improved skill set—­rather, changing
people’s interpretation of what experiencing stress means can improve their response to
stress. Thus, the stress-­mindset intervention is designed to alter peoples’ mindset about
stress by providing them with information on how stress can be enhancing. This is in
direct contrast to other interventions that offer strategies to reduce and/or cope with
stress. The theory is that establishing this stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset will lead to
improved health, well-being, and performance by altering the emotional states people
experience during times of stress, what people attend to and are motivated to do when
in a state of stress, and how the body responds hormonally to stress, as discussed in the
“Mechanisms” section below.
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 221

The core psychological construct of stress mindset can be measured by the Stress
Mindset Measure (SMM; Crum et al., 2013), an eight-item measure that asks partici-
pants the extent to which they agree or disagree with a series of statements about the
consequences of stress for health and vitality, learning and growth, and performance
and productivity. This measure has been validated and explored in a number of sam-
ples, including college students (Crum, Akinola, Martin, & Fath, 2017; Goyer, Akinola,
Grunberg, & Crum, 2019), employees at a large financial firm (Crum et al., 2013) and a
large technology firm (Crum et al., 2019), Navy SEALs (Smith, Young, & Crum, 2019),
and a sample of middle school students (tested using a youth version of the SMM; Park et
al., 2017). Most research suggests that, prior to intervention, people typically fall on the
“stress-­is-­debilitating” side of the scale, reflecting our cultural milieu. The SMM can be
accessed at https://mbl.stanford.edu/materials-­measures/stress-­mindset-­measure.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
Evidence from existing stress-­mindset research indicates that preexisting stress mind-
sets are associated with health, well-being, and performance outcomes. Having a stress-­
can-­be-­enhancing mindset has been tied to improved self-­reported health and energy
levels, reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression, and greater life satisfaction and
performance at work (Crum et al., 2013). While these initial results were correlational,
subsequent randomized controlled trials established causal links between stress-­can-­be-­
enhancing mindsets and these domains (Crum et al., 2019; Crum et al., 2013, 2017;
Goyer et al., 2019).
In the initial experimental study manipulating stress mindsets, a randomly assigned
group of employees at a large Fortune 500 company watched a series of short videos
about the positive effects of stress. Meanwhile, another group watched videos on the
negative effects of stress that presented similar information to what they might encounter
reading a news article or participating in a traditional stress management workshop and
a third control group watched no videos. Participants in the treatment group adopted
more of a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset (as assessed by the SMM) and, 1 week later,
reported fewer negative health symptoms associated with depression and anxiety than
both of the other groups (Crum et al., 2013). As this intervention took place in a work
setting, we also investigated the effects of adopting a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset on
people’s self-­reported work performance. One week after the video intervention, those
in the treatment group reported stronger performance on composite measures of both
“hard” skills—­those related to productivity, including the quality, quantity, accuracy,
and efficiency of their work; and “soft” skills—­those related to the abilities to sustain
focus, communicate effectively, generate new ideas, and contribute to the overall work
environment (Crum et al., 2013).
In a pair of follow-­up studies to the seminal intervention, we tested many of the
same primary outcomes, but implemented more involved versions of the intervention. In
the first study, employees were recruited from a large financial institution shortly after
the 2008 financial collapse to participate in a 2-hour live training on stress mindset. In
222 II.  Health and Well-Being

the second study, employees from a large technology company took a 90-minute online
training about stress mindset. (See the “Intervention Content and Implementation” sec-
tion for more information on the features of this intervention approach compared to the
approach used in earlier studies.) Both randomized interventions found positive effects
on symptoms of anxiety and depression, and participants from the financial institution
also reported higher satisfaction with their physical health 4 weeks after the intervention
(Crum et al., 2019). Furthermore, results from these interventions again suggested that
shifting stress mindsets has the potential to influence hard and soft skills in the work-
place (Crum et al., 2019).
We also adapted our intervention messages for an education setting by conduct-
ing a study with low-­income, ethnic-­minority students entering an elite university. This
population of students is especially likely to experience stress and pressure in a collegiate
setting. One objective of this study was to compare the stress-­mindset intervention to a
traditional stress management program. As such, there were four conditions: (1) the treat-
ment condition in which students received an in-­person stress-­mindset intervention simi-
lar to that used with the employees from the large financial institution described above;
(2) a stress management intervention condition in which students received an in-­person
stress management training of comparable length and format to the treatment condition;
(3) a low-­socioeconomic status (SES), no-­treatment control group; and (4) a high-SES,
no-­treatment control group. Results showed that participants in the mindset condition
experienced higher levels of positive affect during periods of high stress—­in this case,
finals weeks—than college students who received either no intervention or a traditional
stress management intervention (Goyer et al., 2019). Furthermore, in the low-SES, no-­
treatment control condition, there was a significant negative relationship between levels
of perceived stress immediately before the freshman final exam week and self-­reported
exam scores, such that higher perceived stress prior to the final exam week was associ-
ated with lower exam performance; the same relationship was nonsignificant for those in
the stress-­mindset, stress management, and high-SES conditions. This suggests that the
stress-­mindset intervention may have helped mitigate the negative association between
perceived stress and exam performance for low-SES students.
This series of experimental studies offer substantial evidence that we can make sig-
nificant differences in people’s lived experiences by encouraging them to revise the sub-
jective meaning they assign to stress. The next section explores how a shift in mindset can
produce these changes in health, well-being, and performance.

Mechanisms
We theorize that individuals’ mindsets about the nature of stress can impact health, well-
being, and performance outcomes through four mechanisms: attention, affect, motivation,
and physiology. We review each of these mechanisms below. Although these mechanisms
represent simplified theoretical pathways, we suspect that a set of recursive processes
occur in which each of these mechanisms mutually reinforce one another. Furthermore,
we recognize that many of the proposed mechanisms are important outcomes in and of
themselves depending on the research question, but provide them here with a focus on
how these mechanisms might affect global levels of psychological and physical flourish-
ing. An illustration of the mechanisms of stress mindset can be found in Figure 9.1.
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 223

STRESS-CAN-BE-ENHANCING MINDSET

AFFECT ATTENTION MOTIVATION PHYSIOLOGY

More positive Attend to positive Utilize stress Higher DHEAS;
emotion stimuli and response to achieve moderate cortisol
(Crum et al., 2017; appraisals desired ends (Crum et al., 2013,
Goyer et al., 2019) (Crum et al., 2017) (Crum et al., 2013) 2017)

ENHANCED ENHANCED ENHANCED

PERFORMANCE WELL-BEING HEALTH
(Crum et al., 2013, (Crum et al., 2013) (Crum et al., 2013,
2019) 2019)

STRESS-IS-DEBILITATING MINDSET

AFFECT ATTENTION MOTIVATION PHYSIOLOGY

Less positive Attend and Avoid or Lower DHEAS; high
emotion ruminate on counteract stress or low cortisol
(Crum et al., 2017; negative stimuli response (Crum et al., 2013,
Goyer et al., 2019) (Crum et al., 2017) (Crum et al., 2013) 2017)

COMPROMISED COMPROMISED COMPROMISED

PERFORMANCE WELL-BEING HEALTH
(Crum et al., 2013, (Crum et al., 2013) (Crum et al., 2013,
2019) 2019)

FIGURE 9.1.  Theorized mechanisms of the stress-­mindset intervention.

224 II.  Health and Well-Being

Attention
When experiencing stress, the mindset people have about whether it is debilitating or
enhancing is likely to influence attention in logical ways. In theory, having a stress-­is-­
debilitating mindset will lead people to focus on all the ways stress might be a negative
force in their life, whereas having a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset will lead them to
look for and be more mindful of the ways stress has positive effects. Indeed, research sug-
gests that people who are led to adopt a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset are more likely
to display an attentional bias toward positive stimuli (Crum et al., 2017).
More generally, we posit attention as an important mechanism of stress-­mindset
interventions because what people attend to (and how they think about what they attend
to) has been shown to impact performance (e.g., attending to information critical to suc-
ceeding at a particular task; Chajut & Algom, 2003), mental health and well-being (e.g.,
not ruminating on negative events or self-­perceptions; Nilly & Winquist, 2002), and even
physical health (e.g., attending to stimuli that reinforce or bring to mind positive expec-
tations about healing; Zion & Crum, 2018). Given these straightforward pathways and
the encouraging experimental results reported above, more research should be conducted
on the specific attentional outcomes of stress-­mindset interventions. We would expect
changes in both what one focuses on as well as how—and how long—he or she thinks
about it. Such attributional and rumination patterns are likely to differ depending on
one’s mindset about stress (see Amirkhan, 1990), but these mechanisms have not yet been
tested in experimental settings.

Affect
The second mechanism through which stress mindsets are expected to impact health, well-
being, and performance outcomes is changing how people feel when stressed. Again, the
logic is fairly straightforward. If people hold the mindset that stress is debilitating, then
they are likely to experience stress even more negatively because not only are they stressed
but they are stressed about the effects of stress. If that same stress is experienced through
the mindset that stress can be enhancing, the affective consequences of that stress are likely
to be better. While the stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset does not necessarily remove the
stress, and therefore will not completely mitigate negative feelings, such as nervousness or
irritability, the belief that the stress can have positive effects is likely to provide people with
more positive affect, such as feelings of excitement, determination, and inspiration.
Indeed, research supports these mindset-­based alterations in affect. Participants
completing a mock job interview who were taught about the enhancing aspects of stress
experienced increases in positive affect when confronted with the stressful experience,
whereas those taught about the debilitating aspects of stress experienced decreases in
positive affect throughout the course of the study (Crum et al., 2017). Additionally,
incoming first-year students at an elite university exposed to the stress-­mindset interven-
tion experienced higher levels of positive affect during stressful exam weeks than those in
the stress management and no-­treatment control groups (Goyer et al., 2019). These two
studies found no evidence of changes in negative affect. Employees at the large technol-
ogy company who participated in the stress-­mindset intervention experienced a small
trending decrease in negative effect, which could reflect a reduction in stress about stress
since they also reported lower levels of perceived distress, but future research should
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 225

investigate this link further (Crum et al., 2019). Across studies, observed changes in
positive affect have been much stronger and more robust than changes in negative affect,
indicating that viewing stress as enhancing boosts positive emotions, but does not neces-
sarily eliminate the stress and the negative affect stress produces.
Such mindset-­generated improvements in positive affect during stress can be a criti-
cal determinant in shaping whether or not stress will have lasting effects on physiological
health and well-being. A wealth of research supports the benefits of positive affect for
mental and physical health, including psychological resilience, physiological immunity,
and healthier behavior (see Fredrickson & Joiner, 2018; Salovey, Rothman, Detweiler,
& Steward, 2000, for an overview). Positive affect has also been shown to promote a
host of skills and behaviors associated with performance in a broad range of contexts,
including creativity and problem solving (see Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005, for an
overview).

Motivation
Another mechanism that we propose underlies the outcomes of stress-­mindset interven-
tions is what people are motivated to do when in a state of stress. People demonstrate a
range of behavioral responses to stress, but a simple, yet highly meaningful dimension of
these responses is the degree to which individuals approach or avoid stressful informa-
tion and events (Roth & Cohen, 1986). If people view stress as enhancing, it stands to
reason that they would be motivated to approach and actively address a stressful situa-
tion, whereas those who view stress as debilitating would be motivated to reduce, avoid,
or distance themselves from the stressful situation.
To test these proposed mechanisms, Crum and colleagues (2013) measured the stress
mindsets of a group of college students taking an introductory psychology class. Several
weeks later, these students were told that a number of them would be selected to give
presentations during that class session. Students were then asked whether they would
like to receive feedback on their presentation from their peers and/or experts at the busi-
ness school. Individuals who had a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset were significantly
more likely than those with a stress-­is-­debilitating mindset to request feedback, which
represented a more approach-­motivated response to the stressful act of public speaking
(Crum et al., 2013). While this finding is only correlational, it provides initial evidence
that approach motivation may contribute to the positive outcomes we see from stress-­
mindset interventions. Indeed, research suggests that for stressors that are recurring and
can be addressed, actively approaching the stressor (in this case, seeking feedback so as
to improve one’s public speaking skills) generally results in less long-term distress than
avoiding the stressor (in this case, opting out of feedback so as to avoid thinking further
about the stressful event), primarily because the latter approach does nothing to resolve
the cause of the stress (Carver & Connor-­Smith, 2010).

Physiology
The final mechanism we propose as core to the success of stress-­mindset interventions
is direct physiological effects. Research on placebo and nocebo effects has demonstrated
the power of our associations and expectations to elicit physiological change, even with-
out behavioral change (see Zion & Crum, 2018, for a review). Because our mindset
226 II.  Health and Well-Being

about stress will, almost by definition, influence the associations and expectations we
hold for stress, we expected shifts in stress mindsets to have measurable physiological
consequences.
When in a state of stress, our bodies release catabolic and anabolic hormones.
Catabolic hormones, such as cortisol, stimulate the breakdown of proteins to generate
energy for the body, but prolonged exposure can be damaging, leading to conditions
such as osteoporosis, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Anabolic hormones such
as dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S) act in opposition to catabolic hormones,
stimulating cell repair to facilitate healing processes (Charney, 2004; Epel et al., 1998).
In one study, we measured the salivary cortisol levels of students who were told they
might be selected to give an impromptu presentation to their class. Results revealed that
among students with a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset during this task, those with a
high baseline cortisol response experienced reduced cortisol levels and those with a low
baseline cortisol response experienced increased cortisol levels (Crum et al., 2013). As
suggested by Crum et al., this moderating effect may represent a more adaptive response
than a simple across-­the-board decrease in cortisol levels because deficient cortisol levels
have been associated with negative outcomes, such as increased susceptibility to inflam-
matory and autoimmune diseases (Sternberg, 2001), and moderate levels of arousal tend
to promote peak performance (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). While correlational, these find-
ings hint at a connection between stress mindsets and physiological responses to stress.
Moreover, in the study in which participants engaged in a mock job interview, sali-
vary DHEA-S and cortisol levels were also measured. While those in the stress-­can-­be-­
enhancing condition did not experience a significant change in cortisol levels in response
to the challenge,1 they did experience a boost in the anabolic hormone DHEA-S (Crum et
al., 2017), again suggesting a more adaptive response to stress. In addition to facilitating
healing responses, DHEA-S is thought to protect neurons in the hippocampus from some
of the harmful effects of cortisol and evidence suggests that it may promote psychologi-
cal resilience (Charney, 2004). More research is needed to understand the physiological
mechanisms of stress mindsets.

Effects over Time
Although little data exist on the long-term effects of stress-­mindset interventions, the
limited data we do have hints that effects of the intervention hold up over time. Crum et
al. (2019) report positive outcomes 4 weeks postintervention—­however, these findings do
not indicate how the effects might diminish or extend past this point. The strongest test
of longitudinal efficacy over multiple time points comes from the intervention conducted
with low-­income students beginning college at an elite university. These students received
the stress-­mindset intervention during the summer before their freshman year and then
received a “booster” version of the intervention during the fall semester of their freshman
year. Compared to both a group that received a traditional stress management training
and a no-­treatment control group, those who received the stress-­mindset intervention

1 The effects of cortisol in this study were in response to an acute stressor on a single day. Because we did
not have cortisol response on a baseline day, we were unable to test the more complex reactivity pattern
found in Crum et al. (2013) in which a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset was associated with elevated
cortisol for hyporesponders and decreased cortisol for hyperresponders.
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 227

experienced higher levels of positive affect during the finals weeks of both their freshman
spring and sophomore spring. In fact, the difference between the stress-­mindset group
and the other two groups was directionally larger the second year—a difference of 0.43
standard deviation between the no-­treatment control and the stress-­mindset intervention
the first year and a difference of 0.48 standard deviation the second year (Goyer et al.,
2019).
These results align with the theory behind mindset interventions, which predicts
that mindset interventions can have lasting—­and perhaps even compounding—­effects.
If after partaking in a stress-­mindset intervention an individual construes a new bout
of stress as enhancing, he or she should be more likely to think and behave in ways that
make him or her more likely to experience positive outcomes from that stress. Experienc-
ing positive outcomes, in turn, should bolster his or her stress mindset. This recursive
process, characteristic of wise interventions (Walton & Wilson, 2018), may explain why
the gap in positive affect between students who took part in the stress-­mindset interven-
tion and students in the other two conditions increased between freshman and sopho-
more year, even though these students did not receive a stress-­mindset booster in that
time frame. Nevertheless, more research is needed before we can say with confidence how
this intervention impacts long-term outcomes.

Heterogeneity
While there has been very little exploration to date of potential moderators of the stress-­
mindset intervention (Jamieson, Crum, Goyer, Marisa, & Akinola, 2018), our theory
suggests that stress itself could be a moderator. If people are not experiencing stress,
their newfound stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset would have no fuel to produce mean-
ingful outcomes. Similarly, we would expect that the more stress a person is experienc-
ing, the bigger the effects of this intervention would be, which exploratory analyses have
supported (Smith et al., 2019). However, if people are particularly obstinate in their
view that stress is debilitating—­perhaps due to a lifetime spent attributing stress as the
cause of negative events—­they may not benefit from this intervention. Additionally, a
rather obvious point that nonetheless bears stating is that this intervention would also be
unlikely to have an effect if participants already hold a strong stress-­can-­be-­enhancing
mindset. As such, this intervention may be less effective in the aggregate among cultures
or subpopulations that already have a more positive view of stress. On the other hand, in
line with wise intervention theory (Walton & Wilson, 2018), people in these populations
who do not yet have a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset might see longer-­lasting benefits
from stress-­mindset interventions because the cultural messaging they are exposed to on
a daily basis will help maintain and bolster a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing perspective. Future
research should directly test these hypotheses.

COUSINS

This work draws on decades of research on the impact of mindsets (sometimes referred to
as “implicit theories”) that people hold about the nature and workings of things and pro-
cesses in the world, such as the nature of intelligence (Dweck & Leggett, 1988), personal-
ity (Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997), and emotions (Romero, Master, Paunesku, Dweck, &
228 II.  Health and Well-Being

Gross, 2014). Stress-­mindset work is similar in that it further demonstrates that mindsets
can affect behavior (Dweck & Leggett, 1988), well-being (Smith et al., 2018), and perfor-
mance (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007), and that these mindsets are malleable
through intervention (e.g., Paunesku et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2016). It also extends this
research by showing that mindsets need not reflect only beliefs about the extent to which
something is fixed versus malleable, but can also reflect beliefs about other characteris-
tics, such as whether something will have enhancing or debilitating effects.
Research on stress mindsets, akin to research on mindset more generally, is related to
but distinct from research and theory on attributions and appraisals (see Wilson & Lin-
ville, 1982). Mindsets are similar to appraisals in that they are subjective judgments regard-
ing a complex and ambiguous reality. Mindsets are distinct, however, in that they can exist
in the mind (consciously or subconsciously) in an ever-ready fashion, whereas appraisals
and attributions occur in response to a specific situation. More precisely, stress mindset
encompasses the beliefs one ascribes to stress, whether they are currently in a stressful situ-
ation or not. Appraisals refer to situation-­specific evaluations, such as how much stress one
perceives and the degree to which one evaluates it as a threat (appraised demands exceed
appraised resources) versus a challenge (appraised resources meet appraised demands; see
Blascovich et al., 2003; Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, & Lickel, 2000).
The stress reappraisal intervention is especially similar to the stress-­mindset inter-
vention. Described in more detail by Jamieson and Hangen (Chapter 10, this volume),
this intervention teaches people that the physiological arousal they may experience while
stressed can be useful (as opposed to detrimental). For example, students who were
informed about the potential benefits that physiological arousal can have on performance
prior to taking a practice Graduate Record Examination (GRE) not only performed bet-
ter on the math portion in that lab setting but went on to report higher scores on the
actual GRE (Jamieson, Mendes, Blackstock, & Schmader, 2010; see also Brady et al.,
2018; Jamieson, Peters, Greenwood, & Altose, 2016; Jamieson & Hangen, Chapter 10,
this volume). This can be seen as a targeted substantiation of stress-­can-­be-­enhancing
mindset, in which one particular indicator of stress (physiological arousal) in one par-
ticular instance (during tests) improves one particular outcome (performance). This
approach could also be applied more broadly, and indeed, our recent theory and research
is focusing on synergizing these two interventions into what we call “stress optimization”
(Crum, Jamieson, & Akinola, 2020; Jamieson et al., 2018).

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

The stress-­mindset intervention aims to expose participants to the many ways that stress
can, in fact, be enhancing—­a perspective that counters the prevailing cultural narrative
on stress. Using examples from a variety of domains, the intervention seeks to broaden
people’s understanding of how stress can enhance everyday experiences, such as focus
and productivity, recovery from illness, and appreciation for life. To date, the interven-
tion has been delivered using two different structures: (1) a series of short videos that
review selective facts about the effects of stress (Crum et al., 2013, 2017), and (2) a 1- to
2-hour training employing a metacognitive approach that provides a balanced view of
the positive and negative effects of stress and incorporates personal reflection exercises
(Crum et al., 2019).
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 229

Stress‑Mindset Intervention 1.0
The shorter, selective-­information approach first employed by Crum et al. (2013) included
three 3-minute videos on the topics of health, performance, and learning and growth.
The videos contained a combination of music, images, and text, and delivered messages
such as “The secretion of stress hormones does more than just protect the body from
harm. These hormones help rebuild cells, synthesize proteins, and enhance immunity.”
In Crum et al. (2017), only one 3-minute video on the topic of cognitive performance was
used to shift mindsets, and included messages such as “This stress response is designed to
enhance your focus, decision making, memory, [and] performance.” Table 9.1 provides

TABLE 9.1.  Messages Delivered in Stress-Mindset Manipulation Videos and Example

Evidence Provided to Participants
Stress is debilitating Stress can be enhancing
Health and Message: Stress harms your physical Message: Stress can make you stronger
vitality health. and healthier.
(Crum, Salovey,
Example evidence: Stress has Example evidence: Stress leads to the
& Achor, 2013)
been linked with frequent colds, secretion of growth hormones that
hypertension, and cardiovascular rebuild cells, synthesize proteins, and
disease. enhance immunity.
Herbert & Cohen (1993); Sapolsky Dienstbier (1989); Epel, McEwen, &
(1996); Schneiderman, Ironson, & Ickovics (1998)
Siegel (2005)

Learning and Message: Stress threatens your well- Message: Stress can help you grow.
growth being.
Example evidence: The experience of
(Crum et al.,
Example evidence: Stress can lead to stress and adversity can promote deeper
2013)
irritability, emotional exhaustion, low relationships, new perspectives, and
morale/self-esteem, loss of enjoyment, greater appreciation for life.
and memory loss.
Park, Cohen, & Murch (1996); Park &
Schneiderman et al. (2005); Shapiro, Helgeson (2006); Tedeschi & Calhoun
Brown, & Biegel (2007); Shapiro, (2004)
Shapiro, & Schwartz (2000)

Performance Message: Stress makes you perform Message: Stress can help you perform
and productivity worse. better.
(Crum et al.,
Example evidence: Stress deteriorates Example evidence: Stress enhances
2013)
your focus and decision making. your focus and drive.
Keinan (1987); McEwen & Sapolsky Cahill, Gorski, & Le (2003); Fay &
(1995); Schwabe & Wolf (2010) Sonnentag (2002); Hancock & Weaver
(2005)

Cognitive Message: Stress deteriorates your Message: Stress can improve your
performance cognitive performance. cognitive performance.
(Crum, Akinola,
Example evidence: Feeling anxious Example evidence: Feeling anxious
Martin, & Fath,
while completing cognitive tasks can while engaging in cognitive
2017)
hurt performance. performance tasks can help
performance.
Keinan (1987); McEwen & Sapolsky
(1995); Schwabe & Wolf (2010) Cahill et al. (2003); Hancock & Weaver
(2005); Jamieson, Mendes, Blackstock,
& Schmader (2010)
230 II.  Health and Well-Being

an overview of the messages delivered in each video, including the stress-­is-­debilitating

videos employed as controls. All videos used in Crum et al. (2013, 2017) can be viewed at
https://mbl.stanford.edu/instruments/stress-­mindset-­manipulation-­videos.

Stress‑Mindset Intervention 2.0
Although the interventions described above were short, easy to administer, and effectively
shifted participants’ mindsets, there were a handful of potential shortcomings. First, the
original stress-­mindset interventions delivered selective information—­in this case, tout-
ing the positive effects of stress but not volunteering the negative effects. In reality, stress
can be both enhancing and debilitating, and we may lose credence as scientists if we do
not acknowledge these conflicting messages. Authenticity and noncoercive messages have
been found to be important in past intervention work (e.g., Bryan et al., 2016; Yeager,
Dahl, & Dweck, 2018), and thus we may discover interventions are more effective when
they acknowledge the paradoxical nature of stress (see Crum et al., 2019).
Moreover, as psychological interventions are only a small portion of people’s full
psychological experience, participants will likely come across inconsistent evidence
against a single-­sided mindset intervention. For example, a participant of a stress-­can-­be-­
enhancing intervention who reads a news article on the negative health effects of stress or
experiences a dip in his or her work performance due to stress may start to question the
mindset the intervention intended to communicate. Thus, another limitation is that once
people leave the context of the intervention and are inevitably assailed with information
about the ill effects of stress, their mindset might drift back to its preintervention state.
And finally, employing informational videos that confer a single viewpoint is an
inherently passive approach that does not offer people much agency over their mindsets.
On the other hand, conveying the message that mindsets are changeable and offering
people the opportunity to choose their own mindset might help interventions produce
long-term shifts in participants’ mindsets.
To patch these shortcomings, Study 1 of Crum et al. (2019) tested a new version
of the stress-­mindset intervention: a 2-hour live training consisting of three modules.
Module 1 targeted the limitations of providing a one-sided view of stress by introduc-
ing the paradox of stress—­the fact that stress can simultaneously have enhancing and
debilitating effects on health, well-being, and performance. In addition to providing a
more complete account of stress, this module was designed to help inoculate participants
against future stress-­is-­debilitating messages. Addressing both sides of stress allows par-
ticipants to reconcile this contrasting information in their mindsets. Additionally, in line
with research on self-­persuasion (Aronson, 1999), the module prompted participants to
actively reflect on personal experiences in which stress was beneficial to make these mes-
sages more personally meaningful and more likely to be internalized.
Modules 2 and 3 addressed the lack-of-­agency shortcoming by demonstrating the
self-­fulfilling nature of mindsets and empowering participants with a concrete technique
for incorporating the information and shifting their stress mindset. Module 2 taught
participants that mindsets can become self-­fulfilling such that believing that stress can
be enhancing can increase its beneficial effects. Likening the consequences of mindsets
to the placebo effect, the training explored the power of mindsets with several examples
of self-­fulfilling physiological effects in contexts such as healing, aging, and exercising.
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 231

Finally, Module 3 coached participants to actively and deliberately adopt an adaptive

stress mindset by (1) acknowledging any stress they were experiencing; (2) embracing the
ways in which that stress may be important to their goals and values; and (3) utilizing the
stress to improve their health, well-being, and performance. This intervention has since
been transformed into a toolkit that includes videos and reflection questions and is avail-
able at www.sparqtools.org/rethinkingstress.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Stress versus Stressors
When delivering a stress-­mindset intervention, it is important to distinguish between stress
and stressors. Stress is the experience or anticipation of challenge or threat in one’s goal-­
related efforts and stressors are any events or conditions that lead to this anticipation. The
stress-­mindset intervention makes no claim that individual stressors are good things—­
rather, the intervention emphasizes that the stress that emanates from a stressor can, in
some cases, have enhancing outcomes. At first blush, this may seem an inconsequential dis-
tinction. One might argue that if a stressor causes stress, and if that stress can be enhanc-
ing, then surely the stressor should be considered a good thing. But this view neglects the
other outcomes that stressors can spawn. Take the loss of a loved one, for example. The
occurrence itself is, of course, not a good thing. However, the resultant stress could be
harnessed to motivate someone to seek out a support group where they then might develop
strong new friendships. Or perhaps the stress could give them the impetus to make a change
in their life that they had been meaning to make for a while (e.g., change jobs, rekindle a
lost friendship, move to a new area). But accompanying that stress are likely many other
outcomes—­perhaps loneliness, fear, or loss of meaning. Although the stress from losing
a loved one might have led to positive outcomes, such as new friends and a better job, it
does not mean that this stressor was a positive thing. Many stressors—­poverty, divorce,
illness—­are not in and of themselves good things, yet the process of undergoing these expe-
riences can have enhancing outcomes (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).

Managing versus Utilizing Stress
Given the popularity of stress management and reduction programs, participants may
assume that an unspoken objective of the stress-­mindset intervention is to diminish the
amount of stress people are experiencing or to help people cope with the negative effects
of stress. On the contrary, the goal is to help people adopt a mindset that will allow them
to harness the stress that they will inevitably encounter in their daily lives. The focus,
then, is on utilizing—­not managing or reducing—­the stress response to achieve improve-
ments in health, well-being, and performance. One could channel the stress associated
with a moral dilemma into connecting more deeply with their values. One could embrace
the stress of rehabilitating an injury as an opportunity to grow more resilient. One could
convert the stress of a difficult project at work into motivation and focus to complete
the project faster. None of these examples involve reducing stress—­rather, the goal is to
refocus the energy inherent to stress so that your stress response can better serve you.
232 II.  Health and Well-Being

Seeking Out Stress
Although the intervention centers on utilizing stress, it is not meant to encourage tak-
ing on additional stress. While it is likely the case that additional stress could be useful
in some circumstances, like attempting a challenging task or taking on a new role, the
intervention clarifies that stress can have simultaneous positive and negative effects so it
is not necessarily a good idea to seek out more stress for its enhancing properties. From
an organizational perspective, just as this intervention is not an endorsement of taking
on extra stress, it also should not come across as a rationale for the perpetuation of a
stressful work, school, or caregiving environment. For example, in workplace settings,
these interventions would backfire if employees felt that the implicit goal of the interven-
tion was to get employees to work harder. It is important that this intervention comes
from a place of care and a genuine desire to help people utilize inevitable and/or necessary
stress in their lives, not a desire to help them pile on more. This may require a targeted
and purposeful introduction to the intervention to make it clear to participants why this
intervention is valuable and how the organization hopes its members will benefit from it.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Together, this research suggests that stress management approaches may be substantially
improved to the degree that they foster more useful mindsets about the nature of stress.
To better disseminate a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset, we need to (1) collaborate with
global organizations and technological platforms to deliver scaled-­up interventions, (2)
create trainings for practitioners (train the trainer) on methods of delivering these mes-
sages to reach broader audiences, and (3) influence health organizations (e.g., National
Institutes of Health, World Health Organization) to be more mindful of what mindsets
their messages convey.
In doing so, it is important to acknowledge that many people have spent their entire
lives considering stress as harmful and something to be avoided whenever possible. Some
participants may therefore experience knee-jerk skepticism to the notion that stress can
be enhancing. To combat this response, the intervention incorporates a discussion of the
paradox of stress, emphasizing that stress is by no means always good, and in fact can
have simultaneous negative and positive consequences. However, organizations and prac-
titioners hoping to capitalize on these ideas should ensure they do not suggest that people
should hold a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset, but rather present scientific evidence for
its benefits and allow participants to come to their own conclusion without coercion or
condescension. As Walton and Wilson (2018) note, interventions are likely to be less effec-
tive when they are prescriptive—­rather, participants should be given the space to generate
their own narrative and incorporate these ideas in ways they find personally meaningful.
Of course, it is also important to note that this intervention is not a cure-all across any
context in which we might deploy it. Research has suggested that stress-­can-­be-­enhancing
mindsets are impactful during times of stress (e.g., layoffs, military training; Crum et al.,
2013; Smith et al., 2019), but little work has examined the impact of these mindsets in
settings where stress may be less salient. As mentioned earlier, exploratory analyses have
suggested that stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindsets may be more beneficial to those report-
ing greater amounts of stress (Smith et al., 2019), indicating that these messages may be
 The Stress‑Mindset Intervention 233

less impactful for those not experiencing stress when participating in the intervention.
Some participants may even feel concerned that their health, well-being, or performance
could be hampered by their lack of stress, which could be similarly counterproductive. For
example, a student given a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing intervention may be worried that not
being stressed about an exam could result in worse performance. Thus, paying attention
to context is necessary, as with the deployment of any intervention.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Mindsets Are Powerful and Pervasive

Stress-­is-­debilitating mindsets are just one example of pervasive mindsets that may be
holding people back from their full potential. Our culture perpetuates a number of mal-
adaptive or unhelpful mindsets when it comes to our health—­that healthy foods are less
indulgent (Turnwald, Jurafsky, Conner, & Crum, 2017), that adequate exercise cannot
be attained through everyday activities (Crum & Langer, 2007), and that health is pri-
marily the absence of illness (Conner, Boles, Markus, Eberhardt, & Crum, 2018). Even
though these mindsets may dominate our culture, research on stress mindsets suggests
that promoting counternormative narratives of competing mindsets may be beneficial.
In this vein, we must understand which mindsets are possible to hold in order to better
understand mindsets that are currently invisible but of great importance to our lives. Cul-
turally echoed mindsets will remain hidden until more systematic evaluations of mindsets
are conducted.

“Negative” Experiences Can, and Should, Be Embraced

The interventions discussed in this chapter suggest the importance of reevaluating nega-
tive assumptions of daily occurrences. For example, demonizing stress and focusing only
on ways to reduce the amount of stress in our lives may further exacerbate the negative
effects it can have, causing people distress about being stressed and leading to negative
recursive processes (see Brady et al., 2018). Stress does not need to be a solely negative
force in people’s lives. We encourage researchers to reevaluate cultural assumptions on
“negative” experiences, as there may be optimistic narratives that capitalize on these
experiences. With the right mindset, these experiences may be harnessed to promote
health, well-being, performance, and other meaningful outcomes.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Several questions should be explored in future research, including how stress mindsets
are developed and how stress mindsets function in different types of stress, including
acute versus chronic, as well as more severe conditions, such as anxiety disorders and
depression. Of particular interest from an intervention standpoint is to reconsider the
use of biased information to convey mindset messages. Although an unbiased narra-
tive of conflicting mindsets may be less powerful in some contexts and populations
given the difficulty of incorporating paradoxical beliefs (e.g., Yeager et al., 2016), other
234 II.  Health and Well-Being

interventions may be limited in both their application and long-term impact when they
do not address the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of life. In these cases, “meta-­
mindsets” or mindsets about the nature of mindsets may themselves be impactful. Tar-
geting these beliefs may be an effective path to improve future interventions, as it suggests
a more agentic pathway to mindset activation. For example, people who believe that
mindsets are self-­fulfilling (i.e., those who hold a “self-­fulfilling meta-­mindset”) might be
more likely to actively recognize and deliberately switch on adaptive mindsets. Further
research is needed to determine what happens when someone thinks stress is generally
debilitating but believes that activating a stress-­can-­be-­enhancing mindset can benefit
their performance. Will this person be motivated to activate this mindset and will it
prove self-­fulfilling? Or are there psychological barriers to utilizing mindsets when not
fully believed? In addition, rather than explicitly stating how stress-­can-­be-­enhancing
mindsets can help participants (as this message has the potential to undermine effects;
see Sherman et al., 2009; Yeager et al., 2016), future interventions could convey informa-
tion about meta-­mindsets and the nature of stress, then allow participants to act on that
information without explicit influence.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this chapter, we suggested that the predominant view in our society is that
stress is something that should be avoided or mitigated, and we have proposed that a
shift in mindsets, in which stress can be a motivating and energizing force, will promote
optimal functioning. By shifting the mindset we hold about stress, we can begin noticing
and attending to the ways stress benefits our daily lives, experiencing better emotional
responses to stress, motivating ourselves to actively make use of the stressors in our
lives, and benefiting from the physiological reactions stress induces—­ultimately achiev-
ing improved health, well-being, and performance.
While seeking to reduce our stress levels is not inherently bad—­unless it leads to
further stress about stress or reinforces a stronger stress-­is-­debilitating mindset—­it is
counterproductive to believe that we could simply eradicate stress from our lives. Hans
Selye (1974), whose early work arguably precipitated our cultural adoption of a stress-­is-­
debilitating mindset, noted toward the end of his career: “Above all, stress is not some-
thing to be necessarily avoided. It is associated with the expression of all our innate
drives. . . . Indeed, complete freedom from stress is death!” (p. 137). We humbly propose
one tweak to this sentiment: above all, stress is not something to be necessarily avoided
but rather something to be harnessed.

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 C H A P TE R 10

Stress Reappraisal Interventions

Improving Acute Stress Responses
in Motivated Performance Contexts

Jeremy P. Jamieson and Emily J. Hangen

Stress is typically perceived as having negative effects on health and performance, and
people exert substantial efforts to reduce or avoid experiencing stress. Contrary to lay
beliefs, however, stress is not only a negative state to be unilaterally avoided. Adaptive stress
responses can also facilitate performance, help people achieve goals, and even confer
protective health benefits. This chapter presents stress reappraisal, a psychological interven-
tion developed to help optimize stress responses, and reap performance, cognitive, and
health benefits. Rather than reducing or down-­regulating stress arousal, stress reappraisal
educates individuals about the adaptive benefits of stress such that bodily signs of stress
(e.g., racing heart) are conceptualized as coping resources. Reappraising stress arousal as
functional and adaptive increases appraisals of coping resources, which in turn, improve
downstream outcomes. This chapter reviews the extant literature on the background,
mechanisms, and outcomes of the intervention, and discusses heterogeneity, implementa-
tion, and implications of the intervention.

Acute social stressors rooted in achievement pressures or social interactions are ubiqui-
tous in modern society. For instance, in educational settings, nearly all students experi-
ence testing situations as negative stressors (Bradley et al., 2010). Beyond the economic
and performance costs of stress, the accumulation of acute, maladaptive stress has sub-
stantial health consequences. Notably, repeated maladaptive acute stress responses are
associated with increased rates of cardiovascular disease, reduced immune function, and
cognitive impairment, to name a few outcomes (e.g., Jefferson et al., 2010; Lundberg,
2005; Matthews, Gump, Block, & Allen, 1997).
Although stress is typically perceived and experienced as negative and maladaptive,
stress can also facilitate cognitive performance, promote active coping, and protect the

239
240 II.  Health and Well-Being

body against the damaging effects of catabolic hormones (e.g., Dienstbier, 1989; Jamie-
son, Crum, Goyer, Marotta, & Akinola, 2018; Mendes, Gray, Mendoza-­Denton, Major,
& Epel, 2007). Thus, without experiencing the benefits of (the right kind of) stress,
people can underachieve, miss opportunities for growth, and even suffer negative health
outcomes. The notion that stress can have facilitative and debilitative effects (Crum,
Akinola, Martin, & Fath, 2017), however, is not represented in lay theories. People typ-
ically only consider the negative facets of stress and equate stress with distress. This
perspective is even echoed by social scientists. Scales developed to measure stress are
overwhelmingly constructed of negative-­valence items that present stress as a negative
state (e.g., Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983). The result is that people believe that
efforts to cope with stressors should focus on eliminating or avoiding stress altogether
rather than seeking to promote adaptive stress responses (Brooks, 2014).
Given the societal costs of negative stress responses, what can be done to discourage
maladaptive responses and promote thriving during acute stress contexts? Toward this
end, the stress reappraisal intervention reviewed here posits that the way people think
about stress responses can unlock adaptive benefits and attenuate costs. Stress reappraisal
focuses on promoting more adaptive stress response profiles by altering cognitive appraisal
processes (Jamieson, Hangen, Lee, & Yeager, 2018). Specifically, this intervention presents
the arousal experienced during stressful situations as a functional coping resource that aids
performance—­that is, signs of stress arousal (e.g., racing heart) are interpreted as coping
tools that facilitate adaptive patterns of cognitive appraisals to affect subsequent physi-
ological, affective, and motivational processes. For example, consider a job applicant sit-
ting down for an important interview with a prospective employer. The applicant’s heart is
racing and his or her palms are sweaty. These bodily responses could be interpreted as signs
the applicant is nervous and that stress levels need to be reduced through, for instance,
deep breathing. Alternatively, the bodily stress responses could be interpreted as signs the
applicant is “amped up” and ready to perform. Whereas the former interprets stress as
maladaptive and to be avoided, the later interprets stress as functional and to be optimized.
Contrary to traditional relaxation techniques that seek to reduce stress, stress reappraisal
seeks to help individuals make meaning of their stress responses as helpful. The extant
literature suggests that this intervention can improve physiological responses, facilitate
performance, and reduce attention for negative cues in acute stress contexts.

BACKGROUND

Stress reappraisal grew directly out of the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and
threat (Blascovich, 1992). Challenge and threat theory, in turn, built on the framework
provided by the appraisal theory of emotion (Lazarus, 1991) and mapped the biological
underpinnings of acute stress responses (upstream appraisal processes) onto downstream
health, behavior, and decision outcomes in “motivated performance situations,” which
are goal-­relevant performance situations requiring instrumental (i.e., active) responses
(Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, & Salomon, 1999; Blascovich & Mendes, 2010; Mendes,
2009). For instance, job interviews, academic exams, performance reviews, public
speeches, and negotiations are all examples of motivated performance situations.
A core contribution of the BPS model of challenge and threat is specifying the psy-
chological processes underpinning stress responses. Specifically, in challenge and threat
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 241

theory, cognitive appraisals of demands (e.g., perceptions of uncertainty, danger, and

required effort) and resources (e.g., perceptions of familiarity, knowledge, skills/ability,
dispositional factors, and social support) interact to elicit challenge- and threat-­t ype psy-
chological states when individuals are actively engaged (Mendes & Park, 2014). Challenge
states are experienced when appraisals of coping resources exceed perceived situational
demands. Alternatively, threat manifests when perceived demands exceed resources (see
Figure 10.1).
Importantly for understanding appraisals in the context of the BPS model, “demands”
and “resources” are multidimensional. Demands consist of perceptions of uncertainty,
danger, and/or effort, and these facets can be independent or intertwined. For example,
consider an unfamiliar social-­evaluative situation, such as a student taking an important
placement exam. The test taker may not know the layout of the exam and would certainly
not know the exact questions (i.e., uncertainty), which would require the test taker to
devote effort to parsing the format/instructions. Thus, uncertainty and effort dimensions
of demand appraisals are intertwined—­however, placement test situations also include
the potential for negative evaluation and social harm (i.e., “danger” dimension of demand
appraisals), which are not necessarily tied to appraisals of effort or uncertainty.
A large corpus of research from the BPS literature demonstrates that challenge and
threat patterns of appraisals have direct consequences for outcomes. For example, chal-
lenge and threat states demonstrate differential motivational response patterns. Whereas
challenge is generally associated with appetitive approach motivation, threat elicits

Motivated Performance Situation

Task Engagement
by Stress Reappraisal
Processes Targeted

Psychological

Appraisals of Resources and Demands

Processes

High Resources, Low Resources,

Low Demands High Demands

Challenge Threat
Physiological

SAM activation SAM + HPA activation

Processes

Low TPR, Increased HR and VC High TPR,

High CO Low CO

FIGURE 10.1. Overview of the psychological and physiological processes of the biopsychoso-

cial model of challenge and threat. Stress reappraisal seeks to promote challenge responses via
highlighting the adaptive benefits of stress. SAM, sympathetic–­adrenal–­medullary axis; HPA,
hypothalamic–­pituitary–­adrenal axis; HR, heart rate; VC, ventricular contractility; TPR, total
peripheral resistance; CO, cardiac output.
242 II.  Health and Well-Being

aversive, avoidance motivation (e.g., Jamieson, Valdesolo, & Peters, 2014). Downstream,
challenge predicts positive behavioral and performance outcomes (e.g., Blascovich et al.,
1999), but threat impairs decision making, and is associated with cognitive decline and
cardiovascular disease (Jefferson et al., 2010; Matthews et al., 1997). Moreover, in a
study that directly informed the development of stress reappraisal, individuals who were
assigned to appraise a speech preparation task as a challenge experienced more positive
emotions (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004).
Together this research suggests that manipulating or modifying resource and
demand appraisal processes has the potential to improve physiological stress responses
and cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Indeed, a growing literature on stress reappraisal
provides support for the idea that acute stress responses can, indeed, be improved via
modifying appraisal processes (e.g., Beltzer, Nock, Peters, & Jamieson, 2014; Brady,
Hard, & Gross, 2018; Hangen, Elliot, & Jamieson, 2019; Jacquart, Papini, Freeman,
Bartholomew, & Smits, 2020; Jamieson et al., 2020; Jamieson, Mendes, Blackstock, &
Schmader, 2010; Jamieson, Mendes, & Nock, 2013; Jamieson, Nock, & Mendes, 2012,
2013; Jamieson, Peters, Greenwood, & Altose, 2016; John-­Henderson, Rheinschmidt, &
Mendoza-­Denton, 2015; Moore, Vine, Wilson, & Freeman, 2015; Rozek, Ramirez, Fine,
& Beilock, 2019; Sammy et al., 2017; Oveis, Gu, Ocampo, Hangen, & Jamieson, 2020).

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

The focal goal of the stress reappraisal intervention is to increase resource appraisals by
defining the stress response itself as a coping resource (e.g., Jamieson, 2017). In the stress
reappraisal intervention literature, individuals are provided with instructions that pres-
ent the arousal experienced during stressful situations as a functional coping resource
that can facilitate performance. The theory is that this information will alter the ratio
of resources and demands such that the individual is more likely to view the stress as a
challenge as opposed to a threat.
Contrary to other stress management approaches, the stress reappraisal intervention
is not aimed at convincing individuals that stressful situations are not demanding—­that
is, reappraising stress does not decrease perceptions of effort required to address stress-
ors. The focus of stress reappraisal manipulations on resource appraisals is an important
mechanistic distinction when individuals encounter acutely stressful situations that can-
not be avoided or mitigated. For example, in the U.S. (and many others) educational
system, students frequently must take evaluative exams (i.e., a stressful situation); these
exams have important consequences for grades, placements, and applications, and are
generally unavoidable. However, students who reframe stress responses as functional can
help optimize performance in stressful academic testing contexts (e.g., Brady et al., 2018;
Jamieson et al., 2010, 2016, 2020).

PHYSIOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Importantly for the effectiveness of the stress reappraisal intervention, challenge and
threat psychological states are associated with patterns of physiological responding (see
Mendes & Park, 2014, for a biologically oriented review). Dienstbier’s (1989) work on
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 243

physiological toughness helped to provide the organization for the physiological response
patterns delineated by challenge and threat. Specifically, challenge and threat physiologi-
cal responses derive from activation of the sympathetic–­adrenal–­medullary (SAM) and
hypothalamic–­pituitary–­adrenal (HPA) axes. Both challenge- and threat-­t ype responses
are accompanied by SAM activation, which leads to the synthesis and secretion of cat-
echolamines, particularly epinephrine (or adrenaline) and norepinephrine. More down-
stream, catecholamines increase ventricular contractility (decreasing preejection period
and increasing heart rate), constrict veins (facilitating venous return of blood to the heart),
and dilate atrial blood vessels (via binding of epinephrine to beta-2 receptors; Brownley,
Hurwitz, & Schneiderman, 2000). Challenge-­type responses, which are dominated by
SAM activation, are thus characterized by increased cardiac output (CO)—the volume
of blood pumped by the heart across a period of time (usually 1 minute)—and decreased
resistance in the total peripheral vasculature resistance (TPR). Challenge-­t ype responses
also allow for a rapid onset and offset of responses: Resources are mobilized rapidly and
individuals return to homeostasis quickly after stress offset.
In addition to activating the SAM axis, threat also strongly activates the HPA axis,
which is frequently assessed by measuring cortisol (its end product). Given the shorter
half-lives of catecholamines relative to cortisol (e.g., a few minutes vs. 1+ hours, respec-
tively), HPA activation elicits more prolonged stress responses after stress offset relative
to SAM-­dominated challenge responses. HPA activation also tempers effects of the SAM
axis and results in reduced (or little change in) CO and increased TPR downstream in
the cardiovascular system (see Figure 10.1). Thus, the end consequences of the cardiovas-
cular changes accompanying challenge and threat states is that challenge results in more
oxygenated blood being delivered to peripheral sites, such as the brain, whereas blood is
concentrated in the core of the body when individuals experience threat.
As patterns of appraisals shift from more threat oriented to more challenge ori-
ented (i.e., as resource appraisals increase relative to demand appraisals, respectively),
stress axes are differentially recruited to direct downstream stress responses—­thus, by
increasing appraisals of resources, the stress reappraisal intervention seeks to elicit SAM-­
dominated patterns of stress that facilitate thriving under stress.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
Initial findings from the stress reappraisal literature suggest that the intervention improves
outcomes in acute stress contexts. The first empirical test of the intervention was a com-
bined laboratory/field experiment (Jamieson et al., 2010). In this study, students prepar-
ing to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) were first recruited for a laboratory
practice GRE session. They were randomly assigned to receive stress reappraisal instruc-
tions or no instructions prior to taking practice exams. Reappraisal participants out-
performed controls on the quantitative section of the practice GRE. Then, 1–3 months
after the practice exam, participants provided score reports from their actual, real GRE
tests. Again, reappraisal participants outperformed controls on the quantitative section.
Reappraisal participants also reported that stress arousal was more beneficial for perfor-
mance.
244 II.  Health and Well-Being

In a follow-­up laboratory experiment designed to elucidate basic effects, participants

were randomly assigned to receive stress reappraisal, placebo control (“ignore stress”),
or no instruction materials prior to giving a speech about their personal strengths and
weaknesses, and performing mental arithmetic in front of an evaluative audience fol-
lowed (the Trier Social Stress Test; Kirschbaum, Pirke, & Hellhammer, 1993; Jamieson
et al., 2012). During the stressful social-­evaluative tasks (e.g., public speaking and math
problem-­solving tasks), participants assigned to the reappraisal condition exhibited more
adaptive (i.e., challenge-­like) cardiovascular responses relative to participants assigned
to the control conditions. Following the public speaking task, an emotional Stroop task
(Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996) was used to assess attentional bias for negative
cues. Reappraisal participants were less vigilant for negative cues compared to control
participants. These first experimental tests of the stress reappraisal intervention demon-
strated the potential for the intervention to improve outcomes.

Mechanisms
Although initial stress reappraisal studies focused on assessing the effects of the interven-
tion on downstream outcomes, subsequent work has more clearly elucidated the mecha-
nisms underlying these effects. As touched on previously, appraisals of resources (rather
than demands) are the focal psychological mechanisms of stress reappraisal. To demon-
strate, in a double-­blind field experiment, community college students completed either
stress reappraisal or placebo control materials prior to taking an in-class mathematics
exam (Jamieson et al., 2016). Reappraisal instructions educated students about the adap-
tive benefits of stress arousal, whereas placebo materials instructed students to ignore
stress. After the instruction materials, math anxiety and stress appraisals were assessed.
Consistent with performance effects observed previously, reappraisal participants scored
higher on their exams, and also reported less math evaluation anxiety and higher resource
appraisals. Bootstrap mediation analyses suggested the effect of the intervention on exam
performance manifested through appraisals of resources.
The emphasis on changing cognitive appraisals of coping resources can also be seen
in a laboratory study (Beltzer et al., 2014). Prior to performing a stressful public speaking
task, participants were randomly assigned stress reappraisal or were given no instruc-
tions, and then reported on their stress appraisals in anticipation of speaking. Relative
to controls, reappraisal participants displayed less anxiety. The effect of reappraisal on
behavioral displays of anxiety was mediated by the ratio of resources to demands, such
that the higher resources were relative to demands, the less anxiety participants displayed
while speaking.
Taken together, the extant literature suggests that stress appraisals, and resource
appraisals in particular, are core mechanisms of the stress reappraisal intervention (see
Jamieson, 2017, for a review of stress appraisals). To date, however, all direct tests of
mechanisms have relied on self-­reports of appraisals, which have inherent shortcomings.
Notably, stress appraisals are processed both consciously and unconsciously/automati-
cally (Blascovich, 2008). Thus, individuals may or may not have access to all compo-
nents of multifaceted psychological appraisal processes when completing explicit self-­
reports. Moreover, self-­reports cannot be obtained in vivo during stressful situations.
For these reasons (and others; see Blascovich, 2008, for a review), research grounded in
challenge and threat theory—­and by extension, the stress reappraisal intervention—­has
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 245

emphasized mapping psychological processes (e.g., challenge and threat, appraisal pat-
terns) by measuring physiological responses (e.g., Blascovich et al., 1999)—that is, if
appraisals of resources exceed demands, this pattern of psychological responding will
necessitate challenge-­t ype physiological responses (see Figure 10.1), even if the individual
cannot (retro- or proactively) report on the full array of his or her appraisals with a high
degree of accuracy. Future lines of research on stress reappraisal, and other BPS-­oriented
research, could seek to develop implicit measures of appraisals to more tightly yoke psy-
chological mechanisms to downstream outcomes.

Effects over Time
Beyond the basic questions of an intervention’s effectiveness it is important to consider
how long effects persist, and how effects unfold over time. An effective intervention that
produces brief effects requiring repeated delivery to maintain the effects has limited effi-
cacy for producing lasting change. Addressing questions of the duration and dynamics of
intervention effects necessitates elucidating mechanisms. Although the majority of stress
reappraisal research focuses on in vivo stress processes, research has observed subsequent
effects of the intervention following stressful contexts. As noted previously, reappraising
stress arousal reduced attention for emotionally negative cues in a laboratory setting
(Jamieson et al., 2012)—that is, reappraisal participants exhibited less vigilance for nega-
tive cues than control participants even though there was no evaluative pressure (i.e., no
social stress) during the attention task. Thus, the effects of the intervention on attentional
processes persisted after stress offset.
Research has also examined longer-­term performance effects of stress reappraisal in
educational contexts. In initial examinations of duration of effects in an educational con-
text, students were randomly presented with reappraisal or control instructions embed-
ded in an e-mail message delivered prior to exams, and performance was measured across
an academic semester. Reappraisal instructions led to higher end-of-­semester course
grades relative to controls via reducing exam worries (Brady et al., 2018). Moreover, as
touched on previously, a study with students taking the GRE observed performance ben-
efits as a function of the intervention up to 3 months after initial delivery without boost-
ers (Jamieson et al., 2010). Taken together, these lagged effects of the stress reappraisal
intervention suggest students are capable of applying instructions beyond the specific
context in which the intervention is delivered. However, these studies do not elucidate
the mechanisms underlying precisely how stress reappraisal might feed forward to impact
future outcomes.
Exploring processes in longitudinal designs to answer mechanistic questions of
temporal dynamics is potentially important because challenge/threat appraisals are
not encapsulated to specific situations or within individuals—­rather, prior appraisals
influence future appraisals in subsequent similar (or even unfamiliar) situations (e.g.,
Gross, 2015). Toward this end, a recently completed study examined temporal dynam-
ics of stress reappraisal in an educational setting. More specifically, a double-­blind field
experiment examined how stress reappraisal impacts students across several exam situa-
tions (Jamieson et al., 2020). To do so, students were randomly assigned to receive stress
reappraisal or expectancy control instructions immediately prior to their second in-class
exams (to allow for comparisons to Exam 1). Then, psychological processes—­stress
appraisals, achievement goals (Elliot, 1999), and procrastination (Steel, 2010)—were
246 II.  Health and Well-Being

assessed between Exams 2 and 3 with the aim of examining how stress reappraisal might
impact psychological processes outside of classroom exam situations, and how these pro-
cesses might feed forward to affect future academic performance and neuroendocrine
responses. Preliminary results suggest that teaching students that stress is functional
and adaptive improved academic performance and neuroendocrine functioning during
Exam 2. Importantly for understanding temporal dynamics, students using reappraisal
reported they procrastinated less and had more performance-­approach goals in at-home
diary measures, which then directly predicted subsequent Exam 3 scores (e.g., more pro-
crastination led to lower scores). Thus, reappraisal may not only improve proximal stress
responses and performance but also improve psychological processes that are predictive
of longer-­term academic success as has been seen in other interventions reported through-
out this volume.

Heterogeneity of Effects
Like all psychological interventions, stress reappraisal is not a “silver bullet” for improv-
ing stress outcomes. The effectiveness of reappraising stress arousal on outcomes depends
on myriad factors, including demographics, individual differences, and contextual fac-
tors, to name a few. This section focuses on reviewing and proposing moderating fac-
tors of the intervention, including both situational and individual difference factors. The
proposed moderating factors were developed from an understanding of how stress reap-
praisal counters traditional lay beliefs—­namely, presenting stress arousal (and even sub-
sequent negative affective experiences of anxiety) as a coping resource stands in stark
contrast to how people typically attempt to manage stress. In other words, stress reap-
praisal is not aimed at eliminating or dampening stress arousal. It does not encourage
relaxation or reduction of sympathetic arousal as most stress management approaches
do, but instead focuses on changing the type of stress response experienced (threat →
challenge). In fact, negative lay conceptualizations of stress play an important role in why
stress reappraisal is effective. If people already believed stress was beneficial for coping,
teaching them to reappraise stress as functional and adaptive would do little to impact
challenge and threat responses.

Context and Situational Factors
Given typical “stress-­is-bad” perspectives, the classic stress regulation literature has often
(but not always) instructed individuals to reappraise external cues to decrease stress
arousal in passive situations (e.g., Gross, 2002). However, situational factors are impor-
tant to consider when implementing classic reappraisal methods or arousal-­maintaining
stress reappraisal methods. For instance, in clinically relevant samples/situations, the
arousal experienced is often not appropriate/functional. To demonstrate, an individual
with posttraumatic stress disorder may experience a stress response in situations that are
not acutely demanding but include trauma-­inducing cues, such as a veteran responding
to hearing a car backfire because it resembles the noise of a gunshot. Thus, reappraising
stress arousal as beneficial in these situations is not appropriate because arousal is not
needed to actively address acute task demands. Acutely stressful motivated performance
situations, however, necessitate instrumental responding where increased sympathetic
arousal can be functional. Notably, stress reappraisal provides a method for regulating
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 247

affective responses in demanding situations because it focuses on changing the type of

stress response experienced in order to effectively address the demands of the situation.
In sum, if there are no situational demands that need to be addressed, stress reappraisal
will likely be ineffective at improving outcomes.
Not only must situations present acute task demands but individuals must also
engage with the situation for stress reappraisal to be maximally effective. In the BPS
model of challenge and threat, a prerequisite to experiencing challenge and threat states
is engagement, which requires active attention and reflects goal relevance (Seery, Weis-
buch, & Blascovich, 2009). Typically assessed with measures of sympathetic arousal
(e.g., preejection period), engagement is important for understanding stress reappraisal
effects because without sympathetic arousal, there would be no physiological experience
of stress to reappraise. Consider students about to take an important, difficult exam at
the frontier of their knowledge and ability. Students experiencing threat can reappraise
the stress they experience and, in turn, improve their performance (Brady et al., 2018;
Jamieson et al., 2010, 2016). However, a disengaged student who chooses to opt out or
not seriously work on the exam will not experience a stress response and therefore, can-
not reappraise any stress arousal. This lack of engagement in acute stress contexts could
result from a learned helplessness effect (e.g., Jesus & Lens, 2005), whereby an individual
believes that it is not worth trying in a given context because failure will result regard-
less. Stress reappraisal techniques would likely be ineffective at increasing engagement in
such contexts.

Demographic Factors and Individual Differences

Not all individuals should be expected to benefit similarly from stress reappraisal inter-
ventions. The “first wave” of stress reappraisal research focused on demonstrating
group-level effects, usually in comparison to control conditions (e.g., Jamieson et al.,
2012). More recent work, however, has begun to elucidate person-­level moderators. For
instance, a study examining the effects of stress reappraisal during an interpersonal com-
petition observed group-level intervention effects on physiological responses, but also
observed notable moderation by participant gender (Hangen et al., 2019). More spe-
cifically, during an interpersonal mathematics competition, reappraisal instructions were
effective for improving physiological functioning and facilitating performance for men,
but women were unaffected. This study was the first to observe gender differences as a
function of stress reappraisal. In fact, stress reappraisal has specifically been shown to
alleviate stereotype threat effects in women (John-­Henderson et al., 2015; cf. Schmader,
Forbes, Zhang, & Mendes, 2009). Thus, concluding that stress reappraisal interventions
work better for males may be misguided. Rather, gender differences in effectiveness could
be rooted in contextual factors. In competition contexts, for example, a stereotype exists
that males are more competitive than females (e.g., Kray, Thompson, & Galinsky, 2001),
and compared to men, women are more reluctant to engage in interpersonal competitions
(Croson & Gneezy, 2009) and are less confident about their abilities to compete (Niederle
& Vesterlund, 2007). If females avoid stressful, competitive contexts or seek to disengage
when placed in such situations, there would be no active, acute stress to reappraise and
thus limited benefits of the intervention.
Other research on moderators of stress reappraisal suggests anxiety processes
derived from uncertainty processes may play an important role (Brady et al., 2018).
248 II.  Health and Well-Being

To illustrate, students in an introductory psychology class were randomly assigned to

receive stress reappraisal or control materials. Reappraisal instructions led to higher
exam scores and less worry, but only for first-year students. Unlike upperclassmen,
first-year students are navigating a novel academic environment and are inexperienced
in university-­level testing situations, and thus experience more uncertainty and test
anxiety compared to upperclassmen. These data suggest that stress reappraisal may be
particularly effective at facilitating coping and improving performance for individuals
experiencing particularly potent negative affective responses in acute stress contexts (cf.
Jamieson et al., 2016).
Although research on psychological moderators of stress reappraisal effects is
limited, there are interesting avenues for exploration. For instance, patterns of stress
responding following aversive events can be governed by causal attributions (Abramson,
Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Mendes, Major, McCoy, & Blascovich, 2008). Inter-
nal stable attributions—­believing that aversive events originate from properties of the
self—lead to avoidance-­motivated responses, such as threat. On the other hand, exter-
nal attributions—­placing the cause for aversive events on factors outside the self—are
associated with approach-­motivated responses, such as anger (Jamieson, Koslov, Nock,
& Mendes, 2013). Thus, stress reappraisal manipulations may be more effective for indi-
viduals who tend to make external attributions because presenting stress as facilitative
aligns with the motivational orientation (approach) typically experienced by those mak-
ing external relative to internal attributions.
Another likely individual-­level moderator of stress reappraisal is stress mindsets:
whether stress is believed to have enhancing or debilitating consequences (Crum, Salovey,
& Achor, 2013). As covered in more depth in the following “Cousins” section, situation-­
specific stress appraisals can be shaped by more general belief systems about stress.
Individuals with a more stress-­is-­enhancing mindset could be expected to benefit more
from stress reappraisal manipulations. Conversely, individuals who hold strong stress-­
is-­debilitating mindsets might be resistant to stress reappraisal interventions because the
materials align poorly with their worldview.

COUSINS

The stress reappraisal intervention seeks to harness the power of cognitive appraisal pro-
cesses to promote active coping with acute stressors. Resource and demand appraisal
processes, however, target specific stressful situations, and can (and often do) fluctuate
substantially from situation to situation. For instance, one may consider oneself an adept
skier. Presented with a demanding trail (e.g., steep, icy, and narrow), the expert skier per-
ceives his or her coping resources (ability, skills, familiarity, etc.) to exceed task demands.
However, when the same expert skier is placed in a mathematics achievement context,
such as taking an important standardized test, he or she may perceive the demands (high
difficulty of problems, uncertainty processes, etc.) as exceeding the ability to cope (poor
math knowledge, little experience, etc.). Thus, the effectiveness of any intervention for
which appraisal processes are focal mechanisms will likely vary from situation to situa-
tion because of differences in basal appraisal patterns and affective response tendencies.
To improve the likelihood of observing effects across many different contexts, other cog-
nitive processes (in addition to appraisals) can be harnessed.
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 249

Notably, research from the mindsets literature suggests another avenue for inter-
vention. In addition to targeting domain-­specific appraisal processes, improving stress
responses can also be achieved by targeting domain-­general, more meta-level beliefs.
For example, research on stress mindsets, which are beliefs about the nature of stress
in general not tied to specific situations—­demonstrates how manipulating mindsets can
produce downstream benefits (e.g., Crum et al., 2013). Individuals holding a “stress-­is-­
enhancing mindset” believe that stress can have enhancing effects, whereas those holding
a “stress-­is-­debilitating mindset” believe that stress has debilitating effects. Although the
stress can have either or both enhancing and/or debilitating effects, these stress mindsets
orient individuals to a set of expectations and motivations.
Similar to effects observed in the stress reappraisal literature, experimental mindset
research demonstrates that intervention materials that teach a stress-­is-­enhancing mind-
set can improve stress responses, performance, and health outcomes. To demonstrate,
employees taught about the enhancing nature of stress self-­reported greater improve-
ments in work performance and general health compared to employees taught about the
debilitating effects of stress and no instruction controls (Crum et al., 2013). Subsequent
research has observed longer-­term effects of stress-­mindset training across weeks or pos-
sibly even years. For instance, employees taught a stress-­is-­enhancing mindset reported
better health and well-being up to 4 weeks after intervention delivery (Crum et al., 2019),
and in a college student sample, a stress-­is-­enhancing mindset intervention delivered
prior to the start of college predicted positive outcomes across students’ freshman and
sophomore years (Goyer, Akinola, Grunberg, & Crum, 2018).
Importantly for research on stress reappraisal, altering general beliefs about stress
may benefit outcomes by shaping situation-­specific appraisal processes (cf. Yeager, Lee, &
Jamieson, 2017). Individuals with a more stress-­is-­enhancing mindset could be expected
to benefit more from stress reappraisal manipulations because they are already “precon-
ditioned” to appraise stress responses as functional and adaptive. Conversely, individuals
who hold strong stress-­is-­debilitating mindsets might be resistant to stress reappraisal
interventions because the materials align poorly with their worldview that stress is harm-
ful for them.
To date, only one study has explored stress mindsets and appraisal processes in the
same design (Crum et al., 2019). Compared to a stress-­is-­debilitating mindset, a stress-­is-­
enhancing mindset improved affective responses in a negative social-­evaluative situation
that elicited threat appraisals. As might be expected, however, optimal outcomes were
observed when mindsets and appraisals aligned: participants who both held a stress-­is-­
enhancing mindset and received positive feedback that elicited challenge appraisals expe-
rienced the most benefits. However, appraisals and mindsets were not integrated. Taken
together, the growing literature on stress mindsets suggests that stress responses can be
improved by altering meta-level belief systems. This approach provides a nice comple-
ment to the situationally grounded stress reappraisal approach, and suggests avenues for
potential integrations of the two interventions to optimize effects (see Jamieson et al.,
2018, for a review).
In addition to focal grounding in challenge and threat theory, the development of
stress reappraisal methods have relied on the theory of constructed emotion (Barrett,
2017) and the extended process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 2015). Construc-
tionist models of emotion posit that emotions (e.g., anxiety or excitement) are experi-
enced when categorized using knowledge from cognitive concepts. Thus, emotions are
250 II.  Health and Well-Being

“situated conceptualizations” (Barrett, Wilson-­Mendenhall, & Barsalou, 2014; Wilson-­

Mendenhall, Barrett, Simmons, & Barsalou, 2011). Appraisals (among other processes)
help transform internal states into emotions (or stress responses) by integrating bodily
changes with external sensory information and knowledge of the situation to encour-
age behavioral response patterns (Barrett, 2006). Moreover, constructionist theorizing is
consistent with the strong monist—­the idea that the brain and body operate in concert—­
emphasized in stress reappraisal approaches.
Challenge and threat appraisals also fit well with the conceptualization of “valua-
tion” processes in the extended process model of emotion regulation. A valuation sys-
tem includes aspects of the social and external environment, perceptions of internal
and external states, valuations of perceptions, and goal-­directed actions (Gross, 2015).
Stress appraisals may be considered perceptual processes that inform valuations with the
goal of modifying actions (stress responses), and stress reappraisal processes can oper-
ate within second-­level valuation systems that have as their targets first-level valuation
systems focused on constructing emotional experiences and stress responses. In addition,
the importance of agency captured in emotion regulation process models also manifests
in stress reappraisal methods (Gross & Barrett, 2011)—that is, it would be difficult to
actively regulate stress responses without agency.
The integration of concepts from constructionist models of emotion and dynamical
models of emotion regulation has informed ongoing research on the social dynamics of
stress reappraisal. Specifically, melding processes from challenge and threat theory and
the extended process model of emotion regulation with research on coregulation—the
reciprocal maintenance of physiological response patterns (Sbarra & Hazan, 2008)—has
the potential to better specify how appraisals and subsequent physiological responses
help create and maintain healthy relationships, and promote adaptive social behaviors
(e.g., responsiveness; Reis, Clark, & Holmes, 2004). To examine interpersonal dynamics
of stress reappraisal, recent research examined how instructing one member of a team
to reappraise stress impacted their teammate (Oveis et al., 2020). To do so, teammates
engaged in a collaborative product design task followed by an individual product pitch
delivered to evaluators. Prior to collaborative performance, one person received stress
reappraisal instructions. Consistent with predictions, stress reappraisal elicited more
challenge-­like physiological responses relative to controls. Critically, this improvement
manifested in both teammates. The nonmanipulated teammate exhibited improved stress
responses simply by interacting with a person who reappraised the stress arousal as func-
tional. Notably, reappraisal improved nonmanipulated teammates’ stress responses dur-
ing both collaborative work—a period in which the manipulated and nonmanipulated
teammates constantly communicated face-to-face—and later during an individual per-
formance period. Mediation analysis suggests that the effect of reappraisal on nonma-
nipulated teammates’ stress responses during individual performance stemmed from the
improved stress responses experienced during collaborative work.
Future research on the underlying processes of how contagion of stress reappraisal
transmits across teammates could be informed by research on emotion coregulation (But-
ler & Randall, 2013) and physiological linkage (Waters, West, Karnilowicz, & Mendes,
2017). For instance, research from the coregulation literature indicates that the experi-
ence of threat-­t ype stress responses impairs individuals’ capacity to be responsive to their
partners, and this lack of responsiveness can result in threat responses in the partner
(Peters, Reis, & Jamieson, 2018).
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 251

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

One misconception about stress reappraisal is that it is a stress reduction or stress man-
agement technique—­that is, traditional efforts to regulate stress responses have focused
on reducing or “managing” stress responses because lay conceptualizations of stress are
overwhelmingly negative (e.g., Brooks, 2014). However, as noted previously, stress reap-
praisal interventions do not seek to attenuate arousal or reduce perceptions of situational
demands. Informing individuals about the functional benefits of stress responses (e.g.,
increased heart rate helps to deliver oxygenated blood to the brain and periphery) does
not imply that stressful situations are devoid of demands, nor does this approach sug-
gest the best method for coping with stressful experiences is to down-­regulate arousal
and “keep calm.” Consider an athlete about to compete in an important match. Stress
experienced in anticipation of performing can be appraised as challenging, such as “I
possess the necessary training and ability to beat my competitor” (i.e., resources out-
weigh demands), or threatening, such as “I worry that I cannot beat this difficult oppo-
nent” (i.e., demands exceed resources). Stress reappraisal seeks to encourage the athlete
to appraise as the stress experienced in anticipation of and during performance as a
resource that will help him or her achieve victory (i.e., boosting resource appraisals). The
aim of this intervention is not to encourage the athlete to view his or her competitors as
worse, or the match as less important or meaningful (i.e., reducing demand appraisals).
Another misconception of stress reappraisal is that it is easily applied across all indi-
viduals and all stressful domains. As touched on previously in the “Heterogeneity” sec-
tion, though, a prerequisite to exhibiting acute stress responses in challenge and threat
theory is engagement. People must care about performing, coping, and so on in a particu-
lar stressful context for challenge and threat responses to manifest. If an individual does
not care, invest effort, or disengages, he or she is not actively responding to the stressor.
Only when individuals actively engage is stress reappraisal hypothesized to help improve
responses—­that is, stress reappraisal is unlikely to benefit individuals when there is no
stress to appraise/reappraise. For example, consider a stressful standardized exam situ-
ation. A student could not care about the standardized test, disengage with the situa-
tion, and walk out of the room without answering any questions. Such a response pat-
tern would not be associated with any stress response because there are no situational
demands, and thus no resources are needed to cope with demands. The stressful task (the
standardized test) is simply avoided before appraisal processes are engaged. Reappraising
stress arousal is unlikely to promote initial engagement with a stressful situation unless
levels of anxiety (or a similar affective state) are so high in anticipation of the stressor that
the negative affect leads to complete avoidance of the stress context (cf. Peters, Overall,
& Jamieson, 2014). The prior example, however, is not a particularly realistic depic-
tion of how the vast majority of students engage with and respond to testing situations.
To advance through educational systems, students must take exams and cannot sim-
ply remove themselves from situations. Thus, students must engage, which explains why
nearly all students experience exams as stressful (Bradley et al., 2010). Once engaged,
appraisal processes come online to evaluate personal coping resources relative to situ-
ational demands (Blascovich & Mendes, 2010). Stress reappraisal can then help improve
responses by increasing the ratio of resources to demands.
Another nuance of the stress reappraisal intervention is the kind of stress tar-
geted. The research reviewed here provides empirical evidence for the benefits of stress
252 II.  Health and Well-Being

reappraisal in acute stress contexts. However, prolonged exposure to stress, or repeated

activation of stress systems (i.e., chronic stress), has the potential to cause allostatic load
and elicit negative health outcomes (Juster, McEwen, & Lupien, 2010). To date, however,
potential effects of stress reappraisal on chronic stress processes are unknown because
this intervention has not been studied in long-term longitudinal paradigms. As research
progresses in this area, it is our hope that stress reappraisal and other interventions for
optimizing acute stress responses can help modulate experiences of chronic stress through
recursive and reciprocal processes. First, given the longer half-life of catabolic hormones
that mark threat responses relative to anabolic hormones that mark challenge responses,
promoting challenge should allow participants to return to homeostasis more quickly
after stress offset, thus potentially reducing allostatic load. Second, learning how to cope
with acute stress in one context has the potential to transmit to other contexts via altering
second-­level valuation systems (Gross, 2015). This can lead to repeated adaptive stress
responses. Finally, extant stress reappraisal research indicates that improving acute stress
responses can impact attentional systems as well (Jamieson et al., 2012). If this approach
reduces attention for negative cues, it is possible that future ambiguous situations will not
be perceived as stressful or threatening.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

To date, laboratory and field research has utilized two general forms of stress reap-
praisal: (1) a ~10-minute reading exercise comprising summaries of scientific articles on
the adaptive benefits of stress responses and responding to questions aimed at encourag-
ing endorsement of the material via “saying-­is-­believing” processes (e.g., Jamieson et
al., 2012; see Walton & Wilson, 2018, for a discussion; materials available for down-
load at http://socialstresslab.wixsite.com/urochester/research); and (2) a “short-form,”
single-­paragraph instruction presented below (see also John-­Henderson et al., 2015). For
instance, Jamieson and colleagues (2010) used the following short-form instructions to
manipulate stress appraisals prior to GRE tests:

“People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them
do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt
performance on these tests and can even help performance . . . people who feel
‘anxious’ during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel
concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself
feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do
well.”

It is important to highlight that stress reappraisal materials have, to date, relied

on time-­sensitive deliveries. A common thread throughout the extant research on stress
reappraisal is that intervention materials have been delivered either during or immediately
before acutely stressful motivated performance contexts. Materials were not adminis-
trated days or weeks before effects are typically tested; rather, participants are immersed
in stressful experiences—­both in the lab (e.g., Jamieson et al., 2012) and in naturalistic
settings (e.g., Jamieson et al., 2016)—and are administered stress reappraisal intervention
materials while stress arousal levels are high. Thus, participants can immediately apply
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 253

the instructions that are provided to them. To demonstrate, a field experiment found
that teaching community college students to appraise their stress arousal as a coping
tool immediately before an exam reduced their test anxiety and improved performance
(Jamieson et al., 2016). In this experiment, the research team visited participating class-
rooms on the days of exams and administered the intervention materials immediately
prior to students taking their exams, which required substantial coordination between
the research team and instructors, as well as steps to ensure that instructors administer-
ing and scoring exams remained blind to condition assignment and hypotheses.
This targeted approach requires that practitioners seeking to implement this inter-
vention should be cognizant of when the materials are delivered. If a disconnection exists
between when/where materials are completed and when/where stress is experienced, there
is a possibility that some effectiveness of the intervention will be lost. However, it should
be noted that one prior study used a more distal and passive delivery method—­students
were e-­mailed the “short-form” intervention materials the night before an exam—and
still observed psychological and performance effects of the intervention (Brady et al.,
2018). Thus, it may be possible to use a less immersive delivery method, though care
should be taken to ensure that intervention materials are recalled or applied in the same
context where effects are measured.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

In addition to emerging from research on the BPS model of challenge and threat, stress
reappraisal also has roots in concepts derived from emotion regulation and achievement
goal theories. Because of these shared underlying processes, research on stress reappraisal
has the potential to inform the development of these broader models. For example, the
classic process model of emotion regulation highlights “cognitive change” processes
such as reappraisal as effective (and heavily studied) methods for regulating emotional
experiences (Gross, 2002). Along these lines, stress reappraisal changes cognitive factors
(appraisals) to regulate emotional experiences (stress responses). Recent advances in emo-
tion regulation theory have emphasized the importance of valuations: when an event/
experience/situation is “good for me” versus “bad for me” (Gross, 2015). Importantly
for regulating stress responses, reappraising stress as functional and adaptive has the
potential to promote the valuation that stress can be “good for me.” In this way, stress
reappraisal can be conceptualized as an emotion regulation tool operating within the
framework provided by the extended process model.
The emphasis of stress reappraisal on improving physiological, cognitive, and per-
formance outcomes in performance contexts makes it ripe for integration with research
on achievement goals: cognitive representations of future competence-­based outcomes
that one approaches or avoids (Elliot & Fryer, 2008). Crossing dimensions of evaluative
standard and valence yields four basic goals: mastery-­approach goals (focused on doing
well relative to task requirements or one’s own performance trajectory), performance-­
approach goals (focused on doing well relative to others), mastery-­ avoidance goals
(focused on not doing poorly relative to task requirements or one’s own performance
trajectory), and performance-­avoidance goals (focused on not doing poorly relative to
others; Elliot, 1999). Importantly for integration with stress reappraisal, achievement
goals are situation-­specific, self-­regulatory processes.
254 II.  Health and Well-Being

Once instantiated, achievement goals can then create a framework through which
people interpret and experience future achievement situations (e.g., Dweck, 1986). For
instance, reappraising stress arousal can increase subsequent performance-­ approach
goals (Jamieson et al., 2019). The commitment to pursuing these approach goals may
then influence a multitude of affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes and outcomes.
Along these lines, in one set of studies, the positive focus stemming from performance-­
approach goals of attaining academic competence was linked to appraising a specific
course or exam as a challenge (McGregor & Elliot, 2002). Moreover, as with cyclical
emotion regulation processes (Gross, 2015), achievement scenarios are usually not one-
off experiences but instead operate in sequences. Thus, with regard to integrating goals
with stress reappraisal, achievement goals may operate as both antecedents of appraisal
processes and consequences of challenge–­threat responses resulting from stress reap-
praisal manipulations. Moreover, it is possible that goals could serve both these roles
sequentially and reciprocally.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Lay conceptualizations of stress are generally negative. In fact, when asked to choose
the best advice for optimally performing in an upcoming stressful task, 91% of people
indicated that remaining calm and relaxed (i.e., trying not to be “stressed”) was the best
option (Brooks, 2014). This negative conceptualization of stress can play an important
role in maintaining and promoting negative health and well-being outcomes associated
with stressful experiences because appraisals and perceptions of stress directly impact
biological responses (e.g., Crum et al., 2013; Blascovich & Mendes, 2010; Jamieson et
al., 2018). Thus, intervening to change how people appraise and engage with stressful sit-
uations can help improve acute stress responses. This review highlights the physiological,
cognitive, and performance benefits of reappraising stress arousal. In this line of research,
stress responses are presented as a functional coping resource that aids performance—­
that is, signs of stress arousal are interpreted as coping tools that facilitate challenge
appraisals to affect outcomes.
Although this chapter focuses on stress reappraisal interventions, we advocate for
an integrative approach—­advancing research by synthesizing and consolidating exist-
ing models—­to develop interventions to facilitate active coping. Rather than “discover-
ing islands” by creating new models, a potentially more efficacious approach suggested
herein may be building bridges by integrating processes, constructs, and themes across
multiple models (i.e., “connecting islands”). As highlighted in the “Cousins” section,
stress reappraisal and stress mindsets are ideal candidates for integration into a unified
stress optimization intervention. Such an intervention would have the potential to com-
bine domain-­general benefits of mindset interventions with tools for optimizing coping
in specific stressful situations emphasized by stress reappraisal. These potentially additive
effects could be disseminated with little to no cost to recipients as well. Future research,
however, is needed to explicate basic effects of an integrated stress optimization interven-
tion, and subsequently, to maximize efficiency to scale the intervention for widespread
dissemination.
In sum, the research on stress reappraisal reviewed here contributes to a growing
corpus of evidence demonstrating the efficacy of brief, social-­psychological interventions
 Stress Reappraisal Interventions 255

for improving health and well-being outcomes (see Walton & Wilson, 2018, for a review).
As emphasized by Yeager and Walton (2011), however, these interventions are not
“magic” panaceas—­rather, social-­psychological interventions, such as stress reappraisal,
target specific processes to enact positive change. Ultimately, it is our hope that this and
other intervention approaches can be integrated, scaled, and disseminated to potentially
improve people’s lives at near zero cost.

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 C H A P TE R 11

Values-­Alignment Interventions
An Alternative to Pragmatic Appeals
for Behavior Change

Christopher J. Bryan

The science of behavior change has become an increasingly important frontier in the quest
to improve human health and well-being. Recognition of this is now widespread in the scien-
tific community, but the science of behavior change—­the development of effective, empiri-
cally validated techniques for producing lasting, internalized motivation for the behavior
choices people know they should be making but usually do not—is still badly underdevel-
oped. Most public appeals to engage in such “should” behaviors (e.g., exercise, eat health-
ily, save for the future, conserve energy) focus on the pragmatic reasons why those behav-
iors are important. The problem with this approach is that such pragmatic appeals lack the
motivational immediacy to drive the needed changes in behavior for reasons psychologists
have understood for decades. Here, I suggest an alternative approach: reframing should
behaviors in terms that emphasize how those behaviors serve the values that are already
immediate and important to the people whose behavior one seeks to change. I demonstrate
the potential of this approach using the example of an intervention to get adolescents to
adopt healthier dietary habits by framing manipulative food marketing as a subversion of
important adolescent values, including autonomy from adult control and social justice.

BACKGROUND

Perhaps now more than ever before, human thriving depends on individual behavior
choices. To effectively address problems ranging from climate change to obesity, we must
find ways to foster sustained changes in behavior on a population scale. In particular,
we need good ways to create sustained motivation for “should” behaviors—­the things
people know they should be doing but struggle to muster the motivation for. We see pub-
lic appeals for should behaviors every day; we are encouraged to get a flu shot, eat more
vegetables, exercise, conserve energy, and put our phones away while driving. And those

259
260 II.  Health and Well-Being

appeals almost always focus on the pragmatic reasons for should behaviors; they empha-
size how those behaviors will make us healthier, safer, and more financially secure in the
future. This is not an effective approach. The big problem with it is that psychologists
(and many economists) have known for decades that people tend to overvalue immedi-
ate outcomes relative to those in the future (Ainslie & Haslam, 1992; Berns, Laibson, &
Loewenstein, 2007). So, if people see should behavior as the sacrifice of a reward in the
immediate term (e.g., enjoying dessert, having money to spend right now) for a reward
in the future (e.g., health, financial security), they are unlikely to be motivated to choose
them—even if they know they should. This is a problem because, in fact, should behav-
iors usually do require forgoing an immediate reward in favor of one in the future. So
what’s the alternative?
In this chapter, I describe a new approach to creating sustained, internalized motiva-
tion for should behaviors, called values alignment. Values alignment involves identifying
values that have motivational immediacy for people and that could plausibly be served
by the behavior one seeks to motivate, then framing appeals for the behavior in terms
of those values. In particular, values that are central to people’s (culturally defined) con-
ception of what makes someone deserving of acceptance, approval, or admiration from
the members of their important social reference groups tend to be powerful motivators
because seeing oneself as living up to those values is critical to self-­integrity—­the sense
that one is a worthwhile person (Leary & Baumeister, 2000; Sherman & Cohen, 2006;
Steele, 1988).
Although values alignment is a general approach to motivating should behaviors
in a wide range of domains, the theory largely grew out of work on a specific interven-
tion aimed at motivating adolescents to adopt healthier eating habits by framing them
as consistent with the important adolescent values of autonomy from adult control and
the pursuit of social justice (Bryan, Yeager, & Hinojosa, 2019; Bryan et al., 2016). That
intervention is the central focus of this chapter. My collaborators and I framed healthy
eating as rebellious and autonomy assertive by teaching adolescents about deceptive food
marketing designed to manipulate them and others into eating junk food. We framed
healthy eating as social justice-­oriented behavior by emphasizing the ways in which food
marketers deliberately target vulnerable groups, like very young children and the poor.
Our goal was to portray healthy eating not as a way to be healthier in the future—­a
pragmatic motive that lacks motivational immediacy—­but rather as a way to be a “good
teenager” who stands up against unjust adult authority. We hypothesized that the reward
of knowing they were living up to the important values they share with their peers would
have the motivational immediacy to compete with the reward of eating junk food.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS

The psychological process behind values alignment relies on two basic psychological phe-
nomena: myopia and construal.

Myopia: A Persistent Barrier to Delay of Gratification

Few phenomena in psychology are as thoroughly documented: people consistently over-
value immediate costs and rewards and undervalue those in the future (Ainslie, 1992;
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 261

Berns et al., 2007; Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2002; Loewenstein, 1996;
Mischel & Staub, 1965; Thaler, 1981). Often referred to as myopia, this “pervasive deval-
uation of the future” (Ainslie & Haslam, 1992, p. 59), helps to explain why the long-term
benefits of should behaviors seem to provide such a weak incentive for people to make the
immediate sacrifices those behaviors typically require.
Compounding this challenge, motivation to delay gratification depends on people’s
confidence that the distant reward will eventually be achieved (Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin,
2013; Mischel, Cantor, & Feldman, 1996; Mischel & Staub, 1965). And people generally
have enough experience with temptation to realize that even if they manage to delay grat-
ification in a given instance, the likelihood that they will be able to do so in a sustained
and consistent enough way to reap long-term benefits is quite low. These psychological
realities impose a persistent barrier to the effective motivation of should behaviors. The
values-­alignment approach draws on one of social psychology’s earliest and most power-
ful insights to circumvent this barrier: the central role of construal in shaping people’s
experiences and decisions.

Construal: A Hidden Step between Stimulus and Response

Although people tend to think of themselves as responding directly to objective reality
(Ross & Ward, 1996), in fact what they respond to is their internal representation, or
construal, of that reality (Asch, 1940; Koffka, 2013; Lewin, 1935). The far-­reaching
implications of this insight become clearer when considering how susceptible one’s con-
strual of the world often is to influence from subtle contextual cues. For example, in one
classic study (Liberman, Samuels, & Ross, 2004), college undergraduates were invited to
play an economic game that required them to adopt either a cooperative or a competitive
strategy. The researchers manipulated how participants construed the game simply by
giving it different names. Some were introduced to it as the “Community Game,” while
others were told it was called the “Wall Street Game.” The name was irrelevant to the
rules of the game or the monetary values associated with different strategies, but it trans-
formed what participants saw as the point of the game—­whether it was about cooperat-
ing with a partner or competing with an opponent. This simple construal manipulation
had a big effect on how participants played. More than two-­thirds of participants in the
“Community Game” condition adopted a cooperative strategy, while fully two-­thirds of
participants in the “Wall Street Game” condition played competitively.
Upon reflection, it is easy to see why people’s construal processes would be so sus-
ceptible to influence from contextual cues. Most situations we encounter are relatively
ambiguous and we must fill in missing information to make sense of them before we
know how to respond. Our construal of a situation influences what information we fill
in. All of this happens outside of our awareness, so once we have filled in information
based on our construal, it just becomes part of what we perceive to be objective reality
(Ross & Ward, 1996).

Values Alignment Circumvents Myopia by Shifting Construal

The key insight behind values alignment is that the obstacle to should behaviors posed
by myopia is largely a product of people’s construal of those behaviors as being in ser-
vice of long-term pragmatic benefits. That is, in the mind of a person who construes the
262 II.  Health and Well-Being

purpose of should behaviors as the pursuit of a pragmatic benefit in the distant future,
myopia necessarily undermines motivation for those behaviors: Most decisions about
should behavior pit an immediate hedonic reward (e.g., enjoying junk food) that people
are predisposed to overvalue against a distant pragmatic benefit (e.g., being healthy) that
people are predisposed to undervalue.
The aim of values alignment is to circumvent the myopia problem by shifting people
away from the pragmatic construal. When you see a should behavior as an expression of
your existing deeply held values, this introduces a new reason to perform it: the power-
ful eudaimonic reward that comes from feeling that you are living up to your important
values. And, critically, because this reward is mostly abstract and symbolic, it is experi-
enced immediately so its motivational power is not blunted by myopia (see Figure 11.1).
In addition to the immediate reward for choosing should behavior, the values-­aligned
construal introduces a eudaimonic cost for succumbing to temptation and not choosing
should behavior. Because the should behavior is now construed as an expression of one’s
important values, not engaging in that behavior is now construed as inconsistent with
those values. So when a person fails to choose should behavior, she not only forgoes the
reward of living up to her values but must incur the cost of knowing that she is making a
choice that is inconsistent with those values.

Applying the Theory: Framing Healthy Eating as an Expression

of Adolescent Values
With David Yeager, a developmental psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin,
Cintia Hinojosa, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, and others, I imple-
mented these theoretical ideas in the design of a classroom-­based intervention to moti-
vate adolescents to make healthier dietary choices (Bryan et al., 2016; Bryan, Yeager, &
Hinojosa, 2019). Trying to motivate teenagers to reject junk food in favor of healthier
options is an especially tough behavior change challenge. Adolescents tend to overvalue
the present and undervalue the future even more extremely than adults do (Braams, van
Duijvenvoorde, Peper, & Crone, 2015; Casey & Caudle, 2013; Crone & Dahl, 2012;
Steinberg, 2007), and junk food is deliberately formulated by food companies to provide
an extraordinarily strong (immediate) hedonic reward (Kessler, 2009; Moss, 2013). So
under the conventional long-term health-­benefit construal, in order to choose healthier
diets, adolescents must pass up a powerful, immediate hedonic reward in service of a
long-term goal that is not important to them. Considering this, it is perhaps not surpris-
ing that, despite more than 30 years of concerted effort by the scientific community to
develop an intervention that improves people’s dietary habits, personal dietary choices

Construal shift: Anticipated

Behavior seen as (immediate)
Behavior
aligned with eudaimonic reward
values for behavior

FIGURE 11.1. Theoretical psychological process by which values alignment motivates should

behavior.
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 263

are currently the single leading cause of premature death and disease in the developed
world (Forouzanfar et al., 2015; Gakidou et al., 2017).
The two values the intervention was designed to harness—­autonomy from adult con-
trol and the pursuit of social justice—­have been shown in past research to be especially
important to adolescents. The first will come as no surprise; adolescents are famously (or
infamously, depending on your perspective) rebellious against adult authority (Lee, Siegle,
Dahl, Hooley, & Silk, 2014; Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004). This
psychology likely hampers the success of many traditional health interventions, which
typically involve adults advising adolescents about what they should be eating for their
own good—just the sort of message that tends to provoke teens’ rebellious impulses. The
second is less widely appreciated but adolescence is a time when people tend to become
especially concerned about fairness, social justice, and beyond-­the-self aims (Damon,
Menon, & Bronk, 2003; Robinson, 2010; Yeager et al., 2014). For the first time in their
lives, adolescents are beginning to feel like independent agents in the world and they want
to make a difference (Robinson, 2010; Yeager et al., 2014).
To connect to the autonomy value, we framed the intervention as an exposé of
manipulative food-­industry marketing practices designed to inveigle people into consum-
ing more junk food than they would otherwise be inclined to consume. This includes
practices like using deceptive labeling to conceal the sugar content in foods or devoting
huge research budgets to discovering new ways to make junk foods maximally addictive
(Kessler, 2009; Moss, 2013). To connect to the social justice value, we emphasized the
ways in which food marketing contributes to injustice. This refers to practices like dispro-
portionately targeting vulnerable populations (e.g., very young children, the poor, and
minority groups) with marketing of the unhealthiest products (Kessler, 2009). Through
this framing, we sought to replace what we imagined was adolescents’ default construal
of healthy eating—­something like “Healthy eaters are lame nerds who do what adults
tell them to do”—with an alternative construal: “Healthy eaters are independent-­minded
people who are fighting to make the world a fairer place.” This construal, we theo-
rized, would provide adolescents with the immediate symbolic reward of feeling like they
were living up to the important values they share with their peers every time they made
a healthy dietary choice. Perhaps equally important, every time adolescents made an
unhealthy dietary choice, it would impose the immediate symbolic cost of knowing they
were not living up to their important values.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
Using randomized, controlled field experimental methods, the values-­alignment healthy-­
eating intervention has been shown to improve adolescents’ dietary choices in naturalistic
school settings that they believed were unconnected to the research. The first test of its
effectiveness (Bryan et al., 2016) was conducted in a rural/suburban middle school in
Texas with the entire eighth-­grade class in 2 consecutive years (N = 536). Participants
were randomly assigned, at the individual level, to read one of three short informational
articles: an exposé article that linked healthy dietary choices to adolescent values, an
active control article based on current best practices that used material from middle school
264 II.  Health and Well-Being

health curricula and the U.S. government’s health education website and emphasized the
long-term health consequences of healthy and unhealthy diets, or a “no-­treatment” con-
trol article that was similar to the other two in length but did not deal with food or diet.
After reading their respective articles, all students completed a series of survey questions
measuring the extent to which they construed healthy eating as relevant to the two target
adolescent values and some brief writing exercises to help them internalize the key mes-
sages of the article they read (Aronson, 1999).
The day after the intervention session we measured participants’ dietary choices in a
situation they believed to be unconnected with the research. This was possible thanks to
the school principal, who adapted his yearly practice of giving students a “snack pack”
each spring as a reward for their hard work in preparing for the statewide standardized
tests. To ensure students would not see the snack pack as part of the research, we asked
the principal to announce it to students in his normal fashion, long before the research
took place (and long before any student at the school knew about the study). Then, the
morning after the study, during homeroom period (which was a different class from
the one the intervention was administered in), the principal announced over the school
public address (PA) system that students would be receiving their snack packs that day.
Homeroom teachers distributed order forms and the principal explained that snack packs
containing the items they selected would be waiting for them at the main office at the
end of the school day. Students were invited to select two snacks and one drink. The
snack options included three healthy choices (baby carrots, fresh-cut fruit, and nuts with
dried fruit) and three unhealthy choices (cookies, potato chips, and cheese puffs). Drink
options included two healthy choices (bottled water and sparkling mineral water) and
three unhealthy choices (two sodas and a sweetened fruit drink).
Our primary measure of dietary choices was simply the number of unhealthy options
participants chose to include in their snack packs. We found that participants who
received the values-­aligned exposé intervention ordered slightly but significantly fewer
unhealthy options (M = 1.38 unhealthy selections) than those who received either of the
control articles (M = 1.49 unhealthy selections).
There was no significant difference in the number of unhealthy choices participants
made after reading the traditional health education intervention (active control) versus
the article that was unrelated to diet or nutrition (no-­treatment control). The lack of dif-
ference between these two control conditions is itself notable: even just 1 day later, we
found no evidence that traditional health and nutrition education had any effect on par-
ticipants’ dietary choices. Although this is not surprising in light of the psychological bar-
riers preventing people from choosing should behaviors under the traditional pragmatic
construal of that behavior, it is still a striking indictment of the approach that schools and
governments currently invest enormous resources in.
There are various ways to quantify the exposé intervention’s effect on participants’
snack pack choices and each provides a different and complementary perspective on the
intervention’s effects. For example, examining the percentage of participants in each
group who ordered snack packs that were entirely composed of unhealthy options sheds
light on how effectively the exposé intervention motivated participants to make at least
some sacrifice of their hedonic experience and take a step in the direction of healthier
diets. In the two control conditions, 57% of participants chose the maximum possible
number of unhealthy options (three). Adolescents who read the values-­aligned exposé
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 265

article were substantially more willing to forgo a tempting, unhealthy treat in favor of
something healthier but much less hedonically rewarding: only 46% of them chose snack
packs that contained the maximum of three unhealthy options.
The reduction in the number of unhealthy choices among adolescents who received
the exposé intervention also translated into differences in the overall nutritional content
of the snack packs they ordered. While participants in the two control conditions ordered
snack packs with an average of 40.4 total grams of sugar and 60.2 total grams of car-
bohydrates, those who received the exposé treatment ordered items containing 3.6 fewer
grams of sugar and 4.3 fewer grams of carbohydrates, on average.
Although I have argued strongly that emphasizing the practical benefits of should
behaviors is an ineffective way to motivate those behaviors, practical outcomes are of
course still the most relevant criterion when evaluating an intervention from a policy
perspective. Although improving the nutritional content of a single meal or snack cannot
possibly have any meaningful impact on long-term health, it is possible to estimate what
the health significance would be of differences of the size observed in this experiment if
they were sustained over months and years. For example, a relative reduction in carbo-
hydrate consumption of the size observed in this study, if sustained, would translate into
roughly 1 pound of body fat lost (or not gained) every 6–8 weeks in adolescents of this
age.1 So can a values-­alignment intervention produce lasting changes in adolescents’ daily
dietary choices? We examined this in a second experiment.

Effects over Time
Our first iteration of the values-­aligned healthy-­eating intervention provided “proof of
concept” for the values-­alignment approach: It got adolescents to care enough about
healthy eating that they were willing to forgo rewarding junk food in favor of healthier but
less rewarding options 1 day later in a situation they believed was unrelated. To go beyond
that and produce lasting changes in adolescents’ daily dietary choices, we must overcome
some additional obstacles. Perhaps most daunting among those is that adolescents’ lives
are pervaded by junk food marketing. This marketing fosters strong positive emotional
associations with unhealthy food and drives overconsumption (Harris, Pomeranz, Lob-
stein, & Brownell, 2009; Hastings & Cairns, 2010; Kessler, 2009; Moss, 2013; Nestle,
2006; Swinburn et al., 2011). So, are the changes prompted by our relatively brief inter-
vention doomed to be wiped away by the barrage of pro-junk food messaging participants
are exposed to in their daily lives? Not necessarily. After all, the exposé intervention is
designed to change participants’ construal of junk food and of junk food marketing. If it is
effective at changing the meaning adolescents attach to the junk food marketing messages
they are exposed to, maybe it can neutralize their effect—­or possibly even harness their
ubiquity to support the intervention’s message. Imagine if every time adolescents saw an
ad for junk food, it served as a reminder of unjust, controlling manipulation by the food
industry instead of acting as a tempting inducement to consume the product.

1 Because participants’ snack pack choices were limited to a small set of options, the size of the reduc-
tion in carbohydrate content must be considered an imprecise estimate of the reduction we might see if
participants were choosing from the universe of food and drink options available to them in their daily
lives.
266 II.  Health and Well-Being

In a second randomized, controlled field experiment, David Yeager, Cintia Hinojosa,

and I tested a modified version of the exposé intervention that was designed to achieve
this (Bryan, Yeager, & Hinojosa, 2019). We again recruited the entire eighth-­grade class
(N = 362) at a middle school in Texas. As in the first experiment, participants were given
an informational article to read—­either an exposé of manipulative food marketing or a
traditional health education message. (We dropped the no-­treatment control in this sec-
ond study because in the first study its effect was indistinguishable from the traditional
health education control condition.) This time, however, we added a second intervention
session the day after the first session in which participants completed an activity designed
to reinforce their negative construal of junk food marketing in particular. Participants in
the exposé condition were presented with images of junk food advertisements on tablet
computers using software that let them draw or write on the images. Participants were
instructed to cross things out, write or draw things on the image—­whatever they needed
to do to take the dishonest ad and make it more honest. The activity, called “Make It
True,” was intentionally evocative of the subversive adolescent thrill of using graffiti to
rebel against authority (see Figure 11.2). Participants in the traditional health education
condition completed a similarly interactive tablet-­based activity, created by expert profes-
sionals who specialize in media and health communication, in which they spun a virtual
Wheel of Fortune-style wheel and learned how much physical activity it takes to burn
the calories in their favorite foods (New Mexico State University Learning Games Lab,
2015). We called this control activity “Make It Fun.”
We assessed the intervention’s effect on dietary choices by looking at what partici-
pants bought at the school cafeteria. Students pay for their cafeteria purchases by swiping
their school identification (ID) cards; the school provided us with records of every par-
ticipant’s daily purchases for the whole school year. The intervention took place in mid-­
February so we had data on participants’ purchases for approximately 6 months before
the intervention and 3 months after, allowing us to assess any changes in their dietary
choices as a result of their intervention condition, as well as how long any such changes
persisted (up to 3 months).

FIGURE 11.2. Examples of changes participants made to food advertisements in the Make It

True activity. In the right-most image, the speech bubble reads, “I do not actually like it.”
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 267

As we predicted, participants in the exposé condition showed a significant reduc-

tion in their daily purchases of unhealthy snacks and drinks (e.g., chips, cookies, sugary
juices) and a significant increase in their purchases of healthy items (e.g., fruit, milk,
water) from the preintervention period to the postintervention period, relative to those
who received the control intervention. An exploratory follow-­up analysis revealed an
unexpected effect as well: the overall improvements in participants’ daily dietary choices
caused by the exposé intervention were only apparent in boys—that is, what initially
appeared to be a small but significant improvement in the health profile of daily dietary
choices for all participants in the exposé condition was, in fact, a quite large improve-
ment in boys’ purchases (e.g., a 31% relative reduction in junk food purchases) and no
improvement at all in girls’ purchases, relative to the traditional health education con-
trol. If anything, there were hints that girls’ dietary choices in the cafeteria might have
improved slightly more following the control intervention. It is important to be clear
that only the effect on cafeteria purchases was moderated by gender in this way. Boys’
and girls’ psychological responses to the exposé intervention were indistinguishable, but
those psychological changes translated into documented improvements in dietary habits
only for boys.
Why might this have been the case? Two nonmutually exclusive explanations seem
plausible: First, it is important to recall that the lack of any improvement in girls’ dietary
choices relative to the control condition does not mean it was ineffective—­only that it
was not more effective than the control condition. This is important because the control
condition in this experiment was not inert; it was a traditional health education interven-
tion. And one feature of this second iteration of the traditional health-­education control
intervention might plausibly have influenced girls’ dietary choices but not those of boys:
the reference to calories (and how much physical activity is required to burn off those
calories) in the Make It Fun activity. Because girls are subjected to much more pressure to
be thin than boys (Thompson, Heinberg, Altabe, & Tantleff-­Dunn, 1999), it seems plau-
sible that this reminder of the link between diet and thinness might have induced girls
but not boys in the active control condition to make healthier choices. To have confidence
in this explanation, a new experiment will be needed with a no-­treatment control condi-
tion that does not risk triggering girls’ body image concerns. Note that this explanation
of the gender difference is entirely consistent with the theory of values alignment: girls
value thinness much more than boys (because our culture essentially forces them to) and
the proposed explanation is that the active control intervention (inadvertently) aligned
healthy eating with that value. Although this does qualify as an instance of values align-
ment, it relies on, and possibly reinforces, a culturally imposed value that can cause real
psychological harm to girls (e.g., Strahan et al., 2008). Note also that this explanation
would suggest that the values-­aligned exposé intervention is more effective than tradi-
tional health education in boys and roughly as effective as traditional health education in
girls but without triggering body image-­related pressure or shame.
The second possible explanation is that the rebellious “stick-it-to-the-man” spirit
of the exposé intervention is simply less compelling to girls than it is to boys. We know
girls were as persuaded by the exposé intervention as boys were at least insofar as they
showed all the same psychological changes following the intervention that boys did. But it
is possible that these psychological changes energized behavior to a lesser degree in girls.
Again, a new study that includes a no-­treatment control condition will be needed to gain
more clarity about these and other possible explanations.
268 II.  Health and Well-Being

Mechanism
Shifting Construal of Healthy Eating
In the “Psychological Process” section of this chapter, above, I argued that values align-
ment motivates sustained increases in should behavior by changing people’s construal of
that behavior in ways that circumvent the barriers imposed by myopia. Was the exposé
intervention successful in doing this? In both field experiments I described, we measured
the extent to which participants in the treatment and control conditions construed healthy
eating as consistent with the values of autonomy and social justice. Participants were
asked, for example, how much they agreed with statements like “Eating healthy is a way
to stand up to people who are trying to control us” (autonomy) and “When I eat healthy,
I’m doing my part to protect kids who are being controlled by food companies” (social
justice). As expected, we found that participants in the exposé (values-­aligned) condition
agreed more strongly with both the autonomy and social justice construals of healthy eat-
ing than those in either the no-­treatment or the traditional health education control group.

Introduction of Symbolic Reward
I also argued that the construal of should behavior that is produced by values alignment
creates a reward for choosing should behavior that comes from knowing one is living up
to his or her core values. Because this reward is largely symbolic, it can be experienced
immediately—­likely before the relevant behavior (e.g., healthy or unhealthy eating) even
happens in some cases, since the symbolic implications of a behavior can presumably be
experienced in an anticipatory form as soon as one decides to perform it. And because
this reward for choosing should behavior is experienced immediately, its power is not
undermined by myopia and it can compete with the hedonic rewards that would come
from eating rich, unhealthy foods. Essentially, this theoretical argument boils down to a
claim that values alignment makes should behavior feel more (immediately) rewarding.
It is difficult to measure a symbolic reward directly but we were able to obtain
data that provide indirect support for this hypothesis. We obtained saliva samples from
approximately half of the participants in the second intervention experiment a few weeks
before the intervention was administered and assayed them for testosterone (T) levels
(Medrano et al., 2019). Levels of T increase dramatically in adolescence (for boys and
girls) as a result of pubertal development and T is known to increase the brain’s sensitiv-
ity to reward (Braams et al., 2015). T has also been shown to motivate reward-­seeking
behavior. Both correlational and experimental studies in animals and in humans have
shown that increased levels of T drive increases in behaviors that are expected to be
rewarding (Casey, 2015; van Duijvenvoorde, Peters, Braams, & Crone, 2016). So if val-
ues alignment motivates should behavior by making that behavior feel more immediately
rewarding, it should be most effective in people who experience reward most intensely.
It is worth noting that this is quite a bold prediction. Unhealthy food is also power-
fully rewarding, so people with higher levels of T should also be the people who are most
powerfully attracted to junk food under the traditional pragmatic construal of healthy
eating. Nevertheless, we found, as predicted, that the values-­aligned exposé intervention
was most effective at motivating healthy eating among those with higher levels of T.
Because the effect of the intervention on daily cafeteria choices was limited to boys,
we focus on boys in this analysis as well. First, consistent with our assumption that,
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 269

under the traditional pragmatic construal, T should attract boys more strongly to the
hedonic reward of eating junk food, we found that T levels were positively associated
with junk food purchases among boys in the control condition. But the key test of the
theoretical process model is whether the exposé intervention was more effective at reduc-
ing junk food purchases among boys who were higher in T than among boys who were
lower in T. This prediction was also supported by the data; the exposé intervention was
significantly more effective among boys with higher levels of T (Medrano et al., 2019).
The difference was striking: while higher levels of T were associated with higher rates of
unhealthy, hedonically rewarding purchases among boys in the control condition, boys in
the exposé condition made relatively few daily junk food purchases irrespective of their
T levels (see Figure 11.3). Among boys in the exposé condition, although the hedonic
reward of junk food undoubtedly remained a powerful motivator, it was countered by a
powerful eudaimonic reward for making healthier choices.

Altering Construal of Junk Food Marketing

Recall that the major modification of the exposé intervention for the second experiment
was that we added the Make It True exercise (in which participants modified images
of real food ads to make them more honest). The primary purpose of this exercise was
to help students to internalize a negative construal of junk food marketing. Our hope
was that we could link that marketing so strongly, in participants’ minds, with the food
industry’s attempts to deceive and manipulate that it no longer had the power to create
positive emotional associations with junk food and drive overconsumption. How success-
ful were we in neutralizing food marketing?

Male Junk Food Purchases

3 Months Postintervention
0.5 Control Expose
Rate of unhealthy cafeteria purchases

ROS Cutoff Point

0.4
= 0.36 SD

0.3

0.2

0.1

0.0

–1.0 –0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0

Basal Testosterone (scaled)

FIGURE 11.3. Interaction of T × condition on boys’ junk food purchases. Values along the
y-axis represent fitted values with our covariates (age, date, and body mass index [BMI]). The
dashed vertical line indicates the region of significance (ROS) cutoff point: To the right of the line,
the control and expose conditions are significantly different.
270 II.  Health and Well-Being

We assessed the intervention’s effect on participants’ implicit affective associations:

their immediate, gut-level emotional reactions to junk food marketing, junk food, and
healthy food with a widely used and thoroughly validated measure called the affect
misattribution procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005; Payne &
Lundberg, 2014). Administered on tablet computers, the AMP measures these implicit
associations by asking participants to judge how pleasant an unfamiliar, emotionally
neutral image (e.g., a Chinese character) is compared with other similar images after they
have just been exposed to a very brief (75 milliseconds)2 presentation of the target object
(e.g., an image of a junk food ad; see Figure 11.4). The logic of the measure is simple:
participants’ affective response to the target object automatically influences their judg-
ment of the neutral character that follows. Across many trials, the procedure captures
participants’ affective associations with the target category. Participants completed this
task once 2 weeks postintervention and again at the end of the school year (3 months
postintervention).
Results strongly validated our theoretical predictions. Compared with the tradi-
tional health education intervention, the exposé intervention caused participants’ affec-
tive associations with both junk food marketing and junk food to become significantly
more negative and their affective associations with healthy food to become significantly
more positive. These changes were evident both 2 weeks and 3 months postintervention.
Moreover, these changes were just as strong for girls as they were for boys, further sup-
porting the interpretation that the exposé intervention successfully aligned healthy eating
with girls’ values, too. This finding is also consistent with my suggestion that the exposé
intervention may have failed to produce healthier cafeteria choices in girls relative to
the traditional health education control intervention because the latter was inadvertently
aligned with the toxic but high-­priority value of thinness that our culture imposes on
girls.

Heterogeneity
We have already seen two cases of heterogeneity in the effect of the exposé intervention:
its effectiveness at improving daily dietary choices (relative to traditional health educa-
tion) in boys but not in girls and among boys with high, but not low, levels of T. Each of
these instances of heterogeneity helped us learn something important, providing empiri-
cal support for the underlying theory in one case (T) and suggesting updates to our theory
in the other case (gender). This is an important lesson: We frequently think of treat-
ment effect heterogeneity in primarily practical terms—as “boundary conditions” that
set limits on how broadly the usefulness of an intervention generalizes. Although true,
this misses the point that identifying sources of heterogeneity in an intervention’s effect
is often a good way to develop and test the underlying theory about how the interven-
tion works and what adjustments might allow it to work more effectively, or in different
segments of the target population. The two sources of heterogeneity I have discussed so
far are individual differences, but another sort of heterogeneity—­in context—­can also
have important effects that are often equally useful in testing theory (Spencer, Zanna, &

2 Thispresentation duration is just barely above the threshold for conscious processing. Participants are
instructed not to let the initial image influence their evaluation of the neutral image but they can only
control influence of the initial image that they are consciously aware of.
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 271

FIGURE 11.4.  Representation of a single AMP trial. The target object here is the Coke ad. Par-
ticipants are presented with it for 75 milliseconds, followed by a dark screen for 125 milliseconds,
then the neutral character they are asked to judge for 300 milliseconds before it is replaced with a
visual mask, which remains on screen until the participant responds by tapping either the U or the
P (to indicate whether they judge the neutral character to be unpleasant or pleasant, respectively,
relative to other such characters).

Fong, 2005). So far, we have not had the opportunity to study systematically how this
intervention might be affected by context but I describe some anecdotal evidence below
in the “Nuances and Misconceptions” section that suggests contextual variation is also
likely important for this intervention.

COUSINS

One close intervention cousin to the values-­aligned healthy-­eating intervention is the

taste-­focused-­labeling intervention (see Turnwald & Crum, Chapter 12, this volume;
Turnwald et al., 2019). Taste-­focused labeling entails describing healthy dishes in ways
that emphasize their tastiness rather than their healthiness. This change in emphasis is
important because it helps overcome the strong cultural preconception that healthy foods
are less enjoyable to eat than unhealthy foods.3 The taste-­focused-­labeling intervention
is similar to values alignment in that it too motivates healthy eating by changing the
way people construe the purpose of eating healthy foods—­emphasizing the (immedi-
ate) enjoyment of eating them instead of long-term health benefits. The two interven-
tions differ primarily in the source of the immediate reward they rely on to motivate
healthy eating. Whereas values alignment relies on the more abstract, eudaimonic reward
of living in accordance with one’s important values, taste-­focused labeling relies on the

3 This belief may be caused at least in part by the misguided emphasis on pragmatic appeals for should
behaviors that I described at the start of this chapter. Emphasizing health as the primary reason to eat
foods like fruits and vegetables might inadvertently suggest to people that this is the only reason one
would want to eat those foods.
272 II.  Health and Well-Being

concrete, hedonic reward of a pleasurable taste experience. One interesting question for
future research is whether these two approaches could be combined in a way that would
allow them to reinforce each other. For example, by emphasizing the appealing hedonic
properties of healthy foods, taste-­focused labeling might make it easier for adolescents
to make dietary choices that are consistent with their values. Moreover, once the exposé
intervention successfully prompts adolescents to decide that they will make healthier
choices by harnessing their important values, adolescents might become more amenable
to beliefs (e.g., “Healthy foods are delicious too”) that support the wisdom of that deci-
sion (Kunda, 1990).
The exposé intervention to influence dietary choices is one instantiation of the
broader values-­alignment approach to motivating should behaviors. Although the theo-
retical framework for values alignment that I have articulated here was developed in the
context of work on the exposé intervention for healthy eating, other interventions that
came before it have employed values alignment even if their designers did not conceive
of them explicitly in those terms. One example is an intervention to increase high school
students’ motivation for tedious schoolwork by linking education to a self-­transcendent
prosocial purpose (Yeager et al., 2014). In this intervention, adolescents are encouraged
to think of a way in which they believe the world could be a better place (e.g., less hunger,
disease, or prejudice). Once they have identified a self-­transcendent purpose they person-
ally care about, the intervention reframes the sometimes-­boring work they are required
to do in high school as teaching them skills that they can use to make a positive contri-
bution to the world. Compared with control treatments that either provide useful advice
about navigating high school life or that emphasized self-­interested motives for learning,
the self-­transcendent-­purpose intervention increased participants’ willingness to invest
effort in learning difficult material—­even in the face of tempting alternatives like watch-
ing viral videos—­and, in one study, produced a substantial improvement in students’
science and math grades. Like the values-­aligned healthy-­eating intervention, the self-­
transcendent-­purpose intervention works by shifting participants’ construal of a should
behavior—­devoting energy to schoolwork students find boring—­such that it is seen as
serving a deeply held value. The most obvious difference between the two interventions is
that the healthy-­eating intervention identified specific values that we knew, from previous
research, tend to be important in adolescence. In contrast, the self-­transcendent-­purpose
intervention invites participants to identify their own specific value and then encourages
them to think about how their schoolwork might serve that value. According to our
theory, one advantage of the former approach is that harnessing a shared group value
enhances an intervention’s power by drawing on the desire people generally feel to fit
within their social groups (e.g., Asch, 1956). On the other hand, focusing on a value that
is tailored to each individual’s personal priorities might allow the intervention to tap into
values that participants are especially passionate about. More research is needed to test
these hypotheses and assess which contexts, behaviors, or types of people each approach
is best suited to.
Another example is a classic intervention by psychologist Milton Rokeach (1971) that
used values alignment to increase White undergraduates’ support for African Americans’
civil rights in the late 1960s by confronting them with inconsistencies in their own constel-
lation of values and attitudes. Rokeach had participants rank a list of 18 human values
(e.g., freedom, happiness, a world at peace, equality). He then showed them fabricated
data indicating (1) that students at their school, on average, ranked freedom much more
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 273

highly than equality; and (2) that students who were supportive of civil rights, on average,
ranked those two values almost identically, while students who were less supportive of
civil rights ranked freedom much more highly than equality. Rokeach then highlighted the
hypocrisy of the latter ranking, saying, “This raises the question as to whether those who
are against civil rights are really saying that they care a great deal about their own freedom
but are indifferent to other people’s freedom” (p. 454). Highlighting this hypocrisy had a
profound and lasting effect on students. Three to 5 months later, when they received a let-
ter inviting them to join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), they were substantially more likely to send in the $1 membership dues. In the
17 months following this intervention, participants also updated their ranking of the two
focal values, prioritizing freedom less and equality more. What deeply held and widely
shared value did this intervention harness to motivate these increases in support for civil
rights? Although the values of freedom and equality were central features of the interven-
tion, I would argue that neither was the critical driver of motivation—­rather, I believe it
was the strong desire not to feel like or be seen as a hypocrite (see also Stone, Aronson,
Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994). Rokeach’s intervention caused a shift in how participants
construed the significance of prioritizing freedom so far above equality. Highlighting
the hypocrisy of this disparity caused participants to feel substantial discomfort, which
Rokeach then channeled to motivate support for civil rights.
Another class of related interventions uses a subtle linguistic cue to frame behavior
as having implications for identity. In a series of experiments, my collaborators and I have
shown how referring to should behaviors with a predicate noun instead of a verb (e.g.,
“be a voter” vs. “vote”; “don’t be a cheater” vs. “don’t cheat”; “be a helper” vs. “help”)
can cause people to behave more in accordance with their values—­to exert the effort to
vote and to help others, and to resist the temptation to cheat (Bryan, Adams, & Monin,
2013; Bryan, Master, & Walton, 2014; Bryan, Walton, Rogers, & Dweck, 2011; Bryan,
Yeager, & O’Brien, 2019). Using nouns in this way frames should behavior as a reflec-
tion of the kind of person one would reveal oneself to be by performing it—it signals that
the behavior is reflective of a person’s essential, underlying identity (Gelman & Heyman,
1999; Gelman, Hollander, Star, & Heyman, 2000). By signaling that elements of one’s
identity hinge on a behavior choice, noun wording causes people to behave more in accor-
dance with the core values that constitute their (culturally informed) standards for what
constitutes a “good” or worthy person.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Context and Logistics
The values-­aligned food marketing exposé intervention is delivered in a classroom setting
and introduced as material being considered for inclusion in future middle school health
curricula. Because it is critical not to threaten participants’ sense of autonomy, the pur-
pose of the classroom session is described in autonomy-­supportive terms, as a request for
feedback from participants about whether the material will be seen as engaging to other
students of their age. The intervention consists of an informational article that describes
the core content (read on a tablet computer with narration through earphones), a pair of
brief writing exercises to reinforce the lessons of the article, and the Make It True activity,
274 II.  Health and Well-Being

described above, in which participants modify images of real junk food ads to make them
more accurate.

Core Content
The content comes mostly from journalistic accounts of the ways in which food mar-
keters intentionally mislead and manipulate consumers into buying and eating more
unhealthy, processed foods than they otherwise would; the harm this does to people’s
health and well-being; and the ways in which that harmful influence is disproportionately
targeted at vulnerable populations, including very young children and the poor (e.g., Kes-
sler, 2009; Moss, 2013). The content is described in terms that make clear and obvious
the link to adolescents’ drive for autonomy from adult control. For example, see the fol-
lowing excerpt from the informational article:

The companies that make the unhealthy food spend billions of dollars trying to get
people to overeat. The reason is simple: the more people eat, the more money they make.
If people only ate when they were actually hungry—­if corporations just let you choose
what you and your body wanted to eat—they would make a lot less money. So, instead
they spend lots of money to come up with new ways to trick our brains into eating more
than our bodies want, and more than our bodies can handle.

The direct reference to the counterfactual in this passage (“if corporations just let
you choose what you and your body wanted to eat . . . ”) helps cast food marketing in
clear opposition to adolescent autonomy. Tone and language are important here, too. The
use of simple, direct language (“just let you choose”; “trick our brains”) prevents read-
ers from feeling they are being talked down to, which could provoke autonomy threat
or defensiveness. The importance of making the reader feel respected is evident in the
following passage as well:

Why do the companies go after kids? Previous company executives have admitted that
it’s because they are easy targets. Children that young usually believe what adults tell
them. Corporations put ads on Saturday morning cartoons for the most sugar-­packed,
addictive junk foods. They teach kids as young as 3 and 4—who don’t know any better—­
that eating lots of junk food is cool, fun and normal.

The above excerpt is obviously intended to provoke a prosocial concern for social
justice but it accomplishes another goal, too. Focusing on the intended effects of food
marketing on very young children makes it possible to portray a belief likely held by
many of the readers “that eating lots of junk food is cool, fun and normal” as childish
and naïve without insulting the reader or provoking defensiveness.
We also sought to link the desire for the hedonic reward of junk food directly with
food marketers’ subversion of the reader’s autonomy. That was the purpose of the follow-
ing passage, for example:

Our brains are naturally designed to tell us to stop eating when we’ve had enough. But
they have laboratories and hire scientists to figure out the brain’s blind spots. Then they
create foods that cause the brain to crave more and more sugar and fat, even when we’re
not hungry.
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 275

This passage helps to externalize even the internal experience of craving junk food.
We worried that if participants construed their desire for junk food as coming from
within, they would feel compelled to justify the validity of those cravings (Aronson,
1969; Festinger, 1957; Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). Externalizing those cravings makes
clear that they are threats to autonomy rather than genuine internal desires.
The article also contains examples of real food industry executives, all middle-­age
White men, to serve as objects of the reader’s rebellion. These executives were featured
because, in addition to representing a controlling adult authority, they have all been iden-
tified as avoiding their own companies’ products for health reasons. One such example is
John Ruff who, the article explains, “is an executive at Kraft (maker of Kool-Aid, Tang,
Oreos, and lots of other high-sugar, high-fat snacks). He dropped high fat and high calo-
rie snacks to stay healthy. His diet calls for avoiding his company’s snacks. He continues
to sell them to others.” Mentioning this hypocrisy helped underscore the ways in which
junk food marketing directly undermines the values of autonomy and social justice. This
was expected to provoke righteous outrage and fuel participants’ motivation for behavior
change to defend those core adolescent values.

Supporting Psychology
As is common in many wise interventions, the core content of the exposé intervention
is complemented with components designed to evoke supportive psychological processes
(Walton, 2014; Walton & Wilson, 2018). To communicate a descriptive norm (Cialdini,
2003; Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008) supportive of the intervention’s core
message, participants read about a survey of the previous year’s ninth graders in which
“almost all” respondents were “shocked and angry” about food marketers’ manipulation
and planned to “fight back against the companies by eating less of their processed foods.”
Those survey results were followed by quotes from previous participants reiterating key
points from the article and explaining how they planned to fight back by avoiding junk
food.
Next, participants completed a pair of short writing activities in which they were
asked why they thought so many people were “outraged and upset” about food market-
ers’ manipulation, invited to share their own feelings on the topic, and finally to describe
what kinds of food choices “students like [them]” could make, starting right away, to
fight back against this injustice. These activities were designed to serve a self-­persuasion
function—­to help students internalize and feel ownership over the persuasive arguments
in the article (Aronson, 1999).

Make It True Exercise
The primary goal of the Make It True exercise was to highlight the role of food ads in
supporting the deception and manipulation of the food industry. The activity was framed
in terms that recalled the key messages we had communicated the day before:

“What is advertising? It’s a way for companies to sell their products (and make
money). A big problem is that junk food ads often target young kids and don’t tell
the whole truth. How? Companies use bright colors and cartoons to paint a fake pic-
ture about their food. And they put these ads everywhere—­in children’s TV shows,
276 II.  Health and Well-Being

schools, websites, and even phone apps. Surrounding little kids with these ads is a
big way that companies try to take over their power to think for themselves. But we
don’t have to let a big company do the thinking for them.”

Note again the emphasis on protecting young children from marketing, which simul-
taneously reinforces the alignment of our message with prosocial justice and allows us
to call out the food industry’s deception with less risk that we might provoke defen-
siveness by making participants themselves feel like dupes. Next, we provided examples
of marked-­up ads that the previous year’s eighth graders had produced during piloting
to help inspire participants. To scaffold participants’ creative process, we also provided
thought questions (e.g., “When you pick an ad, ask yourself . . . does it seem false or like
it’s hiding part of the truth?”; “Does it seem like it’s trying to make junk food seem way
more fun than it really is?”) and suggested ways they might modify the ads (e.g., “Add
speech or thought bubbles”; “Cross out words to make a point”; “Do a play on words”;
and “Add a whole new slogan that shows the reality of the product”).

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Wise interventions can be extraordinarily powerful. Examples of psychologically sophis-

ticated interventions that “move the needle” on important outcomes that have been stub-
bornly resistant to change from other approaches are increasingly common (Walton &
Wilson, 2018). In light of these striking successes, it can be tempting to think of wise
interventions as “magic bullets”—to distill them to simple, one-­dimensional versions of
their core idea and expect them to work across a wide range of contexts (Yeager & Wal-
ton, 2011). The truth is that such interventions can indeed improve outcomes in a wide
range of contexts but, in order to be effective, they are often intricately tailored to the
specific context in which they are meant to be implemented. To extend them effectively to
novel contexts, one must think carefully about how well the intervention, as it was origi-
nally conceived, fits those other contexts. In the case of values alignment, one important
question is whether the specific values the intervention was designed to harness are as
important and widely shared in the new context. Here, I describe a learning experience
my collaborators and I had in the early stages of piloting the food marketing exposé inter-
vention that drove this lesson home for me.
Initially, we piloted the exposé intervention in two middle schools in the New York
City area: one in a wealthy North Bronx neighborhood that serves an upper-­middle class,
primarily White and Asian student body; and one in a poor South Bronx neighborhood
that serves a mostly Black and Latinx student body. Students at both schools read an
early draft of the exposé article about food industry manipulation and disproportionate
targeting of very young children and the poor. Both groups of students read the article
with focused interest but their reactions to it were quite different. Students at the upscale
North Bronx school reacted with outrage, many spontaneously beginning to plan the
ways they would fight back against this unfair behavior by the food companies (e.g.,
“When I get home, I’m going to make kale chips with my mom!”). Students at the poorer
South Bronx school had much more muted reactions. They agreed the behavior of the
food companies was unfair but this did not energize them to combat the injustice in
the same way. Further discussion with those students, and subsequent reflection, made
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 277

clear that the exposé intervention as we had drafted it (and as we have tested it so far)
was well aligned with White, middle class adolescent values in particular. In relying on
the published research literature to characterize adolescent values, we likely fell prey to
a common and persistent misconception implicit in most psychological literature: the
characterization of “human” psychology from research that is based overwhelmingly
on samples of White, Western, relatively educated, middle class people (Henrich, Heine,
& Norenzayan, 2010; Sears, 1986). The social-­psychological literature on social class
makes clear why an intervention designed to motivate action by triggering the desire
for personal autonomy might be less well aligned with the values of adolescents from
working-­class backgrounds—­namely, working-­class culture tends to value individual
choice less than middle-­class culture does, privileging interdependence among ingroup
members and attentiveness to the needs of others in one’s group (Stephens, Fryberg, &
Markus, 2011; Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul, 2009; Stephens,
Markus, & Townsend, 2007).
In addition to this major misalignment of the exposé intervention with the values
of lower-­socioeconomic status (SES) students, the social justice component of the inter-
vention, which discusses the ways in which the food industry disproportionately targets
low-­income communities, has a very different meaning to low-SES adolescents than it
does to middle-­class adolescents. This material is designed to create a sense of prosocial
purpose for rejecting junk food in participants by emphasizing the ways in which groups
more vulnerable than participants themselves are being targeted. It is well suited to that
purpose when the audience is middle class; not so when the audience is the low-­income
group being targeted by companies.
This analysis makes clear why the current version of the exposé intervention seemed
to resonate less strongly with the pilot participants from the low-SES school in the South
Bronx. It also suggests ways in which relatively minor modifications might help align
that intervention better with the values of lower-SES adolescents. If the emphasis were
on the ways in which the food industry targets very young members of low-­income com-
munities and communities of color, the call to action in the intervention could be framed
less in terms of “sticking it to the man” or “taking back control” and more in terms of
the importance of being role models and “protecting the younger members of our com-
munity” from harmful outside influence. Pilot work and rigorous testing are needed to
be confident that such a modified framing would be effective in lower-SES communities
of color but, as a starting place, this framing certainly seems better aligned with values
in those communities.
Another nuance that is relevant to values-­alignment interventions generally is worth
noting. I have emphasized that values alignment involves framing should behavior in
terms of values other than long-term pragmatic benefit. But this does not mean that the
pragmatic benefits of should behavior are made to seem irrelevant; the difference between
pragmatic and values-­aligned appeals is about emphasis. The health implications of junk
food consumption, for example, are still important to the logic of the exposé interven-
tion but they are not emphasized as the sole or central reason to make healthier choices.
Instead, they help motivate why deceptive marketing undermines the values of autonomy
and social justice, which are the central focus of the intervention—­that is, the food indus-
try’s manipulation of people’s choices and its targeting of vulnerable populations feel like
such violations of these values in part because greedy executives are profiting by under-
mining people’s well-being. Pragmatic concerns play a similar role in other values-­aligned
278 II.  Health and Well-Being

interventions: In the purpose-­for-­learning intervention (Yeager et al., 2014), the emphasis

is on making a positive contribution to the world but learning useful skills and get-
ting a job is understood to be how people can do that; in the noun-­wording interven-
tion, the identities “voter” and “helper” are so appealing because of the pragmatic value
those behaviors are understood to have. The point is not that people are uninterested in
pragmatic outcomes; rather, it is that those pragmatic outcomes—­especially if they are
uncertain or in the distant future—­lack the motivational immediacy, on their own, to
overcome the barriers to action.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Research on values alignment more generally and on the food marketing exposé in par-
ticular, is still at a relatively early stage and more research is needed before it is possible to
offer a comprehensive set of guidelines to practitioners. In the case of the food marketing
exposé intervention, one key principle is the importance of supporting the autonomy of
participants (Yeager, Dahl, & Dweck, 2018). The conceit we used to achieve this in the
studies—­framing the content as draft material for future middle school health courses—­
would not likely wear well as subsequent classes of students received the same material
year after year. But an alternative framing of the material, simply as facts that food
companies try to conceal but that participants have a right to know about, would likely
accomplish the same purpose and be more sustainable.
More broadly, as illustrated by the example of how the exposé intervention seemed
much less resonant for students of color in a low-SES school, the question of how to
identify the right values to focus on in a values-­alignment intervention is an important
and difficult one. Especially in Western, educated populations, psychological literature
can sometimes inform answers to this question. But for many populations and in many
contexts, existing literature does not provide a sufficient basis for designing an interven-
tion. I believe a big part of the answer is that we must begin to incorporate qualitative
approaches, borrowed from ethnography, into the intervention-­design process. As more
research is conducted on values alignment, a systematic, scalable process for this can be
developed and serve as a guide to researchers and practitioners. For now, I suggest the
guiding principle (which I have alluded to throughout this chapter) that values that are
central to a culture’s conception of what makes a “good” member of the social group,
worthy of respect and admiration from other group members (Leary & Baumeister,
2000), tend to be powerful motivators.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

In using construal processes to tackle challenges related to myopia, this work brings
together two important lines of theory that, historically, have mostly existed separately
from each other. The pervasiveness and stubborn consistency with which people discount
the value of the future and the negative consequences this tendency has for people’s health
and well-being has made it a major topic of research in psychology, economics, and related
fields. Research on ways to encourage more future-­oriented behavior has been intense
and has resulted in numerous discoveries of methods for reducing the influence of myopic
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 279

discounting on behavioral decisions. These include interventions that allow people to

precommit to a more farsighted decision long enough before that decision is implemented
that they do not yet feel the hedonic pull of the more shortsighted choice (e.g., Thaler &
Benartzi, 2004) and ones that use computer simulation or other techniques to increase
the vividness with which people are able to imagine the effects of shortsighted decisions
on their “future self” (Hershfield, John, & Reiff, 2018; see also Weber et al., 2007).
Although interventions in these veins have been effective at changing decisions in a given
moment, none has shown potential to reorient people toward farsighted decision making
in an ongoing manner.
The extraordinary power of the subjectivist approach to psychology, and of con-
strual processes in particular, is that they afford the possibility of changing what situa-
tion people understand themselves to be responding to (Asch, 1940). So rather than try-
ing to find ways to overcome discounting by “bridging the gap” between the present and
distant future, values alignment simply alters people’s perceptions of what the rewards
and costs are for choosing should behaviors versus not choosing them. By realigning this
decision to be compatible with people’s existing psychological predispositions, values
alignment makes it possible to simply circumvent the obstacle of myopia and achieve a
more enduring reorientation toward preferring should behavior.
And, of course, the potential to change people’s understanding of the situation they
are responding to has implications that go far beyond overcoming temporal discounting.
So, a more general theoretical lesson of this work is that interventions that take advan-
tage of flexibility in how people construe their worlds are a powerful tool for changing
behavior and for addressing vexing social problems (Walton & Wilson, 2018). Finally,
the success of the values-­alignment approach in fostering lasting change in adolescents’
dietary preferences suggests that the overwhelmingly dominant theoretical focus, in con-
ventional scholarship, on material self-­interest as the central motivator of behavior might
not be appropriate. Self-­interest is unquestionably an important motivator but there are
also many situations in which people happily privilege other important values over their
own self-­interest (e.g., Olivola & Shafir, 2013). In behavior change situations where self-­
interest proves not to be an effective motivator, those working to foment change should
consider alternative approaches.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The work I have described in this chapter constitutes an initial demonstration that values
alignment can generate enduring motivation for should behavior. Much more research is
needed to take this from a promising idea to a viable, scalable program. I have already
mentioned two high-­priority directions for future research in earlier sections. First, to
better understand the reason for the gender difference in the effect of the exposé inter-
vention on cafeteria purchases in the second intervention study, a follow-­up experiment
that includes both a traditional nutrition education control and a no-­treatment control
is a high priority. Second, my theorizing about why the exposé intervention material
seemed to resonate less strongly with low-SES adolescents of color and how the interven-
tion could be amended to be effective in that population cries out for testing. Improving
dietary habits and health outcomes in the communities most affected by food marketing
should be a high priority.
280 II.  Health and Well-Being

Another high-­priority question is whether the effects of the food marketing exposé
intervention could be made even stronger by incorporating social components. For rea-
sons of methodological rigor, the intervention studies we have conducted to date have
used individual-­level random assignment to experimental conditions, within classrooms.
Because roughly half of the participants in each classroom were in the exposé condi-
tion and the other half in the control condition, we had to take steps to prevent par-
ticipants from discussing the intervention material with one another (to prevent cross-­
contamination). But an intervention like this one, which is predicated on linking dietary
choices to the important values adolescents share with one another, might have even
stronger and longer-­lasting effects if participants felt like they were part of a social move-
ment to take a stand against the manipulation and injustice perpetrated by a heinous
group of adult authority figures (see Paluck, Shepherd, & Aronow, 2016). Testing this
would require a much larger scale than has been possible in experiments to date, with
enough schools to allow classroom, or preferably, school-­level random assignment.
In addition, one constraint on improvement in the health profile of students’ cafete-
ria purchases in the last study was a lack of appealing healthy options. Combining the
food marketing exposé intervention with a program that made more appealing healthy
options available in the school cafeteria might result in an even greater improvement in
nutritional outcomes. Indeed, this suggestion could even be combined with the previous
one. The intervention could be amended to encourage students to lobby their school to
make healthier options available. This combination might have the dual benefits of intro-
ducing a sense of group cohesion around a constructive purpose (thus fostering stronger
commitment to the cause) and increasing students’ commitment to healthier diets because
they had to work hard to gain access to them (Aronson, 1969; Aronson & Mills, 1959).
And, of course, the values-­alignment approach is not specific to autonomy and social
justice or to influencing dietary preferences and choices. It is a general theoretical frame-
work for fostering lasting, internalized motivation for a wide range of should behaviors.
For example, in a newer line of research with Ashley Whillans, a psychologist at Har-
vard and Liz Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, I am explor-
ing whether values related to parenting can be harnessed to motivate charitable giving.
This work is predicated on the observation that most people can only afford to donate
amounts of money that feel trivial relative to the massive scope of the need and that this
may prevent many people from giving at all. So we are examining whether emphasizing
to parents of young children that giving can serve a purpose other than charitable impact
might motivate them to give more often. In particular, we frame giving as a way to create
a teachable moment for their children. We encourage parents to include their young chil-
dren in the giving process and to use this as an opportunity to teach their children about
the importance of caring about the needs of others. In a series of laboratory studies, we
have found that inviting parents to consider giving to a charitable cause along with their
children (vs. on their own while a researcher entertained their children) made them more
willing to give to the cause and to share their e-mail address with the charitable organiza-
tion for solicitation of future donations. We are currently conducting a field experiment,
in partnership with a large online charitable giving organization, to test whether a ver-
sion of this teachable-­moment framing could motivate parents to make ongoing, monthly
donations. Parents who visit the site are encouraged to begin giving their young children
a “charitable allowance” and sit down with their children each month to discuss the dif-
ferent causes they could donate the money to.
 Values-­Alignment Interventions 281

CONCLUSION

In the coming decades, human thriving is likely to depend on finding ways to produce
consistent changes in the everyday behavior choices that are behind many of our most
daunting problems. Values alignment offers a way to produce lasting, internalized moti-
vation for such changes. It does this by circumventing the persistent psychological bar-
riers that often prevent people from making the daily choices they know they should be
making. Much more research will be needed before this approach can begin to offer scal-
able solutions to the many challenges humanity is faced with, but results so far are cause
for optimism that this goal can be achieved.

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 C H A P TE R 12

The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling
Intervention
Emphasizing the Tasty
and Enjoyable Attributes of Healthy Foods

Bradley P. Turnwald and Alia J. Crum

Rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease call for interventions that
promote healthier dietary intake. While most interventions emphasize the long-term impor-
tance of eating healthily and highlight the nutritional benefits of healthy options, these
health-­focused approaches have had limited success. Here we discuss a novel interven-
tion that focuses instead on promoting healthy foods based on their tasty and enjoyable
characteristics—­qualities that most people prioritize over healthiness in the moment of food
choice. Highlighting tasty and enjoyable properties changes people’s reason for choos-
ing healthy foods from a choice that is perceived as effortful, instrumental, and misaligned
with taste priorities to a choice that is aligned with the short-term goal of choosing tasty
and enjoyable food. Compared to the classic approach of emphasizing health qualities and
benefits, taste-­focused labeling increases the proportion of people who choose healthy
foods across a range of field settings and for a variety of vegetables and plant-based foods.
In this chapter, we describe (1) theoretical foundations that led to the formulation of the
taste-­focused-­labeling intervention, (2) experimental evidence that it increases healthy food
choices, (3) mechanisms and moderators of the effects, (4) how to implement the taste-­
focused-­labeling intervention, and (5) directions for future research.

BACKGROUND

Poor dietary intake (diet low in fruits and vegetables and high in sugar, sodium, and
saturated fat) is a major driver of chronic disease (Lim et al., 2013). An estimated 45%
of deaths associated with heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes can be attributed

286
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 287

to unhealthy eating (Micha et al., 2017), and nearly half of Americans’ dietary intake
qualifies as “poor” (Rehm, Penalvo, Afshin, & Mozaffarian, 2016). Improving the health
qualities of the foods that Americans choose to eat is a public health priority.
To promote healthier eating, three major approaches have been emphasized: (1) edu-
cating individuals so that they understand what constitutes a healthy diet and the impor-
tance of consuming a healthy diet (e.g., nutrition education programs), (2) using nutri-
tional labeling (e.g., calorie labeling, traffic light labeling, warning labels) so that people
can more easily identify healthy choices, and (3) changing aspects of the food choice
environment to make healthy choices more accessible or likely (e.g., access to healthy
foods in disadvantaged communities, monetary incentives, nudging, and choice architec-
ture). Despite each of these approaches improving attitudes, intentions, or behaviors in
some studies or for some populations, substantial progress on improving dietary intake
or slowing obesity rates has not been made (Gortmaker et al., 2011; Hawkes et al., 2015;
Mann, Tomiyama, & Ward, 2015; Roberto et al., 2015).
One potential explanation for the limited success of many health-­focused approaches
is a shared underlying feature: reliance on a fundamental assumption that most people
will prioritize healthiness above other motives in the moment of food choice if they can
simply identify what the healthy choice is. This seemingly logical assumption is, more
often than not, flawed. People certainly must have access to healthy foods, but large
national surveys across decades show that most Americans prioritize tastiness more than
healthiness when making food choices (Aggarwal, Rehm, Monsivais, & Drewnowski,
2016; Glanz, Basil, Maibach, Goldberg, & Snyder, 1998). Making matters worse, many
Americans perceive healthy foods as less tasty (Raghunathan, Naylor, & Hoyer, 2006)
and less filling (Suher, Raghunathan, & Hoyer, 2016) compared with unhealthy foods.
Given such preferences and expectations, it is not surprising that in spite of improved
education, access, and nutritional labeling, people forgo healthy options and opt instead
for unhealthier foods that they expect will be tastier and more satisfying.
Are healthy foods objectively less tasty, filling, and appealing than unhealthier
foods? The notion that healthy foods are not tasty is not an objective fact but rather a
mindset—­a core assumption about the nature and processes about something (in this
case, healthy foods) that is culturally developed and psychologically informed, and
orients people toward a particular set of expectations, associations, and attributions
(Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013; Dweck, 2008). Research shows that experiences with
food are shaped by prior experiences, information, and culture. First, food preferences
are learned, change over time, and improve with repeated exposure (Aldridge, Dovey,
& Halford, 2009; Birch, 1998; Wardle & Cooke, 2008). Second, foods can be experi-
enced as more or less tasty, filling, physiologically satiating, and neurologically reward-
ing depending upon how they are labeled or framed. Specifically, when the same food is
labeled as healthy (vs. not), people experience it as less tasty (Fenko, Kersten, & Bialkova,
2016; Lähteenmäki et al., 2010; Raghunathan et al., 2006), less filling (Finkelstein &
Fishbach, 2010; Suher et al., 2016), less appealing (Fenko et al., 2016; Lähteenmäki et
al., 2010), less physiologically satiating, (Crum, Corbin, Brownell, & Salovey, 2011),
and less neurologically rewarding (Veldhuizen, Nachtigal, Flammer, de Araujo, & Small
2013). Third, culture, rather than objective nutrients alone, influences the foods that
people experience as most pleasing. While Americans believe that the healthier the food,
the less tasty (­Raghunathan et al., 2006), Indian populations endorse this mindset to a
288 II.  Health and Well-Being

lesser degree (Dube, Fatemi, Lu, & Hertzer, 2016), and the French endorse the opposite
mindset—­that the healthier the food, the tastier it is (Werle, Trendel, & Ardito, 2013).
Together, this body of research shows that, like other mindsets, while the mindset that
healthy foods are not tasty or enjoyable is not necessarily true or false, it has an impact.
By orienting people to a particular set of associations, expectations, and motivational
responses, the mindset that healthy food is not tasty or satisfying can create the reality
that is implied.
If not from objective qualities of the food itself, how are these mindsets formed?
Negative mindsets about healthy foods are, in part, rooted in and reinforced by American
cultural messages. For example, national fruit and vegetable promotion campaigns (e.g.,
“5 A Day,” “Fruits and Veggies: More Matters”) place more emphasis on the importance
of eating healthy foods for fighting disease than on tasty and enjoyable attributes (Marty,
Chambaron, Nicklaus, & Monnery-­Patris, 2018; Pettigrew, 2016). In contrast, unhealthy
foods are promoted in more appealing ways than healthier foods on restaurant menus
(Turnwald, Jurafsky, Conner, & Crum, 2017; Turnwald, Anderson, Jurafsky, & Crum,
in press), through celebrity endorsements (Bragg, Miller, Elizee, Dighe, & Elbel, 2016),
popular character endorsements (Kelly et al., 2010), television advertisements (Harris,
Bargh, & Brownell, 2009; Kelly et al., 2010), and major sports sponsorships (Bragg et al.,
2018). Emerging work demonstrates a systematic bias in how healthy versus unhealthy
foods are portrayed even in nonadvertisement contexts. Unhealthy foods are systemati-
cally portrayed with less exciting, indulgent, social, and overall appealing language than
healthy foods across America’s top-­selling movies, television shows, social media outlets,
and food reviews (Turnwald et al., 2020). These social, marketing, and informational
influences in American culture shape and reinforce the mindset that healthy foods are
not tasty or enjoyable.
In this chapter, we present the taste-­focused-­labeling intervention. In contrast to tra-
ditional health-­focused approaches, taste-­focused-­labeling challenges negative mindsets
about healthy foods by highlighting the tasty and enjoyable characteristics of healthy
dishes. This intervention is designed to not only align healthier foods with diners’ taste
motives in the moment of food choice but to also improve people’s mindsets about healthy
foods as a general category by changing the traditional health-­focused lens through which
they think about them. In the following sections, we describe the psychological processes
involved, experimental evidence, mechanisms and moderators, implementation instruc-
tions, and questions for future research.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Taste-­focused labeling is a wise intervention (Walton & Wilson, 2018) that works to
improve both people’s momentary expectation of how tasty and enjoyable a specific
healthy dish will be and to broadly improve people’s mindsets about all healthy foods.
Figure 12.1 summarizes the hypothesized psychological processes through which the
taste-­focused-­labeling intervention operates.
Describing the solid line paths from left to right, promoting the tasty and enjoy-
able attributes of healthy foods enhances people’s expectations of how delicious the food
will taste (Liem, Aydin, & Zandstra, 2012; Turnwald et al., 2019). Since most people
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 289

FIGURE 12.1. Conceptual model of how taste-­focused labeling works. Solid arrows represent
paths that are empirically tested. Dashed arrows represent hypothesized paths.

prioritize tastiness when making food decisions, increased expected tastiness of the dish
leads more people to choose it.1 It also shifts people’s reason for choosing a healthy food
toward choosing for a tasty experience rather than for long-term health benefits, thereby
aligning a healthy choice more closely with taste priorities. Since the subjective experi-
ence of taste is a combination of a food’s qualities and one’s expectations, expecting that
a food will taste better can enhance the actual experienced taste of foods (Maimaran &
Fishbach, 2014; Raghunathan et al., 2006; Turnwald & Crum, 2019). For this specific
healthy food with a taste-­focused label, a positive taste experience makes consumption
of that same healthy food with a taste-­focused label on repeated occasions more likely
because people have learned that it tastes good. Moreover, a positive taste experience
with this healthy food (labeled as taste focused) has the potential to influence mindsets
that healthy foods, as a general category, can be tasty and enjoyable. This is because a
positive taste experience with a healthy food can challenge the mindset that healthy foods
are not tasty or satisfying by providing a personally experienced counterexample.
Within this process, there are two important questions for future research, as we
later describe and as depicted in the model with dashed lines. First, does a positive mind-
set shift transfer to a person’s subsequent experiences with the same healthy foods and
other healthy foods (with and without taste-­focused labels)? An improvement in the
mindset that healthy foods can be tasty could increase a person’s expectations about
how tasty healthy foods in new environments are and increase the likelihood of choos-
ing healthy foods for taste reasons in new environments, particularly if those foods also
have taste-­focused labels. Second, does a positive mindset shift occur only after a positive
taste experience or can exposure to the label alone shift mindsets about how tasty healthy
foods can be?

1 In the “Heterogeneity” section, we address moderators in this model, including one’s prior experiences
with a particular dish or setting, the extent to which one prioritizes tastiness more than healthiness, and
how flavorfully dishes are prepared.
290 II.  Health and Well-Being

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Three experiments and one multisite replication experiment tested whether labeling
could change food choices in real-world contexts. Table 12.1 presents a summary of these
experiments and key results.
The first experiment tested whether more students in a university dining hall sam-
pled a small bowl of raw vegetables with dipping sauce when labeled and promoted
as taste focused versus health focused. On each of two test days, two cafeteria staff
members prompted each diner (total N = 1,116) upon entry to try a serving of mixed
vegetables (carrots, jicama, and green beans) with miso dipping sauce. On one day, the
vegetable dish was labeled as “Fiber-­Packed Vegetables with Nutritional Miso Sauce”
and verbally advertised as “healthy,” “nutritious,” and “good for you” by staff. On the
other day, the same dish was labeled with a taste-­focused description (“Crispy Veggie
Straws with Decadent Miso Dip”) and verbally promoted as “delicious” and “tasty” by
staff. We found that 49% more diners chose the vegetables when labeled as taste focused
compared to health focused (Turnwald & Crum, 2019).
The second experiment expanded to a lunch-­buffet setting in which healthy foods
(salad, vegetable wrap) competed among other food choices to test the hypothesis. Par-
ticipants (N = 202) walked through one of two lunch-­buffet lines and had their choice
of salad, quinoa, vegetable wrap, turkey or steak sandwich, and dessert. On one serv-
ing line, the salad and vegetable wrap were labeled as health focused (“Light n’ Healthy
Salad,” “Healthy Choice Vegetable Wrap”), and on the other as taste focused (“Indulgent
Creations Deluxe Salad,” “Mouthwatering Grilled Vegetable Wrap”). Other items were
given the same, nondescriptive labels on both lines, and labels were not visible to diners

TABLE 12.1.  Effect Sizes by Study

Study N Setting Outcome Food Duration Increase
1 1,116 Field: Taste-test Proportion of diners Raw 1 day 49%
diners table in university choosing vegetables
dining hall and dip

2 202 Field: Self- Proportion of diners Salad 1 day 18%

diners serve buffet at a choosing
Vegetarian 84%
conference
wrap

3 27,833 Field: Self-serve Proportion of diners Hot Over 10 41%

diners buffet in university choosing vegetables weeks
dining hall
Mass of food chosen 33%

4 137,842 Field: Self-serve Proportion of diners Hot Over 12 29%

diners buffet in five choosing vegetables weeks
university dining
Mass of food chosen 35%
halls
Mass of food 39%
consumed

Note. All studies were conducted at lunchtime. N represents the total number of diner choices observed in each study.
Duration represents the number of days for which data were collected in the study, and % increase represents the
percent increase in the outcome (proportion of diners choosing healthy foods, mass of food chosen, or mass of food
consumed) when labeled taste focused versus health focused.
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 291

prior to selecting a buffet line. We observed that 18% more participants chose salad and
84% more participants chose the vegetable wrap when labeled as taste focused compared
to health focused (Turnwald & Crum, 2019).
These two experiments showed that, on a single occasion in a naturalistic field set-
ting, a greater proportion of diners chose various healthy foods when labeled as taste
focused than as health focused. However, these results do not inform whether this inter-
vention has lasting effects, whether food choices revert to baseline on repeated exposure
due to novelty effects, or whether they might reverse due to potential backfire effects. To
drive improvements in dietary intake and health, this intervention must sustain healthy
food choices over the long term. Therefore, we scaled the intervention to test the effect of
repeated exposure to taste-­focused and health-­focused labeling over the course of several
months.
The third experiment assessed whether taste-­ focused labeling impacted healthy
food choices in a naturalistic field setting on repeated exposures over a 10-week period
with a large sample (Turnwald, Boles, & Crum, 2017). We also tested whether the type
of healthy language impacted choice (restriction-­focused healthy language vs. positive-­
focused healthy language). Across 46 days of data collection in a university dining hall in
which 27,933 diner food choices were observed, taste-­focused labeling (e.g., “Dynamite
Chili and Lime-­Seasoned Beets”) increased the proportion of diners choosing vegetables
by 25% compared to basic labeling (e.g., “Beets”), 35% compared to healthy-­positive
labeling (e.g., “Vitamin-­Packed Beets”), and 41% compared to healthy-­restrictive label-
ing (e.g., “Low-Carb Beets”). The healthy-­positive and healthy-­restrictive labeling did not
differ from each other, demonstrating that a focus on healthiness decreased choice even
when the health-­focused language was positive. Additionally, we measured the weight of
vegetables that diners chose each day, and found that, similarly, a 16–33% greater mass
of vegetables was chosen on days that vegetables were labeled as taste focused compared
to basic, healthy-­positive, and healthy-­restrictive labels. Importantly, the benefits of taste-­
focused labeling were stable over time. There was no label condition × time interaction on
the proportion of diners selecting vegetables or the mass of vegetables selected for taste-­
focused labeling compared to any of the other three labeling types.
In a fourth experiment, we replicated the taste-­focused-­labeling intervention in five
universities across the United States to test whether taste-­focused labeling was scalable,
whether the effects would replicate, and to test for heterogeneity (Turnwald et al., 2019).
Each day, the five university dining halls labeled their main-­course vegetable as taste
focused, basic, or health focused, and measured the number of diners who chose the vege-
table. Results showed that across 137,842 diners, 185 days, and 71 different preparations
involving 24 different types of vegetables, taste-­focused labeling increased the proportion
of diners choosing vegetables by 29%. Once again, the beneficial effect of taste-­focused
labeling compared to health-­focused labeling on vegetable selection did not change over
time at any of the five research sites.
At one of the sites in this experiment, we also measured how much of the vegetables
people were actually eating, as it is possible that people were taking more vegetables
when labeled as taste focused but then throwing them away. To measure the total mass
of vegetables that diners served themselves, we weighed the serving dishes each time
they were filled throughout the lunch period. We then collected each diner’s plate waste
at the entrance to the dining hall waste rooms and scraped off any of the remaining
daily vegetable on their plate into a separate trash pail. Since we removed all other trash
292 II.  Health and Well-Being

pails from the dining hall, the total mass of vegetables selected minus the total mass
of vegetables wasted represented the mass of vegetables that diners actually consumed.
Using these methods on each of 16 days revealed that taste-­focused labeling significantly
increased actual consumption of vegetables by 39% per day, on average. This effect on
actual vegetable consumption was also stable over time. Together, these studies provide
strong evidence that taste-­focused labeling increases people’s choice of a large variety of
healthy foods (e.g., raw vegetables, hot vegetable dishes, vegetarian wraps, salads) across
a variety of institutional field settings (tasting tables, buffet lines, and dining halls).

MECHANISM AND EFFECTS OVER TIME

How does taste-­focused labeling work? The first part of our theory (solid black paths
in Figure 12.1) is that taste-­focused labeling increases diners’ expectations of having a
positive taste experience with a particular healthy food, which increases the likelihood
that they will choose that food for taste reasons and have a positive taste experience.
Although many of the field studies measured behavior and not psychological processes,
several follow-­up studies provide evidence in support of this hypothesis. In two indepen-
dent preregistered experiments with online participant samples, taste-­focused labels sig-
nificantly increased participants’ expectations of a positive taste experience compared to
basic and health-­focused labels (Turnwald et al., 2019). Furthermore, in all samples, the
effect of taste-­focused labeling on increased likelihood of choosing was fully mediated
by increased expectations of a positive taste experience. Evidence from our longitudinal
behavior experiments (see the “Empirical Evidence” section Study 3 and multisite replica-
tion) also supports this first part of the mechanism. The effects of taste-­focused labeling
compared to health-­focused labeling on vegetable selection did not diminish over time
when the same group of diners were exposed to different healthy dishes with different
taste-­focused labels over the course of 10–12 weeks, suggesting that this process may
occur with each new exposure to a healthy food with a taste-­focused label.
We also found that taste-­focused labels change the reason why people say they would
choose a vegetable dish. When participants in an online study were asked why they would
choose a variety of vegetable dishes (on a scale of 1 = For health benefits to 5 = For a
tasty experience), they indicated that it would be primarily for health benefits when these
vegetable dishes had basic labels (e.g., “Broccoli,” “Carrots”). When these same dishes
were presented with health-­focused labels, participants were even more likely to indicate
that they would choose these dishes primarily for health benefits. However, when we pre-
sented these same dishes with taste-­focused labels, participants shifted their reason to be
primarily for a tasty experience (above the midpoint of the scale; Turnwald et al., 2019).
This provides evidence that participants view healthy foods with taste-­focused labels as
being less in conflict with their taste goals.
To confirm that taste-­focused labeling can enhance the actual taste experience of
consuming healthy foods, we asked participants (N = 203) in a large university dining
hall to taste green beans labeled as health focused (“Light n’ Low-Carb Green Beans and
Shallots”) or taste focused (“Sweet Sizzlin’ Green Beans and Crispy Shallots”). Com-
pared to individuals who tasted green beans with the health-­focused label, those who
tasted green beans with the taste-­focused label rated them as more delicious. They also
endorsed the mindset that “in general, healthy foods taste delicious” postconsumption to
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 293

a greater extent than individuals who ate the same green beans labeled as health focused
(Turnwald & Crum, 2019).
These data preliminarily speak to the effect that choosing a healthy food with a taste-­
focused label can lead to a more positive taste experience and improve mindsets about
the tastiness of healthy foods as a category. Yet more work is needed to understand this
process. Does the improved mindset result from merely seeing healthy foods with taste-­
focused labels, or can this change be cemented only after having a positive taste experience
with a tastily labeled healthy food? Does this mindset improvement increase how tasty a
person expects other healthy foods to be (with and without taste-­focused labels) and, if
so, for how long do the effects last? Future work is needed to understand these questions.

HETEROGENEITY

Our research to date suggests at least three important moderating factors of the taste-­
focused-­labeling intervention: (1) how deliciously the foods are prepared, (2) a person’s
priorities when making food decisions, and (3) a person’s cultural background.
First, taste-­focused labeling is more effective in settings that serve tastier vegetable
dishes. Taste is an interaction between its qualities and expectations and thus both matter.
Prior lab research (Woolley & Fishbach, 2016) showed that priming taste goals increased
participants’ consumption of a raw vegetable compared to priming health goals, but this
effect was moderated by how tasty the food was (e.g., apple vs. raw spinach). Our mul-
tisite intervention extended these findings to field settings by showing that taste-­focused
labeling was more effective at schools that served tastier vegetable recipes on average than
schools that served more bland preparations (Turnwald et al., 2019). Moderation at the
level of setting occurs because one’s belief regarding whether this particular distributor
or setting generally serves tasty food influences how credible the taste-­focused label is in
this setting. Further downstream in the model depicted in Figure 12.1, once a diner has
chosen the dish, how flavorfully this dish is prepared may moderate the extent to which a
positive taste experience occurs because the actual experienced taste must meet expecta-
tions set by the label. Backfire effects could occur in cases where blandly prepared veg-
etables do not meet expectations, disappointing diners and confirming existing negative
mindsets that healthy foods are not tasty.
A second factor that influences the efficacy of taste-­focused labeling is the extent to
which a person prioritizes tastiness and healthiness when making food decisions. Many
Americans prioritize tastiness over healthiness (Glanz et al., 1998; Aggarwal et al., 2016).
Yet a relatively small proportion of people, such as dieters and restrictive eaters, do pri-
oritize healthiness in the moment of food choice and may be more attracted to health-­
focused labels because they affirm intentions to choose something that is, above all else,
healthy (Irmak, Vallen, & Robinson, 2011; Papies & Veling, 2013). In an online sample
of participants (N = 277), we found that those who prioritized healthiness to a greater
extent were more likely to say that they would order foods with health-­focused language
than those who prioritized healthiness to a lesser extent, consistent with this moderation
hypothesis and with prior studies on health-­focused-­labeling effects on dieters (Irmak et
al., 2011; Papies & Veling, 2013).
Third, other studies suggest that culture and geography likely influence the effects
of health-­focused and taste-­focused labeling. The model depicted in Figure 12.1 assumes
294 II.  Health and Well-Being

an American context. While the mindset that healthy is not tasty or filling was observed
in American contexts (Raghunathan et al., 2006; Suher et al., 2016), other cultures do
not endorse this mindset to the same degree (Dube et al., 2016; Werle et al., 2013). For
any group that already holds positive mindsets about the tastiness of healthy foods, the
theory would predict that taste-­focused labeling would have a smaller effect because
there is little room for improvement in the mindset. However, even for people who have
the general mindset that healthy foods are tasty, taste-­focused labeling may still help in
cases of individual foods that they do not like (e.g., for someone who has the mindset that
healthy foods, in general, are tasty except for asparagus). While this list is not exhaustive,
these moderators are important to consider when implementing taste-­focused labeling for
various populations and settings.

COUSINS

The closest intervention “cousins” to taste-­focused labeling include interventions that

associate foods with other desirable qualities. One such example in young children (ages
4–6) is to make healthy eating more desirable by placing cartoon characters on the label,
packaging, or promotional materials of healthier foods (e.g., Hanks, Just, & Brumberg,
2016; Roberto, Baik, Harris, & Brownell, 2010). This strategy increased the likelihood of
children choosing healthier foods (Hanks et al., 2016; Roberto et al., 2010) and improved
the taste of carrots (Letona, Chacon, Roberto, & Barnoya, 2014; Roberto et al., 2010).
Similar to taste-­focused labeling, using branded characters associates healthy foods with
a desirable quality that is salient to a target population. It differs from taste-­focused
labeling in that instead of using words related to a positive taste experience, children are
attracted to familiar characters that they like and associate tastiness with the presence of
these characters on food products.
Another related approach to taste-­focused-­labeling harnesses the values of rebellion
and autonomy in teens to avoid junk food (Bryan et al., 2016). In this values-­alignment
intervention (see Bryan, Chapter 11, this volume), avoiding unhealthy foods was framed
as a status-­enhancing behavior that allows one to “stick it to the man,” be an informed
autonomous being who resists controlling authority figures, and stand up against the
social injustices of targeting vulnerable populations. This intervention cousin is similar
to taste-­focused labeling in that it changes the meaning-­making process of choosing a
healthier versus unhealthier food. However, it differs in that it harnesses social values
of adolescents and presents unhealthy foods as misaligned with these important values.
In contrast, taste-­focused labeling aligns healthier eating with the more general value of
prioritizing tastiness and encourages individuals to approach healthy foods rather than
avoid unhealthy foods.
Outside of the food context, the taste-­focused labeling intervention harnesses a
similar psychological approach as utility value (e.g., Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009),
prosocial purpose (e.g., Yeager et al., 2014), and social meaning at work (e.g., Grant &
Hofmann, 2011) interventions. Although the domains are different, all of these interven-
tions help endow things that are instrumental, long-term pursuits that may otherwise
lack much positive meaning to the person (e.g., school lessons, homework, work, safety)
with meaning or relevance to motivate greater engagement in the process. For example,
high school students improved their math and science grades when asked how course
material might be useful to them or a close other three to five times throughout the term
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 295

(Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). Yeager and colleagues showed that identifying an
important social problem, reading motivational stories from other students who were
driven by a desire to contribute positively to the world, and writing their own motiva-
tional story for future students also improved high school students’ grades. In a health
care context, Grant and Hofmann demonstrated that health care providers increased
their soap use when primed with messages about protecting patients’ health compared to
messages about protecting their own health. Because goal pursuit in education and health
contexts typically involves sustained effort over the course of years, imbuing the daily
processes with pleasure or meaning beyond the long-term instrumental benefits is a use-
ful psychological approach that can inform future work in these domains.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

We created a toolkit called “Edgy Veggies” (http://sparqtools.org/edgyveggies) in part-

nership with Stanford Psychological Answers to Real World Questions (SPARQ) for
implementing taste-­focused labeling in dining settings. This toolkit contains step-by-step
instructions for how to implement taste-­focused labeling, many example taste-­focused
labels, and recipe suggestions that may further enhance the benefits of taste-­focused labels.
The first step to implementing taste-­focused labeling is to identify which foods to pro-
mote. This intervention is designed to promote healthy foods. Unhealthier foods typically
already have taste-­focused descriptions and do not need any added boosts. These healthier
foods could be vegetable side dishes, healthier entrees, plant-based or vegetarian/vegan
dishes, or healthier preparations of classic favorites. Raw, whole fruits and vegetables can
still be promoted by emphasizing tasty and enjoyable properties (Woolley & Fishbach,
2016), although options for taste-­focused words are slimmer without the possibility of
drawing on preparation methods, ingredients, or unique spins on a composed dish.
The second step is to consider how the foods are prepared. It is important that the
dishes are prepared flavorfully for two reasons: (1) it provides more options to choose
from when constructing the taste-­focused label because there are more ingredients, excit-
ing preparation methods, or flavors to highlight, and (2) the flavor of the dish must
at least meet the expectations set by the taste-­focused label, otherwise diners may feel
disappointed or misled. The flavor of dishes is often enhanced by the addition of herbs,
spices, salt, pepper, olive oil, or sauces, and these additions do not have to make the dish
less healthy.
The third step is to choose an enticing, taste-­focused description for the dish. As
described in Turnwald and colleagues (2019), taste-­focused labels (e.g., “Herb n’ Honey
Balsamic-­Glazed Turnips,” “Sizzlin’ Szechuan Green Beans with Toasted Garlic”) are
designed to elevate diners’ expectations of a positive taste experience with healthy dishes.
To do so, each taste-­focused label is tailored to each dish to provide expectations of
specific flavors (i.e., words that describe the taste, preparation methods, or specific ingre-
dients) and at least one other theme designed to elevate expectations of a positive experi-
ence (e.g., exciting, indulgent, traditional, location words). This second component of
elevating expectations of a positive experience is intentionally flexible to allow labels
to draw on a variety of themes that may better fit some specific dishes or contexts than
others. For example, dishes may elevate expectations of a positive experience by using (1)
exciting words (e.g., twisted, sizzlin’, splashed, boldly, inspired) if a unique ingredient or
preparation method is used; (2) indulgent words (e.g., glazed, creamy, mouthwatering,
296 II.  Health and Well-Being

caramelized, juicy) if a sauce is used or the dish is particularly satisfying; (3) traditional
words (e.g., old-­fashioned, classic, countryside, Abuelita’s, homestyle, Mama’s) if the
dish is hearty, comforting, nostalgic, or rooted in tradition; or (4) location-­based words
(e.g., New Orleans, Shanghai, tavern style, Thai, Provence) if the dish draws from ingre-
dients or preparation methods that are positively associated with a particular culture,
location, or setting.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

There are three common misconceptions about taste-­focused labeling. A first common
misconception is that any fancy or positive word would work just as well as taste-­focused
labels. However, taste-­focused labeling increased diners’ expectations of how delicious
healthy foods will taste and their hypothetical choices of vegetable dishes compared
to fancy labels (e.g., “Viridescent,” “Ebullient”) and vague-­positive labels (e.g., “Awe-
some,” “Incredible”; Turnwald et al., 2019). While vague-­positive labels and fancy labels
may sound novel because people are not used to seeing vegetables described with vague-­
positive or fancy words, these words do not provide specific flavor expectations and so
are less effective than taste-­focused labels.
A second common misconception is that this approach is merely a behavioral nudge.
Nudges are aspects of the choice architecture that alter people’s behavior in a predictable
way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives
(Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). However, nudges are limited in that they try to influence
behavior without considering how people make sense of the choices before them. In con-
trast, taste-­focused labeling was informed both by people’s taste goals in the moment of
food choice and the psychological obstacles (e.g., culturally entrenched mindsets that
healthy foods are not tasty) that may prevent them from construing healthy foods as
consistent with those goals.
A third common misconception regards the moderator of preparing vegetable dishes
more flavorfully. Taste-­focused labels work better when applied to vegetable dishes that
are prepared flavorfully, but some may feel that preparing vegetable dishes with flavor-
ful ingredients may reduce their nutritional benefits. Ingredients that are perceived as
unhealthy (e.g., cheese, butter, salt) can be mindfully incorporated into vegetable dishes
in small amounts that enhance flavor but do not override health benefits. Vegetables in
our studies were often prepared with ingredients that enhance both flavor and health
benefits, such as plant oils, herbs, and spices. Since dieting and restriction are ineffective
long-term strategies (Mann et al., 2007), preparing healthier foods more flavorfully using
chefs’ culinary strategies (Cohen et al., 2015; Spencer, Kurzer, Cienfuegos, & Guinard,
2018) and labeling them in enticing ways to highlight those flavors are both important
steps for enhancing vegetable consumption in ways that last.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Taste-­focused labeling improves people’s food choices in real-world settings. Jaclyn

­Bertoldo, nutritionist at Stanford University Residential and Dining Enterprises and part-
ner on this research, provides an operator’s perspective on implementing this intervention
in major dining operations:
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 297

“This research reinforces what I have experienced in the field—the more that I empha-
size the health aspects of a food, the less enthused people are to eat it. Taste-­focused
labeling is an exciting strategy because it is relatively easy and inexpensive to imple-
ment, and it has the potential to boost customer satisfaction and positively enhance
the dining experience. Plant-based options are also less expensive than meat-based
options. Using this strategy to increase the extent to which customers choose plant-
based foods and actually enjoy eating them is a win–win–win for food service opera-
tors and food companies concerned about their bottom line.”

Taste-­focused labels are flexible and can be tailored to dining environments in an

array of settings. However, there are important differences to consider across dining
environments. For example, taste-­focused labels on restaurant menus and in other set-
tings in which foods are not visible to customers before choosing what to eat may be
particularly effective because diners only have the descriptions to base decisions on. In
settings such as cafeterias, dining halls, or school lunchrooms in which diners can see the
food prior to making a decision, we expect labeling effects to be weaker because people
likely attend less to labels when they can see the food. These settings also typically fea-
ture repeat diners who have built habits that may be more difficult to change compared
to diners in new settings.
It is also important to consider the audience. Special care should be taken to ensure
that foods and ingredients are not being misrepresented and that descriptive language is
culturally sensitive in all contexts—­some themes are better suited for certain contexts
than others. There may be more liberty to play with words like finger licking or Grand-
ma’s special recipe if the dining setting is a Southern barbecue restaurant compared to an
upscale steakhouse or an elementary school cafeteria. The important thing is to match
the enticing descriptions that are already being used to describe a setting’s most popular
dishes and to apply those same themes to the healthiest dishes. It is helpful to ask oneself
which words would make a dish sound appealing to patrons in the dining setting of inter-
est and use that as a jumping-­off point for the label-­brainstorming activities presented
earlier in the chapter in the Edgy Veggies toolkit.
Incorporating chefs into the idea-­generation stage when designing the labels can also
provide a greater wealth of ingredients and words to choose from, as the chefs have the
most intimate relationship with the food. According to Bertoldo:

“One of the most important lessons we’ve learned in our operations is the importance
of engaging chefs in the process. Not only do they have a lot of creative insight for
generating delicious names, but they also play a critical role in developing healthy
dishes that taste and look as delicious as they sound.”

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

This intervention has implications for psychological theory regarding health promotional
approaches. Most interventions to improve healthy behaviors have focused on educating
people to identify healthy choices or about the importance of making healthy choices.
They have also assumed that a long-term desire to be healthy will be enough to prioritize
healthiness among many competing desires in the moment of food choice (e.g., tastiness).
However, taste-­focused labeling capitalizes on emphasizing the attributes of healthy
298 II.  Health and Well-Being

foods that align with most people’s top priority in the moment of food choice: tastiness.
Instead of leading with healthiness, which people associate with poorer taste, this inter-
vention changes how foods that are healthy are construed to the individual, shifting his
or her mindset by providing a new lens through which to experience and perceive these
foods—as delicious and enjoyable. As mentioned in the “Cousins” section of this chapter,
taste-­focused labels are also similar to a class of interventions that help endow instrumen-
tal, long-term pursuits (e.g., school lessons, homework, work, safety) with meaning or
relevance to motivate greater engagement in the process.
Broadly, this intervention suggests that health interventions may be more effec-
tive when they match how target health behaviors are portrayed with people’s intrinsic,
short-term motives and priorities (Woolley & Fishbach, 2016, 2017). Research and policy
approaches have called for limiting appealing advertising of unhealthy foods (Kelly et
al., 2010), using labeling strategies like calorie labels or warning labels that make it easy
to recognize unhealthy foods (e.g., Block & Roberto, 2014; Donnelly, Zatz, Svirsky, &
John, 2018; Thorndike, Gelsomin, McCurley, & Levy, 2019), or teaching cognitive train-
ing strategies that emphasize health consequences of choosing unhealthy foods (Boswell,
Sun, Suzuki, & Kober, 2018; Van Dessel, Hughes, & De Houwer, 2018). However,
few approaches leverage tasty and enticing components of healthier foods. The present
research shows that it is possible to increase the lure of healthy foods by changing the
experience that people expect to have when eating them and making available the inter-
pretation that healthy foods can satisfy taste motives. Because we need people to not only
avoid healthy foods but to choose healthy foods, these efforts are just as critical as the
large body of research on strategies for decreasing the appeal of unhealthy foods.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Expanding to Other Settings
Are there certain locations, dining settings, or food types that taste-­focused labeling is
especially effective or not effective for? We hypothesize that labels may be most effective
when they are the only piece of information upon which to make decisions (e.g., menus)
and when a diner is in a new situation compared to when the label is only one of multiple
sources of information (e.g., dining halls in which one can see the dish, smell the dish, see
others choosing or avoiding the dish), or when the diner has prior experience with a dish.
Much of the work to date is limited in that it was conducted in dining settings within
a college campus and all within a North American cultural context with participants
who are likely younger and more educated than the general population. More research is
needed across different populations and commercial settings.

Understanding Differences by Race, Culture, Socioeconomic Status,

and Other Demographic Differences
It is especially important to understand whether taste-­focused labeling may be an effec-
tive intervention among groups of lower-­ socioeconomic status (SES) and non-White
groups that traditionally have poorer dietary intake. Studies on identity-­based motiva-
tion (Oyserman, Fryberg, & Yoder, 2007) suggest that health-­focused labeling may be
ineffective for groups of low-SES or minority groups because healthy behaviors, such as
healthy eating, are not seen as congruent with group identity (see also Berger & Rand,
 The Taste‑Focused‑Labeling Intervention 299

2008; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002, for work on the importance of identity rele-
vance in other domains). This potentially could mean that taste-­focused labeling may bet-
ter align with groups that have the least healthy diets and for whom emphasis on health
is counter to their cultural values, but research is needed to test these ideas thoroughly. It
remains to be tested whether these differences also depend upon which themes are used in
a taste-­focused label to elevate expectations of a positive experience (e.g., exciting, indul-
gent, traditional) because some themes may be more identity relevant for some groups.

Exploring the Broader Impact of Taste‑Focused Labels on Mindsets

about Healthy Foods as a General Category
Future work is needed to continue to understand the extent to which taste-­focused labels
may cause mindset shifts in how healthy foods, as a general category, are perceived. Does
the improved mindset result from merely seeing healthy foods with taste-­focused labels,
or can this change be cemented only after having a positive taste experience with a tast-
ily labeled healthy food? Does this mindset improvement increase how tasty a person
expects other healthy foods to be (with and without taste-­focused labels)? How long do
the effects last? Do diners perceive healthy foods with taste-­focused labels as healthy
foods that are tasty, or do they no longer perceive them as healthy foods?

Testing Longitudinal Effects of Exposure to Taste‑Focused Labeling

on Health Consequences
While our research shows that taste-­focused labels can increase healthy food choices
after a single exposure and repeated exposures, no work has tested whether the improved
healthy food choices impact health. Future work is needed to test whether health improves
as a result of extended exposure to taste-­focused labels, such as physiological (blood pres-
sure, heart rate, body mass index [BMI]), subjective (e.g., well-being), and other indices
of health (e.g., doctor visits, number of work days missed due to illness).

CONCLUSION

In summary, taste-­focused labeling is a psychologically wise intervention that increases

the proportion of people who choose healthy foods across a range of settings and for a
variety of vegetables, plant-based foods, and healthier restaurant offerings compared to
the classic approach of emphasizing health qualities and benefits of healthy foods. It does
so by promoting healthy foods based on their delicious and enjoyable characteristics—­
qualities that most people prioritize over food healthiness in the moment of food choice.
This scalable intervention shifts what it means to choose healthy foods from a long-term
goal of health to a short-term taste goal. This shift has the potential to evoke lasting ben-
efits in healthy food choices and mindsets about healthy foods.

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 PA R T III

CONFLICT AND
RELATIONSHIPS
 C H A P TE R 13

The Incremental Theory

of Personality Intervention

David S. Yeager and Hae Yeon Lee

This chapter explains how an incremental theory of personality—­the belief that people can
change their socially relevant characteristics—­can cause people to cope with their social
difficulties more effectively. We review evidence from randomized trials showing that even
short exposures to an intervention teaching an incremental theory of personality can shift
people’s construals, so that adolescents see social difficulties as experiences that could
be changed with time and therefore as less threatening. Our interventions have improved
adolescents’ maladaptive stress responses, mental health, and academic achievement. We
explain how the incremental theory of personality intervention works through attributional
and biopsychosocial mechanisms. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for
research and practice, such as the implications of implicit theories of personality for school
or home environments and for theories of stress and coping.

Making the transition to high school typically comes with social challenges. In some
of our studies, we asked ninth-grade students every day for several days in the first month
of high school to tell us about negative events that happened to them that day (e.g., Yea-
ger, Lee, & Jamieson, 2016). It was common for students to write about events such as
these:

“Well sometimes people call me fat or stupid . . . I didn’t want to tell them, but it
killed me inside.”
“This morning I was walking by and all the person could do was act as if I weren’t
there. Seeing them and they just look you in the face without a ‘hi’ or a smile
made me feel invisible.”
“All my friends were acting weird and wouldn’t tell me why. I feel out of place since
they’re all keeping something from me.”

305
306 III.  Conflict and Relationships

“I had an old friend look at me with disgust, even though I’m not the one who did
anything wrong.”
“In lunch I only see people in groups of 3–10, never alone. I feel extremely lonely
again.”

What can be done to help adolescents deal with these challenges and others like them?
We developed the incremental theory of personality intervention to answer this question.
The core assumption underlying our intervention is that the meaning of stressful
experiences can be ambiguous. Are they happening to me because of something wrong
with me or my context, or are they normal events that I can learn from? The incremental
theory of personality intervention offers people a new lens for seeing the world—one that
focuses on humanity’s potential for dynamism and change. In doing so, the intervention
gives people reason to expect that even socially painful experiences, such as peer victim-
ization or exclusion, are not causes for despair, because they might get better with time.
The effect of inviting people into this more dynamic worldview has been to improve
adolescents’ emotional and academic lives, as they confront the inevitable social adver-
sities that accompany a difficult life transition. As we will see, randomized trials have
evaluated the intervention and have documented improvements in adolescents’ behavior,
well-being, and grades. Now that the intervention has shown effects in the context of
high school bullying and social exclusion, the stage is set for research to generalize the
intervention to other socially challenging periods of life and to test it in more—and more
diverse— ­settings.

BACKGROUND

Quite often, adolescents jockey for social status in a way that harms their peers (Cole-
man, 1961; Crosnoe, 2011; Hawley, 1999). Aggressive behaviors can range from bully-
ing, defined as a repeated use of aggression against someone with lower social power
(Hong & Espelage, 2012), to more subtle forms of relational aggression, such as targeting
others’ reputations or weakening their social networks through indirect insults, rumors,
or exclusion (Prinstein, Boergers, & Vernberg, 2001). Adolescents are not only victims of
these behaviors but are also initiators of them. Some young people perceive a need to pro-
tect their status and signal their social power before others do the same to them. Many
seek revenge after victimization.
Managing social challenges such as these can feel like more than one can handle.
As such, the normative difficulties of adolescence can evoke maladaptive stress responses
that feed into symptoms of anxiety and depression (Hammen, 2005). Epidemiological
data suggest that recent birth cohorts of adolescents may be even more affected by this
than previous cohorts (Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin, 2017) perhaps because con-
nected technologies (e.g., social media) have made it easier than ever for students to
engage in relational aggression, such as targeting others’ reputations (George & Odgers,
2015; Underwood & Ehrenreich, 2017).
To make matters worse, social difficulties co-occur with academic difficulties. Ado-
lescents have been said to have two jobs in secondary school: the job of doing well socially
and the job of doing well academically (Coleman, 1961; Crosnoe, 2011). When the first
job is going poorly, it can compromise adolescents’ cognitive ability to do the second.
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 307

Worries about social status can interfere with the basic cognitive processing required
to perform well in classes (Yang, Lee, Crosnoe, & Yeager, 2020), and threats to social
belonging in a setting can undermine motivation to learn (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Walton,
Cohen, Cwir, & Spencer, 2012). In sum, adolescents’ reactions to social status threats
can act as a “psychological hub” that connects diverse outcomes, from aggressive behav-
ior to mental health to academic achievement.
The incremental theory of personality intervention targets a belief system, the entity
theory of personality, that lies underneath this “psychological hub,” and in doing so it
simultaneously affects a number of related outcomes (see Yeager et al., 2014, for a dis-
cussion). The entity theory of personality is the belief that people cannot change. High
school students with an entity theory have been prone to despair, as we explain below.
The incremental theory of personality intervention seeks to neutralize the entity theory
and improve adolescents’ coping with social stressors by teaching a simple belief: People
can change and improve their personal characteristics, under the right conditions, with
the right experiences, and with social support.
The effectiveness of this message grows out of the insight that adolescents who think
that current social challenges are permanent will cope more poorly with them. That
poorer coping in turn can spill over into their social behavior, well-being, and academic
achievement. But if adolescents can put their ongoing social difficulties into perspec-
tive—­if they can see that social difficulties are temporary and not indicative of people’s
core character traits—­then adolescents may cope more effectively. By coping better, ado-
lescents may show more prosocial behavior and better mental health and academic per-
formance.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

The Entity Theory of Personality “Meaning System”

As stated, an incremental theory of personality is the belief that people’s basic social (or
moral) characteristics are malleable and can be developed (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995;
Plaks, 2017; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). It is contrasted with the entity theory of personal-
ity, which is the belief that people’s basic characteristics cannot be changed (Dweck et al.,
1995; Plaks, 2017; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). These beliefs—­called implicit theories (or
mindsets) of personality—have been the subject of a great deal of basic research in social,
developmental, and personality psychology. The implicit theories model first focused on
the context of academic achievement (Dweck & Leggett, 1988), and later was extended
to moral and social judgments (Dweck et al., 1995; Molden, Plaks, & Dweck, 2006),
social stereotyping (Levy & Dweck, 1999; Levy, Stroessner, & Dweck, 1998), intergroup
conflict (Halperin, Russell, Trzesniewski, Gross, & Dweck, 2011), and more (see Dweck
& Yeager, 2019, for a review).
The two implicit theories—­entity and incremental—­imply different “meaning sys-
tems” that shape construals of social situations and goal pursuit within them (Dweck
& Yeager, 2019; see also Dweck & Yeager, Chapter 1, this volume). In an entity theory,
individuals tend to endorse the goal of “proving” or demonstrating their social compe-
tence, rather than improving it (i.e., social “approach” and “avoidance” goals; Erdley,
Loomis, Cain, & Dumas-Hines, 1997; see also Ryan & Shim, 2008, for a discussion of
308 III.  Conflict and Relationships

social goals). When judging others, an entity theory furthermore creates a heightened
focus on underlying traits as causes of behavior, as well as the expectation that traits will
remain consistent far into the future. This leads to surprise when traits are not shown to
be the most important determinants of individuals’ behavior or when they change (see
Plaks, 2017, for a review). Then, when confronted with others’ social failures, those with
more of an entity theory respond in ways that condemn or exclude the targets, as opposed
to working productively to educate or change the targets (Rattan & Dweck, 2010).
An incremental theory of personality intervention seeks to target and change the
entity theory meaning system. To understand how and why this is effective, below we
preview two mediators of an entity theory’s effects on behavior and stress responses:
attributions and stress appraisals. (These will show up again when we review the media-
tors of the intervention’s effects.)

Attributions
One psychological process affected by implicit theories of personality is a person’s attri-
butions concerning the causes of ongoing difficulties (Dweck, 1975; Weiner, 1985). This
is an important psychological process because the start of high school is a moment with
excessive attributional ambiguity.
The attributional ambiguity of high school is illustrated well by a 16-year-old author,
Florida Frenz (2013), in her inspiring book How to Be Human. Frenz is on the autism
spectrum and is a sophisticated observer of the high school transition:

Some [friends] have abruptly decided they don’t want to hang out with me. . . . But more
often “friends” indicate their disinterest more subtly. They may not nod or wave at me
anymore. Their eyes may wander or glaze over when I try to talk to them. Their replies
may go from being stories or jokes to terse answers such as “uh-huh” or “oh.” The gray
areas are most frustrating. Is this about me . . . or her? Will my friendships with the
other members of the group start fraying as well? Is this a phase or a permanent thing?
(emphasis added)

The sentences in italics highlight the attributional questions. Prior research has
shown that how adolescents answer those questions can have important effects on how
they cope. When individuals attribute an event such as being socially excluded or being
targeted by bullying to factors that are stable and outside of one’s control (e.g., the flawed
moral character of one’s peers or one’s own inherent social inadequacy), then they may be
expected to cope more poorly, for instance, by showing signs of helplessness or despair
(Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997; Gervey, Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1999; see also Janoff-­
Bulman, 1979). But when a person attributes an event such as social rejection or bullying
to factors that could be changed (e.g., others’ more temporary motivations or erroneous
beliefs, or one’s misunderstanding of the current social milieu), then the person may be
expected to cope better, and may be willing to proactively solve the problem (Yeager &
Miu, 2011). Thus, whether one construes social difficulties as stemming from fixed ver-
sus malleable causes can be an important determinant of how one responds to the event
(Beck, 2008; Janoff-­Bulman, 1979; Weiner, 1985), and in particular whether one copes
well or poorly.
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 309

In past correlational studies, individuals who endorsed more of an entity theory of

personality—­for instance, agreeing with items such as “Your personality is something
about you that you can’t change very much”—were more likely to report fixed, stable
attributions for their own social difficulties or others’ negative social behavior. In one
study, children with an entity theory who were led to believe that they had not yet been
chosen by a peer for a social interaction were more likely to report wondering whether
they were not “a likable person” (Erdley et al., 1997). In another study, adolescents with
more of an entity theory who read a story about peers who bullied others were more
likely to say that the peers were “bad people” (Yeager, Trzesniewski, Tirri, Nokelainen,
& Dweck, 2011).
Recent research (Seo et al., 2019) supported these earlier findings in two ways: first,
with a raw-data meta-­analysis of all past studies we conducted and, second, with a repli-
cation study conducted in a national sample of 25 public high schools (total N ~ 6,000).
As expected, in both cases, an entity theory of personality predicted a tendency to make
fixed-trait attributions about the self (“Maybe I’m not a likable person”) and about oth-
ers (“They are bad people”) following socially challenging situations, such as bullying or
exclusion. As shown in clinical psychology research (Beck, 2008; Dweck, 1975; Slavich,
O’Donovan, Epel, & Kemeny, 2010) the tendency to make fixed-trait attributions pre-
dicted higher internalizing symptoms (global stress and depression) and externalizing
symptoms (desire for revenge and willingness to proactively use social aggression to pro-
tect one’s social status). Thus, an entity theory of personality can predict problematic
behavior and poorer well-being via attributional processes. Schleider, Abel, and Weisz
(2015) also report meta-­analytic evidence concerning the link between implicit theories
and internalizing/externalizing symptoms.

Physiological Stress Responses
The fixed-trait attributional styles that follow from an entity theory of personality can
give rise to maladaptive physiological stress responses that may explain how individuals
who differ in their implicit theories of personality go on to show differences in symptoms
over time (Schleider & Weisz, 2016; Yeager et al., 2016). The key to understanding why is
to recognize that adolescents are not simply disinterested observers of the causes of their
social world. The attributions for social difficulties that they make flow directly into their
assessments of whether they are likely to be able to deal with or change stressors such as
peer victimization or exclusion. Illustrating this fact is a quotation from a high school
student participating in a focus group we conducted for one of the original incremental
theory studies:

“I’m in my first month of high school and I have already had one or two melt
downs. . . . It is already getting to be a bit much to handle all at once. I can already
see I am in a heck of a ride for high school. . . . ”

What stands out to us in this quotation is how students’ predictions about the future—­
whether their stressors are likely to continue throughout high school—­seem closely linked
to their appraisals of whether they have what it takes to handle the stressors. Quotations
like this one led us to test the hypothesis that individuals with more of an entity theory of
310 III.  Conflict and Relationships

personality may tend to construe their social stressors as demands that they do not have
sufficient resources to handle what is called a threat state in the biopsychosocial (BPS)
model of challenge and threat (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996; Jamieson, Hangen, Lee, &
Yeager, 2018).
Threat-­t ype responses to stressors, which we now know are more likely to grow out
of the entity theory meaning system in which negative social stressors are construed as
demands that cannot be changed, have been known for some time to contribute to long-
term physical and mental health problems (Jamieson et al., 2018; Juster, McEwen, &
Lupien, 2010). Threat states elicit greater cortisol responses, greater constriction of the
blood vessels, and less efficient cardiac output, all of which could help the body to survive
acute physical trauma but are poorly suited for physical and mental health in the absence
of acute physical threats (Jamieson et al., 2018; Mendes & Park, 2014).
Daily diary data have shown that an entity theory of personality elicits threat-­t ype
stress responses and this can explain why an entity theory might be related to down-
stream health outcomes (Seo et al., 2019). Threat-­t ype stress responses, such as elevated
cortisol levels, tend to linger and become self-­reinforcing (Lee, Jamieson, Miu, Josephs,
& Yeager, 2019), and predict the onset of more global outcomes like depression (Dick-
erson & Kemeny, 2004) or poorer cognitive performance (Lupien, McEwen, Gunnar, &
Heim, 2009). Hence, if an incremental theory of personality intervention could reduce
threat-­type responses—­by leading adolescents to perceive their stressors as things that
they can handle—­then the intervention could result in better long-term outcomes via its
effects on physiological stress responses.

How the Incremental Theory Intervention Counteracts the Entity

Theory of Personality
The incremental theory of personality intervention seeks to convey this message: People
behave in mean ways not because of the kind of person they are but because of thoughts
and feelings that they have—­thoughts and feelings that live in the brain. Because we
know that the brain can change and mature over time, and thoughts and feelings can
change too, then people’s behaviors and habits can change as well. We note that the
intervention does not try to make the strong argument that your own personal bullies can
change—­instead, it makes the argument that people, in general, can change for the bet-
ter, and then participants complete guided exercises that allow them to apply the message
to their own social relationships (see Halperin et al., 2011, for an intervention that took
a related approach in the context of intractable conflict).
The intervention follows the basic “grammar” of “wise interventions” that seek to
change mindsets (Walton & Wilson, 2018; Yeager & Walton, 2011). The intervention
draws on scientific evidence, “sticky” (or memorable) examples, stories from upper-year
students, and an opportunity to internalize the new mindset by writing a persuasive let-
ter to future students in the school. We review this content in greater detail as we present
the evidence.
The tone and tenor of the intervention is autonomy supportive (Vansteenkiste, Simons,
Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004; Yeager, Dahl, & Dweck, 2018)—that is, the intervention
does not seek to “tell” adolescents what beliefs they should hold. It invites young people
to try on the lens of the incremental theory of personality, and asks them to explain how
it could work for them. This may be an important element. The autonomy-­supportive
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 311

approach avoids the disrespectful implication that the intervening parties view the ado-
lescents’ beliefs or adjustment to be deficient (Yeager et al., 2018). It can also make the
intervention more credible; adolescents who are told to believe that bullies can change
may begin to think of specific bullies who may never change. Adolescents may have a
more optimistic response when they are asked to generate an argument about why peers
who are sometimes mean could potentially change.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
The incremental theory of personality intervention has reduced both externalizing behav-
ior (e.g., aggression) and internalizing symptoms (e.g., maladaptive stress responses and
depression). In a few studies, it improved adolescents’ academic performance.

Externalizing Behavior
The first incremental theory of personality intervention sought to reduce adolescents’
aggressive retaliation in response to a peer provocation (Yeager, Trzesniewski, & Dweck,
2013). The intervention took the form of a multisession classroom workshop delivered
to ninth- and tenth-grade students (total N = 230) at a relatively lower-­achieving school
with rather high levels of peer conflict. It occurred over 3 weeks, in six classroom ses-
sions each lasting under 50 minutes. Adolescents were presented with scientific informa-
tion about changes in the brain and in personality—­that changes were always possible,
even if they were not automatic or easy. They read stories from older students who had
learned about the incremental theory of personality (during a pilot study) and completed
activities (skits, games, small-group discussions) that allowed them to use the incremental
theory for specific, hypothetical instances of victimization or exclusion. Like growth-­
mindset-­ of-­
intelligence interventions (Aronson, Fried, & Good, 2002), participants
were guided to internalize the message by completing a writing exercise—­a “saying-­is-­
believing” exercise—­in which they wrote a letter to a future student encouraging him or
her to remember that people can change (Aronson, 1999).
In the first trial, the primary behavioral measure of aggression was assessed 1
month after the end of the intervention. Behavior was measured via a standardized
task adapted from social psychology: the number of grams of hot sauce participants
allocated to a peer to consume when they believed that the peer had excluded them in
an online game, and that the peer strongly disliked spicy food (Lieberman, Solomon,
Greenberg, & McGregor, 1999; i.e., Cyberball; Williams & Jarvis, 2006). In truth,
there was no peer (the provocation was controlled by a computer) and no one actu-
ally ate the hot sauce. Yeager, Trzesniewski, et al. (2013) showed that adolescents who
received the incremental theory of personality intervention, compared to two separate
control groups allocated about 40% less hot sauce. Improvement was also visible in
students’ daily behaviors in schools. Three months after the intervention, those who
received the incremental theory of personality intervention were more likely to be nomi-
nated by their teachers (who were unaware of students’ conditions) for having improved
their social behavior in school.
312 III.  Conflict and Relationships

Subsequent studies have shortened the intervention and made it easier to replicate in
larger samples, taking it from six sessions led by trained facilitators to one session self-­
administered either on paper or via an online module (Yeager et al., 2014; Yeager, Miu,
Powers, & Dweck, 2013). The shortened intervention kept the same basic elements—­
scientific evidence about the brain’s and personality’s potential for change, stories from
upper-year students who received and endorsed the incremental theory of personality,
and the “saying-­is-­believing” letter to a peer—but the content was communicated more
efficiently. Two experiments found that this shortened, self-­administered incremental
theory of personality intervention effectively reduced adolescents’ willingness to respond
aggressively to a hypothetical scenario relative to a control group, via changes in attribu-
tional tendencies (Yeager, Miu, et al., 2013).
It may seem surprising that a briefer version of the intervention could show measur-
able effects. But an inspection of the letters students wrote to a peer shows that they often
processed the message and found it to be powerful. Here are two examples from one of
our recent studies:

“All the people that are mean and hurtful to you are just missing out on a good friend
they could’ve had. But with all that said people can change and learn what they did
and said are wrong. Just because someone is one way right now doesn’t mean they
can’t change at all in time. Because in reality they can change.”
“When we were starting the school year I went [to] where my friends hang out. Then
they just looked at me and kept on talking. . . . I felt really left out especially because
we were all really good friends in middle school . . . [Although] it may seem like your
life is crashing down, and that nothing will ever get better, it is not the end of the
world. Your life will not be like this forever. . . . People can change. It’s only your
first day of school.”

Internalizing Symptoms
The first evaluation of the incremental theory of personality intervention found an effect
on symptoms of depression (Yeager, Trzesniewski, et al., 2013), even though, at the time,
it was designed primarily to reduce aggression. That study showed that although in the
control condition adolescents who were more victimized were also more depressed, this
was not the case in the intervention condition. With an incremental theory of personality,
depression was lower for victimized adolescents compared to control participants who
were victimized.
Why did the effect on internalizing symptoms appear? We began to dig into this
result more deeply, which led us to the theoretical synthesis with the BPS model of chal-
lenge and threat described above. We conducted new studies focusing on internalizing
symptoms in general and maladaptive stress responses in particular (e.g., Yeager et al.,
2014), and we found that the one-­session incremental theory of personality interven-
tion could reduce negative stress responses to an experimenter-­controlled social challenge
(again, exclusion via Cyberball; Williams & Jarvis, 2006). Then in a field experiment that
tracked students’ levels of cortisol over 1 week after the intervention—­which, as noted,
represents one hormonal indicator of threat-­type responses to social stressors—­Yeager
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 313

and colleagues (2016, Study 2) found that the incremental theory intervention reduced
cortisol among adolescents who reported more intensely negative social stressors.
Can the short-term reductions in threat-­t ype stress responses from the incremental
theory of personality last? Evidence is beginning to show that they can. Yeager et al.
(2014, Studies 2 and 3) reported two experiments showing that at a 9-month follow-­up
there were lower levels of global negative stress responses (measured via the Perceived
Stress Scale; Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983) among those who had received the
incremental theory of personality at the beginning of the school year.
Could the incremental theory go on to reduce clinically significant depressive symp-
toms? Individuals who appraise a social stressor as something that they can handle should, in
principle, be less likely to show increases in their depressive symptoms (Hammen, 2005)—
therefore, an intervention to improve social stress coping might prevent those increases in
depression. Consistent with this logic, Miu and Yeager (2015) reported 9-month effects of
the incremental theory intervention on self-­reported depressive symptoms (measured via a
short form of the Children’s Depression Inventory [CDI]; Kovacs, 2003).
Two teams have recently found significant effects of the incremental theory inter-
vention on clinical symptoms of depression. Schleider and colleagues (2015) found that
an incremental theory of personality intervention led to lower levels of depressive symp-
toms, compared to controls, in a longitudinal study conducted with clinical populations
of adolescents who reported elevated symptoms prior to random assignment to condi-
tion. Calvete and colleagues (2019), conducting a replication study with adolescents in
Spain (between ages 13 and 18), reported lower levels of depressive symptoms at 6- and
12-month follow-­up among those receiving the incremental theory intervention, com-
pared to controls—­but this result was moderated by age in unpredicted ways that would
ideally lead to additional replication studies.

Academic Performance
The incremental theory of personality intervention was designed to improve responses to
social stressors, and did not have an academic component—­that is, the short interven-
tion made no mention of trying harder in school. Therefore, initially we did not expect
to find that the incremental theory of personality intervention would improve grades, but
because social success is so closely tied to academic success in high school, we thought
it would be worth testing. In the three studies we conducted so far that tested for it, we
found evidence for effects on grades (Yeager et al., 2014, Studies 2 and 3; Yeager et al.,
2016, Study 2). This result was conceptually replicated in a laboratory study focusing on
performance on a speech and math task (Yeager et al., 2016, Study 1). Thus, an intriguing
result is that an intervention that focuses primarily on helping adolescents to deal with
their social lives has also produced cross-­domain benefits for academic outcomes as well.
This supports the “psychological hub” idea that we described above.

Mechanisms
Several experiments have generated preliminary evidence in support of psychological
mechanisms growing out of the two theoretical models reviewed earlier: attribution the-
ory and the BPS model of challenge and threat.
314 III.  Conflict and Relationships

Changes in Construals: Attributions and Appraisals

Implicit theories of personality can cause individuals to construe the meaning of the
demanding situation differently, make a different appraisal of their resources to deal with
the situation, and therefore show different coping responses.
In a randomized field experiment (Lee et al., 2020), ninth-grade adolescents (N =
138) completed a task that involved ostracism on social media (Wolf et al., 2015), which
is an experimentally controlled social-­evaluative demand. Individuals received fewer likes
than peers in response to their social media posts, or more likes (randomly assigned). Lee
and colleagues (2020) found that adolescents who had been exposed to the single session,
online incremental theory of personality and who had previously held an entity theory
of personality ended up reporting fewer maladaptive appraisals (e.g., “I felt rejected by
others”) and fewer fixed self-­attributions (e.g., “Maybe I’m not a likable person”; “I felt
bad about who I am”) when they got fewer likes than their peers.
Yeager et al. (2016, Study 1) induced an experimentally controlled social-­evaluative
stressor after randomized assignment of the incremental theory of personality interven-
tion. The stressor was the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST; Kirschbaum, Pirke, & Hellham-
mer, 1993), which involves giving a public speech and doing mental math in front of
unsupportive peers (in actuality, confederates). Teens who had been assigned to an incre-
mental theory of personality intervention reported reduced threat-­t ype appraisals of the
social stressor (e.g., saying they can confidently handle the demands of the public speech
task) relative to controls—­that is, the incremental theory of personality intervention has
reduced two of the purported mediators of the negative effects of the entity theory of
personality: fixed trait attributions and threat-­t ype appraisals of stressors.

Stress Physiology
The effects of the incremental theory intervention have also appeared on physiological
responses to social stress—­responses that are thought to lead to long-run differences in
well-being (Goodyer, Park, Netherton, & Herbert, 2001; Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007;
Sapolsky, 2000; Staufenbiel, Penninx, Spijker, Elzinga, & van Rossum, 2013). In the
first experiment described in the previous section, adolescents receiving the incremental
theory of personality intervention and undergoing the TSST showed more adaptive car-
diovascular responses relative to controls, in the form of greater vascular dilation and
cardiac efficiency, and also more adaptive adrenal responses (i.e., lower cortisol response;
Yeager et al., 2016). A similar pattern of results emerged in an experiment conducted
by Schleider and Weisz (2016), which also showed improvements in acute physiologi-
cal responses to an experimentally induced stressor within a population of adolescents
already showing higher depression at baseline.
Could stress physiology improvements explain the effects of the incremental theory
of personality on academic performance? A correlational mediation analysis reported
by Yeager and colleagues (2016, supplemental online material), reproduced in Figure
13.1, found that the intervention’s effect on lower threat-­type appraisals of the stressor
predicted changes in vascular dilation from baseline to during the stressor (i.e., reactivity
in “total peripheral resistance” [TPR]), and this difference in stress reactivity in turn pre-
dicted performance on the public speech and mental math tasks. This is consistent with
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 315

FIGURE 13.1. Mediation model showing the path from the incremental theory of personality
intervention to improved cognitive performance during a social stressor (the Trier Social Stress
Test [TSST]). Coefficients represent standardized estimates. TPR, total peripheral resistance,
an indication of vascular constriction, which is a physiological indication of threat-­type stress
responses. N = 52. Data from Yeager, Lee, and Jamieson (2016, Study 1).

the conclusion that adolescents who received the incremental theory intervention circu-
lated more oxygenated blood to their brains, resulting in better cognitive performance.

Effects over Time
So far, the incremental theory of personality intervention has been evaluated for the
length of one school year—­usually 9 months (e.g., Miu & Yeager, 2015). This was inten-
tional; students are far less likely to transfer or drop out of high school within ninth
grade relative to between ninth and tenth grade. However, a critical question is how and
whether the effects persist beyond the 1-year period.

Heterogeneity: Mindset × Context Theory

The incremental theory of personality intervention has usually been evaluated as a uni-
versal, preventative intervention, not a targeted intervention (though see Schleider et al.,
2015, for a clinical application). This means the intervention is typically given to people
regardless of their levels of risk prior to the experiment, and therefore there are likely to
be unmeasured moderators of the treatment effects (Greenberg & Abenavoli, 2017). We
are now carrying out new intervention experiments to examine heterogeneity. The model
we are working from was developed in the context of growth-­mindset-­of-intelligence
interventions (see Dweck & Yeager, Chapter 1, this volume).
Our model, which we call mindset × context theory, makes the prediction that wise
interventions will show meaningful treatment effects when they are suitable (well tai-
lored to the population at hand), when they target susceptible individuals (those whose
mental health would be compromised if not for the intervention), and when they are
delivered in sustaining environments (those in which the context could plausibly support
a recursive process). Concretely, this leads to the prediction that there should be larger
effects of the incremental theory of personality intervention for individuals with prior
vulnerabilities (prior entity theories, prior victimization, or prior chronic stress) in con-
texts where the message that “people can change” feels “true” (perhaps schools where
victimization tends to “get better” over time).
316 III.  Conflict and Relationships

COUSINS

The incremental theory of personality intervention owes much to the incremental theory
of intelligence intervention (also known as the growth-­mindset-­of-­intelligence interven-
tion; see Aronson et al., 2002; Dweck & Yeager, 2019; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). And the
“grammar” of wise interventions that it implements comes directly from interventions to
address belonging uncertainty (Walton & Cohen, 2011).
Like the social-­belonging intervention (see Walton & Brady, Chapter 2, this volume),
the incremental theory of personality intervention targets the “psychological hub” of
social relationships during a challenging life transition. Both interventions rely on the
possibility of attributional ambiguity in the meaning of everyday adversities, and seek
to tilt patterns of attributions in favor of changeable causes rather than fixed causes of
difficulty. And both interventions have shown evidence of affecting both academic and
health outcomes (see Walton & Cohen, 2011). One way to distinguish the two interven-
tions is in the arguments they make about how adversities can change. The incremental
theory of personality intervention conveys evidence that people’s internal traits change
(e.g., via changes in the brain that come with development and experience), whereas the
social-­belonging intervention argues that people’s social circumstances change (e.g., by
joining study groups or meeting with professors during office hours). A second way that
the interventions differ is in who is targeted by the message and who tends to benefit.
The incremental theory of personality intervention targets students who are undergo-
ing social difficulties in general (e.g., bullying or exclusion), but the social-­belonging
intervention focuses on alleviating identity threat (e.g., students facing stereotype threat).
Therefore, we do not expect the incremental theory of personality intervention to be
moderated by race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status unless in a given sample these are
correlated with the vulnerability targeted by the intervention (i.e., prior susceptibility to
social adversity). But the social-­belonging intervention should be moderated by groups
that tend to experience identity threat, because it is designed to clear up attributional
ambiguity for identity-­threatened individuals.
The incremental theory of personality was also informed by interventions seeking
to reduce the “hostile attributional bias,” which is the tendency for aggressive individu-
als to attribute causally ambiguous social difficulties to hostile intent (Dodge & Frame,
1982; Dodge, Godwin, & Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 2013). The
incremental theory of personality intervention targeted a belief system that was thought
to give rise to a pattern of attributions, but did not attempt to directly change hostile
intent attributions.
The incremental theory has some alignment with the stress-­ is-­
enhancing mind-
set (Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013). The latter involves the mindset that one’s stress
responses can be positive and energizing and can help one address and overcome the
stressor. This should also reduce “threat-­t ype” responses to stressors, and yield patterns
of cortisol reactivity that are analogous to the incremental theory of personality. The dif-
ference between the two is that the incremental theory of personality focuses on people’s
appraisals of the external stimulus (the stressful event) and the stress-­is-­enhancing mind-
set focuses on people’s appraisals of the internal stimulus (your ongoing stress response).
An interesting future direction could be to combine these two approaches into a sin-
gle intervention; such an intervention would presumably convey that negative, stressful
events and negative stress responses can be changed and improved over time.
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 317

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Although the incremental theory of personality intervention can have replicable effects,
it relies on a number of nuances that we think are important for its effectiveness. The
first is that the intervention does not seek to teach an extreme incremental theory of per-
sonality so much as it seeks to reduce the extreme entity theory. Said differently, for the
intervention to work adolescents do not need to believe that all people can greatly change
at any time or in any social circumstances—­instead, they probably only need to have a
reasonable doubt about the assumption that people’s characteristics cannot ever change.
The former might be tough for many students to believe; the latter might provide a basis
for optimistic outlooks. The intervention simply conveys that it is possible for people to
change, under the right conditions, with the right support, and with sufficient motivation
on behalf of the person seeking to change.
Another nuance is that the intervention does not argue that you deserve to be bullied
or excluded (which could imply you have weak social skills that need to be improved)
or that you are responsible for changing every peer who is unkind or aggressive. Such a
message could have two negative side effects: It could cause adolescents to blame them-
selves if their peers do not change, or it could cause adolescents to put themselves into
dangerous situations where change is unlikely but harm at the hands of the peer is likely.
The incremental theory of personality intervention makes the argument that change hap-
pens in many ways—­sometimes, just through chronological maturation, or natural life
transitions—­and it is not any one person’s responsibility to change another person. But,
regardless of how change happens, it is always possible.
Finally, as the intervention begins to be tested in clinical settings (Schleider & Weisz,
2016), one open question concerns how the intervention is presented to participants. In
the universal, preventative settings where the intervention was initially tested, it has been
framed as a survey about the transition to high school, but participants have not been told
that they are getting an “intervention” designed to help them. The goal, as noted, is to be
autonomy supportive and prevent reactance (see also Yeager et al., 2018). However, ado-
lescents who are seeking treatment for clinically elevated mental health problems, such
as depression and anxiety, may be aware that they are being treated and actively seek out
treatment. An intriguing question is whether the intervention needs to be “stealthy” or
not (see Walton & Wilson, 2018; Yeager & Walton, 2011, for discussions). (We are grate-
ful to Jessica Schleider, a psychological scientist at Stony Brook University, for suggesting
this important future direction for research.)

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

This research has implications for how schools and parents talk about and address
bullying. Research on essentialism (Gelman, 2004), which refers to social judgments
that focus on a person’s or group’s fixed “essence,” raises the concern that describ-
ing socially aggressive students with generic noun phrases (e.g., “bullies” or “victims”
or “troublemakers”) could contribute to an entity theory culture and climate. Using
generic phrases, defined as statements that take the form “bullies do X” (or, in past
studies, “bears eat ants”) to describe the characteristics or behaviors of groups of indi-
viduals, has led listeners to infer that the group’s characteristics or behaviors are rooted
318 III.  Conflict and Relationships

in a deep-­seated, inherent “essence” that cannot be changed (Cimpian & Markman,

2011; Gelman, Star, & Flukes, 2002). Such judgments are at the root of the entity
theory of personality.
An implication of our research, then, is that school policies seeking to reduce bully-
ing and improve coping with social conflict, but that describes the behavior of “bullies,”
could contribute to the consequences of an entity theory—­consequences such as a desire
for revenge or poorer coping. Indeed, a related argument has been made in the context
of youth violence in the 1990s, including the use of fixed labels (e.g., “superpredator”)
to describe deviant youth (Dodge, 2008; see also Yeager & Miu, 2011). It may be more
effective for schools and parents to focus on behaviors, not people (i.e., “bullying” not
“bullies”) and also to focus on the underlying, malleable reasons why some of their peers
might engage in that behavior—­such as their misguided desire to make themselves feel
better, or their insecurity with their own social status.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

The research on the incremental theory of intervention has contributed to psychological

theory by offering a means for bridging prominent theoretical models in different areas
of psychology. The first bridge has been between implicit theories models of coping
(Dweck & Leggett, 1988) and attribution theory (Kelley, 1973; Weiner, 1985). Fixed-
trait attributions (vs. modifiable-­cause attributions) for a specific situation have long
held a prominent place in cognitive models of depression (Beck, 2008). But a challenge
for the application of attribution theory to the treatment of internalizing or external-
izing has been to devise methods that are not case based but instead lead individu-
als to chronically make modifiable-­cause attributions across situations. A theoretical
contribution of implicit theories models has been to describe the “meaning system” in
which attributions reside (Molden & Dweck, 2006), and that can shape attributions in
specific situations that are distinct from the situations discussed during a reattribution
manipulation.
A second bridge has been between the implicit theories models of coping and the
BPS model of challenge and threat (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996; Jamieson et al., 2018;
Yeager et al., 2016). This has been one of our most exciting and generative advances in
recent years, because it has led to new theoretical insights in both models—­in addition
to the new, integrative perspective on stress and coping. As noted, key to the BPS model
is an individual’s appraisal of the demand (the stressor) and the resources (the ability
to cope with the stressor); the ratio of these two appraisals determines physiological
responses that are characteristic of “threat” versus “challenge.” But the BPS model has
not focused on why some individuals might chronically make the appraisal that they
do not have the resources to meet the demands they are facing. The integration with
implicit theories models (e.g., Jamieson et al., 2018) provides one means to explain this.
Second, research on implicit theories of personality had previously found that this very
socially focused intervention had surprising effects on academic outcomes (Yeager et
al., 2014). This was a bit of a puzzle, since the intervention did not mention academic
motivation or performance. The BPS model, however, provided theoretical grounding for
it; as mentioned, mediation analysis conducted with data collected by Jamieson (Yeager
et al., 2016, Study 1) identified psychobiological mechanisms, such as reductions in the
 The Incremental Theory of Personality Intervention 319

experience of lingering threat-­t ype stress responses to social stressors that could interfere
with cognition and performance.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Apart from research on the implications for practice and theory noted above, we see at
least three exciting avenues for future research. The first is to continue to replicate the
effects of the intervention and identify the subgroups and school contexts where effects
are weaker and stronger. This will be critical for understanding the public health impact
of the intervention, but it is also for advancing mindset × context theory, which may apply
to many kinds of wise interventions.
The second future direction is to continue to understand the recursive (or self-­
reinforcing) processes (Cohen, Garcia, Purdie-­ Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009;
Walton & Wilson, 2018) that sustain the treatment effects long after the treatment
administration has ended. One way to do so is by carrying out finer-­grained research on
moment-­to-­moment stress processes. This could co-occur with ambulatory measurement
of cardiovascular responses to provide a more precise picture about when implicit theo-
ries improve coping outcomes over time.
Another way to examine recursive processes is to measure the emergent social inter-
actions and access to resources that might result from an incremental theory. Presum-
ably, an intervention that promotes more adaptive stress responses might also embolden
adolescents to seek out new and more variable social relationships. Those relationships
might then provide a buffer from real-world adversities, or even reduce the prevalence of
bullying or exclusion. In general, an important possible mechanism for enduring effects
of the intervention is changes in the social world brought about by personal agency (see
Walton & Wilson, 2018, Figure 1C).
A primary future direction for our research groups is to think more about develop-
mental timing (Dahl, Allen, Wilbrecht, & Suleiman, 2018; Yeager et al., 2018). What is
the optimal time—in terms of chronological age, in terms of pubertal maturation, and in
terms of educational or professional transitions—­to change mindsets? We have presumed
that the change in mindset is best done at the beginning of a school transition (Miu &
Yeager, 2015; Yeager et al., 2014), but this has not been directly tested in a sample that
controls for differences across school systems. Should implicit theories be changed pre-
ventatively, well before the socially challenging start of high school? Could this depend
on pubertal timing—­and therefore, vary across gender, racial, and ethnic groups since
groups differ in the onset of pubertal maturation? Advances in hormone assays that indi-
cate pubertal maturation (i.e., testosterone and estradiol) and validation of self-­reported
pubertal indices will make tests of these questions more feasible than before. Now that
the intervention can be made precise, lasting one session, then research can be carried
out on when and how it can best be administered and how it interacts with development.
Finally, now that the intervention and its mechanisms have been studied in the con-
text of one socially trying circumstance—­peer victimization and exclusion during the
transition to high school—­we think an important future direction is to examine its appli-
cation to other social difficulties. How could the intervention help individuals transition-
ing to college or the workplace and struggling to feel included? We are excited to see how
the intervention could be adapted and evaluated in these or other contexts.
320 III.  Conflict and Relationships

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Support for writing this chapter came in part from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD084772-01), the Raikes Foundation, the Wil-
liam T. Grant Foundation, and Hope Lab. This research was supported by grant, P2CHD042849,
Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of
Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily rep-
resent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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 C H A P TE R 14

The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention

Jason Anthony Okonofua and Michael Ruiz

Suspensions are the most common form of exclusionary discipline, discipline that removes
students from the learning environment. They are associated with a negative consequence
for education and life outcomes. Research suggests that suspensions result from a default
punitive approach to curb student misbehavior. In this chapter, we detail an intervention
designed to shift teachers’ mindsets about misbehavior to show more empathy. An empathic
mindset is one in which teachers value students’ perspectives, nurture students’ growth,
and prioritize the maintenance of positive relationships with students. We describe lab
studies and a large-scale field experiment that demonstrate how the shift from a punitive to
empathic mindset can produce more productive outcomes for both teachers and students.
The intervention ultimately halved suspension rates in middle school across three school
districts (N = 1,682 students) and helped students with a history of suspension to maintain a
perception of respect from adults at their school. This chapter situates the intervention in the
wise intervention framework with information about the content and delivery of the interven-
tion and the mechanisms by which it operates. We end with details about implications of the
intervention for theory and integration with policy and practice.

BACKGROUND

Students across the United States are removed from learning environments by way of
suspensions at an alarming rate. In 2011, more than 5 million students were suspended
from schools throughout the United States, which marked a substantial increase since
a few decades ago when less than 2 million students were suspended in 1974 (Losen
& Wald, 2003; U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2016). These
rates are of particular concern, because suspensions are an exclusionary discipline that
removes students from environments where learning is the priority. And some students,
especially those with multiple suspensions, are placed in an environment where they are

324
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 325

more likely to enter a life trajectory of school dropout, unemployment, mental and physi-
cal illness, and incarceration—­a process called the “school-­to-­prison pipeline” (Jordan,
Lara, & McPartland, 1996; Gottfried, 2010; Couch & Fairlie, 2010; Pager, Western, &
Sugie, 2009; Boynton, O’Hara, Covault, Scott, & Tennen, 2014; Rocque & Paternoster,
2011). Further, one student’s discipline problems can affect other students’ outcomes in
the classroom (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013; Ferguson, 2012). The effects
of discipline problems can also extend beyond the school. Recent research showed that
taxpayers must contribute millions of dollars to offset the lifetime consequences of school
suspensions for society at large—by way of incarceration costs and lower future earnings
and tax revenue (Rumberger & Losen, 2017).
These effects have exploded concurrently with zero-­tolerance policies put in place
to deter threats to school safety with punitive repercussions. An unexpected drawback
lies in how suspensions have become a more common response to relatively minor and
ambiguous misbehaviors compared to weapon or drug possession (Skiba, 2014). In recent
years, the most common reasons for office referrals that result in suspensions are for
misbehaviors classified as insubordination or classroom disruption. However, according
to Skiba, “no data exist to show that out-of-­school suspensions and expulsions reduce
disruption or improve school climate” (p. 27).
Stigmatized groups are impacted by these school policies at a disproportionate rate
(Pager et al., 2009). Research has shown that lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, Black,
Latinx, Native American, and students in special education are at a heightened risk for
suspension from school (U.S. Department of Education, 2014; Himmelstein & Bruckner,
2011; Poteat, Scheer, & Chong, 2015). For example, Black students are two to three
times more likely to be suspended than their White peers (Fabelo et al., 2011). These
disparities exist from preschool through high school (Skiba et al., 2011) with Black pre-
schoolers being 3.6 times more likely to receive a suspension than White preschoolers
(U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2016).
Teacher–­student relationships suffer under these punitive—­ nonempathic—­
conditions. For teachers, they become disheartened when they feel that dealing with mis-
behavior gets in the way of their teaching goals (Johnson, Yarrow, Rochkind, & Ott,
2009). For students, they can feel threatened and question their teachers’ intentions when
teachers are more likely to critically respond to them without communicating that they
care (e.g., Yeager et al., 2014). This process can be of particular risk for students from
stigmatized groups who may already be vigilant to cues that they do not belong at school
(Goyer et al., 2019) or will not receive fair treatment (Mendoza-­Denton, Downey, Purdie,
Davis, & Pietrzak, 2002; Steele, 1997). Students tend to behave with more defiance and
less cooperation when they perceive a teacher to be an untrustworthy authority figure
(Fenning & Rose, 2007; Gregory & Weinstein, 2008)—a process that is exacerbated for
stigmatized students who may already expect unfair treatment. In this way, the default
punitive context can deteriorate the quality of teacher–­student relationships and cause
both teachers and students to feel their goals cannot be reached in school (Okonofua,
Walton, & Eberhardt, 2016). Discipline problems can then arise, a process also especially
likely for students from stigmatized groups.
Public and private institutions have attempted a variety of strategies to curb the exor-
bitant rates of exclusionary discipline. From a policy standpoint, many states have enacted
laws that prohibit schools from suspending students for reasons such as insubordination
326 III.  Conflict and Relationships

or “defiance” (Pupil Discipline . . . , 2015). From a skill-­building standpoint, companies

and organizations have partnered with school districts to invest in sweeping professional
development and structural changes through programs like positive behavioral interven-
tions and supports (Reinke, Herman, & Stormont, 2013). Pointedly, these efforts do
not precisely address a major source and effect of discipline problems: fraught teacher–­
student relationships. Approaches from these standpoints rightfully curb a punitive com-
ponent of the context, yet lack a promotion of enhanced interpersonal communication
(e.g., empathy) to take its place.
The empathic-­discipline intervention aims to address that lack of an interpersonal
approach head-on with an aim to help teachers sustain high-­quality, trusting teacher–­
student relationships over time to prevent discipline problems. The theory underlying
the intervention is based on two core findings about the role of teachers: (1) over time,
processes of labeling students can contribute to discipline problems, and (2) valuing stu-
dents’ perspectives and reappraising responses to students’ misbehavior can disrupt label-­
making processes in relationships. Across these aspects of the intervention, teachers are
viewed as pivotal “gatekeepers” who are in a position to construct the context for better
relationships for entire classrooms of students. The goal of the intervention is to reduce
the likelihood that a punitive mindset will lead teachers to label misbehaving students as
troublemakers and respond to them with severe discipline (see Figure 14.1).

FIGURE 14.1.  Empathic discipline (top path) activates empathic mindset, as opposed to default
punitive mindset (bottom path). In turn, a more productive recursive cycle ensues.
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 327

What is the default punitive mindset? Teacher responses to misbehavior can be shaped
by the extent to which a teacher thinks the misbehavior will be an ongoing or consistent
hindrance. Teachers can come to think misbehavior will be ongoing when they attribute
the misbehavior to an inherent characteristic of the student. We refer to this belief as a
“punitive mindset.” In turn, teachers may seek more punitive discipline, often discipline
that removes the student from the learning environment (e.g., referral to the principal’s
office). Researchers evidenced such a belief and process in a series of experiments about
race disparities in disciplinary action (Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015). Teachers were pre-
sented with a series of misbehaviors by a student and were asked questions about how
they would respond. Teachers were more likely to respond to a student they labeled as
a troublemaker with a desire for more severe discipline and were more likely to see the
student being suspended in the future. The troublemaker labeling was thus pivotal in the
discipline process and it was a process that played out over the course of multiple mis-
behaviors. Further, teachers became more distressed and wanted more severe discipline
from one misbehavior to the next, and this escalation was steeper for students viewed
as troublemakers. All of these effects were most pronounced if the student was assumed
to be Black, because the student was more likely to be a troublemaker if assumed to be
Black as compared to White. However, for either a Black or White student, being labeled
a troublemaker predicted the process of harsh responses to misbehavior. The empathic-­
discipline intervention seeks to replace this punitive mindset with an empathic mindset,
one that appreciates the potential for students to behave better and for relationships with
students to improve over time.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

The adoption of the empathic mindset creates opportunity to build respect, rather than
mistrust, in a teacher’s relationship with a student who has misbehaved. Over time, each
mindset (punitive or empathic) can contribute to recursive cycles such that either the
relationship deteriorates and thus discipline problems grow, or a positive relationship
remains intact and thus future conflict is prevented (see Figure 14.1). In this section, we
describe the process by which a psychological component (a teacher’s mindset and a stu-
dent’s feeling of respect) and a behavioral component (how a teacher and a student then
respond to each other) can contribute to recursive cycles that ultimately lead to severe
exclusionary discipline, or not.
A teacher can have distinct mindsets or models for dealing with student misbehavior.
As mentioned, a teacher’s punitive mindset can lead him or her to view misbehavior as
a stable pattern and thus respond with severe or exclusionary punishment. Also, due to
many teachers entering the profession with a desire to support and help children grow
(Johnson et al., 2009), that same teacher might also harbor an empathic mindset, one
that prioritizes the maintenance of high-­quality and productive relationships with stu-
dents who struggle, including students who misbehave. Each mindset can be activated
and affects the way a teacher will respond to misbehavior. When the empathic mindset is
activated teachers are less likely to label a misbehaving student as a troublemaker and are
more likely to want to find out more about why the student misbehaved.
The researchers conducted an initial experiment to determine whether a targeted
exercise could activate distinct mindsets in teachers and in turn shift their responses
328 III.  Conflict and Relationships

to a student’s misbehavior. K–12 teachers (N = 39) were randomly assigned to engage

with reminders of how punishment (punitive mindset) or good teacher–­student relation-
ships (empathic mindset) is the solution to misbehavior (Okonofua, Paunesku, & Walton,
2016). It is important to note that, on average, these teachers had 14 years of experi-
ence as teachers. The brief article did not include information that was likely new to the
teachers—­rather, the article served as a structured reminder, a primer of a preexisting
representation of quality relationships with students. Teachers in the empathic mindset
condition were less likely to label the hypothetical student a troublemaker following the
misbehavior. Further, when asked how they would respond to the misbehavior, teachers
were more considerate of the student’s perspective (e.g., “Ask the student why he or she
was misbehaving”) in the empathic-­mindset condition. In the control condition, teachers
were more punitive (e.g., threaten the student, assign detention, or involve the principal).
Students make sense of and respond to different kinds of treatment from teachers.
For example, the extent to which students question their sense of belonging at school is
associated with how they feel teachers treat them (Goyer et al., 2019). Students’ responses
can be directly connected to the mindsets that teachers act on in response to misbehavior.
When a teacher’s punitive mindset is activated, his or her response can lead a student to
feel less respect for the teacher and less motivation to behave well. When teachers act
on an empathic mindset in response to a student’s misbehavior, might that process be
curbed?
In a second experiment, the researchers sought to determine the impact on students
of teachers’ punitive or empathic mindsets. Might students feel more respect for a teacher
and more motivation to behave well when a teacher responded to their misbehavior with
an activated empathic mindset?
College students (N = 302) were prompted to reflect on their experiences as middle
school students and answered questions about how they would feel in a hypothetical
scenario about their misbehavior in class. Each participant was randomly assigned to
either read that the teacher threatened him or her, assigned detention, and involved the
principal (punitive control) or read that the teacher asked why the misbehavior occurred
and rearranged the classroom to make it more conducive to better behavior (empathic
mindset). Compared to the control condition, participants who read about a teacher with
the empathic mindset were more likely to think the teacher deserved respect and were
more motivated to behave well and follow instructions. While there were some limita-
tions to this experiment,1 these findings were noteworthy. The findings suggest that a
student response to the default punitive mindset is less respect and motivation to behave
well. Further, this response can be reversed when teachers’ empathic mindset is activated.
These preliminary experiments provide theoretical insight into how distinct teacher
mindsets can be activated through a strategic reminder of their values and the benefits
of valuing students’ perspectives. It also shows how an empathic mindset can set forth a
cycle of more productive behaviors from both the teacher and student thereafter. When
teachers’ empathic mindset was activated, they were more likely to want to get perspec-
tive (e.g., have a conversation with the student) and to respond to the student’s situation
(e.g., rearrange the physical structure of the classroom). In turn, the student felt more
respect in the relationship and became more interested in behaving well. Taken together,

1 Ideally,middle school students would have been the participants in this study. However, we decided
that college students would be better able to express how they would have felt in the situation.
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 329

while the findings are short term—based in scenarios—­they suggest that a productive
recursive process would ensue between the teacher and student.
The productive recursive process is coined “empathic discipline” and as a whole
makes way for a mindset shift and a behavioral shift in the effects of discipline. The
mindset shift pertains to the change in teachers’ beliefs about students and their behavior.
When teachers engage with materials that remind them of the powerful positive impact
of quality teacher–­student relationships—­as opposed to a default punitive mindset—­they
become less likely to attribute a student’s behavior to a rigid component of the student’s
character (i.e., labeling the student as a troublemaker). In turn, the student respects the
teacher more and is more motivated to behave well in class in the future.
The behavioral component is evident in how the teacher and student interact in their
behaviors toward each other. The teacher seeks to find out more about the student’s per-
spective and how to use discipline as a vehicle to gain or maintain the student’s respect
and trust in the relationship. The student wants to follow the teacher’s instructions and
to behave well in the future. Over time, the quality of the teacher–­student relationship
is protected and there is a reduced likelihood of conflict in the future due to these inter-
twined mindset and behavioral shifts.
The empathic-­discipline intervention is geared to offset the punitive path to disci-
pline problems. It aims to shift teachers’ mindsets away from default troublemaker label-
ing and punitive responses to misbehavior. Instead, it strategically highlights (1) listening
to and seeking to understand students’ perspective in periods of misbehavior, even when
this perspective is not productive; (2) prioritizing and sustaining positive relationships
with students, especially in times of misbehavior; and (3) helping students grow and
improve within the context of a trusting relationship. The intervention seeks to remind
teachers that they are in a unique position to do each of these three things, which will
allow them to make meaningful contributions to their students’ lives. In turn, teachers
will create a context for students to feel more respect in the teacher–­student relationship
and be more motivated to behave well.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

The researchers conducted a randomized controlled field experiment to test whether the
effects described in the previous section can extend to actual teacher–­student relation-
ships and discipline rates. Can an opportunity for teachers to reflect on, articulate, and
commit to an empathic mindset cause reductions in discipline problems?

Outcomes
The experiment was evaluated at five middle schools in three California districts with
math teachers (N = 31) and students (N = 1,682; 52% female; 17% Asian, 2% Black,
54% Latino, 7% White, 20% other/unknown). The schools varied in the percentage of
their student population that received free or reduced-­price lunch, an indicator of socio-
economic status (37%, 68%, 70%, 61%, and 62%, in order of largest to smallest total
student enrollment at each of the five schools that participated).
In the experiment, math teachers were randomly assigned to engage either with
modules about how technology use is important in involving students (control) or with
330 III.  Conflict and Relationships

modules about the importance of sustaining positive relationships with students by way
of valuing and seeking to understand their perspectives, especially when students mis-
behave. In each module, teachers read brief articles and narratives about the topic, and
answered questions about their understanding and experiences related to the topic.
Math teachers completed two online modules, a 45-minute session in the fall
(October–­November) and a 25-minute session in the winter (January–­February).2 All
materials were delivered online such that teachers completed the sessions from their own
computers and did so at their convenience during a 2-week window. The fall and spring
time line was chosen to ensure that teachers had experiences with their current students
before engaging in the first module—­that is, teachers would be able to engage with the
materials in a meaningful way that would directly apply to their students. The second
module was designed to serve as a booster, or reminder, when the school year reconvened
after holiday breaks.
As described earlier, suspensions are especially impactful because they remove stu-
dents from the learning environment and they are significantly more common than other
exclusionary disciplines, like expulsions or referrals to law enforcement. Further, this was
the only discipline outcome schools tracked across each school district. This intervention
halved year-long student suspension rates from 9.6 to 4.8% (see Figure 14.2). Similar to
national suspension rates, control-­condition suspension rates were highest among boys,
Black and Latinx students, and students with a history of suspensions. The reduction in
suspension rates was comparably large for the following groups: boys, from 14.6 to 8.4%;
African Americans and Latinx, from 12.3 to 6.3%; and previously suspended students,
from 51.2 to 29.4%.
There was also a notable shift in students’ experiences of respect. Students were
asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement “Teachers and other adults at
my school treat me with respect.” The intervention bolstered the respect of the most at-
risk students and previously suspended students, perceived from all teachers and adults
at their school. It is important to note that the felt respect was not solely from their math
teacher but rather all teachers at the school. This point is further explained in the next
section.

Mechanism
Did suspensions drop solely due to a change in math teachers’ interactions or discipline
standards with students, or did they drop, as well, because students experienced fewer
suspensions from interactions with adults across school contexts (e.g., nonmath teach-
ers)? Evidence suggests the latter.
Not only did students report experiencing greater respect from all their teachers at
school (not just their math teacher) but records also indicated that the fewer suspensions
were not likely due solely to fewer referrals for discipline from math teachers. One school
district in the sample kept records of the faculty member who referred a student for ulti-
mate suspension. Students from this school accounted for 33% of the full student sample.

2 Math teachers were recruited because all students at the schools had one math teacher only. This
allowed for a design that determines efficacy of the treatment with only one of the students’ teachers.
Otherwise, it would be difficult to determine effects on students if they had some teachers randomly
assigned to the treatment condition and others to the control condition.
 331
FIGURE 14.2.  Middle school students (N = 1,682) whose math teacher (N = 31) completed the empathic-­mindset intervention as compared to random-
ized control materials were half as likely to be suspended over the school year. From Okonofua, Paunesu, and Walton (2016). Error bars represent 95%
confidence intervals after 10,000 bootstraps. Reprinted with permission from the authors.
332 III.  Conflict and Relationships

In this school, students of math teachers who received the intervention were 55% less
likely to be suspended from school (treatment = 5.4%, control = 12.1%). Yet, the effect
was not due to a change only in math class. Only 7.4% of suspensions were referred by
math teachers. Furthermore, all students referred for suspension by a math teacher were
also referred for suspension by other faculty (e.g., a science teacher). Thus, even exclud-
ing suspensions referred by math teachers from the analysis yields an identical reduc-
tion in suspension rates. This supplemental finding suggests that, at least in this school,
improving the experience with at least one teacher led to a broad improvement in student
behavior across diverse classroom contexts. It notably also suggests that the effect was
not merely due to math teachers being more lenient in their discipline practices nor to an
improvement in students’ behavior solely in math classes—­rather, students’ perceptions
of and experiences in the entire school context became more productive and less condu-
cive to discipline problems.
These findings suggest that part of the effect results from a shift in students’ percep-
tions and experiences throughout the school and the school day. Students’ entire school
experiences can be improved when a single teacher presumably treats them as more
deserving of respect and as having a valuable perspective. This is consistent with the
aforementioned recursive process of respect in teacher–­student relationships (see Figure
14.1). This is also consistent with the finding that the most at-risk students, those with
a history of suspensions, were less likely to lose respect for adults at their school when
they had a teacher who received the empathic-­discipline intervention. It also suggests the
importance of students’ perspectives in this process (see Goyer et al., 2019).

Effects over Time
The intervention’s effects lasted for several months. Teachers began participation in
October and suspension records were evaluated for that entire school year. The sustained
effects seem to also be associated with protecting teacher–­student relationships from
deterioration. This is evident in how, several months after the intervention, students with
a history of suspension perceived more respect from adults at their school when they have
a teacher with the empathic mindset, as opposed to not having it. Future research might
explore outcomes beyond the year of the intervention, such as how teachers interact with
new students in following years or how students interact with new teachers in the follow-
ing years.

Heterogeneity
In the initial test of the intervention, the proportional reduction in suspension rates was
comparable for all students. Also, due to certain groups being more at risk of receiving
suspensions, the absolute impact was relatively larger for them (males: from 14.6 to 8.4%;
African American and Latinos: from 12.3 to 6.3%; and previously suspended students:
from 51.2 to 29.4%). The intervention was tested at only five schools and with only the
math faculty at those schools (N = 31; 77% female; 39% sixth grade, 29% seventh grade,
32% eighth grade). While this can attest to the intervention’s strength to bring about
large and lasting effects with a small sample of high-­impact players, it does not allow for
definitive heterogeneity information.
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 333

Future research is needed to confirm more specific conditions for the intervention’s
efficacy. For example, randomized controlled trials are currently in place to evaluate the
effects of teacher characteristics (e.g., race, gender, and stress) and school characteristics
(e.g., school size, student demographics, and grade levels) on the extent to which the
intervention reduces suspension rates (see “Future Directions” section).

COUSINS

The empathic-­discipline intervention is a psychologically wise intervention (see Walton

& Wilson, 2018) that focuses on relationships between teachers and students. How can
the quality of these relationships be maintained over time? The value of pursuing answers
to this question is not unique to school settings. For example, other interventions have
focused on how to maintain relationship quality in marriages.
There are notable differences between the empathic-­discipline intervention and inter-
ventions for romantic relationships. Romantic relationships involve equal status between
partners and partners who have chosen to be connected. Further, the interventions often
administer the treatment to both partners. However, teacher–­student relationships are
hierarchal in nature with teachers in a superior position to students. Teachers and stu-
dents typically do not choose their relationships—­rather, they are assigned. Yet, the simi-
larities in the relationships (e.g., sustained contact over time, stress from interpersonal
contact, and interconnected goals) can make interventions similar in theory.
Targeted psychological interventions can mitigate the deleterious effects of conflict
in relationships. In one randomized controlled trial, researchers aimed to curb the decline
in marital quality (Finkel, Slotter, Luchies, Walton, & Gross, 2013). Couples (N = 120)
were assigned to either engage with control materials or engage with a treatment that
encouraged them to consider a perspective other than their own as a way to reappraise
their emotional responses to conflict in their relationship. Every 4 months for 24 months,
all couples completed checkup activities about marital quality (e.g., satisfaction, trust).
After the first 8 months, couples also completed activities to describe a “significant dis-
agreement” or conflict during the preceding 4 months and reported how distressed they
felt by answering questions such as “I am angry at my partner for his/her behavior during
this conflict.” At months 12, 16, and 20, couples in the treatment condition reappraised
the conflict they reported for the preceding 4 months by responding to prompts that
guided them to view the conflict as a “third party . . . who sees things from a neutral
point of view.” It also guided them to reflect on obstacles to getting that perspective and
to make plans to make the best of disagreements by taking this kind of perspective dur-
ing the next 4 months. Compared to couples in the control condition, couples that reap-
praised conflict by considering a perspective other than their own showed a significantly
mitigated decline in relationship quality.
Why might getting a perspective other than one’s own protect relationships from
reductions in quality? In the reappraisal intervention, the researchers found that the ben-
efits of the intervention were due to a reduction in conflict-­related distress over time. The
researchers also suggest that the effect was due to the couples in the reappraisal condition
adopting an “adaptive framework” of wanting the best for all involved in the relationship
(see Libby & Eibach, 2011, p. 234).
334 III.  Conflict and Relationships

The empathic-­discipline intervention and the reappraisal intervention are similar in

key ways. They both focus on relationship-­based processes that unfold over time, target
shifts in how people make sense of conflict and distress, and use perspective-­getting and
empathic intentions to protect relationship quality. First, like the reappraisal interven-
tion, the empathic-­discipline intervention aims to combat a decline in relationship quality
over time. Similar to marital quality, research shows that the quality of teacher–­student
relationships declines over time and ultimately contributes to discipline problems (e.g.,
Hamre & Pianta, 2001). Second, in both marital and teacher–­student relationships, the
decline in quality is connected to stress in times of conflict (e.g., when one or both persons
feel disrespected; e.g., Johnson et al., 2009). Third, both interventions leverage a consid-
eration of another person’s perspective and an adaptive framework as a means to protect
the quality of the relationship. Albeit, the reappraisal intervention involves considering
the perspective of a neutral third-party’s perspective of the relationship; both interven-
tions aim for a person to think beyond his or her own perspective or the imagined per-
spective of the other person in the relationship. As in the reappraisal intervention, teachers
exposed to the empathic-­discipline intervention engaged in activities to remind them and
guide them through the importance and benefits of getting students’ perspectives—­and
not solely imagining them. Teachers were reminded to think about doing so especially
when conflicts arise. Further, in both interventions, this was presented as something that
can be difficult to do but worthwhile—­and the worthwhile component is framed as such
for all parties involved. Teachers who engaged with the empathic mindset were reminded
that high-­quality teacher–­student relationships enhance both teachers’ capacity to reach
their teaching and career goals and students’ capacity to reach their learning and life
goals (see Okonofua, Walton, et al., 2016).
An underlying component of the similarities between these interventions lies in their
focus on processes that unfold over time. Relationships are not one-time encounters—­
rather, they play out over time. Conflict early in a relationship can contribute to later con-
flict such that the magnitude of its detriment grows. The cycle of reverberating attitudes
and behaviors exists in martial relationships and also in how teachers and students view
and treat each other. It is critical for interventions to consider this dynamic (see Cohen,
Garcia, Purdie-­Vaughns, Apfel, & Brzustoski, 2009; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Wal-
ton & Cohen, 2011).

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Framing
Following past social-­psychological interventions (e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2011), teachers
were not told that they were receiving an intervention, that the exercise was intended to
reduce discipline problems, or that teachers are biased in their discipline practices. Teach-
ers could have interpreted that framing as controlling or as stigmatizing. Instead, teachers
were treated as experts asked to offer their feedback on best practices and how to not show
bias in discipline. They were told that the researchers were interested in learning more from
them about effective discipline practice so they could pass on their insights to new teachers.
The intervention was delivered through a 45-minute online session in the fall and a
25-minute online session in the winter. Each session was introduced as an opportunity
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 335

for future teachers to learn from participants’ past experiences as teachers and that the
researchers would present them with brief articles and stories to guide their feedback.
These different forms of reflection were geared to cohesively remind teachers of the three
primary themes for empathic discipline: (1) seek to understand students’ perspective when
misbehavior occurs, (2) prioritize the maintenance of positive relationships with students,
and (3) help students develop and control their behaviors.

Articles
The articles detailed how it is important for teachers to bring out the best in their students
through communication of care and respect relationships. They highlighted how situa-
tional factors such as stigma and puberty can cause students to worry about unfair treat-
ment and can affect their behavior. A student can also come to feel less threatened in school
and more motivated to behave well when teachers consider situational factors and value the
student’s perspective. The following is an example of language used in the articles:

Of course, it takes more time to reach some students than others because their previ-
ous experiences and expectations differ. Some students have had good experiences with
teachers. Others have had negative experiences. . . . But teachers who consistently reach
out and engage students do make a difference. They help students see that they do have
a fair shot and that people in authority are there to help them grow and develop, not
stand in their way.

Last, the articles explain how this consideration is especially important in the heat of
the moment, when conflicts or misbehavior arise. One article states:

Teachers told us that some of the greatest challenges they faced—and some of their best
opportunities for helping students—­occurred after students misbehaved or struggled
academically. These situations offer teachers an opportunity to talk with students and
help them understand their experiences in class and in middle school more positively.

Turmoil is an opportunity to show students care and respect in a way that can be
especially meaningful for students and impactful for long-term gains in quality teacher–­
student relationships.

Stories
The content also included brief stories to drive home major points in the articles. The
stories were told from the perspectives of various students and a teacher, and they each
included multiple psychological methods to persuasively remind teachers of how key
themes emphasized in the articles play out in real-life situations (see Table 14.1). For
example, norms were established in most of the stories. These norms ranged from how
many students misbehave when they feel anxious to how students become less anxious
when they feel they receive care and respect, especially from teachers. The objective was
to remind teachers that misbehavior is to be expected from growing children and a nor-
mal response is to show care to students. Research shows that establishing norms in this
way can lead a person to change his or her behavior to avoid deviating from it (Goldstein,
Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008).
336 III.  Conflict and Relationships

TABLE 14.1.   Psychological Approaches through Stories in the Intervention Content

from the Study by Okonofua, Paunesku, and Walton (2016)
Story Reminder strategy
Messages: Teachers seek and value students’ perspectives; it helps when discipline prioritizes respect.
Student quotation 1. Reminder that any given student can be in a
situation to misbehave and that misbehavior
“In middle school, I didn’t feel like I belonged. . . .
can be due to context (e.g., worries about
So I didn’t pay attention in class and sometimes I
belonging at school).
got in trouble. One day I got detention and, instead
2. Encourage teacher to listen to student to
of just sitting there, my teacher talked with me
gain perspective and show respect.
about what happened. He really listened to me. . . .
3. Show how a student’s perception of a caring
It felt good to know I had someone I could trust in
teacher is pivotal to development.
school.”

Student quotation 1. Show how efforts to seriously understand

a student’s perspective can communicate
“One time, after I got in trouble in 7th grade, I still
respect.
remember how my teacher took me aside later and
2. Show that discipline can be administered in
listened to my side of the story. . . . Even though
a mutually respectful manner that protects
I still got a detention, I was glad that she didn’t
the integrity and trust in the teacher–
just dismiss what I had to say, like other teachers
student relationship.
sometimes did. . . . ”

Teacher quotation 1. Show it is normal for a student to crave

respect, trust, and care, especially from
“When I was a child, I remember worrying about
adults in their lives.
how I would be treated by teachers at my school.
2. Show how teachers’ own past experiences
But I will always remember Ms. McBride, who
can allow for common ground with
treated me with respect and trust. She showed me
students and their perspectives.
that teachers could make all the difference in how
students feel about school.”

Messages: Students worry about respect; stigma can affect students’ perspectives.
Racially stigmatized student quotation 1. Show that it is normal for students to worry
about unfair treatment and how that feeling
“Whenever I get a new teacher, I think ‘Is she gonna
can be heightened by risk of discrimination
treat me fairly? Does she call on the White students
due to a student’s background.
more? Does she expect them to know the right
2. Provide an example of how a teacher’s
answers and us to get them wrong?”
intentions may not always be clear to a
student.

Racially stigmatized student quotation 1. Show that students from stigmatized groups
may expect unfair treatment.
“I always thought school wasn’t for me, or for
2. Place teachers in the perspective of a student
people like me. It seemed that people like me just
to help him or her remember the situational
get in trouble in school. But my 6th-grade math
reasons why a student might misbehave.
teacher really changed my mind. She told us that she
3. Provide an example of how a teacher can
knew that every one of us could learn and that she
help a stigmatized student to feel more
would work hard to help us get there. . . . ”
certain that he or she can belong at school.
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 337

Saying Is Believing
After reading and reflecting on the materials, teachers wrote essays describing how they
use the kinds of practices described to build positive relationships with students during
difficult disciplinary contexts. For instance, one participating teacher wrote, “I NEVER
hold grudges. I try to remember that they are all the son or daughter of someone who
loves them more than anything in the world. They are the light of someone’s life” (see
Table 14.2 for more teacher quotations). Teachers were told that these essays would be
shared with new teachers to help them in their practice. This procedure, in which people
freely advocate for an idea to a receptive audience (“saying is believing”), is a powerful
persuasive technique. It makes the experience active, not passive, promoting deep pro-
cessing. It also encourages people to commit themselves to an idea and to connect this
idea to their own lives and practice (Walton & Wilson, 2018; Yeager & Walton, 2011).

TABLE 14.2.  Sample Teacher Responses about Building Positive Relationships

with Students from the Study by Okonofua, Paunesku, and Walton (2016)
Teacher responses to “What are some of the ways that you try to build positive relationships with
your students, or things that you would like to try in the future to improve your relationships with
your students?”

1.  “At the start of the year I introduce myself to each student individually. We do several journal and
other assignments that allow me to learn more about my students. I write comments on the pages
so the students know that I actually do read their work. I take note of anything my students share
that I may want to reference in conversation.”

2.  “I make myself available to students after school to provide them with more personalized support.
When students are struggling I try to get on their level and find out what is going on not focusing
on what they are doing wrong but trying to focus more on what I can do to ameliorate the situation
and look for solutions moving forward. I also try to attend events like sports or theatre that they
are interested in and talk to them about the things they like.”

3.  “I feel that one way to build positive relationships is to talk to the students. Often times students
feel that they are judged even before they walk into the classroom. So if you listen to them and talk
with them they are willing to work for you.”

4.  “We share good news each week—building a strong classroom community. Each student who
wants to share can share. No one is left out. I am fair. I say hello to each student as they walk
through the classroom door. I also try and say good-bye to students as they leave. I smile at each
student as they enter the classroom. I also try to listen to what a student is telling me and try to be
fair and consistent in my discipline in the classroom.”

5.  “Pull students aside to talk with them about behavior or grades; help students set goals and create
steps for meeting them; incorporating student interests into activities and lessons; giving students
choice in projects (i.e., students can select, research, focus, determine format for presenting
information, etc.); allowing students to create own groups for work; chatting with students about
their interests and their daily lives.”

6.  “I try to find out interests and hobbies outside of school. I attend these activities and talk with
parents to build relationships. I talk to the students back at school about the activity that I
attended.”

7.  “I do ice-breaker activities & ask students their hobbies and interests. I also make a point of letting
the class know that I am human & make mistakes as well. Our motto is It’s OK to make a mistake
as [long] as you have grown from it. That could mean apologizing, fixing or having the Ah-Ha
moment. We also have ‘Bad Day’ plans and students can let me know if it is a Bad Day and I will
work with their comfort level for participation.”

338 III.  Conflict and Relationships

Control Condition
In the randomized controlled trial, half of the math teachers were assigned to a
“technology-­engagement” control condition. The content of this condition was about
how to leverage technology to engage students in lessons and assignments. Thus, like the
treatment condition, it was about means to improve student outcomes. The key difference
is that this condition did not talk about seeking students’ perspectives or ways to think
about student misbehavior.
The control condition was similar in structure and in time to complete. Like the
treatment condition, the control condition consisted of two online sessions: a 45-minute
session in the fall and a 25-minute session in the winter. Also, the content was delivered
in the form of articles, stories, and exercises similar in length.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

The empathic-­discipline intervention is still not fully understood. Current and future
research is needed to determine the specifics for implementation and expectations for
effects in various contexts. So far, there is one major nuance or misconception about
the intervention. The psychological message is about seeking to understand a student’s
perspective when the student misbehaves, not merely imagining or assuming his or her
perspective.

The Empathic Mindset Leads Teachers to Get Perspective,

Not Take Perspective
Second, the intervention is about getting perspective. It is not about a teacher’s ability
to guess what a student thinks or feels. It is more about the act of learning a student’s
perspective (e.g., by listening to him or her) and what that act can communicate to the
student (e.g., respect).
The intervention is about the process of finding out more about a student or why
a student misbehaved. It is about understanding the student—­even if the student’s per-
spective is unproductive. For example, if a student is distressed, a teacher mirroring this
emotion could escalate the conflict. Also, it is not necessarily about sharing a student’s
opinions or agreeing with a student’s interpretations of his or her surroundings. If a stu-
dent thinks that school is a waste of time, it could be problematic and ethically question-
able for a teacher to agree with the student—­rather, it is about showing that one cares to
know about and values the perspective and works from that perspective to productively
respond to misbehavior. This can lead a student to feel less threat and more respect. For
example, when a teacher asks a student why he or she behaved a certain way (i.e., his
or her thoughts and feelings predicating the behavior), it communicates that the teacher
thinks the student is more than a collection of behaviors (e.g., troublemaker) but rather a
person with thoughts and feelings behind those actions. It communicates that the teacher
cares about and respects the student as a person. The question and understanding are
the key points, not necessarily that a teacher agrees that a student’s thoughts or feelings
should continue to manifest in a certain behavior. In fact, many times, discipline requires
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 339

teachers to guide students to better manage their thoughts and feelings, a key lesson in
child development.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

It is important to be cautious when introducing to real-world context interventions that

are based on effects studied in lab settings. Lab experiments are particularly informa-
tive because they control conditions (e.g., a set and specific student misbehavior) in a
way that makes it possible to detect specific effects (e.g., different understandings of
misbehavior) of a given treatment (e.g., reminder to value students’ perspectives). The
empathic-­discipline research reports from both lab experiments and experimentation in
actual classrooms. It thus provides noteworthy insights about how context matters for
practical implication (Ross & Nisbett, 1991).

Scalability
The empathic-­ discipline intervention was administered with teachers in five schools
across three school districts. This required a focus on scalability that maintained fidel-
ity to the treatment—­in other words, it was important to make sure the cohesion of the
psychological experience was sufficient while also done in a way that can be administered
across many contexts. This form of consideration is key for future steps to increase the
scalability of the intervention.
Critical components for scalability was that the intervention could be administered
online and at teachers’ convenience. By constructing the intervention materials in an
online forum, it could be implemented remotely from the research base—the location of
the research team. The intervention was thus able to be administered at schools in differ-
ent cities while still being able to be monitored in a single location.
The online platform also made it possible for teachers to participate in the inter-
vention at their convenience within a 3-week window. As mentioned, context matters.
Schools have varying schedules and planning in place that determine teachers’ day-to-day
schedules. For example, in some schools, teachers have planning periods when participa-
tion would work best. In other schools, teachers have dedicated times for professional
development meetings when participation would work best. While a strict participation
schedule (e.g., all participation at a single time and in a single place) would allow for more
control over the delivery of the materials and fidelity to the participation procedure, it
could disrupt schools’, teachers’, and students’ regular working and learning schedules.
In turn, it could lead teachers to not appropriately engage with the materials or opt to not
participate at all. The implementation schedule of providing a set number of weeks for
teachers to participate at their leisure allowed for relative control over timing of imple-
mentation while also being flexible to schools’ various schedules.

Context Matters
As with all psychological interventions, the context matters. Schools have different
policies in place and different theories for how to approach improvements to student
340 III.  Conflict and Relationships

outcomes. The empathic-­ discipline intervention will likely work best when tactfully
integrated with policy and skill-­building approaches. While future empirical research is
needed to confirm the efficacy of integration, theory suggests that it will be beneficial in
contexts with certain policy and skill-­building interventions in place.
In modern times, research suggests that schools can have a default punitive climate
in which teachers become more likely to respond to misbehavior with punishment instead
of care. In this social climate, teachers can come to view a misbehaving student in terms
of a label (e.g., a “troublemaker” or a “bad kid”; Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015; Okono-
fua, Walton, et al., 2016). Their discipline might then focus on getting rid of the student
as opposed to adjust the context to make it more conducive to better behavior. The inter-
vention takes a psychological approach (i.e., how teachers interpret student misbehavior)
to shift classrooms from the default punitive social climate to one that is more conducive
to teachers and students feeling less disgruntled or threatened. Therefore, the interven-
tion may be particularly beneficial in school contexts that can provide time and space
for teachers and students to nurture their relationships. Put differently, teacher–­student
relationships can be strengthened and discipline problems reduced when policies are in
place to enable local or district leaders to effectively create nonpunitive social climates in
schools.

Integration with Policy and Skill Building

There have been promising developments in discipline policy and skill building, and the
researchers predict that this psychological intervention will work best when integrated
with those approaches. For example, many states have adopted policies to restrict office
referrals or suspensions for defiance or disrespect (see Pre-K Student Discipline Amend-
ment Act of 2015; Pupil Discipline . . . , 2015). This can lead teachers to experience a
loss of a tool in their toolkit to respond to misbehavior. The empathic-­discipline inter-
vention can remind teachers of the importance of seeking new tools that can help them
get students’ perspectives and to respond to misbehavior in a manner that is mindful of
students’ worries about respect and fair treatment. Together, these approaches can reduce
the likelihood of punitive mindsets guiding discipline decisions.
Unlike skill-­building approaches, the empathic-­ discipline intervention does not
teach teachers new information about pedagogy or curriculum. However, the interven-
tion might work best when coupled with such information and training. The content of
the intervention is intended to encourage teachers to actively seek an understanding of
students’ perspectives (Eyal, Steffel, & Epley, 2018). The intervention aims to increase
teachers’ motivation to seek out new or more effective tools—­strategies that show stu-
dents they care for and respect them—to put in their discipline toolkit. This encourage-
ment and motivation can increase the likelihood that teachers seek and meaningfully
engage with relevant skill-­building professional development. For example, cultural com-
petency is a skill-based approach that has received a great deal of attention in how it
might bridge the cultural gap between teachers and students from different backgrounds
(Prater, Wilder, & Dyches, 2008; see also Dee & Penner, 2016). A teacher who remem-
bers the importance of connecting with students—­especially those who might fear they
will not receive fair treatment—­might engage with this kind of professional development
in a more meaningful way that is likely to stick with them and apply it when interacting
with students from stigmatized cultural groups.
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 341

As individual approaches—­psychological, policy, or skill building—­they might do

some work to reduce discipline problems and inequity in their rates of occurrence. The
largest and most lasting effects will likely result when these approaches are strategically
integrated with a common aim. The empathic-­discipline intervention should be under-
stood and employed with attention placed on how it fits in a broader range of approaches
that combat the default punitive climate in many school contexts.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Many psychological interventions have shown large positive effects from a direct focus on
students’ own mindsets about their experiences. Empathic discipline advances that work
with evidence for how a focus on students’ environments (i.e., teachers’ responses to their
students’ behavior) can also improve student outcomes. This intervention attests to the
power of the situation to affect outcomes, for better or for worse (Ross & Nisbett, 1991).
This is most apparent in how the intervention highlights the default punitive context in
schools. Lab studies show that when teachers are reminded that punishment is critical for
students to learn self-­control, the teachers are more likely to view a student as a trouble-
maker when he or she misbehaves. They are also more likely to start students on a path to
suspension and less likely to try to find out more about the cause of the misbehavior. The
default context is so normalized that a brief intervention that reminds teachers to value
students’ perspectives and to help students perceive respect from them can significantly
change the likelihood of a student getting in trouble throughout the school day.
Second, psychologically wise interventions can contribute to lasting change in real-
world outcomes. These interventions are low cost and brief, which can cause them to be
interpreted as magic (Yeager & Walton, 2011). However, they are carefully crafted to
shift how people interpret their experiences in a way that can build on itself with new
experiences over time (see Walton & Wilson, 2018). This is the case with empathic dis-
cipline. It shifts the way teachers interpret misbehavior and the students who misbehave.
Over time, this can change the way teachers interact with students, and students can
come to feel more respected at school. In this way, the intervention provides an example
of how a strategic nudge can be embedded in patterns of interaction such that it can build
on itself and ultimately influence an entire context (see Harackiewicz, Rozek, Hulleman,
& Hyde, 2012; Outes, Sanchez, & Vakis, 2017; Paluck, Shepherd, & Aronow, 2016;
Powers et al., 2016, for other examples).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The high-­priority next steps for the empathic-­discipline intervention include investiga-
tions of mechanisms by which the intervention’s effects benefit teachers, benefit students,
and persist over time, and also include explorations of conditions in which the interven-
tion is most effective, or not.
How might the intervention affect teachers? The preliminary findings indicate that
teachers who engage with the empathic mindset or participate in the empathic-­discipline
intervention are less likely to view students as troublemakers and more likely to respond
to misbehavior in ways that communicate respect to students. Previous research suggests
342 III.  Conflict and Relationships

higher levels of empathy are associated with decreased teacher stress (Platsidou & Agali-
otis, 2017). Other research indicates that decreases in teachers’ stress (e.g., by way of less
perceived threat in teacher–­student relationships) are associated with fewer discipline
problems for their students (O’Brennan, Pas, & Bradshaw, 2017; Pas, Bradshaw, Hersh-
feldt, & Leaf, 2010). Might the empathic-­discipline intervention’s effect on relationships
be in part associated with reductions in less anxiety or stress? Further, research shows
that people’s perception, judgment, and decision making are more likely to be shaped
by stereotypes when they lack cognitive resources (e.g., when stressed or exhausted; see
Spencer, Charbonneau, & Glaser, 2016). If the intervention’s effects are associated with
reductions in stress, might it also reduce the likelihood of stereotyping, as is suggested by
the reduction of troublemaker labeling?
How might the intervention affect students? When college students imagined them-
selves as receiving treatment from a teacher with the empathic mindset, they felt more
respect in the relationship and more motivation to behave well. Also, previously sus-
pended students of teachers who received the empathic-­discipline intervention were more
likely to feel respect in their relationships with all adults at their school. These findings
suggest that students might experience a shift in their construal of respect throughout
the school day. Might the intervention lead students to feel less stress or anxiety in their
relationships with teachers or in school at large? Recent research suggests that such a
shift in construal can lead to long-term reductions in discipline problems (Goyer et al.,
2019).
How might the intervention’s effects extend beyond single teacher–­student relation-
ships? Preliminary results mark a 50% reduction in year-long suspension rates. Also,
previously suspended students reported a heightened perception of respect several months
after teachers participated in the intervention. Might future students (e.g., the next year)
of a teacher who receives the intervention also be less likely to be suspended and more
likely to feel respect with adults at their school? Also, might students of teachers who
receive the intervention continue to be less likely to be suspended and more likely to feel
respect in future years with new teachers?
Under what conditions might the intervention not work? So far, the empathic-­
discipline intervention has been tested in middle schools in adjacent districts that serve
racially diverse student populations (17% Asian, 2% Black, 54% Latino, 7% White,
20% other/unknown). Future research is needed to determine the intervention’s efficacy
in other middle school contexts and at other grade levels. For example, it will be useful to
discover how well the intervention works in schools with (1) more or less racial and socio-
economic status diversity in the student population (e.g., more Black students); (2) vari-
ous default cultural contexts, such as policies for responses to student misbehavior (see
Pre-K Student Discipline Amendment Act of 2015) and school structure and support (see
Gregory, Cornell, & Fan, 2011); and (3) various teacher characteristics, such as their race
(see Egalite, Kisida, & Winters, 2015), stress levels, job satisfaction, and burnout—­each
of which has been associated with the quality of teacher–­student relationships (Johnson
et al., 2009). Research suggests that factors like punitive policies and stressed teachers are
associated with more suspensions for students. The empathic-­discipline intervention may
then be especially effective for teachers affected by these factors.
Answers to these questions will provide a better understanding of the mechanisms
that lead to the overall shift in how teachers and students view each other following
the intervention. It is important to better understand these mechanisms to ensure it can
 The Empathic‑Discipline Intervention 343

predictably improve teacher and student outcomes in various contexts throughout the
country that suffer from high and disproportionate rates of discipline problems.

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 C H A P TE R 15

The Group‑Malleability Intervention

Addressing Intergroup Conflicts by Changing
Perceptions of Outgroup Malleability

Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, and Eran Halperin

In the past few decades, social scientists have sought new tools to address and change
psychological barriers to conflict resolution. One such barrier is group members’ resistance
to changes that promote peace, due to the fear that such changes may lead to disappoint-
ment or be perceived as weakness by the outgroup. A suggested solution to this barrier
involves manipulating individuals’ beliefs regarding the possibility for group change. In the
present study, a field intervention involving Israelis (N = 508) from three locations in Israel
extended previous lab findings by testing the durability of a group-­malleability interven-
tion over a 6-month period of frequent violence. Three different 5-hour interventions were
administered as leadership workshops: The group-­malleability intervention was compared to
a neutral coping-­with-­stress intervention and, importantly, to a state-of-the-art perspective-­
taking intervention. The group-­malleability intervention proved superior to the coping inter-
vention in improving attitudes, hope, and willingness to make concessions, and maintained
this advantage over a 6-month period of intense intergroup conflict. Moreover, it was as
good as, and in some respects superior to, the perspective-­taking intervention. These find-
ings provide the first naturalistic examination of the potential of a group-­malleability interven-
tion to increase openness to conflict resolution.

BACKGROUND

Work on psychological interventions to reduce intergroup tensions is assuming new

importance in light of recent developments in conflict regions around the world. Mil-
lions of refugees are fleeing their homes, and the resulting humanitarian crisis is being
felt worldwide, transforming local or regional conflicts into an urgent global challenge.

346
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 347

Recent analyses suggest that the number of state-based armed conflicts has reached a
new peak since the collapse of the Soviet Union (Melander, Pettersson, & Themner,
2016), supporting the notion that we are in the midst of a global escalation of intergroup
conflicts. These recent developments emphasize the importance of finding ways to atten-
uate the destructive effects of intergroup conflicts.
In the past few decades, social scientists have sought new tools to address and change
psychological barriers to conflict resolution (Hameiri, Porat, Bar-Tal, Bieler, & Halperin,
2014; Paluck, 2009). The assumption that undergirds this approach is that conflicts are
fueled and perpetuated by certain psychological barriers that may arise as an attempt to
cope with the challenging reality of living in a conflict (Bar-Tal, 2007; Ross & Stittinger,
1991). One such barrier is the resistance to change toward peace, due to the fear that any
change would lead to disappointment or be perceived as weakness and be taken advan-
tage of by the outgroup (Bar-Tal, 2013; Bar-Tal, Oren, & Nets-­Zehngut, 2014). The goal
of the current intervention is to attempt to influence a belief that seems to be central to
groups’ resistance to change, which is the belief that the other side will never change.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

One central mindset commonly held by members of groups involved in intractable con-
flicts is the notion that the other side is inherently malevolent and will never change
(Halperin, 2008; Peterson, 2002). Believing that the other side will never change serves
a variety of adaptive functions. First, it shields the individual from disappointment. If
one expects nothing from the other side, one cannot be disappointed by any violent or
harmful actions taken by the other side (Norem & Cantor, 1986). Second, it helps the
individual to justify aggression and violence that are perpetrated by one’s own group
toward the other side (Bar-Tal, 2013; Bar-Tal et al., 2014). If those on the other side are
inherently evil and will never change, they must be resisted by force if necessary, and no
other means (e.g., negotiations, gestures) can be beneficial.
The mindset that the other side cannot change is central to the narratives of groups
involved in intractable conflicts. Indeed, this mindset is often echoed by the leaders of
these groups—­for example, take the famous quote by former Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir, who, on the brink of the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, said, “The
sea is the same sea, and the Arabs are the same Arabs,” implying that just as the sea never
changes, so too will the Palestinians never change (Goldenberg, 2012). In 2012, Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reiterated Shamir’s quote, suggesting he was right
in his evaluations of the Palestinians (Podolsky, 2012). These quotes by Israeli leaders
represent a narrative held by many people in Israel and in other countries involved in
conflicts, which is that the other side will never change.
Believing that the other side will always stay the same is a psychological moat that
helps to keep victims of conflicts away from the stress and distress of the conflict, but also
one that hinders progress toward peace. If there is no chance that the Palestinians will
change, why even try (Bar-Tal & Halperin, 2011; Bar-Tal, Halperin, & Pliskin, 2015)?
If one believes that the other side can never change, investing efforts in actions that may
lead to a reduction in violence or even to reconciliation is perceived as useless. Instead, it
makes more sense to invest resources in order to eliminate potential threats using force
and aggression. The belief that the other side will not change may serve short-term goals
348 III.  Conflict and Relationships

of self-­justification, well-being, and avoidance of disappointment, but may hinder the

possibility of a long-term solution to the conflict (Halperin, 2008; Halperin, Russell,
Trzesniewski, Gross, & Dweck, 2011). Influencing beliefs about the possibility of change
may therefore be a precondition for any type of action that brings conflict resolution.
The potential impact of group-­malleability mindsets in an intergroup conflict con-
text has led researchers to become interested in empirically examining the causal role of
perceived group malleability in motivating support for conflict resolution (Halperin et
al., 2011; Rydell, Hugenberg, Ray, & Mackie, 2007). The idea behind this approach was
that convincing people that groups can change and develop may increase the motivation
of those involved in intractable conflicts to change their attitudes, emotions, and behav-
ior toward the other side (Halperin, Cohen-Chen, & Goldenberg, 2014).
In an attempt to understand the psychological processes related to perceived group
malleability, Halperin and colleagues (2011) manipulated perceptions of group malleabil-
ity among both Israeli and Palestinian samples by asking them to read a mock scientific
report that discussed the possibility of group change. In the malleability condition, par-
ticipants read that groups do not have a fixed, inherent nature, but rather are capable of
positive change (with no mention of Israelis or Palestinians). In the fixed condition, par-
ticipants read a similar article that made the exact opposite arguments (i.e., that groups
are fixed and do not tend to change). Halperin and colleagues predicted that the psycho-
logical mechanism that would be most affected by the manipulation would be negative
attitudes toward the other side, and particularly the belief that the other side is inherently
malevolent. This prediction was based on the assumption that if participants believe
that groups can change, there is less chance that they would think that groups would
have a malevolent nature. Therefore, following this brief manipulation, participants com-
pleted a survey that examined both these attitudes toward the outgroup and their will-
ingness to make the appropriate concessions for peace. Results suggested that those in
the group-­malleability condition expressed less negative attitudes toward the outgroup—­
particularly attitudes related to the inherent evil nature of the other side—and these
negative attitudes mediated support for willingness to make the appropriate concessions
for peace. Results were similar among both Jewish Israeli and Palestinian participants.
This encouraging set of lab studies was followed by additional studies that were
designed to further understand the mechanisms and potential outcomes related to group-­
malleability manipulations. Focusing their attention on an emotional mechanism, Cohen-
Chen, Crisp, and Halperin (2016) suggested that hope—often activated by the appraisal
that situations are dynamic—­may be the main affective outcome of changing percep-
tions of group malleability. Indeed, studies by Cohen-Chen and colleagues (Cohen-Chen,
Crisp, & Halperin, 2015; Cohen-Chen et al., 2016) showed that changes in perceived
malleability mainly influenced participants’ hope for the possibility of conflict resolu-
tion, which in turn increased their willingness to support concessions.
Other studies were designed to examine whether perceived malleability may lead
to constructive outcomes relevant to intergroup conflicts other than support for conces-
sions. In one such study, Halperin and colleagues (2012) showed that perceived group
malleability led to an increased desire to interact with the other side. Further research
examining this question showed that increasing perceptions of group malleability not
only improved the motivation for intergroup interactions but also the quality of such
interactions (Goldenberg et al., 2017). Finally, a set of studies by Wohl and colleagues
(2015) showed not only that group malleability affects the motivation to meet with the
other side but also that perceived malleability can increase the chance that collective
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 349

apology by the outgroup would lead to intergroup forgiveness. This research laid the
psychological foundation from which the group-­malleability intervention was designed.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Although there has been ample lab-based evidence for the effectiveness of a group-­
malleability intervention, to date there has not been any intervention in a field setting
that examined the long-term effects of a group-­malleability manipulation. This interven-
tion was therefore initiated in order to learn more about the potential of using group
malleability as a tool to change conflict-­related attitudes, emotions, and perhaps even
willingness to make concessions in the field. The group-­malleability intervention was
compared to two other interventions. The first one was a perspective-­taking intervention,
which focused on the importance of taking the other side’s perspective when leading a
group, even in challenging situations. It was chosen because of its suggested potential for
conflict resolution and prejudice reduction (Bilali & Vollhardt, 2013; Galinsky & Mos-
kowitz, 2000). However, after a series of three pilot studies, it was altered to enhance its
effectiveness by de-­emphasizing perspective taking in the local Israeli–­Palestinian context
(which evoked resistance from some participants; Sassenrath, Hodges, & Pfattheicher,
2016; Vorauer & Sasaki, 2009; Zaki & Cikara, 2015) and instead discussed the impor-
tance of perspective taking in general. The second intervention was a coping-­with-­stress
intervention that was chosen as a control comparison to both the group-­malleability
and perspective-­taking interventions. The coping-­with-­stress intervention was designed
to teach participants useful coping skills to overcome stressors that leaders often encoun-
ter. Coping was chosen and prepiloted as a control condition because it provided useful
leadership-­related skills, but also because it was unrelated to group-­malleability or con-
flict resolution. Furthermore, a similar workshop has been used as a neutral control con-
dition for a malleability intervention (Yeager, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2013). In order to
examine the longer-­term effects of these interventions, participants’ attitudes and behav-
ior were measured in five time points, up to 6 months after the intervention.

Outcomes
We recruited a sample of Jewish–­Israeli participants (N = 508) from around the country
with diverse backgrounds, ages, and political affiliations (191 males and 317 females,
M = 28.81 years, SD = 8.69). Participants’ attitudes, hope, and support for conciliatory
behavior were measured one time before the intervention and four times following the
intervention: postworkshop, 2 weeks, 2 months, and 6 months after the intervention.
Some participants dropped out of the study during each follow-­up period, leaving us with
59% of the sample in the 6-month follow-­up (N = 300). However, no differences were
found in attrition rate between the groups. The period in which the data were collected
was relatively a tumultuous period in Israel, often referred to as the “silent intifada”
(Caspit, 2014), in which there were multiple terrorist attacks in Israel, conducted primar-
ily by desperate individual Palestinians who were not directly sent by a known terrorist
organization.
We first examined differences in participants’ negative attitudes toward the Palestin-
ians. The scale that was used to estimate these negative attitudes was similar to the one
used in Halperin and colleagues’ (2011) lab study. The scale focused primarily on the
350 III.  Conflict and Relationships

perception that Palestinians are inherently malevolent and included items such as “To
what extent would you say that the Palestinians are evil?” Looking first at the differences
between our three conditions after the intervention, results suggested that participants
in the malleability intervention held significantly fewer negative attitudes compared to
the control coping intervention (see Figure 15.1, Panel A). Analysis suggested no differ-
ence between the group-­malleability intervention and the perspective-­taking intervention
(which was also significantly better compared to the control condition).
Following this comparison of participants’ negative attitudes, we examined differ-
ences in participants’ hope regarding a shared future with the Palestinians. We focused
our attention on hope, as previous work suggested that it was an important outcome
of group-­malleability manipulations (Cohen-Chen, Halperin, Saguy, & van Zomeren,
2014; Wohl et al., 2015). Comparing the group-­malleability and coping conditions fol-
lowing the intervention suggested that participants in the group-­malleability interven-
tion reported significantly higher hope compared to the control coping intervention (see
Figure 15.1, Panel B). Unlike in the case of negative attitudes, we did find a significant
difference between the two interventions. These findings point to at least one outcome
that seems to differentiate between our group-­malleability and perspective-­taking inter-
ventions.
Influencing psychological constructs, such as negative attitudes and hope for the
future, do not necessarily translate into change in support for conciliatory behavior. We
therefore examined three such measures. The first was a scale that examined support for
a two-state solution. A two-state solution represented the most popular solution for the
Israeli–­Palestinian conflict when the original study was conducted in 2011. The general
principles of the two-state solution include an establishment of a Palestinian state, a divi-
sion of Jerusalem, territory exchanges between Israel and Palestine, and a symbolic pay-
ment of reparations by Israel to Palestinian refugees. Between 2010 and the end of 2014
(which is when our intervention was conducted), dramatic changes in public opinion led

FIGURE 15.1.  Average ratings of participants’ negative attitudes (A) and hope (B) at each point
for all three conditions, obtained from the longitudinal model. Error bars are standard errors. For
the sake of simplicity, the distance between points has been constrained to be equal despite the
differences in time.
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 351

to shifts in terms of public support for that idea, which rendered the items on our old
scale obsolete (Hilal, 2007). This is because some major parties in the Israeli government
had completely abandoned the two-state solution as a viable resolution to the conflict.
Looking at differences among all of our intervention participants’ support for a two-
state solution revealed no difference between any of our conditions. To overcome this
limitation, we created a more timely measure of concessions that included symbolic ges-
tures, such as acknowledgment of Palestine as an independent and sovereign country, and
allowing the Palestinian soccer team to play in international games. Indeed, our modified
concession scales revealed a significant difference between the group-­malleability and
the coping interventions, but not between the perspective-­taking and group-­malleability
interventions, providing initial evidence that our intervention was able to shift at least
more symbolic concessions compared to the traditional two-state solution measure.
In addition to our concession measures, we wanted to examine whether our interven-
tion actually affected participants’ decisions involving dividing resources between Israelis
and Palestinians. We therefore added two conciliatory behavior measures that were influ-
enced by economics games. The first such measure was a dictator game (Bolton, Katok,
& Zwick, 1998), in which participants were asked to divide resources worth hundreds of
millions of Israeli shekels (NIS) between Israelis and Palestinians. Similar to our revised
concessions measure, we found significant differences between the group-­malleability
and the coping interventions, but no differences between the group-­malleability and the
perspective-­taking interventions (see Figure 15.2). Our second measure was modeled on a
trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995), in which participants were actually given
10 NIS (approximately $3.00), and were asked to transfer some or all of the amount to
a Palestinian player, in the hope that the Palestinian player would reciprocate. Partici-
pants were told that any amount that would be given back to them by their Palestinian
confederate would be tripled before being given to them. Therefore, if they trusted that
their partner would reciprocate, it made sense to share all of their money with their con-
federate with the hope that they would make more than the initial 10 NIS that were given
to them. Results suggested that participants in the group-­malleability intervention gave
significantly more money to their Palestinian confederate than participants in either the
coping intervention or the perspective-­taking intervention (see Figure 15.2).
Overall, these results point to the difference between the malleability and coping
conditions on all measures except for support for a two-state solution. We found sig-
nificant differences between the group-­malleability and perspective-­taking interventions
only in participants’ hope and in the trust game. Further research should be done to
examine whether these effects are replicated in other field interventions—­however, both
of these results point to a difference in participants’ ability to be optimistic in estimating
outcomes from interacting with the other side. These findings are congruent with recent
work that shows that a group-­malleability intervention mainly influenced Israeli and
Palestinian participants’ ability to cooperate with each other (Goldenberg et al., 2017).

Mechanisms
The group-­malleability intervention influenced participants’ perceptions regarding the
possibility of group change (assessed in a manipulation check). We believe that this gen-
eral perception is relatively easy to influence, as it is an implicit belief that is not con-
stantly reevaluated and reaffirmed as are other beliefs, such as ideology or religiosity
352 III.  Conflict and Relationships

FIGURE 15.2.  Performance in two decision-­making tasks (standardized) at the 6-month follow-
­ p. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals.
u

(Rydell et al., 2007). Participants’ acknowledgment in the possibility of group change

is then applied to specific cases that are relevant to participants, such as the Israeli–­
Palestinian conflict. Mentioning the specific details of the conflict in our pilot studies did
not lead to optimal outcomes (reported below), suggesting that it is better to let partici-
pants make the connection between general perceptions of malleability and the specific
context in which they are in.
The theoretical connection between group malleability and the outcomes measured
in our interventions is easy to explain. Belief in the possibility of group change leads to
more hope, as hope is an emotion driven by the appraisal that the world is dynamic and
could change for the better (Cohen-Chen et al., 2016). The connection of perceived group
malleability to negative attitudes, and particularly attitudes related to groups’ inherently
malevolent nature is also straightforward. If one believes that groups can change, it is
much harder to believe that some people have an inherently evil nature. Following that
rationale, believing in the possibility of change should increase the motivation to try and
influence an outgroup’s change by offering concessions that will help them strive and
succeed. Indeed, these findings have been suggested in previous works (Cohen-Chen,
Halperin, Crisp, & Gross, 2014; Halperin et al., 2011).
In light of these previous findings, we examined two potential mediation models.
In the first model, perceived group malleability following the workshop led to changes
in hope and negative attitudes right after the workshop, which in turn led to changes in
support for conciliatory behavior 6 months after the workshop. In the second model,
perceived group malleability following the workshops mediated all outcomes during the
6-month follow-­up. Although both models led to significant results, it was the simple
model that was better at predicting the existing data (see Figure 15.3). Below, we pro-
vide coefficients of the direct, indirect, and total effects, including confidence intervals
for each mediator. As some outcomes differ in their scales, we standardized all of the
presented outcomes. Furthermore, due to the simplicity of the model, model fit estimates
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 353

Malleability beliefs . 5 9**

(postworkshop) Negative attitudes
–. 2 (6 months)
6*
**

*
–.42*
)
(.12
* ** Hope

–.4
. 37 (6 months)

4* .33**
6)
* (–.1

*
–.11*

–
Malleability mindset –.35** (–.17) New concessions

*
vs. coping condition (6 months)
–. 3 0*
(–.16)
–. 5
9 **
* (– Dictator game
.48

–. 2 6
* **) (6 months)

* **
Trust game
(6 months)

FIGURE 15.3.  Mediation model for all outcomes measured at the 6-month follow-­up. We used
the postworkshop measure of malleability beliefs as a mediator of outcomes at the 6-month fol-
low-­up. Results suggested a significant indirect effect for all measured outcomes. p ≤ .10, p ≤ .05*,
p ≤ .01**, p ≤ .001***.

were irrelevant and therefore are not presented. Overall, results suggest significant indi-
rect effects for all of our outcomes, indicating that differences in malleability beliefs
between the malleability and coping conditions in the postworkshop measure mediated
all of the outcomes in the 6-month follow-­up.

Effects over Time
So far, we have compared the three interventions by aggregating all postworkshop mea-
sures that were taken following the intervention. However, since we have four measures
that were taken after the workshops (postworkshop, 2 weeks, 2 months, and 6 months),
we can also examine changes in our outcomes over time. We focused our analyses on
participants’ hope and negative attitudes toward Palestinians, which were measured dur-
ing these four follow-­ups. Importantly, in our analysis, we examined models that allowed
varied changes across time points (growth curve analysis). However, in most of these
cases, model comparisons suggested that a simple linear model was strongest compared
to all other models. Finally, similar to all other analyses, we controlled for premeasures
of each outcome in the analysis.
Results revealed no change over time in negative attitudes in the group-­malleability
condition, suggesting that the changes that occurred following the intervention were
sustained over time. Indeed, comparing negative attitudes in the 6-month follow-­ups
between the group-­ malleability and coping interventions suggested that differences
were still significant. There were still no differences between the group-­malleability and
perspective-­taking conditions (which were also significantly lower than the control con-
dition; see Figure 15.1, Panel A). Unlike negative attitudes, participants’ hope did seem
354 III.  Conflict and Relationships

to significantly decline in the postworkshop measures. One potential reason for this
decrease is the increase in terrorist attacks that occurred during these 6 months that may
have specifically affected participants’ hope regarding the future. However, even after
this decline, participants’ ratings were still significantly higher compared to the prework-
shop measures and compared to both the perspective-­taking and coping interventions.

Heterogeneity
One important question regarding the heterogeneity of the group-­malleability interven-
tion is whether its impact differs among participants with different political affiliations.
Two opposite hypotheses are offered. First, it is possible that liberals are more influenced
by a group-­malleability intervention, as a plethora of work suggests that liberals are more
susceptible to the notion of change (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Jost, Federico, &
Napier, 2009; Schein & Gray, 2015). However, liberals’ susceptibility to the notion of
change may mean that the impact of the intervention is weaker, since perceptions of mal-
leability are already an integral part of their thinking (Kahn et al., 2018). The current
sample is big enough to examine this important question, which bears on the target audi-
ence of such an intervention.
To address this question, we divided our participants into three political groups:
liberals, centrists, and conservatives. We decided to use a centrist group because unlike
the United States, the Israeli political system includes many different parties and a large
portion of the population considers itself as centrist. For each of these three groups, we
compared the levels of hope and negative attitudes across the group-­malleability and
control coping interventions. Results suggest that the difference between the incremental
and coping intervention groups was mainly driven by differences within rightists and
centrists. In both cases, we found no significant difference between the incremental and
coping conditions for liberals. These results suggest that the malleability intervention
may be especially useful for conservatives, which suggests the possibility that targeting
conservatives might lead to maximal changes.

COUSINS

The idea that changing perceptions of group malleability can influence people’s emotions,
attitudes, and behaviors toward other group members can be associated with two types
of cousins. The first and most obvious cousin is an intervention that is focused on chang-
ing perceptions of malleability of the self and others as a tool to motivate individuals to
confront challenging situations. The second cousin is an intervention that is focused on
changing one’s perception of the outgroup, either through interaction or through per-
spective taking. Here we review both of these approaches.
The idea that perceptions of malleability can serve as a tool for intervention was
developed by Carol Dweck, who suggested that beliefs regarding one’s own malleability
were a factor influencing people’s motivation, especially in light of challenging tasks (see
Dweck, 2006, 2012, for reviews). Focusing initially on the domain of education, Dweck
argued and showed that children who perceived their intelligence as malleable (compared
to those who perceived their intelligence as fixed) were more motivated to overcome edu-
cational challenges that threatened their sense of self (Hong, Chiu, Dweck, Lin, & Wan,
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 355

1999; Nussbaum & Dweck, 2008). These children therefore showed improved perfor-
mance in school compared to children who perceived their intelligence as fixed. Dweck
not only showed that believing in malleability is associated with group performance but
also that this belief can be manipulated, and that changing students’ malleability beliefs
can thus improve their performance in school (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007;
Kamins & Dweck, 1999).
Dweck’s insights in the domain of education were then examined in the context
of interpersonal relations. For example, in a series of studies, Chiu, Dweck, Tong, and
Fu (1997) showed that people who perceived others’ personalities as fixed tended to
make more strict trait judgments regarding other people, whereas those with incremental
beliefs were more lenient in their judgment of others (Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997). Fur-
ther interventions were conducted by Yeager and colleagues, exploring the contribution
of perceived malleability to interpersonal relations. In a series of projects, Yeager and
colleagues showed that convincing participants that other people can change was associ-
ated with reduced aggression (Yeager, Trzesniewski, et al., 2013), hostility (Yeager, Miu,
Powers, & Dweck, 2013), and vengeance after peer conflict (Yeager, Trzesniewski, Tirri,
Nokelainen, & Dweck, 2011). Overall, this large body of work provides ample evidence
of the potential of perceived malleability in improving interpersonal relations, especially
in cases of challenging interactions. We assume some overlap between the individual and
the group-­malleability interventions. Naturally, to believe that groups can change one
has to believe in change among individuals as well. At the same time, we believe that
changes in intergroup emotions and beliefs are driven mainly by people’s views regarding
groups as separate entities and that explains part of the potential embedded in the group-­
malleability interventions, as supported by the data presented above.
Beyond interventions that focus on the notion of malleability of individuals and
groups, there are many intergroup interventions that attempt to change people’s inherent
perception of their outgroup, often with an emphasis on the similarities between one’s
ingroup and the outgroup. These interventions can be divided into a few subtypes. The
first type involves attempting to convince group members that they are actually similar
to the outgroup. For example, priming common ingroup identity among racial groups
leads to a reduction in intergroup bias (see Gaertner, Dovidio, Anastasio, Bachman, &
Rust, 1993, for a review). Even convincing rival groups that they have genetic similarities
can also reduce explicit bias and in turn lead to an increase in support for peacemaking
(Kimel, Huesmann, Kunst, & Halperin, 2016). Eliciting a sense of similarity seems to be
efficient in blurring intergroup boundaries and thus changing group members’ percep-
tions of their ingroup.
A second and related type of intervention does not explicitly try to convince group
members of similarity to the outgroup but rather asks group members to take the per-
spective of the outgroup, either with or without the presence of the outgroup. This is done
with the hope that taking the other side’s perspective would either lead to emphasizing the
similarities between the experiences of both groups or at least to a greater understanding
of their position. For example, in a study by Broockman and Kalla (2016), canvassers
asked voters to think about a time when they themselves were judged negatively for being
different, in order to emphasize their similarity with transgender people, showing that
this had an effect on attitudes toward transgendered individuals. In general, perspective-­
taking interventions seem to lead to a variety of positive outcomes, including decreases
in prejudice (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000), increases in ingroup help (Batson, Chang,
356 III.  Conflict and Relationships

Orr, & Rowland, 2002; Bilewicz, 2009), and increased willingness to engage in contact
(Wang, Kenneth, Ku, & Galinsky, 2014). Importantly, however, some research suggests
that perspective-­taking interventions may backfire. One reason for this is that when par-
ticipants are asked to take the perspective of the outgroup, they either realize how big the
gap in views between them and their outgroup actually is, or focus on how much effort
would be required to bridge the gap between the two groups (see Maoz, 2011; Sassenrath
et al., 2016; Vorauer & Sasaki, 2009; Zaki & Cikara, 2015, for similar arguments).
The perspective-­taking workshop used in the current project took advantage of
insights from these studies. Participants were told that taking others’ perspective is an
important way to understand their motivations and needs and therefore an extremely
important tool for decision making. Indeed, we found that our perspective-­taking inter-
vention led to reduced negative attitudes compared to our control coping intervention
and to increased willingness to make concessions. We did find in our pilot studies, how-
ever, that mentioning the local context of the conflict led to a reversed order and to an
increase in negative attitudes. These findings reveal a potential moderator to perspective-­
taking outcomes.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

Each group-­malleability workshop was 5 hours long and included a preworkshop ques-
tionnaire (30 minutes), general leadership content (similar to all conditions, 1.5 hours),
and the relevant content of each condition (3 hours; see Table 15.1). The general leader-
ship content section was identical in all three groups and was inspired by a leadership
development model created by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leader-
ship. Participants learned about transformational leaders (Bass, 1985) and how different
leadership styles influence group performance. After the general leadership content, the

TABLE 15.1.  Summary of the Workshop Schedule

9:00–9:30 Preworkshop questionnaire Measurement of personality traits and potential
moderators. All relevant outcomes were measured in
another premeasure 2–4 days before the intervention.

9:30–10:30 General leadership content Identical in all three groups and inspired by a leadership
development model created by the Harvard Kennedy
School’s Center for Public Leadership.

10:30–11:00 Break

11:00–12:15 Intervention content, part 1 Introduction of the central idea of the intervention
using a story line, a video, and an active discussion.

12:15–12:30 Break

12:30–1:30 Intervention content, part 2 Examining historical examples and practicing

implementing the ideas of the intervention using a
simulation between management and employees of a
factory.

1:30–2:00 Postworkshop questionnaire

 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 357

workshop shifted to fit with each of the conditions. The structure of the interventions
was similar for all conditions in terms of schedule and type of activities—­however, the
main message of each intervention was tailored to each condition. In addition to making
sure that the structure of the interventions would be similar, a second goal was that these
three interventions would be similar in how much they were engaging and entertaining
for participants. Indeed, our tests of participants’ engagements suggested that partici-
pants enjoyed our interventions in a similar way.
The malleability workshop focused on the benefits of remaining a relevant leader in
an ever-­changing context, highlighting the importance of identifying and encouraging
change in groups. In the first part of this section of the workshop, participants were told
that they would focus on a specific aspect of leadership—­namely, the ability to identify
and facilitate group change. To open this segment, the instructors presented the story of
Amir, head of a research and development group in a large company who failed to recog-
nize positive changes in his employees. Ignoring his employees’ changes decreased Amir’s
relevance and eventually led to a deterioration in his relationship with them. After going
over the story, instructors led a discussion on the importance of believing in change, iden-
tifying it, and facilitating it. Next, participants were introduced to the concept of change
in human development and then learned about brain plasticity (by watching a short video).
Moving from the individual to the group level, participants learned about the possibility
of change in groups, focusing on different aspects that groups could change, such as their
stereotypes of others or of themselves, their ideologies, and their lifestyle. Participants
were asked to provide examples in each domain following a discussion with the group.
Instructors then provided participants with their own examples for each of these domains.
The second part of the workshop (after the second break) focused on group change
and leadership. Workshop instructors emphasized the fact that change is never easy, and
that leaders must be willing to embrace and facilitate transformations in order to remain
relevant. Participants were given three examples of leaders who were able to identify and
amplify group change: Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s legendary chief executive officer (CEO), recognized changes in con-
sumer preference in the domain of personal computing and developed products that fit
these emerging needs. Martin Luther King Jr., a leader and activist for race equality in
the United States, was able to recognize that affordances created societal changes within
the United States that allowed him to lead a successful collective action movement call-
ing for equality. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female head of state in Africa, was able
to recognize and capitalize on important changes in her home country of Liberia and
lead the country to a better future. We chose these three figures as they could serve
as excellent examples not only for the group-­malleability interventions but also to the
perspective-­taking and coping interventions. Indeed, in each workshop we used the same
three people, focusing the participants’ attention on different aspects in these three fig-
ures’ biography, behaviors, and statements.
Following this section, participants took part in a simulated negotiation between
the management group of a paper facility and the facility’s union representatives. The
context of the negotiation was the need to cut costs in order to improve the facility’s
profits. Participants were divided into three groups: management, employees, and observ-
ers. Each group was given different materials prior to the negotiation. After conduct-
ing the negotiation, participants analyzed the position of each group, emphasizing the
notion of group change. For example, one of the key points during the negotiation was
358 III.  Conflict and Relationships

management’s belief in the employees’ ability to change a few crucial work-­related norms
in order to improve production.
Finally, to conclude the workshop, we focused on the change in groups that can lead
to improved intergroup relations. A few historical examples were used, including changes
in European countries such as England and France that led to tremendous improvements
in their relationship, changes in Arab society that led to the Arab Spring, and the con-
flict in Ireland. For example, when examining the story of the Irish conflict, partici-
pants learned about the bloody history between the unionists (mostly Protestants) and
the Irish nationalists (mostly Catholics). They then learned about changes occurring in
Ireland, and especially change in the approach of the Sinn Féin political party that led to
a greater willingness for peace. Participants observed the processes that occurred within
each group, leading to these intergroup changes.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Two nuances played an important role in the success of our group-­malleability inter-
vention. The first nuance is that the workshops were framed as a leadership workshop
rather than a conflict-­resolution intervention. Both during the recruiting and during the
workshops, participants were explicitly told that they were taking part in a pilot study
designed to examine the utility of different leadership workshops. Leadership was chosen
as a focus to provide an appealing framework that would be broad enough to encom-
pass all three interventions. We believe that using the leadership framework was a good
strategy, as it reduced potential reactance to the notion of conflict resolution (Bar-Tal &
Halperin, 2011; Brehm, 1966).
The second and perhaps more important nuance of our workshop is that we did not
mention the specific context of the Israeli–­Palestinian conflict throughout the interven-
tion but rather talked about group malleability in general and used examples that were
far from the local context. This decision was made after we conducted two pilot studies
to test whether mentioning the Israeli–­Palestinian conflict would be helpful or harmful.
Results of our pilot studies indicated that not mentioning the Israeli context yielded the
best outcomes in changing participants’ negative attitudes toward Palestinians, increas-
ing participants’ hope regarding a mutual future, and increasing willingness to make
concessions. In fact, in pilot studies in which the Israeli–­Palestinian conflict was highly
emphasized during the intervention, we even saw an increase in negative attitudes for
some of the participants. We therefore believe that not mentioning the specific context of
the conflict was crucial to the success of our intervention.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Our findings provide encouraging evidence for the possibility of using the group-­
malleability intervention to reduce negative attitudes, increase hope, and increase the
willingness to make concessions necessary to promote the resolution of protracted inter-
group conflict. Our longitudinal analysis suggests that changing people’s perceptions
of group malleability may have long-­lasting effects. With this knowledge at hand, it is
important to consider how our intervention can be adapted by practitioners and used in
tandem with other known interventions. Next we examine some of these opportunities.
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 359

Adoption at Scale
As part of the process of adopting our interventions with a larger audience, we are enthu-
siastic about the possibility of examining the effects of our group-­malleability interven-
tion in other challenging intergroup contexts. For example, our workshop could poten-
tially be used to train professionals who are vulnerable to developing intergroup bias in
their daily lives. Police officers, teachers, nurses and doctors, judges, and many other
professionals whose work is highly affected by their relations to negatively stereotyped
groups could potentially benefit from our workshops. The general message of the work-
shop has the advantage, as discussed above, that it does not raise the resistance that these
professionals may have to (or the offense they might take from) a direct message about
changing their attitudes or reducing their prejudice (Paluck, 2009). We have already
started using such workshops in Israel, as part of the work of aChord: Social Psychology
for Social Change, a research-­based organization aimed at promoting tolerant equal and
respectful relations among different groups within the Israeli society. Under the umbrella
of that organization, training and workshops are provided to school principals, teachers,
and business managers in an attempt to reduce stereotypes and promote less biased and
more harmonious relations among different identity groups within the Israeli society.
In addition to using our workshops in a classroom setting, another area of growth
for our intervention is in finding ways to convey the message of our intervention using
other modes of communication. The most readily available option is to conduct the
group-­malleability intervention online. Indeed, there has been recent growth in the use of
psychological interventions—­and specifically mindset interventions—­online (Paunesku
et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2016). We believe that as in those studies, the general message
of group malleability can be effective even if disseminated online. However, future work
should examine the aspects of the intervention that are lost in the transition to an online
intervention. For example, based on our initial analysis, it seems that participants who
came to our workshop with someone they knew were more affected by its content. Such
effects are probably less strong in online interventions, which might diminish the overall
impact of a group-­malleability intervention delivered online.
In addition to conducting our intervention online, the general message of group mal-
leability might be disseminated in other ways that could reach a larger audience. For
example, one of the big supporters of the idea of group malleability as a motivating tool
for conflict resolution is the Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, who initiated a large social
initiative focusing on change beliefs under the name “Israeli Hope.” In a recent speech,
Rivlin (2015) said, “I stand as one who really believes. Not because there is no choice, but
because right before my eyes I see a process of change taking place.” In addition to being
used by public figures, our interventions might also be used as an advertising campaign
for organizations interested in using efficient messaging in order to change population-­
level attitudes in the contexts of conflicts (see, e.g., Hameiri, Porat, Bar-Tal, & Halperin,
2016). It is still unclear how changing the method of dissemination would affect the
impact of the intervention, and future work will be needed to examine these effects.

Group Malleability Combined with Contact

An immediate extension of our work is to think about our group-­malleability interven-
tion as a precursor to other interventions designed to improve conflict resolution. The
basic rationale behind this approach is that changing perceptions of group malleability
360 III.  Conflict and Relationships

may enhance the impact of other well-known interventions as it would increase group
members’ hopefulness regarding a potential mutually beneficial outcome. One type of
intervention that might especially benefit from group-­malleability interventions is the
contact-­encounter intervention. Contact is perhaps the most used and well-­researched
approach to alleviate tension and reduce prejudice between groups (Paluck, Green, &
Green, 2019; Tropp, 2015; Zhou, Page-Gould, Aron, Moyer, & Hewstone, 2018). The
idea behind contact encounters is that by meeting members of the opposite side in a con-
structive environment, group members may be able to develop a better understanding of
the other side, as well as acknowledge similarities between the two groups.
Since the contact approach was first suggested (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998; Petti-
grew & Tropp, 2006; Williams, 1947), its popularity has increased substantially (Hews-
tone & Brown, 1986; Maoz & McCauley, 2008; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). In Israel, for
example, a series of representative public opinion surveys conducted during 2002–2005
indicated that about 16% of the entire population of Israel had attended organized con-
tact workshops (Maoz, 2011). However, alongside optimism regarding the potentially
positive outcomes of contact, there have been some findings that suggest that contact may
not be as useful in leading to real and long-term change as hoped, especially in intergroup
conflicts (MacInnis & Page-Gould, 2015; Maoz, 2011; Paluck et al., 2019). One of the
challenges that has been suggested in the literature is that during contact encounters,
group members learn about the position of the other side, which makes them realize how
challenging reconciliation will be for the two groups. It seems possible, therefore, that
changing perceptions of group malleability may be useful to alleviate some of these con-
cerns by making the possibility of group change more readily available.
We recently conducted an intervention that provides an initial investigation of the pos-
sibility of extending our intervention to the Palestinian population (Goldenberg et al., 2017).
This intervention was designed with the intention of using a group-­malleability manipu-
lation as a way to improve a contact encounter between Jewish Israeli and Palestinian–­
Israeli adolescents. Both Jewish and Palestinian students were assigned to either a group-­
malleability or a coping intervention. Unlike the adult intervention that lasted 5 hours, the
content of these workshops was divided into three separate meetings that were designed
to prepare participants for a fourth contact encounter between those schools. During the
contact encounter, participants played a few introduction games, as well as completed a
set of tasks that measured their ability to cooperate with one another. Results suggested
that participants’ performance in the group-­malleability condition was significantly bet-
ter compared to the coping condition (Goldenberg et al., 2017). Although these findings
cannot directly speak to the impact of the intervention on the Palestinian participants com-
pared to the Israeli participants, the results are encouraging. Further work should be done
to examine the specific effects of our intervention on Palestinian participants.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

One of the more influential insights from psychology is that we operate in the world on
the basis of how we perceive the world to be (rather than how the world actually is). From
a motivational perspective, our motivation to influence the world around us is deter-
mined in part by our estimation of whether we are actually able to impact the world or
not (Bandura, 1997, 2006). Evidence for this insight can also be seen at the group level:
groups are more likely to support a collective-­action movement if they believe that it may
 The Group‑Malleability Intervention 361

change the reality and lead to the desired outcome (van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears,
2008). The belief that reality can change increases the motivation to change it and forms
a self-­perpetuating cycle of change.
But the belief that one can influence the world is conditioned on a more basic belief
that change and development are possible (Dweck, 2000, 2006). If a person does not
believe that people can change in general, then it’s likely that they won’t believe that
investing energy in a specific situation may lead to change. A similar rationale can be
applied to the group context. If group members hold the belief that other groups cannot
change their inherent nature, this is most likely to affect their belief regarding a specific
group change. Our current intervention provides further evidence relevant to this theo-
retical background and to the fact that changing this belief can have important down-
stream implications.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The current intervention opens many interesting questions that call for further research.
Here we present two main next steps that are currently planned. The first step involves
further understanding of the active ingredient in our group-­malleability manipulation.
One important question that stems from our work is when participants are led to believe
that groups can change, do they focus their attention on their own group or on the other
group? Groups in conflicts often develop strong systems of moral justification for their
behavior (Bar-Tal, 2007). It is therefore likely that group members think to themselves,
“My group is completely OK, but now there is hope that the other side could change.”
We therefore hope to investigate this question and further examine whether convinc-
ing group members that their own group can also change may increase or decrease the
impact of the intervention.
The second future direction involves the broader impacts of our intervention for
those not directly targeted. The current work was done with a focus on just the individu-
als who took part in the interventions, ignoring their social networks. However, just like
other behaviors, interventions may also spread (see, e.g., Centola, 2010). Participants in
our intervention may share the content they learn with friends or family, and these people
may either be influenced by the message, resist its effect, or even polarize their own opin-
ion as a reaction to the message. Learning more about the potential impacts on others of
the content of our intervention is key to leading a real change in the Israeli society. In a
recent project, we began examining this question by creating predesigned social networks
to manipulate and monitor real-time interactions among group members (Centola, 2010;
Coman, Momennejad, Drach, & Geana, 2016). A certain portion of our network will go
through our intervention, which allows us to examine its effects on their social network.
Overall, the impact that our intervention has on influencing challenging intergroup rela-
tions motivates us to continue our research in this domain with the hope that it could be
utilized for conflict resolution and also for real group change.

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 C H A P TE R 16

The Couples Activity for Reappraising

Emotions Intervention
A 7‑Minute Marital Conflict Intervention
Benefits Relational and Individual Well‑Being

Erica B. Slotter and Laura B. Luchies

Marital quality normatively declines over time, which is especially unfortunate given that
it is a key contributor to overall life satisfaction. In an effort to preserve marital quality, we
designed an intervention that uses emotional reappraisal to help spouses manage the
negative emotions they experience during marital conflict. We tested the Couples Activity for
Reappraising Emotions (CARE) intervention in a 2-year study of married couples (N = 120).
Couples that spent 21 minutes over the course of a year engaging in exercises in which they
viewed their marital conflicts from the perspective of a benevolent third party experienced
stable marital quality, whereas those in a control group experienced a typical decline in mari-
tal quality. Moreover, couples in the CARE intervention group also reported better psycho-
logical health than those in the control group. In this chapter, we discuss procedures of the
CARE intervention, processes that may underlie its effectiveness, predictions about couples
for whom it may be less effective, and possibilities for scaling the intervention to make it
available and easy for anyone to use. The success of the CARE intervention demonstrates
that brief, inexpensive, theory-­based social-­psychological interventions can address ongo-
ing, costly social problems, such as marital dissatisfaction.

BACKGROUND

Marital quality is one of the most crucial social factors in predicting people’s health and
well-being (e.g., Myers, 2000; Parker-­Pope, 2010). Copious research has documented
that lower-­quality marriages come with health costs, whereas higher-­quality marriages

366
 The CARE Intervention 367

yield health benefits (e.g., Burman & Margolin, 1992; Carr & Springer, 2010; Kiecolt-­
Glaser & Newton, 2001; Proulx, Helms, & Buehler, 2007; Slatcher, 2010; Whisman,
2001). In terms of psychological health, greater marital quality is associated with greater
feelings of general life satisfaction and well-being, with over half of people who report
being “very happy” in their marriages also report high levels of general happiness. In
contrast, only 10% of people who report being “pretty happy” in their marriages report
similarly high levels of overall happiness. Indeed, the association of life satisfaction with
marital quality is stronger than life satisfaction’s ties to job satisfaction or overall health
(Heller, Watson, & Hies, 2004). Low levels of marital happiness have been associated
with an increased risk of negative mental health outcomes, including both subclinical and
clinical levels of depression (e.g., Beach, 2014; Whisman, 2001).
Greater marital quality also confers benefits for physical health. For example, among
patients who have had a coronary artery bypass graft, those who reported high rather
than low marital satisfaction 1 year following the surgery were 3.2 times more likely to
be alive 15 years after the surgery. This effect could not be explained by demographic,
behavioral, or baseline health measures (King & Reis, 2012; see also Coyne et al., 2001).
A recent meta-­analysis demonstrated that the associations of marital quality with vari-
ous health outcomes, ranging from cardiovascular events to chronic illness, had effect
sizes similar in magnitude to the effects of diet and exercise on health outcomes (Robles,
Slatcher, Trombello, & McGinn, 2014). The benefits of high-­quality marriages and the
tolls of strained marriages have been documented across adulthood, with analogous
effects emerging among the newly married, those in midlife, and older adults (e.g., Beach,
Katz, Kim, & Brody, 2003; Carr, Freedman, Cornman, & Schwarz, 2014).
Despite the fact that a strong marital bond is an important factor in determining
health outcomes, marital quality normatively declines over time. Across couples, marital
quality typically declines throughout the course of a marriage, with couples especially at
risk for a drop in marital quality around the time they first become parents (e.g., Glenn,
1998; VanLaningham, Johnson, & Amato, 2001). Although the fact that marital quality
tends to decline over time is well-known, exactly why this happens is not. Some contrib-
uting factors likely include a ceiling effect (i.e., couples typically start their marriages
so happy that their satisfaction has nowhere to go but down), habituation (i.e., spouses
simply get used to each other’s positive traits and behaviors and take them for granted),
and an accumulation of frustrations over time.
Given the unfortunate, almost paradoxical, effects wherein happy marriages are
essential for well-being and yet marital happiness tends to decline, relationship schol-
ars have sought to identify factors that predict marital quality. These factors may, in
turn, be risk factors for negative psychological and physical health outcomes. Dozens
of factors have been identified, including conflict dynamics within the marriage, social
support provided by the marriage, and external factors placing stress on the marriage
(e.g., F
­ incham & Beach, 1999; Neff & Karney, 2007; Reis, 2012). One recent theoreti-
cal model (Slatcher & Schoebi, 2017) categorized risk factors into three groups: external
stressors, a lack of marital strengths, and marital strains. External stressors include fac-
tors outside of the marital dyad, such as financial pressures, parenting demands, or work
concerns. Inadequate marital strengths include a lack of positive behaviors and interac-
tion patterns, such as poor partner responsiveness, low levels of intimacy, or insuffi-
cient self-­disclosure. Marital strains include negative behaviors and interaction patterns,
such as hostility, demand/withdraw conflict patterns, or negative affect reciprocity. The
368 III.  Conflict and Relationships

effects of the factors within each category can be moderated by individual differences,
such as attachment style or self-­esteem.
Interventions designed to promote marital quality could target any of these catego-
ries. However, one marital strain has been shown to be an especially robust predictor
of marital quality: negative affect reciprocity. Negative affect reciprocity is a chain of
retaliatory negativity between spouses during marital conflict (Gottman, 1998). Nega-
tive affect reciprocity occurs during conflict when spouses counter their partner’s com-
plaint or criticism with an escalated complaint or criticism of their own. This pattern
of interaction creates a destructive cycle in which behaviors become increasingly hostile
as the conflict progresses. Negative affect reciprocity reliably distinguishes couples that
are experiencing low marital quality and marital distress from higher-­quality, nondis-
tressed couples (e.g., Gottman, 1998; Fincham & Beach, 1999). One of the greatest chal-
lenges for couples locked into negative exchanges is to find an adaptive way to exit from
such cycles (Weiss & Heyman, 1997). Moreover, the effects of negative affect reciprocity
within a marriage are likely cumulative—­the longer the pattern of behavior persists in
the relationship, the less happy the relationship becomes. Thus, breaking the pattern of
negative affect reciprocity should benefit couples at any stage in their relationship.
Scholars and practitioners have attempted to develop therapeutic interventions to
interrupt cycles of negativity before they become all consuming (e.g., Baucom, Shoham,
Mueser, Daiuto, & Stickle, 1998). For example, behavioral marital therapy uses social
learning approaches to help spouses gain insight into problematic interaction patterns
and learn to modify their behavior (e.g., Baucom & Epstein, 1990). Although traditional
psychotherapy approaches can help spouses learn to manage their emotions and behavior
more constructively, they come with drawbacks. They tend to require considerable invest-
ment of time and money on the part of the couple. Couples must have both the insight to
know their relationship could be improved and the resources to seek and follow through
with such treatment. Additionally, couples that are seeing a marital therapist may already
be sufficiently distressed in their marriages that therapeutic interventions are rendered
less effective than if they had been implemented sooner.
Inspired by research demonstrating that brief, theory-­based, social-­psychological
interventions can yield remarkably enduring improvements in people’s lives by fostering
thoughts and behaviors that self-­reinforce over time (see Walton & Wilson, 2018, for
a review), we developed a brief intervention aimed at reducing conflict-­based negative
affect reciprocity. Given that marital happiness is strongly influenced by recursive, self-­
reinforcing dynamics, such as negative affect reciprocity, it represents a promising target
for a social-­psychological intervention. The relative ease and low cost of the interven-
tion’s implementation, together with its directed, theoretically driven approach, make
it a promising way for couples to interrupt the cycle of negative affect reciprocity in the
relationship. Alleviating this marital strain can help preserve marital quality over time,
thereby allowing people to reap the psychological and physical health benefits of being
in a satisfying marriage.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Our intervention, called the Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) inter-
vention, capitalized on the power of emotional reappraisal—reinterpreting the meaning
 The CARE Intervention 369

of emotion-­eliciting situations (Gross, 2002, 2015)—to help people manage negative

emotions constructively. According to appraisal theories of emotion, it is the subjec-
tive interpretation of an event, rather than the event itself, that leads to specific emo-
tional reactions (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985). Emotional reappraisal entails reframing an
emotion-­laden event in order to change one’s emotional response to it, thus mitigating
any associated distress (Gross, 1998, 2015; Ochsner & Gross, 2005).
At its core, emotional reappraisal involves construing emotion-­eliciting occurrences
in ways that alter their meaning with a focus on engaging in “cold” cognitive processing,
rather than “hot” emotional processing (e.g., Gross, 2002; Lazarus & Alfert, 1964; Och-
sner & Gross, 2005). Emotional reappraisal asks people to reconsider an emotion-­eliciting
event from the perspective of a person who is not involved in the event itself. The goal is
to encourage people to distance themselves psychologically from an emotion-­laden expe-
rience by considering the experience from an outsider’s view. This psychological distance
allows people to consider the event—its implications, consequences, and resolution—­
without becoming overwhelmed by high levels of affect (e.g., Kross, Ayduk, & Mischel,
2005; Richards, Butler, & Gross, 2003; Sbarra, Boals, Mason, Larson, & Mehl, 2013;
Slotter & Ward, 2015). When applied to marital conflict, this psychological distance
will reduce people’s feelings of distress during disagreements with their spouse. Greater
psychological distance and less distress will allow people to respond constructively, in a
manner that promotes the health of their relationship, rather than react destructively, in
a manner that escalates a cycle of negativity.
Research has demonstrated that reappraising a variety of negative emotional events
improves subjective well-being, especially when contrasted with other emotional regula-
tion strategies, such as suppressing emotions (e.g., John & Gross, 2004; Gross & John,
2003). For example, a 6-week intervention study of older adults experiencing depression
and life challenges contrasted different types of cognitive therapies (Watt & Cappeliez,
2000). A key finding was that participants receiving “integrative therapy,” in which they
had completed emotional reappraisal exercises, exhibited reduced depressive sympto-
mology over a 3-month time period compared to participants receiving “instrumental
therapy,” in which they had passively recalled positive coping strategies that could be
applied to their current negative life conditions. These and other research findings (e.g.,
Gross, 1998, 2002; Slotter & Ward, 2015) show that emotional reappraisal can reduce
emotional distress in response to negative life events.
The CARE intervention applied these theoretical principles to negative affect reci-
procity in marital conflict. The intervention was adapted from a laboratory experiment
in which participants were asked to (1) reconsider an interpersonal conflict from a third-
party perspective, (2) ruminate about the conflict, or (3) were given no instructions (Ray,
Wilhelm, & Gross, 2008; see also Kross et al., 2005). Participants in the reappraisal
group experienced less anger and distress about the conflict than did participants in the
rumination group. Conflict-­related anger and distress dissipated more rapidly among
people who completed emotional reappraisal exercises than among those who did not.
Given the default tendency to view interpersonal conflict from a first-­person perspective,
helping people shift their perspective to that of a third party should provide psychologi-
cal distance from emotion-­laden events, such as interpersonal conflict, and thus reduce
the negative emotional consequences of those events (e.g., Robinson & Swanson, 1993;
Verduyn, Van Mechelen, Kross, Chezzi, & Van Bever, 2012).
Applied to marital quality, the same emotional reappraisal approach should help
370 III.  Conflict and Relationships

spouses view their disagreements from a more distanced, less emotionally “hot” perspec-
tive. In the CARE intervention, we did not ask participants to view conflicts with their
spouse from the perspective of any third party. Instead, we asked them to adopt the per-
spective of a benevolent third party who “wants the best for all involved” and to consider
how this person might “find the good that could come from” disagreements. With this
distanced and benevolent perspective, spouses are prompted to see the bigger picture of
their relationship and respond constructively instead of reacting destructively. Compared
to destructive responses, which escalate conflict-­related distress, constructive responses
would reduce conflict-­related distress; this dissipation represents a disruption in the cycle
of negative affect reciprocity. Disrupting negative affect reciprocity helps preserve marital
quality by reducing one type of marital strain that predicts declines in relational happi-
ness. Furthermore, emotional reappraisal of marital conflict should be associated with
better psychological well-being for the people in these happier marriages.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
To test the effectiveness of the CARE intervention, we conducted a 2-year study of het-
erosexual married couples (N = 120; see Finkel, Slotter, Luchies, Walton, & Gross, 2013,
for details). Both members of the couple participated in the study, although each individ-
ual completed study measures independently. At the beginning of the study and every 4
months thereafter, participants completed an online survey and reported on their marital
quality, including feelings of trust, love, passion, intimacy, satisfaction, and commitment.
At each follow-­up survey, which occurred every 4 months for the remainder of the study,
participants recalled and provided a brief, fact-based summary of the most significant
conflict they had experienced in their marriage since the previous follow-­up. They also
reported on their feelings of postconflict distress as a proxy for negative affect reciproc-
ity.
The first year of the 2-year study did not include the CARE intervention, and all par-
ticipants underwent identical procedures. During the first year of the study, participants’
reports showed decreases in marital quality, replicating the well-­documented normative
decline in marital quality (e.g., Glenn, 1998; VanLaningham et al., 2001). This decline
was evident in all six aspects of marital quality, as well as in an overall composite mea-
sure of marital quality.
One year into the study, we randomly assigned half of the couples to the CARE
intervention and the other half to a control group. During Year 2, all couples recalled
and described a conflict they had experienced, just as they had in Year 1. Couples in the
control group did not receive any additional instructions, whereas couples in the CARE
intervention condition were instructed to engage in emotional reappraisal techniques
after describing the conflict. They completed an additional writing task that involved
three prompts and lasted approximately 7 minutes. In it, they were asked to take the per-
spective of a neutral third party who wants the best for everyone and consider how they
could overcome barriers to adopting this perspective during future conflicts. Full details
on the intervention and its implementation are available in the “Intervention Content and
Implementation” section.
 The CARE Intervention 371

Participants in the control condition reported continued decreases in marital quality

during Year 2, extending the trajectory they had experienced in Year 1. However, the
decline in marital quality was stemmed among participants in the CARE intervention. In
fact, the slope of marital quality in Year 2 among participants who completed the CARE
intervention was statistically flat; the decline in marital quality disappeared for these
participants in the second year of the study. Figure 16.1 illustrates the effect of the CARE
intervention on the composite measure of marital quality.
We also examined how the CARE intervention might have impacted participants’
psychological well-being. Whereas the effects on marital quality were published previ-
ously (Finkel et al., 2013), our examination of psychological well-being uses unpublished
data from the same study, so we are including more details about it here. On the first
and final surveys of the 2-year study, participants reported on three indicators of psycho-
logical distress: depressive symptomology (Radloff, 1977), psychological stress (Cohen,
Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983), and life dissatisfaction (Diener, Emoons, Larsen, &
Griffin, 1985). We used multilevel modeling analyses to predict each of the three indi-
cators of psychological distress at the end of the study from participants’ CARE inter-
vention status (control = 0, reappraisal = 1), controlling for the same measure at the
beginning of the study, 2 years earlier. As detailed in Table 16.1, CARE intervention
participants exhibited significantly better end-of-study psychological outcomes than did
control participants. Thus, the CARE intervention improves both relational and indi-
vidual well-being.

Notes T0 is a SEPARATE variable, intake is not part of this central analysis….T1 is the first followup wave
Overall Composite made by z-scoring composites and averaging them into 1

Composite Marital Quality

0.3
Control Condition

CARE Intervention Condition

0.2

0.1

0.0

-0.1
CARE Intervention Begins

-0.2

-0.3
0 4 8 12 16 20 24

Months Since Study Entry (Waves 1–7)

FIGURE 16.1. Trajectories of marital quality for participants in the CARE intervention condi-
tion and participants in the control condition. Reprinted with permission from Finkel, Slotter,
Luchies, Walton, and Gross (2013).
372 III.  Conflict and Relationships

TABLE 16.1.  The CARE Intervention’s Effects on Psychological Well-Being

Psychological distress variable Parameter estimate t value
End-of-study depressive symptomology
Intake depressive symptomology  .66 12.99**
CARE intervention status –.14 –2.23*

End-of-study stress
Intake stress  .80 11.51**
CARE intervention status –.11 –2.44*

End-of-study life dissatisfaction

Intake life dissatisfaction  .78 12.67**
CARE intervention status –.15 –2.41*

Note. Degrees of freedom ranged from 115 to 119; slight variations were due to missing data.
*p < .05; **p < .001.

Mechanism
We next sought to examine the mechanism by which the CARE intervention might be
buffering participants against drops in marital quality over time. We tested two possible
mechanisms. The first tested mechanism was the possibility that those in the CARE
intervention condition experienced less severe marital conflicts than control participants.
Results showed that this was not the case; there was no notable difference in how severe
participants in the two conditions rated the conflicts they had experienced.
The second tested mechanism was the possibility that those in the CARE interven-
tion experienced less distress related to their marital conflicts than control participants—­
even though the conflicts they had experienced were just as severe. Results provided
evidence for this mechanism. CARE intervention participants experienced less distress
about their marital conflicts over the course of the second year of the study, which was
the same time they were engaging in the intervention. Additional mediation analyses
showed that this reduction in conflict-­related distress went on to predict more stable
levels of marital quality. In sum, couples that participated in the CARE intervention
experienced less conflict-­related distress over time, and this led them to experience more
stable marital quality over time.

Effects over Time
Because we have tested the CARE intervention in only one study to date, we have limited
evidence about its long-term effects. However, from this study we do know that marital
quality stabilized among couples that engaged in the CARE intervention, and that this
stabilization lasted throughout the year that the intervention took place. On the other
hand, marital quality continued a downward trajectory among control participants. We
expect that both trends would continue, causing the gap in marital quality between those
who engaged in the CARE intervention and those who did not to widen over time.
Learning, practicing, and mastering new skills takes much practice, repetition, and
time. Yet, the CARE intervention took only 7 minutes at each of three occurrences, total-
ing just 21 minutes in a year’s time. This small amount of time would not be enough for
participants to learn, master, and implement a skill that would directly lead to better
 The CARE Intervention 373

marital quality. Instead, we think that the CARE intervention instilled in participants
a new mindset to use when facing marital conflicts. Unlike skills, new mindsets can be
adopted quickly (Walton & Wilson, 2018). Once people adopt a new mindset about mar-
ital conflict, that mindset may remain, perhaps for the duration of their marriage. To the
extent that this is true, continuing to complete reappraisal exercises may not yield addi-
tional benefits. However, to lessen the possibility of shifting back into the preintervention
default tendency to see conflicts from an emotionally “hot” egocentric perspective, it may
be helpful for people to continue to invest 21 minutes a year into their marriages by sus-
taining the CARE intervention over time. We do not foresee any downsides of continuing
the intervention long term—doing so might help and would not hurt.

Heterogeneity
We tested whether the CARE intervention would be more or less effective among dif-
ferent groups of participants, including men versus women, younger versus older par-
ticipants, or couples that had been married for shorter versus longer lengths of time. In
our study, none of these factors affected the CARE intervention’s effectiveness. We also
examined six indicators of marital quality, including feelings of trust, love, passion, inti-
macy, satisfaction, and commitment. All six indicators yielded similar results.
However, it is important to note that all of our participants volunteered to take part
in a study of romantic relationships. Couples whose relationships are very distressed are
unlikely to want to participate in a study like this. We suspect that the CARE interven-
tion would be less effective among clinically distressed couples living in a climate of con-
tempt. Instead, this intervention presupposes that people who use it are living in a general
climate of decency, believe their relationship is worth maintaining, and have a partner
who warrants the benefit of the doubt. If a relationship is so troubled that wanting the
best for all involved means that it may be best for the relationship to end, the CARE
intervention is unlikely to work well, if at all. Moreover, it could give people living in
a toxic relationship false hope for improvement, potentially putting them at risk if that
relationship is abusive.

COUSINS

The CARE intervention is both similar to and different from several other social psy-
chological interventions. Because marital conflicts are stressful, it is instructive to com-
pare the CARE intervention to other interventions that have focused on people’s views
of stress and the implications of those views. For example, people can hold different
appraisals about specific stressful situations. They can see stress arousal either as a use-
ful tool that can be harnessed to help one rise to a challenge, or they can see stress
arousal as a detriment to one’s ability to address a threat (see, e.g., Jamieson & Hangen,
Chapter 10, this volume; Jamieson, Nock, & Mendes, 2012). Interventions that induce
people to see stress as indicating a challenge rather than a threat predict more optimal
physiological responses and enhance one’s performance. Other research has examined
people’s general mindsets about stress (see, e.g., Crum, Handley-­M iner, & Smith, Chap-
ter 9, this volume; Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013). Although people tend to see stress
as negative, stress has enhancing as well as debilitating consequences. Inducing people
to adopt a stress-­is-­enhancing mindset rather than a stress-­is-­debilitating mindset also
374 III.  Conflict and Relationships

predicts more optimal physiological responses and enhances one’s performance. Both
stress appraisal and stress-­mindset interventions have focused on outcomes related to
performance on specific, stressful tasks. In contrast, although marital conflicts are stress-
ful, they are neither a task to be accomplished nor a challenge to be overcome. In fact,
if spouses view marital conflicts as something to perform well on or “win,” they may
double down on their default egocentric view of the conflict—­the opposite of the CARE
intervention’s goal. Therefore, we caution against broadly applying these other interven-
tions to the stress of marital conflict.
A type of intervention that is more like the CARE intervention is one that uses self-­
distancing strategies (e.g., Kross et al., 2005; Ray et al., 2008). In a seminal study in
this line of research, participants recalled an interpersonal situation in which they felt
overwhelming anger and hostility (Kross et al., 2005). Then they were asked to view this
experience in one of two ways. In the self-­immersed condition, they viewed the situation
through their own eyes all over again. In the self-­distanced perspective, they viewed the
situation as if they were a fly on the wall. In addition, half of the participants in both
the immersed and distanced conditions were asked to think about what they were feel-
ing, whereas the other half were asked to think about why they were feeling the way
they were feeling. People who had adopted the self-­distanced perspective and thought
about the reasons underlying their emotions experienced less negative affect than those
in the other conditions. These results showed that a self-­distanced and abstract perspec-
tive allows people to think about negative experiences without eliciting high levels of
negative emotions. The CARE intervention employed a self-­distancing strategy for view-
ing marital conflicts. Yet, it went further than asking participants to view their marital
conflict from the perspective of a fly on the wall. Instead, participants were asked to take
the perspective of a third party who wants the best for all involved and to consider how
this person might see the good that could come from the conflict. These instructions may
have encouraged CARE intervention participants to adopt an abstract perspective, much
like those in Kross et al.’s (2005) why condition.
Still other social psychological interventions have prompted mindset changes that
have benefited dyadic relationships. For example, one intervention led teachers to adopt
an empathic mindset about discipline, in which they were encouraged to understand and
value their students’ circumstances and perspectives (Okonofua, Paunesku, & Walton,
2016). Students in these teachers’ classes were only half as likely to be suspended as those
in a control group; they also perceived greater respect from their teachers. Another inter-
vention was administered to mothers of medically at-risk infants during home visits (e.g.,
Bugental, Beaulieu, & Silbert-­B eiger, 2010; Bugental et al., 2002). The intervention facil-
itated the mothers’ own problem-­solving and information search, whereas the control
home visiting program provided mothers with ideas on how to solve problems and gave
them information. It also discouraged mothers from holding pejorative views about them-
selves and their children, such as the belief that they are a bad mom or that their child
is a bad baby. The intervention yielded several positive outcomes over time, including
decreased use of corporal punishment, increased maternal investment of time in the child,
and better child health. In both lines of research, the intervention targeted one member of
a dyad, yet benefited both members. As currently designed, the CARE intervention targets
both members of a married couple, but it could be adapted to involve only one spouse. We
expect that the CARE intervention would be beneficial even if only one spouse partici-
pated in it, although its benefits are maximized when both spouses participate.
 The CARE Intervention 375

A final intervention is most similar to the CARE intervention in domain-­romantic

relationships—­although it is quite different in the psychological process it seeks to change.
People with low self-­esteem often act in self-­protective ways that ultimately harm their
relationships, such as resisting compliments from their romantic partners (e.g., Murray,
Holmes, Griffin, Bellavia, & Rose, 2001). An intervention sought to disrupt this self-­
fulfilling pattern of behavior. In it, people with low self-­esteem were induced to take
on a mindset in which they reframed their partners’ compliments in an abstract way by
explaining why their partner admired them (see, e.g., Marigold, Chapter 17, this volume;
Marigold, Holmes, & Ross, 2007, 2010). Participants who completed this exercise felt
better about the compliment, themselves, and their relationship. Moreover, this abstract
reframing intervention (ARI) reduced low self-­esteem individuals’ negative behavior over
a 2-week period as reported by their partners. There are several differences between the
ARI and the CARE intervention. First, the ARI targets responses to and accentuates the
meaning of a positive experience (i.e., a compliment), whereas the CARE intervention
targets responses to and diminishes the meaning of a negative experience (i.e., marital
conflict). Second, the ARI is designed to disrupt a process unique to people with low
self-­esteem in romantic contexts, whereas the CARE intervention is designed to disrupt
a process that is widespread across romantic contexts (i.e., negative affect reciprocity).
These differences highlight the importance of specifying the mechanism by which social-­
psychological interventions work. There is no universal intervention to fix problems in
romantic relationships—­instead, different interventions can address different problems
that arise in romantic relationships.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

The CARE intervention was designed to be a brief, directed intervention to reduce nega-
tive conflict-­related emotions, thus reducing negative affect reciprocity, with the aim of
protecting marital quality in ongoing relationships. The study designed to test the CARE
intervention was conducted largely online, with all procedures of the CARE intervention
and its effects completed entirely online. As stated previously, participants in the study
completed an intake session, as well as six follow-­up waves, every 4 months over 2 years.
Participants received e-mails when it was time to complete a follow-­up wave with a link
directing them to the assessment. They could complete the follow-­up at their convenience
within 2 weeks of receiving the e-mail. Each follow-­up wave took an average of 20–30
minutes to complete.
Participants wrote about a recent conflict in their relationship at each wave of the
study. They provided a “fact-based summary of the most significant disagreement” they
had experienced with their spouse over the preceding 4 months, “focusing on behavior,
not on thoughts or feelings.” We asked them to “provide enough information that some-
one unfamiliar with the disagreement would be able to understand what happened.”
Participants were asked to respond to this prompt for about 2 minutes but could write as
long as they liked.
During Year 2 (Waves 5–7), half of the couples were randomly assigned to the CARE
intervention. The participants were asked to engage in an additional, approximately
7-minute writing task in which they were asked to emotionally reappraise the conflict
they had written about from the perspective of a neutral third party who wanted the best
376 III.  Conflict and Relationships

outcome for all persons involved. Specifically, they were asked to respond to the follow-
ing three prompts:

“Think about the specific disagreement that you just wrote about having with your
partner. Think about this disagreement with your partner from the perspective of
a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved; a person who sees things
from a neutral point of view. How might this person think about the disagreement?
How might he or she find the good that could come from it? (Please write about this
for 3 minutes.)”
“Some people find it helpful to take this third-party perspective during their interac-
tions with their romantic partner. However, almost everybody finds it challenging to
take this third-party perspective at all times. In your relationship with your partner,
what obstacles do you face in trying to take this third-party perspective, especially
when you’re having a disagreement with your partner? (Please write about this for
2 minutes.)”
“Despite the obstacles to taking a third-party perspective, people can be successful
in doing so. Over the next 4 months, please try your best to take this third-party
perspective during interactions with your partner, especially during disagreements.
How might you be most successful in taking this perspective in your interactions
with your partner over the next 4 months? How might taking this perspective help
you make the best of disagreements in your relationship? (Please write about this for
2 minutes.)”

Each prompt and a space for typing responses appeared on a separate page in the
online survey. Participants clicked a button marked “Next” to proceed through the
pages. For each prompt, participants were asked to consider the questions at hand and
write about them for a set amount of time. They could take longer if they wished, but
they could not advance the page until the base amount of time had passed. The CARE
intervention occurred at the very end of the follow-­up assessments before participants
were thanked for their participation and dismissed.
Participants in the CARE intervention group also received reminder e-mails about
the reappraisal task they had completed during their follow-­up assessments. The e-mails
were automatically sent 2 months after the completion of each wave in the second year of
the study. The e-mail was designed to remind participants to engage in emotional reap-
praisal regarding conflict in their marriage. The e-mail text, slightly edited for space,
was:

Hello [name],
We’re writing to check in. The next follow-­up questionnaire isn’t for another two
months, but we wanted to thank you again for participating in the study.
When you completed your most recent questionnaire, you wrote about a specific
disagreement with your partner. You thought about this disagreement from the perspec-
tive of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved and about how this
person might find the good that could come of the disagreement.
You then thought about obstacles you face in your own life that might interfere with
your ability to take a neutral, third-party perspective regarding disagreements in your
own relationship. Finally, you thought about specific ways that taking this third-party
 The CARE Intervention 377

perspective in your own relationship can help you make the most of disagreements with
your partner.
As you go through your daily life, please keep in mind the benefits of adopting a
third-party perspective regarding your relationship. Sometime today (now, if the timing
works), please take a few moments to think about ways you can adopt this perspective
about conflicts in your relationship, about ways to find the good that can come from
them.
Thanks again for staying involved in the study. We’ll check back with you in a
couple of months. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the study, feel free
to e-mail us.

Participants in the control group received e-mails in between their follow-­up assessments
in the second year of the study as well, but these e-mails simply thanked them for being
involved in the study and told them that they would receive their next follow-­up survey
in 2 months.
The CARE intervention, as it was designed, has the advantage of being brief—it was
completed in 7 minutes per wave, making participants’ total investment in the interven-
tion 21 minutes in a year—and yet, it was powerful enough to eliminate declines in cou-
ples’ marital quality over a year. It is also easy and flexible to administer—­participants
in our study completed the intervention procedures online, largely at their convenience,
in locations of their choosing. Overall, the design of the CARE intervention makes it an
efficient, and yet powerfully effective, intervention to protect marital quality and psycho-
logical well-being.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

A dangerous misconception that some people may have about the CARE intervention is
seeing it as a panacea that can replace marital therapy and fix troubled marriages. We
tested the CARE intervention in couples that volunteered to participate in our study; few
of them were likely to be highly distressed. In our view, the CARE intervention should be
used by couples that want to maintain, not end, their relationship and in which partners
have a foundation of care for each other and warrant the benefit of the doubt. If a rela-
tionship is so toxic that a reasonable third party could not see the good that could come
from disagreements in it, the CARE intervention would not help. Instead, these spouses
should consider whether their relationship should continue, and if so, they should seek
professional counsel about how to improve it. Moreover, the CARE intervention stabi-
lized marital quality, but it did not increase it. If the current level of marital quality in a
relationship is not satisfying, the CARE intervention might be able to keep it from getting
worse but probably won’t improve it.
Another potentially important nuance about the CARE intervention is that we asked
participants to take the perspective of a benevolent third party who wants the best for
all involved. Participants were prompted to imagine how this person could see the good
that could come from the disagreement and consider how they could make the best of
future conflicts in the relationship. Although we did not compare this benevolent third-
party perspective to a neutral one, we expect that it contributed to participants’ ability to
respond constructively to their marital conflicts, leading to less conflict-­related distress.
Other potential third-party perspectives, such as a friend’s or family member’s view, may
378 III.  Conflict and Relationships

not have been as effective, especially if people would choose to take the perspective of a
person who might be on “their side” more than their spouse’s side. It is also important
to note that we did not ask participants to put themselves into their spouse’s shoes and
try to see things from their spouse’s perspective. In the midst of marital conflict, people
are likely to believe that their spouse’s perspective is overblown, irrational, or just plain
wrong. Trying to take a spouse’s view is likely to heighten these beliefs and backfire by
promoting the default egocentric and emotionally hot perspective, which would only
make things worse.
A few other details of how we administered the CARE intervention may be critical
to its effectiveness. First, both spouses participated in the CARE intervention. Although
we do not think it is absolutely necessary for both spouses to complete the CARE inter-
vention for it to yield some benefit, we expect that it is most powerful when both spouses
take part because of the beneficial synergy that would occur. Second, participants com-
pleted the reappraisal exercises about specific conflicts in their own relationship, not
interpersonal conflicts in general. We expect that reappraising concrete, personal con-
flicts was effectual because these are the conflicts about which participants can benefit
from shifting from an emotionally hot, egocentric perspective to that of a distanced,
rational, benevolent third party. Third, participants anticipated obstacles that they might
encounter when adopting the benevolent third-party perspective during future marital
conflicts and how they might overcome these obstacles. We expect that doing this helped
participants push through challenges they might have encountered, rather than seeing
them as evidence that taking the third-party perspective is too difficult. Fourth, par-
ticipants were not forced to complete the intervention exercises or write in response to
each prompt, although the survey did not allow them to move forward until the base
amount of time had passed. Other social-­psychological interventions have been shown
to work best or only when people voluntarily take part in them (e.g., Bryan et al., 2016;
Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004; Lyubomirsky, Dickerhoof, Boehm,
& Sheldon, 2011; Silverman, Logel, & Cohen, 2013), and the CARE intervention might
be less effective if it were a required activity.
Although these nuances may enhance or reduce the effectiveness of the CARE inter-
vention, we do not anticipate ways in which it could backfire. We designed the CARE
intervention to be straightforward, easily administered, conducted online, and scalable.
Variations in the CARE intervention’s procedures may render it less beneficial but are
unlikely to make it harmful.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Given the beneficial effects of the CARE intervention on marital quality and psychologi-
cal health, it would be advantageous to make it available to couples on a larger scale.
One way to roll out the CARE intervention to more people is through professionals and
practitioners who work directly with couples. Although we have publicized our results
in the popular media and are aware of practitioners who have adopted or adapted this
intervention in their practice, there is much more opportunity to actively promote the
intervention among those who work directly with couples. As previously discussed, the
CARE intervention maintains, but does not improve, marital quality. We also caution its
use among highly distressed couples. Therefore, it would be most helpful for practitioners
 The CARE Intervention 379

who work with couples early in their relationships, such as those who provide premarital
counseling or officiate weddings, to promote the CARE intervention.
A second and even more scalable way to roll out the CARE intervention to more
couples is to build an application (app) that delivers the intervention to any person who
would like to use it in his or her relationship. The app could lead users through the 7-min-
ute intervention at regular intervals and send push notifications or e-mail reminders about
adopting a third-party perspective during conflicts. As discussed in the “Nuances and
Misconceptions” section, the CARE intervention was designed to be self-­administered
online, and we do not anticipate ways in which it could be harmful when used by peo-
ple who are involved in average to high-­quality relationships. The app could include
an optional research component, perhaps varying the frequency of the intervention and
reminder notifications. Users would report on their relationship quality periodically, cre-
ating a cost-­effective way to test variations of the intervention while delivering the inter-
vention to an unlimited number of couples at minimal cost.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

The CARE intervention’s success has theoretical implications, informing researchers

about the usefulness of emotional reappraisal to a new domain. Past research has shown
that emotional reappraisal is useful to people navigating relationship dissolution (Slotter
& Ward, 2015; Sbarra et al., 2013), smoking cessation (Fucito, Juliano, & Toll, 2010),
anxiety disorders (Goldin et al., 2012), and suicidal ideation (Kiosses et al., 2018). Our
work demonstrates that emotional reappraisal can be applied to the domain of close
relationships as well, and especially to marital conflict. Furthermore, past research has
shown that people tend to adopt a first-­person perspective during interpersonal conflicts,
often leading to a destructive pattern of negative affect reciprocity (e.g., Robinson &
Swanson, 1993; Verduyn et al., 2012). This work indicates that this default pattern of
behavior can be avoided—­and quite easily.
As discussed in the “Effects over Time” section, the CARE intervention took only
7 minutes of participants’ time at each of three occurrences over the course of a year.
Twenty-­one minutes in a year’s time would not be enough for participants to learn and
implement a skill—yet the CARE intervention had the power to maintain marital qual-
ity. Therefore, we see emotional reappraisal of marital conflicts as a shift in mindset or
perspective (see Walton & Wilson, 2018). Such a shift can occur quickly and has the
potential to yield long-term effects without additional iterations of the intervention that
cultivated the changed mindset. Nonetheless, we do not foresee any reason why couples
should not continue to invest 21 minutes a year into their marriage by continuing the
CARE intervention exercises. Doing so could help keep people from sliding back into
their previous, emotionally hot, egocentric view of marital conflicts.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Even though the intervention itself is inexpensive and easy to implement, conducting a
standard study to test it is not. Recruiting a sufficient number of couples and tracking
them for 2 years or more is expensive and time-­consuming. To date, we have tested the
380 III.  Conflict and Relationships

intervention’s outcomes only one time, and we are not aware of other studies that have
replicated or extended our work. With that in mind, we outline six avenues for future
empirical work.
First, as mentioned in the “Implications for Practice” section, future research could
test the CARE intervention using an app that delivers the intervention to many users via
their mobile devices. Doing so would be a cost-­effective way to extend research on the
CARE intervention.
Second, future research could test the CARE intervention with a more diverse sam-
ple of participants. Our participants varied in age and in the length of their marriages—­
however, they were predominantly White, of midrange socioeconomic status, and all of
them were in heterosexual relationships. Given recent work showing that some of these
factors can impact marital conflict and marital quality dynamics (e.g., Jackson et al.,
2016), examining the effectiveness of the CARE intervention within a broader popula-
tion is essential. One possibility would be to test the CARE intervention among newly-
weds to determine whether it could help maintain the high level of marital quality that
couples tend to experience in the so-­called honeymoon phase. Another possibility would
be to test the CARE intervention in couples undergoing the transition to parenthood, a
time during which marital quality is especially likely to decline. It would also be informa-
tive to examine the CARE intervention across cultures. It is possible that the intervention
would be less effective among couples living in interdependent cultures to the extent that
their default perspective is less egocentric than it tends to be among people living in inde-
pendent cultures (see Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Wu & Keysar, 2007).
Third, future research could follow up with the original participants some years
after the original study period to gauge whether those who had been assigned to the
CARE intervention condition have continued to reappraise conflicts in their relation-
ships and/or have maintained higher levels of marital quality than those in the control
condition. We expect that the CARE intervention brings about a mindset shift that yields
recursive, self-­perpetuating processes over time; these processes would continue to yield
benefits even after the intervention ended. Nonetheless, it would be fruitful for future
research to investigate the longer-­term effects of the intervention, both with and without
additional iterations of the intervention.
Fourth, future research could involve a study in which only one member of each
couple completes the intervention to determine whether one or both members of the
couple should participate to yield maximal benefits. As discussed in the “Nuances and
Misconceptions” section, we think that having both members participate would create a
synergy and make the intervention the most effective. However, it may yield some ben-
efits if only one spouse engages in the intervention, especially because either partner can
stop a cycle of negative affect reciprocity. Couples in which one spouse is truly behaving
more negatively than the other are an interesting case. On the one hand, it would be most
helpful to change the behavior of the spouse who is behaving most negatively. On the
other hand, it may be the most helpful to change the mindset of the spouse who is on the
receiving end of the negativity; doing so may avoid further instigating the spouse who
is behaving most negatively. However, keep in mind our caution about using the CARE
intervention while couples are highly distressed.
Fifth, future research could systematically vary aspects of the CARE intervention
to determine the minimally necessary elements for the intervention to remain effective.
This type of investigation would be similar to Marigold et al.’s (2007) work that isolated
 The CARE Intervention 381

the core of an intervention to help people with low self-­esteem to respond positively to a
romantic partner’s compliments. Furthermore, it would enable further refinement of the
psychological processes that are at work in the CARE intervention. Relatedly, we used
conflict-­related distress as a proxy measure for negative affect reciprocity, the primary
mechanism we targeted. A better measure that could be used in future research would be
behavioral evidence of negative affect reciprocity, which could be captured in videotaped
conflict discussions.
Sixth, future research could extend the scope of the CARE intervention’s outcomes
to include physical health. As reviewed at the beginning of this chapter, marital quality
is an important predictor of physical health, but this finding is based on correlational
and longitudinal studies. A future experiment of the CARE intervention’s effectiveness
on both marital quality and physical health could provide even stronger evidence of the
causal effect of marital quality on physical health.

CONCLUSION

For decades, psychological researchers and practitioners have grappled with the paradox
of marital quality: it is essential for people’s psychological and physical well-being, and
yet it declines over time within relationships. Fortunately, this decline is not inevitable.
The CARE intervention, grounded in appraisal theories of emotion and capitalizing on
people’s ability to reinterpret their emotional experiences, interrupts the spiral of nega-
tive affect reciprocity that can occur during marital conflict. It both stops declines in
marital quality and benefits psychological well-being. Compared to previous attempts
to intervene in declining marital quality, the CARE intervention has the benefit of being
brief (couples completed it in 7-minute sessions, three times during a year period), theory
driven (it was developed out of a robust literature on the benefits of emotional reap-
praisal), and flexible (the current variant of the procedure was applied online but could be
adapted to many other settings). Because of its effectiveness and ease of implementation,
the CARE intervention represents a promising avenue for both researchers and practitio-
ners to aid people in protecting and preserving their marital happiness.

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 C H A P TE R 17

The Abstract Reframing Intervention

Helping Insecure Individuals Benefit
from Romantic Partners’ Positive Feedback

Denise C. Marigold

Insecurity in romantic relationships can create a self-­fulfilling prophecy, whereby people who
doubt their partner’s love and commitment consequently behave in ways that drive their
partner away. Yet relational insecurity is difficult to overcome. Insecure individuals tend to
ascribe considerable meaning to a partner’s negative behavior but trivial meaning to their
positive behavior. The intervention described in this chapter was designed to address the
latter phenomenon. Participants recall an instance of receiving a compliment from their
partner, then are encouraged to view this compliment more broadly as a meaningful and
significant example of their partner’s admiration for them. I have demonstrated in numerous
studies that this abstract reframing intervention can foster a greater sense of relationship
security and subsequent positive relationship behavior among individuals who are typically
insecure in their relationships.

BACKGROUND

Romantic relationships have much potential to be rewarding and affirming. The confi-
dent belief that one is cared for and supported is hugely beneficial to both psychological
and physical well-being (Myers, 2000), and relationship satisfaction is a strong contribu-
tor to overall life satisfaction (Gustavson, Røysamb, Borren, Torvik, & Karevold, 2016).
Yet many such relationships are marred by conflict and doubt. Several of the factors that
contribute to relationship troubles can be targets for intervention. For example, dyadic
factors like poor communication can be addressed with training in problem-­solving skills

385
386 III.  Conflict and Relationships

either through psychoeducational programs (Halford, Markman, & Stanley, 2008), con-
flict reappraisal exercises (Finkel, Slotter, Luchies, Walton, & Gross, 2013; see Slotter &
Luchies, Chapter 16, this volume), or couple therapy (e.g., Sevier, Eldridge, Jones, Doss,
& Christensen, 2008). Contextual factors like external stressors can fray relationships
(Neff & Karney, 2004), so stress management strategies may be helpful for alleviating
relationship troubles. The research reported in this chapter focuses on a psychological
intervention designed to improve relationships for individuals with low self-­esteem (LSEs)
by addressing a social-­cognitive factor: the tendency to interpret the meaning of partners’
behavior in a maladaptive way.
Although there is little evidence that LSEs are any less attractive, intelligent, or capa-
ble than their high-self-­esteem counterparts (HSEs), LSEs tend to view various aspects
of their lives more negatively (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003; Cameron
& Granger, 2019; Orth, Robins, & Widman, 2012) and they are inclined to interpret
positive information about the self in a relatively negative light (Danielsson & Bengtsson,
2016). In romantic relationships specifically, LSEs are generally less secure and satisfied
(Fincham & Bradbury, 1993; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996) and they underestimate
how much their partners love and value them (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 2000). These
tendencies push LSEs in the direction of defensive self-­protection; if they can keep a bit
of distance from their partner, it won’t be as painful when they eventually receive the
rejection they expect is inevitable. Moreover, when feeling acutely threatened, such as
when facing a partner’s transgression, LSEs often become cold and critical toward their
partner, again as a means of protecting themselves against hurt. Derogating their partner
allows them to feel they are not losing anything of substantial value. In an unfortunate
self-­fulfilling prophecy, these defensive responses to perceived threats contribute to a
decrease in partners’ satisfaction over time (Murray, Bellavia, Rose, & Griffin, 2003).
There are at least two related psychological processes in which LSEs engage that
serve to maintain their insecurities. One, they abstract from negative relationship events,
reading broader meaning and significance into even minor, everyday kinds of slights (e.g.,
they might interpret a partner’s bad mood as a sign of their partner’s waning affection for
them). Second, they fail to abstract from positive relationship events, often seeing them as
little more than isolated incidents that do not signify anything of importance about their
partner’s feelings toward them. What’s more, LSEs may even make a negative attribution
about their partner’s motivation for something like a compliment—­perhaps their partner
felt sorry for them, or was preparing to ask for a favor.
There is an extensive literature on the causes and consequences of partner attribu-
tion processes, but it has focused primarily on the meaning people make of their partner’s
negative or potentially threatening behavior, like during a conflict discussion (Pearce &
Halford, 2008). Indeed, a number of individual difference variables linked to insecurity
(low self-­esteem, anxious attachment style, neuroticism, depression) predict the tendency
to make distress-­maintaining attributions for partners’ transgressions (Bellavia & Mur-
ray, 2003; Collins, Ford, Guichard, & Allard, 2006; Karney, Bradbury, Fincham, & Sul-
livan, 1994; Pearce & Halford, 2008; Sümer & Cozzarelli, 2004; Uebelacker & Whis-
man, 2005). Critically, these attributions have long-term consequences for relationship
well-being (Karney & Bradbury, 2000).
Far less research has focused on the kinds of attributions for positive partner behav-
ior that may also serve to maintain insecurity. Theoretically, one should be less likely to
attribute a partner’s positive behavior to caring motives if that behavior is perceived to
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 387

be facilitated by external factors, or to benefit the partner (e.g., the partner’s act of kind-
ness is public and makes a good impression on others; Kelley, 1973). Additionally, when
people who are insecure believe their partner is aware of their insecurities, they are more
likely to suspect that their partner’s positive affirmations are not authentic (Lemay &
Clark, 2008).
How can LSEs be made to see their value in their partner’s eyes? Some attempts to
boost LSEs’ sense of security with positive feedback have actually backfired. For example,
giving LSEs feedback that their questionnaire responses showed they were high in “con-
siderateness” made them feel more insecure (compared to a no-­feedback control condi-
tion; Murray, Holmes, MacDonald, & Ellsworth, 1998). Even prompting LSEs to affirm
their own worth as a partner, by repeating “I am a lovable person,” made LSEs feel more
anxious (Wood, Perunovic, & Lee, 2009). More broadly, thinking about personal suc-
cesses of various sorts can also increase LSEs’ anxious feelings (Wood, Heimpel, Newby-
Clark, & Ross, 2005). Such efforts are consistent with the “self-­esteem movement” that
aimed to increase self-­esteem for the purpose of preventing associated social problems
(Singal, 2017). Unfortunately, LSEs have defenses against such efforts. When positive
feedback or self-­statements are externally imposed, participants question whether they
truly apply to themselves. HSEs are likely to conclude they do apply and then move on.
LSEs, on the other hand, are also liable to be more equivocal, and search their memories
for evidence that both supports and weakens that conclusion.
In designing the abstract reframing intervention (ARI), I considered how one might
“fly under the radar” of LSEs’ defenses. How could LSEs be affirmed without activating
self-­doubts and self-­evaluation concerns? One key component was to have LSEs choose
their own personal quality on which they were affirmed. False feedback from an experi-
menter may not be easily believed if there is clear evidence to the contrary. I expected that
when LSEs had a chance to recall their own example of a compliment from their partner,
they would likely recall one that they felt fairly confident about already. The second com-
ponent was to have LSEs take their recalled compliment and subtly encourage them to
ratchet up its meaning.
The intervention thus appears like this: On one page, participants are asked to
“Think of a time when your current romantic partner told you how much he/she liked
something about you. For example, a personal quality or ability you have that he/she
thinks very highly of, or something you did that really impressed him/her.” They are then
asked to write down a few cue words that would identify that memory to them, note how
long ago it occurred, and then turn to the next page to describe the compliment more
fully. On the next page, the intervention instructions are as follows: “Explain why your
partner admired you. Describe what it meant to you and its significance for your rela-
tionship.” These instructions assume that the compliment reflected the partner’s broader
view of the participant (i.e., admired them), and that the compliment must have been
meaningful and significant in some way.
The Linguistic Category Model (Semin & Fiedler, 1988; Semin & De Poot, 1997)
was the primary inspiration for the wording of the ARI. This model makes the distinction
between action verbs like said and state verbs like admired, with the state verb implying
that the behavior has lasted for a longer period and is more likely to recur in the future.
I expected that the use of a state verb would lead LSEs to perceive the compliments to be
more broad and global in their implications about their value to their partner. Research
in a number of other domains has supported the contention that subtle linguistic cues
388 III.  Conflict and Relationships

can indeed have significant effects on self-­perceptions and behavior (e.g., helping: Bryan,
Master, & Walton, 2014; voting: Bryan, Walton, Rogers, & Dweck, 2011).
One of the other conditions used for comparison instructed participants, after think-
ing of a compliment, to “Describe exactly what your partner said to you. Include any
details you can recall about where you two were at the time, what you were doing, what
you were both wearing, etc.” Labeled as the “concrete” condition, this allowed us to test
whether immersion in and elaboration on the incidence of positive feedback, which LSEs
might typically avoid, was sufficient to yield beneficial outcomes. A control condition
instructed participants to simply “Describe the event below.” This condition allowed us
to get a sense of self-­esteem differences in spontaneous responses to compliments (see
Appendix 17.1 for full materials).

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

The participants in these intervention studies have been primarily young adults in dating
relationships. The purpose of the ARI is to encourage them to consider the potential for
broader meaning in their partner’s feedback, and to consider the impact such affirma-
tions may have on their relationship more globally. In doing so, there seems to be a cor-
responding move from primarily past-tense language to also include some present-­tense
language. The compliment becomes something their partner thinks or feels about them
that is indicative of the kind of relationship they have, rather than something their part-
ner simply said at one time. This is particularly important for LSEs, who are less inclined
to reach this kind of broad conclusion naturally. Our research showed that when asked
to describe compliments from their romantic partners with no further instructions (i.e.,
the control condition), LSEs tend to use more past-tense verbs than do HSEs (Marigold,
Holmes, & Ross, 2007). What follows are two examples of participants in the control
condition whose partner complimented them on their intelligence. The first is from a par-
ticipant who scored low in self-­esteem (over 1 standard deviation below the mean). Note
the restriction to a single incident in the past.

“I got the best score in a course in university. He took the course in the term after my
course and the professor mentioned the best score for the previous term was exactly
my score. So he told me afterwards that I was smart.”

The second is from a participant who scored high in self-­esteem (over 1 standard devia-
tion above the mean). Note the description of the partner’s ongoing positive view of the
participant.

“I get nervous about university, because I am in first year, and my boyfriend keeps
reassuring me. He says I am very smart and that he is so proud of me. He is so loving
and makes me feel like I can do anything.”

How does the intervention affect how people reflect on a compliment? To see this, we
compared the concrete condition and the ARI condition. In the concrete condition, par-
ticipants are asked for further details about the time the compliment was given—where
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 389

they were, who was there, what they were doing. Again, for the two examples that follow,
the participants indicated that their partner complimented them on their intelligence.
In the concrete condition, people stuck to what happened in the past. For example, one
participant in this condition explained:

“A week ago I won an award for being a top student at U of W. I told my boyfriend
over the phone, on his way home from work. He said, ‘That’s awesome! I’m proud
of you, you’re so intelligent.’ That same day he told everyone he knew that I was a
top student at U of W.”

In the abstract condition, people talked about how the past event indicated ongoing posi-
tive meaning for their relationship. For example, a different participant in the ARI condi-
tion went on to explain:

“I had scored an [A] on my midterm. . . . He told me I was a very intelligent per-

son. . . . It meant a lot to me that he sees me this way. It shows me how supportive he
is of my school work and my goals for life. . . . We have a supportive relationship.”

In another set of examples, two participants indicated that their partner compli-
mented them on being caring. In the concrete condition, the participant went on to say:

“In the conversation, he mentioned how he thinks I am a genuinely caring person.”

In contrast, the participant in the ARI condition wrote:

“He admired me because he was going through a tough time, and he realized he
wasn’t alone and that I cared about him. This was important to me because it meant
that he knew my feelings for him and that I want to help him the best I can.”

It is important to note that LSEs are not always less positive than HSEs about the
exchange of compliments between romantic partners. I conducted one study (Hoplock,
Stinson, Marigold, & Fisher, 2018) to compare LSEs’ reactions to compliments directed
at the self versus others, using hypothetical compliment scenarios. Would LSEs also mini-
mize the meaning of compliments shared between other couples? Half of the participants
were randomly assigned to read about a compliment one hypothetical person gave to their
romantic partner. The other half of the participants were asked to imagine receiving the
same compliment from their romantic partner. As expected, LSEs in the self-­compliment
condition were less enthusiastic about the compliment, and believed it was less sincere
than did LSEs in the other-­compliment condition. The simple effect of self-­esteem was
significant in the self-­compliment condition but not in the other-­compliment condition.
LSEs did not differ from HSEs in their judgments about compliments exchanged between
other people. These findings confirm that LSEs do have the capacity to see the potential
for enjoyment and meaning in partners’ praise; it’s only when the compliment applies to
themselves that they respond differently than HSEs, which can be taken as evidence of
motivated thinking.
390 III.  Conflict and Relationships

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
The first set of published studies established the basic effect of the ARI, both immediately
after completing the intervention and in a follow-­up 2 weeks later. In Study 2 of Marigold
et al. (2007), all participants first thought of a time their partner said something nice to
them. The control condition was simply asked to describe that event, with no further
instructions. The concrete condition was asked to describe the concrete details surround-
ing what was said, where, who was there, and so forth. The ARI condition was asked
to explain why their partner admired them, and describe what it meant to them and
why it was significant to their relationship. There were a number of dependent variables
that showed similar patterns. Among LSEs, those in the ARI condition reported greater
positive feelings about the compliment, state self-­esteem, felt security, and relationship
valuing than did those in the control or concrete conditions. In fact, LSEs in the ARI
condition reported outcomes that were just as high as HSEs (who did not differ between
conditions). The typical pattern is illustrated in Figure 17.1.

Effects over Time
This effect persisted over time. In two studies, results of a follow-­up questionnaire deliv-
ered 2–3 weeks later showed that LSEs who had been in the ARI condition at Time 1
continued to feel more secure than did LSEs in either the control or concrete conditions,
mirroring the pattern of results from Time 1. LSEs who had been in the ARI condition

6.5

6.0

ARI
Concrete
Control
5.5

5.0
LSE HSE

FIGURE 17.1.  Self-­reported felt security as a function of self-­esteem and condition (Study 2 from
Marigold, Holmes, & Ross, 2007).
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 391

also reported a greater frequency of positive partner behavior since Time 1. Although
participants did not receive an explicit reminder of the compliment prior to making their
ratings at Time 2, it is possible that receiving the follow-­up questionnaire was sufficient
to remind participants of their positive experience at Time 1. That may account for the
increased felt security ratings and perceptions of partner positivity reported by LSEs in
the ARI condition (i.e., they felt more secure when completing both Time 1 and Time 2
questionnaires but not in between). Another possibility is that receiving the ARI at Time
1 actually changed LSEs’ experience, or the perception of their experience, in the inter-
vening 2- to 3-week period (i.e., their felt security and perceptions of positive partner
behavior remained high between Time 1 and Time 2). The next set of studies suggest
some support for the latter explanation.
A study reported in a later paper employed partner reports to verify that the ARI
had an effect beyond participants’ perceptions, on their observable behavior (Marigold,
Holmes, & Ross, 2010, Study 2). In this study, participants were randomly assigned to
complete the ARI or a control condition with no instructions for describing the compli-
ment (see Marigold et al., 2007). Findings on relationship ratings replicated previous
research (Marigold et al., 2007) in that LSEs rated their relationships more positively
in the ARI condition than in the control condition, as high as HSEs in either condi-
tion. Moreover, 2 weeks later, partners were contacted to report on the participants’
behavior over the preceding 2 weeks. Results showed that LSE participants who had
initially received the ARI had partners who reported lower frequency of critical, nega-
tive behavior from the participants in that time period (compared to LSEs who were in
the control condition), as low as HSE participants in both conditions (see Figure 17.2).

2.9

2.5

ARI

Control

2.1

1.7
LSE HSE

FIGURE 17.2. Partners’ reports of participants’ frequency of negative behavior in previous 2

weeks, as a function of participants’ self-­esteem and condition (Study 2 from Marigold, Holmes,
& Ross, 2010). Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
392 III.  Conflict and Relationships

This finding is consistent with the notion that LSEs who have received the ARI are actu-
ally changing their behavior. In the previous set of studies (Marigold et al., 2007), when
LSEs reported noticing more positive partner behavior in the weeks following the ARI,
they may have actually been eliciting that positive behavior as a response to their own
behavior changes.

Mechanism
In Marigold et al. (2007), the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Fran-
cis, & Booth, 2001) program was used to analyze the verb tense used in the narratives
participants wrote to describe their compliment. These results showed that when partici-
pants were given no specific instructions on how to describe the compliment they recalled
(simply, “Describe the event”), LSEs used more past-tense verbs than did HSEs. In the
ARI condition, LSEs used fewer past-tense verbs and more present-­tense verbs than did
LSEs in the control or concrete conditions. HSEs did not differ in their verb use among
the three conditions.
In addition to feeling more positively about the compliment in the ARI condition,
LSEs also rated it as more sincere and thought they were more deserving of the com-
pliment (Marigold et al., 2007). Thus, the abstraction seemed to lead them to a more
internal attribution for the motivation behind their partner’s praise, which mediated fur-
ther effects on state self-­esteem and relationship ratings. In unpublished data (Marigold,
2011), I found that LSEs who think of an “admired” quality compared to a “compli-
mented” quality are more confident in their possession of that quality, which further
supports the use of a state verb (admired) to connote a sense of endurance.

Process
Another study (Marigold et al., 2010, Study 1) provided evidence that the ARI could
reduce LSEs’ defensive reactions to relationship threats. The threat in Study 1 involved a
“Secret Selves” exercise (Murray, Rose, Bellavia, Holmes, & Kusche, 2002) where par-
ticipants were instructed to think about several aspects of themselves they try to keep
hidden from their partner, knowing conflict could arise as a result. LSEs who completed
this exercise rated their relationship significantly more negatively than LSEs who did not
(HSEs were unaffected by the manipulation). It is thought that contemplating a nega-
tive evaluation from their partner prompts LSEs to become more negative and critical
about their relationship as a means of self-­protection. It is less painful to be rejected by a
partner who is not all that great anyway. As described earlier, this kind of self-­protective
behavior in response to threat has important consequences in that it actually contributes
to the demise of the relationship over time (Murray, Griffin, Rose, & Bellavia, 2003). Yet
in our study, for LSEs who were asked to complete the ARI prior to the threat exercise,
no such relationship derogation effect was found. These LSEs remained just as positive
about their relationship as were those who were not threatened.
Furthering the evidence for behavioral effects of the ARI, another paper reported the
effects of the ARI on a subsequent conflict discussion among romantic partners (Mari-
gold & Anderson, 2016). In this study, partners’ conflict history was the moderating vari-
able. A history of difficult or destructive conflict interactions might function similarly
to LSE in this context in that concerns about partners’ care and responsiveness become
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 393

activated. Indeed, partners with a higher conflict history had lower positive expectations
of how a conflict discussion would go in the lab. However, the ARI increased posi-
tive expectations among couples with a stronger conflict history (those with less history
of conflict were not affected by the manipulation). Subsequently, the increased positive
expectations translated to less distress, more positive behavior (according to self- and
partner reports), and better quality conflict discussions (according to coding by observers
who were blind to both condition and conflict history).
It is worth noting that in all of these studies, coding by objective observers revealed
that there was no association of self-­ esteem with the positivity of the compliments
selected—­that is, LSEs and HSEs recalled equally positive compliments; the difference
lay in the way in which they naturally described them and the meaning they made of
them. As Walton and Wilson (2018) point out, psychologically wise interventions assume
that objective opportunities for enhancement may already be present, but the meaning
people make of social information may limit them from taking advantage.

Heterogeneity
In one unpublished study (Marigold, 2010), I attempted to replicate the basic ARI effect
with married couples, using self-­esteem as a moderator, but the effect was not significant.
Although one cannot make any firm conclusions based on this single sample, it seems
reasonable that one incidence of praise has less potential to be consequential to partners
who are seriously committed. It may take much larger or sustained gestures of affection
to influence the felt security of long-term coupled or married LSEs. Further research can
explore this notion more fully.

COUSINS

Self-­affirmation is one intervention that bears some similarity to the ARI (see Sherman,
Lokhande, Müller, & Cohen, Chapter 3, this volume). The self-­affirmation exercise typi-
cally has participants choose their most cherished value from a list provided and describe
how they have acted consistently with it in the past. This process seems to generate a
more expansive view of the self and its resources, which buffers people from subsequent
threats to the self. The similarity between the two interventions lies in the process of hav-
ing participants generate their own affirmations, which may be particularly important
for individuals who are chronically insecure, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Affirma-
tions that are externally imposed are more likely to activate self-­doubts and evaluative
concerns.
Numerous positive outcomes of the self-­affirmation intervention have been reported
in relationships as well as in the domains of education and health (see Sherman et al.,
Chapter 3, this volume). In regard to relationships, for example, self-­affirmation has been
shown to improve relational security more broadly (i.e., with family, friends, and roman-
tic partners), and facilitate more welcoming social behavior with a stranger (Stinson,
Logel, Shepherd, & Zanna, 2011). In another study, self-­affirmation increased adoles-
cents’ general prosocial feelings and behaviors over a 3-month period (Thomaes, Bush-
man, Orobio de Castro, & Reijntjes, 2012). Self-­affirmation may not be as well suited
to improving positive feelings and behavior in one’s romantic relationship. The ARI is a
394 III.  Conflict and Relationships

more targeted intervention than self-­affirmation in that it is person specific, resulting in

more positive views of a particular partner and relationship.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

As described earlier, the ARI requires participants to “Think of a time when your current
romantic partner told you how much he/she liked something about you. For example, a
personal quality or ability you have that he/she thinks very highly of, or something you
did that really impressed him/her.” They are then asked to write down a few cue words
that would identify that memory to them, note how long ago it occurred, and then turn
to the next page to “Explain why your partner admired you. Describe what it meant to
you and its significance for your relationship.” (See Appendix 17.1 for full materials.)
This intervention has been delivered both in person and online, with no apparent dif-
ference.
The intervention can be adapted to encourage abstraction of other positive partner
behaviors. In one unpublished study (Marigold & Anderson, 2011), the manipulation
was adapted to reflect on a partner’s caring behavior rather than positive feedback. Spe-
cifically, participants were asked to “Think of a time when your romantic partner did
something nice for you. For example, helped you with homework, brought you a present,
put your preferences ahead of his or her own.” In the abstract reframing condition, they
were then asked to “Explain why your partner cared for you so much. Describe what
it meant to you and its significance for your relationship.” Participants in the control
condition were simply asked to “Describe the event in the space below.” Results showed
that in the control condition, LSEs experienced less positive affect and made fewer posi-
tive attributions for the behavior than did HSEs. LSEs in the abstract condition reported
more positive affect and attributions than did LSEs in the control condition, as high as
HSEs in either condition.
A study published by Gaucher et al. (2012, Study 4) used the same ARI but sub-
stituted “close friend” for “partner.” Participants were then asked to make a video that
would ostensibly be shown to that friend in which they described a negative experience
they had at their university. Results showed that LSEs were more expressive (according to
both self-­report and observer coding) in the ARI condition than in the control condition.
The authors theorized that LSEs are generally reticent to share their true thoughts and
feelings because that leaves them vulnerable to rejection, which may seem likely given
their lower self-worth. Once LSEs’ sense of perceived regard was increased by the ARI,
they felt more comfortable expressing themselves authentically, which is critical to foster-
ing closeness and intimacy.
In a completely different domain, Zunick, Fazio, and Vasey (2015) adapted the ARI
for use with participants who hold relatively negative self-views to encourage them to gen-
eralize from success experiences in public speaking. They used a “directed abstraction”
technique for which the ARI “was one of the primary inspirations” (Zunick et al., 2015,
p. 4). After recalling a past public speaking success (Study 2) or having a public speaking
success in the lab (Study 3), participants in the directed abstraction condition were asked
to “Explain why you were able to achieve such a successful performance. Begin by com-
pleting the sentence stem below. ‘I was able to achieve a successful performance because I
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 395

am . . . ’ ” Participants in the control condition instead responded to the prompt “Describe
how you performed as you did in this situation. What did you do?” Generalization from
success was measured with a composite variable including participants’ views of their
overall public speaking abilities, expectations for future performance, and self-­related
affect. The directed abstraction led people with negative self-views to generalize more
from a successful public speaking experience than they would have otherwise, leading to
a greater likelihood of returning to the activity and more persistence in the face of dif-
ficulty.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Without a strong understanding of the psychological process involved in low self-­esteem,

a well-­intended intervention might easily be ineffective or even detrimental. There are at
least two theoretically meaningful ways the effect of the ARI can be reduced or reversed.
One is outlined in Marigold et al. (2007, Study 3). A very subtle rewording of the inter-
vention instructions eliminated the boost for LSEs. Recall that the original instructions
were to “Explain why your partner admired you. Describe what it meant to you and its
significance for your relationship.” In the modified version, the instructions were posed
as thought-­provoking questions: “Explain whether you think what your partner said
indicated that he/she admired you. Consider whether it was meaningful to you and sig-
nificant for your relationship.” It was thought that the effectiveness of the ARI for LSEs
was rooted in its subtlety. The original wording managed to assumptively imply that
the compliment must have been meaningful and significant, and give participants the
task of elaborating on an idea that is assumed to be true. This seemed to slip under the
radar of LSEs’ defenses and avoid activating their doubts. When LSEs were explicitly
provided with an opportunity to question the broader meaning and significance of the
feedback, their self-­evaluative worries undermined their enjoyment of the compliment.
For example, one LSE participant in this questioning condition, who had recalled a time
her partner said she was smart, further remarked, “I don’t think he admires this about
me because I am really only smart at math/engineering. He is way smarter when it comes
to real life stuff. It was not significant.”
This study supports the idea that LSEs may do best with a gentle push toward the
assumption that they are cared for and does not allow them to question this conclusion.
There are other studies that have similarly shown that LSEs’ self-­doubts can be subtly
and unexpectedly activated. For example, Wood et al. (2009) showed that encouraging
LSEs to repeat positive self-­statements (e.g., “I am a lovable person”) made them more
anxious than if they had repeated no statements. It was thought that this blanket positive
conclusion led participants to search for evidence that may or may not support it, and
LSEs were more focused, or could more easily access, evidence against that conclusion.
In another line of research, when LSE children were praised for personal qualities, they
felt especially ashamed after failure (Brummelman, Thomaes, Overbeek, et al., 2014).
When they were given inflated praise, they were less likely to seek out challenging tasks
(Brummelman, Thomaes, de Castro, Overbeek, & Bushman, 2014). In these studies, the
authors theorized that positive feedback raised perceived expectations of others, which
the LSE children doubted they could continue to meet.
396 III.  Conflict and Relationships

A second way that shifting the original materials can undermine, and in this case,
reverse the effects of the ARI involves applying it to the partner. In one study (Marigold,
2018), participants were asked to “Think of a time when you told your current romantic
partner how much you liked something about him/her. For example, a personal quality
or ability he/she has that you think very highly of, or something he/she did that really
impressed you.” The abstract condition was then asked to “Explain why you admired
your partner. Describe what you think it meant to your partner and its significance for
your relationship.” The control condition was simply asked to “Describe the event in the
space below.” Essentially, the original wording of the ARI was taken and then shifted to
focus on a compliment the participant gave to, rather than received from, their partner.
Although writing abstractly about a compliment received from one’s partner increases
LSEs’ felt security, in the modified version, writing abstractly about a compliment given
to one’s partner decreased LSEs’ felt security. It is thought that this occurs because LSEs
are particularly sensitive to feelings of inferiority in their relationship (Murray et al.,
2005), and these feelings may be activated when considering their admiration for their
partner.
It is also worth noting that giving participants false positive feedback is quite dif-
ferent from the ARI’s approach of encouraging participants to generate their own affir-
mations, and in fact, the former can backfire. One example comes from Murray et al.
(1998), where participants received feedback from the experimenter that a questionnaire
they completed indicated they were high (or low) in considerateness. The positive feed-
back actually made LSEs feel more insecure (Murray et al., 1998). The ARI is clearly
more effective than this type of approach.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

Therapists may use this research in either individual or couple therapy. With LSEs, thera-
pists may challenge the notion that they are not well loved or will assuredly be rejected
by partners by asking them to bring to mind evidence of their partner’s love and care.
However, if they stop there, it will be easy for the LSEs to dismiss past compliments or
generous behaviors as isolated incidents, perhaps brought on by the partner’s sense of
obligation or pity for the LSE. Therapists can prevent this dismissal by prompting LSEs
to describe the meaning and significance of these acts of admiration or care.
In couple therapy, therapists may encourage partners to express appreciation or
admiration for each other (e.g., Gottman & Silver, 1999). Whether done in therapy or
in everyday interactions, I believe there are three key considerations that can make or
break the success of delivering compliments to LSEs. One is the particular quality cho-
sen for the compliment. Recall that in the ARI, participants select their own quality on
which they’ve been complimented, which they then go on to write about in an abstract
way. This allows them to select a quality about which they are relatively confident, or
view as important to their sense of self. Thus, people who are asked to express admira-
tion to their partners should take care to choose a quality that their partner can easily
embrace. It might intuitively seem more impactful to compliment partners on a quality
about which they frequently express doubt, but this strategy could ultimately backfire if
the complimenting further fuels the doubts (e.g., “Why is my partner saying this? Do they
really mean it? Do they just feel bad for me?”).
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 397

Second, given LSEs’ suspicions about the authenticity of positive feedback (Lemay
& Clark, 2008), partners should take care to reserve compliments for qualities that they
truly appreciate in their partner, to be given in times in which they are feeling genuinely
loving and affectionate. Given how readily LSEs attribute ulterior motives to their part-
ner’s expression of affection, it seems prudent to ensure those expressions are made with-
out any ulterior motive that might be detected.
A third consideration is phrasing the compliment with some positive meaning for the
relationship implied. For example, rather than saying, “You are really helpful,” one might
say, “I appreciate how willing you are to help when I need it. It makes me feel like we
are a team.” One might need to be careful to keep it simple and brief; going on too long
about the partner’s helpfulness and its significance for the relationship may eventually be
perceived as manipulative.
Ultimately, these are speculations based on prior related research. More targeted
research should be conducted on couples delivering compliments to each other, both
in and out of a clinical setting. Further, therapists must use judgment to determine the
context in which this activity may ultimately be helpful rather than harmful. If there is
overwhelming evidence that the partner really does not care for the individual and treats
them poorly, they may need to be coached to leave the relationship rather than increase
an unwarranted sense of security and commitment.
Beyond therapeutic settings, people may benefit from the ARI by learning about
it through literature in which it has been described. For example, in Eli Finkel’s (2017)
popular book The All-or-­Nothing Marriage, the ARI is cited as one example of a “love
hack,” a strategy that involves “tweaking how we think about our partner and relation-
ship” (p. 183). Love hacks on their own are not sufficient to rescue a failing relationship
or even to make a stable relationship flourish. But they are relatively easy and accessible,
they do not require much investment of time, and they do not rely on cooperation from
the partner. The hope is that couples may benefit in at least some small way from using a
variety of love hacks and even developing their own.
Presenting the ARI as one simple yet meaningful strategy, among others, for facili-
tating relationship well-being may be an effective way to reach a larger audience. How-
ever, no research has yet addressed whether awareness of the ARI and its intended
effects may undermine its usefulness. Research on self-­affirmation has shown that it
is not awareness per se that can undermine its effect but rather the feeling of being
manipulated or controlled (Silverman, Logel, & Cohen, 2013). This is an important
distinction to make in future research investigating whether LSEs may still benefit from
compliment abstraction once they know its intended effects; perhaps the answer is yes if
they feel personally motivated to try the exercise themselves, but no if they feel someone
is imposing it upon them.
Most of the previous research has focused on self-­esteem as the moderator of the
intervention’s effect, but changing the context may change the moderator. At a concep-
tual level, the most appropriate moderator may be one that distinguishes reactions to
the social information being conveyed in that particular context. Thus, self-­esteem is
most appropriate when considering reactions to feedback about the self; a measure of
conflict history seems to be more appropriate when considering reactions to anticipated
and actual conflict. Indeed, as discussed earlier in this chapter, a dyadic study of couples
discussing a conflict in their relationship showed the ARI was particularly beneficial for
couples with a stronger history of destructive conflict (Marigold & Anderson, 2016).
398 III.  Conflict and Relationships

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

These findings reinforce a long history of research showing that meaning matters (see
Walton & Wilson, 2018, for a review). To the extent that people believe their partners’
negative statements and behaviors signify a lack of care or concern for the self, they may
become more insecure or dissatisfied. To the extent that people believe their partner’s
positive statements and behaviors fail to signify care and concern for the self, their secu-
rity and satisfaction will not benefit. Insecurity and dissatisfaction further predispose
people to make relationship-­threatening attributions, and so the cycle continues (Brad-
bury & Fincham, 1990).
This research also tells us something about how relational insecurities operate. Peo-
ple’s motivations shape their perceptions, such that those who are primarily motivated to
protect themselves from hurt (e.g., LSEs) actually “see” things differently. Just as LSEs
more readily identify acceptance cues directed at others than at themselves (Cameron,
Stinson, Gaetz, & Balchen, 2010), they make more positive meaning of compliments
directed toward others than to themselves (Hoplock et al., 2018). Thus there is little evi-
dence to suggest that LSEs have some kind of perception deficit that prevents them from
being able to accurately recognize cues of acceptance and positive regard—­rather, they
falter in these tasks only when their own sense of self and security are on the line. Under-
standing this phenomenon should be helpful to partners of individuals who are insecure,
who often find that their behavior does not get interpreted as intended.
As with other “wise” interventions, the ARI research shows that we can target small
changes that, with some reinforcement, can have larger, long-term effects. It also tells
us that when we cannot change people’s reality (e.g., by mandating the number or kind
of compliments people pay their partners), there is still some utility in changing the way
people think about their reality (e.g., seeing the potential for broader meaning in the
compliments they do receive).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The highest priority next step for this research is to determine how partners of LSEs may
deliver compliments more effectively, in a manner that prevents LSEs from dismissing
them as genuine. People may naturally feel compelled to give their LSE partners feed-
back on qualities about which they know their partner is insecure in an effort to combat
that insecurity. However, there is good evidence to suggest that approach may very well
backfire (e.g., Brummelman, Thomaes, Overbeek, et al., 2014; Lemay & Clark, 2008).
Instead, people may be better off giving LSE partners compliments on qualities about
which they appear to be relatively confident—­such qualities may lend themselves bet-
ter to spontaneous abstracting by the LSEs. As discussed earlier in the chapter, people
may also be able to give their partners compliments in a way that implies some meaning,
though they must take care that those efforts to affirm are not too heavy-­handed.
For the LSEs’ part, ideally they would not continually require a researcher’s gentle
encouragement toward making meaning out of positive partner feedback. Over time,
they can practice moving away from reflexively dismissing compliments outright and
giving them further consideration. Of course not all compliments will be that meaning-
ful, and sometimes their partner may actually be just trying to make them feel better or
 The Abstract Reframing Intervention 399

prepare them to be asked a favor. Another option would be to simply say “thank you”
when they receive a compliment, allowing it to stand as is without any further consid-
eration of whether the evidence actually backs it up. Perhaps this practice of acceptance
would eventually extend beyond the moment.
Given the enormous potential of romantic relationships to be rewarding and affirm-
ing, and to benefit both psychological and physical well-being more broadly (Gustavson
et al., 2016; Myers, 2000), the problem of LSEs’ relationship insecurity is an important
one. There is much opportunity to alleviate this problem when one understands the psy-
chological processes involved in the experience of low self-­esteem and of meaning making
in relationships, and the “wise interventions” that are designed with this in mind.

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402 III.  Conflict and Relationships

APPENDIX 17.1.  Study Materials

Relationship Event
Think of a time when your current romantic partner told you how much he/she liked something
about you. For example, a personal quality or ability you have that he/she thinks very highly of, or
something you did that really impressed him/her. When you have thought of such an occurrence,
please write a few cue words that will identify that memory to you (e.g., “said I was thoughtful”),
then turn the page to describe the event more fully.

Cue words:

Please describe the event more fully:

ARI Condition
Explain why your partner admired you. Describe what it meant to you and its significance for your
relationship.

Concrete Condition
Describe exactly what your partner said to you. Include any details you can recall about where you
two were at the time, what you were doing, what you were both wearing, etc.

Control Condition
Describe the event in the space below.
 PA R T IV

SUSTAINABILITY
 C H A P TE R 18

The Social Norms Approach

A Wise Intervention for Solving Social
and Environmental Problems

Jessica M. Nolan, P. Wesley Schultz, Robert B. Cialdini,

and Noah J. Goldstein

Social norms interventions work by communicating to a target audience that other people
are engaging in the desired behavior, or will approve of you if you do the behavior (or con-
versely that other people are avoiding an undesired behavior, or will disapprove of you if you
do it). Social norms interventions have been used to address a number of social and envi-
ronmental problems with positive effects that have been documented to persist over time.
Key considerations in social norms interventions are that they are believable, utilize cred-
ible sources, and reference meaningful groups. Importantly, social norms interventions are
often most effective at changing the behavior of those who frequently engage in undesired
behaviors (e.g., consuming electricity) or who infrequently engage in desired behaviors (e.g.,
recycling). This chapter includes sample messages and advice for successfully implement-
ing a social norms intervention. The process by which social norms affect behavior and the
implications for theory and practice are also discussed.

On a hillside in Italy, a large crowd has gathered to sing about how they would “like
to buy the world a Coke” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2406n8_rUw). As the camera
pans the crowd we see people with different skin colors and clothing presumably repre-
senting a multitude of countries and ethnicities from around the world. The crowd con-
tinues their heartfelt lip-­syncing with “It’s the real thing. Coke is what the world wants
today.” This commercial, released by Coca-Cola in 1971, went on to become one of its
most famous (Andrews & Barbash, 2016). The theme of the ad is clear: People all over
the world are drinking Coke and you should, too.
In this chapter, we describe how social norms can be harnessed as a wise interven-
tion to influence behavior. As in the Coca-Cola commercial, social norms interventions

405
406 IV. Sustainability

provide “social proof” to the audience that other people engage in a desired behavior (or
do not engage in an undesired behavior) in an attempt to leverage an individual’s need
to belong and the tendency to conform to the behavior of others. Because social norms
interventions more frequently utilize descriptive social norms, that is the primary focus
of this chapter. However, research on injunctive norms is included when it helps to clarify
the differences between the two types of norms and their underlying mechanisms. We
also focus primarily on research that utilizes explicit normative appeals and that attempts
to impact behavior, rather than just attitudes or beliefs.

BACKGROUND

There are two origin stories to be told for social norms interventions: one for the aca-
demic discussion of social norms in social psychology, and the other for the develop-
ment of social norms marketing to curb problematic drinking. We begin with the former.
Many social norms interventions carried out today have been influenced by the work
of Cialdini and colleagues in the early 1990s on the focus theory of normative conduct.
This work was built on an understanding of social norms as “rules and standards that
are understood by members of a group, and that guide and/or constrain social behavior
without the force of laws” (Cialdini & Trost, 1998, p. 152). This definition allows social
norms to exist at multiple levels, representing a shared understanding among members
of a group that can be as small as a family unit or group of friends, or as large as a
whole society. Cialdini and colleagues took this definition a step further by distinguish-
ing between two types of social norms that can influence behavior: descriptive norms
that describe what most people do, and injunctive norms that prescribe or proscribe what
people think should or should not be done. Furthermore, more than a half-dozen experi-
ments, many looking across real behavior in the field, provide substantial support for the
focus theory of normative conduct.
The focus theory of normative conduct proposes that norms must be salient or acti-
vated to guide behavior. Both descriptive and injunctive norms can be activated, and a
variety of manipulations can be used to bring a particular norm into focus. For example,
in one of their early experiments, Cialdini, Reno, and Kallgren (1990) exposed partici-
pants to either a clean (antilittering descriptive norm) or littered (prolittering descriptive
norm) parking garage and then had a confederate either walk by (low norm salience),
drop a crumpled bag (high-­descriptive norm salience), or pick up a crumpled bag (high-­
injunctive norm salience). Researchers recorded how many participants in each condition
littered a large handbill that had been left on the windshield of their car. The results
showed, first, that participants were more likely to litter the handbill when the environ-
ment was already littered versus when it was clean. Second (and more importantly), con-
sistent with the prediction of focus theory (Cialdini et al., 1990) that salient norms will
guide behavior, there was an interaction between the norm salience manipulation and the
manipulation of the environment. In the high-­descriptive norm salience condition, par-
ticipants who saw the confederate drop the crumpled bag in an already littered parking
garage were just as likely as those who saw the confederate walk by to litter the handbill.
However, those who saw the confederate litter the crumpled bag into a clean environment
were much less likely to litter compared to those who saw the confederate just walk by.
When the confederate littered, they brought attention to the prevailing descriptive norm
 The Social Norms Approach 407

and made it more likely that the participant would use that norm to inform their own
behavior. In the high-­injunctive norm salience condition, participants littered less when
the confederate picked up the crumpled bag versus just walked by, regardless of whether
the environment was clean or littered (see Figure 18.1). Subsequent research showed
that a salient piece of litter, like a watermelon rind, in an otherwise clean environment,
could also activate the antilittering descriptive norm and that sweeping litter into a pile
and using an antilittering message on the handbill left on the windshield could activate
injunctive norms against littering with similar effects (Cialdini et al., 1990).
Let’s turn now to the second origin story for social norms interventions. The devel-
opment of social norms marketing began in the late 1980s with research at Hobart and
William Smith Colleges. This early research on college drinking norms showed that col-
lege students frequently overestimated how much and how regularly their peers were con-
suming alcohol (Perkins & Berkowitz, 1986). Subsequent research found that exagger-
ated beliefs about the prevalence of alcohol use and abuse was widespread across college
campuses of various sizes and in different regions of the country (Perkins, 2003). This
discovery of exaggerated or “misperceived” norms, combined with correlational research
showing that normative beliefs about the behavior of others are often a strong predictor
of one’s own behavior (e.g., Clapp & McDonnell, 2000), led to the development of the
social norms marketing approach.
The social norms marketing approach provided an alternative to the traditional
health promotion model. In the traditional model, problematic drinking was seen as a
consequence of favorable attitudes toward drinking. As a result, interventions designed
in the context of the traditional model focused on changing attitudes toward alcohol
use as a way to promote responsible drinking behavior. Typically, these attitude-­change
interventions focused on educating the target audience about the dangers associated with
the harmful effects of alcohol, whether they be health related or legal risks. The social

40
Percent who littered handbill

35

30

25

20

15 Environment clean
Environment littered
10

0
None Descriptive Injunctive
(confederate (confederate (confederate
walks by) litters bag) picks up bag)
Activated norm

FIGURE 18.1.  Percentage of people who littered a handbill based on which norm was activated
and the state of the environment. Figure redrawn using data from Reno, Cialdini, and Kallgren
(1993).
408 IV. Sustainability

norms marketing approach acknowledged that problematic drinking behavior might also
be caused by peer and social influences, real or imagined (see also Perkins, 2003, for a
detailed history of the emergence of the social norms approach).

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

How does the social norms approach achieve lasting effects? As a wise intervention, the
social norms approach alters the way that people make sense of the world around them
by providing answers to psychologically important questions, such as “How can I behave
effectively in a given situation,” or “How should I behave to avoid disapproval from
important others?” The desire to find answers to these questions is driven by two of the
fundamental motives that underlie meaning making: the need to understand and the need
to belong (Walton & Wilson, 2018). Later in the chapter we discuss the details of three
mechanisms that result from these fundamental needs:

1. A heuristic mechanism fueled by the need to understand and behave effectively—­

for example, a consumer shopping for a new washing machine chooses the one
listed as “most popular” in a shopping guide.
2. A cognitive mechanism fueled by the need to belong—­for example, a college stu-
dent perceives that most of their peers are drinking alcohol and follows suit.
3. An internalization mechanism that is fueled by a combination of these two fun-
damental needs—for example, a homeowner may initially set out their recycling
pail each week because the neighbors are doing it, but over time they may come
to believe that it is the right thing to do.

We also discuss how the social norms approach engages recursive processes between an
individual and their social environment that help to sustain changes into the future.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Outcomes
There is abundant evidence for the effectiveness of the social norms approach. Social
norms interventions have been used successfully to promote a wide range of health, pro-
social, and environmental behaviors. In the health domain, social norms interventions
have increased vegetable consumption (Robinson, Thomas, Aveyard, & Higgs, 2014),
hand washing (Lapinski, Maloney, Braz, & Shulman, 2013), and use of designated driv-
ers (Perkins, Linkenbach, Lewis, & Neighbors, 2010), and decreased sedentary behav-
ior (Priebe & Spink, 2015), binge drinking (Haines, 1998), pregame drinking (Burger,
LaSalvia, Hendricks, Mehdipour, & Neudeck, 2011), drinking and driving (Perkins et
al., 2010), and inappropriate antibiotic prescription by physicians (Linder et al., 2017).
In the prosocial domain, social norms interventions have spurred signing petitions (Mar-
getts, John, Escher, & Reissfelder, 2011), donating to charitable causes (Agerström, Carls-
son, Nicklasson, & Guntell, 2016), and voting (Gerber & Rogers, 2009). As evidenced
 The Social Norms Approach 409

from this list, social norms interventions have broad generalizability across behaviors.
In the environmental domain, social norms interventions have increased curbside recy-
cling (Schultz, 1999), towel reuse among hotel guests (Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevi-
cius, 2008), water conservation (Ferraro & Price, 2013), composting household organics
(Phelps, Large, Schultz, & Ettlinger, 2017), and decreased energy consumption (Nolan,
Schultz, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2008), littering (Cialdini et al., 1990), and
theft of petrified wood at a national park (Cialdini et al., 2006).
In our own research on household energy conservation, we found that a message
utilizing social norms outperformed more traditional approaches (Nolan et al., 2008).
The research began with a survey of Californians to assess their energy-­conservation
behavior, normative beliefs, and beliefs about what motivated them to conserve. A major-
ity of Californians reported engaging in many of the energy-­conserving behaviors that
we asked about, including using fans instead of air-­conditioning at night and turning off
unused lights. The results of this correlational study also showed that although respon-
dents were most likely to attribute their motivation for conserving energy to a desire to
protect the environment and future generations, in fact, the best predictor of their self-­
reported energy-­conservation behavior was their descriptive normative beliefs about the
energy-­conserving behavior of others.
We followed up the statewide survey with a large-scale field experiment comparing
the effectiveness of a social norms message inviting households to “join your neighbors”
to more traditional appeals to “protect the environment,” “do your part for future gen-
erations,” and “save money.” Door hangers were distributed to participating households
for 4 weeks. Each week the door hanger promoted a different energy-­saving behavior
along with a motivational appeal specific to the type of message. Those in the environ-
mental protection condition were told how much carbon dioxide emission they would
prevent, those in the social responsibility condition were told how they could reduce
demand for electricity, and those in the self-­interest condition were told how performing
the recommended behavior would save them money. In the social norms condition, we
used information from the statewide survey to provide households with true information
about the percentage of neighbors like them who were engaging in the recommended
energy-­saving behavior (see Figure 18.2 for a sample door hanger). We found that partici-
pants who received the social norms intervention used significantly less energy during the
intervention compared to those in the other conditions. In addition to measuring home
energy consumption, we also interviewed households to inquire about their perception of
the effectiveness of the door hangers. Consistent with the results of the statewide survey,
the results of the door-to-door survey revealed that the social norms message was rated
as the least motivating, despite the fact that it had been most effective at reducing home
energy consumption.
This and other related research (e.g., Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2007)
inspired companies such as Opower to adopt the social norms approach for large-scale
application, providing customers with normative feedback on their home energy bills.
Over a 10-year period, Opower reduced energy consumption by an average of 2–5%
in more than 100 utility districts and reached nearly 60 million households (Allcott,
2011). The cumulative impact of this large-scale application is estimated to have reduced
household energy costs by $1 billion and carbon dioxide emissions by 13 billion pounds
(Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2018).
410 IV. Sustainability

Join your neighbors

in conserving
energy

Summer is here and most people in your

community are finding ways to conserve
energy at home.

“How are San Marcos

residents like you
conserving this
summer?”

By using fans
instead of A/C!

Why?
In a recent survey of households in
your community, researchers at Cal
State San Marcos found that _____%
of San Marcos residents often use
fans instead of air conditioning to
keep cool in the summer.

Using fans instead of air conditioning –

Your Community's Popular Choice!

FIGURE 18.2. Sample door hanger used in the study by Nolan, Schultz, Cialdini, Goldstein,
and Griskevicius (2008).

Mechanism
Social Proof
There is evidence to suggest that conformity to social norms, and descriptive norms in par-
ticular, occurs through a heuristic process (Göckeritz et al., 2010; Jacobson, Mortensen,
& Cialdini, 2011). Individuals, motivated by a need to understand how to behave effec-
tively, use the behavior of others to quickly make decisions about their own behavior.
Thus, activated social norms can serve as an efficient guide for the decision maker, pro-
viding “social proof” for the effectiveness of a particular behavior (Cialdini, 2001). This
heuristic process is also consistent with evolutionary explanations of conformity. For
example, in the domain of eating, adhering to descriptive norms may have provided an
easy way to ensure the selection of safe foods and may have promoted food sharing in our
environment of evolutionary adaptation (Higgs, 2015).
 The Social Norms Approach 411

Support for the heuristic nature of this approach comes from research showing
that social norms interventions can impact behavior, even when participants do not
self-­report greater intentions to engage in the behavior (Stok, Mollen, Verkooijen, &
Renner, 2018). Furthermore, participants with fewer cognitive resources are more likely
to conform to a descriptive norm message (Jacobson et al., 2011), and other research
showing that individuals who are personally involved with the behavior being promoted
(Göckeritz et al., 2010), or who are encouraged to elaborate on a message (Kredentser,
Fabrigar, Smith, & Fulton, 2012), are less likely to conform to a descriptive norm mes-
sage. In contrast, the reverse is true for social norms interventions that employ injunc-
tive norms. Depleting cognitive resources makes injunctive norm messages less effec-
tive, while elaboration makes them more effective. These results support the notion that
descriptive norms operate as a heuristic cue that help to achieve the goal of efficient and
effective action with minimal cognitive resources, whereas injunctive norms are more
focused on the maintenance of interpersonal interactions and thus require greater cogni-
tive resources to process them.

Changing Normative Beliefs
The social norms approach can also be construed as an intervention that harnesses indi-
viduals’ need to belong by linking belonging to beliefs about what constitutes desired
behavior. In many cases, individuals overestimate the prevalence of undesirable behav-
iors and underestimate the prevalence of desirable behaviors. Social norms interventions
correct these misperceptions of the norm by providing people with accurate information
about what constitutes typical behavior in a valued social community. Norms and nor-
mative beliefs, though related, represent distinct constructs. Whereas the former speaks
to the actual state of affairs regarding a target behavior’s prevalence or acceptance, the
latter encompasses individuals’ perceptions of these actualities (Nolan, 2011). It is these
normative beliefs that may become the proximate drivers of behavior (Morris, Hong,
Chiu, & Liu, 2015).
Social norms marketing campaigns have been shown to be quite effective at cor-
recting misperceptions of campus drinking norms (Clapp, Lange, Russel, Shillington, &
Voas, 2003; Neighbors, Larimer, & Lewis, 2004). For example, a social norms market-
ing campaign was designed to reduce problematic drinking among young people from the
United States crossing the border to go to the bars in Tijuana, Mexico (Johnson, 2012).
The results showed that providing these young people with accurate information about
how much alcohol previous border crossers had consumed succeeded in changing their
normative beliefs about drinking and that this change in beliefs was negatively correlated
with their blood alcohol levels as they crossed back into the United States. Other evidence
for the role of normative beliefs comes from research showing that social norms inter-
ventions can be enhanced by first asking people to guess the norm before it is revealed
(Bartke, Friedl, Gelhaar, & Reh, 2017). Importantly, asking people to guess the norm
increased charitable giving only among people who perceived it to be less common than it
actually was (i.e., those who underestimated the prevalence of the desired behavior). For
those who overestimated the true descriptive norm, guessing only served to undermine
their motivation as they learned that charitable giving was in fact less frequent than they
had previously assumed.
412 IV. Sustainability

Internalized Norms
A third way that social norms interventions may operate to change behavior (and main-
tain those changes) is via the internalization of social norms as personal norms—that
is, a personal moral obligation to act in a certain way. It is accepted, and expected, that
over time social norms will become internalized as personal norms (Schwartz, 1977;
Sherif, 1966). According to Sherif, “Norms develop in man and become part of him as he
develops in a social environment” (p. 46). Personal norms are internally sanctioned and
backed by the anticipation of shame, guilt, and/or embarrassment when a personal norm
has been violated (Horne, 2003; Kerr, Garst, Lewandowski, & Harris, 1997; Posner &
Rasmusen, 1999; Rozin, Lowery, Haidt, & Imada, 1999) and as a “warm glow” when
one has behaved consistently with their own personal standards (e.g., Andreoni, 1995).
Thus, in addition to having short-term effects on behavior, social norms interventions
may also be able to change behavior in the long term.
The long-term impact of social norms interventions is likely the result of a recur-
sive process between the individual and their social environment. For example, someone
who reduces their home energy consumption as a result of a social norms intervention
may receive approval for this change from friends and colleagues or may be more likely
to notice or associate with others who also conserve energy. These interactions rein-
force the new pattern of behavior and help to maintain, or even strengthen, the energy-­
conservation norm, as well as to help the norm become internalized.

Effects over Time
Not only do social norms interventions have an immediate effect on behavior, they can
continue to affect behavior for days, weeks, or even years later. The strongest effects
seem to come from interventions that provide ongoing exposure to normative informa-
tion or provide “boosters” on a semiregular basis. In the environmental domain, large-
scale longitudinal research by Allcott and Rogers (2014) showed that the most dramatic
decrease in energy consumption came immediately after the introduction of normative
feedback. While these large reductions in energy usage were not sustained, households
that continued to receive monthly or quarterly reports over the next 2 years did con-
tinue to conserve, just at a lower rate. In addition, these households continued to con-
serve energy over the next 2 years even after they stopped receiving regular home energy
reports. It is possible that the continuation in energy conservation over time may, in part,
be the result of households having implemented one-time behaviors, such as installing an
energy-­efficient appliance, that have a long-term impact on consumption. However, simi-
lar long-term effects have been found for social norms interventions designed to discour-
age overprescribing of antibiotics by physicians (e.g., Linder et al., 2017). In this problem
space, behaviors must be repeated to be sustained, which suggests that these long-term
effects cannot be attributed entirely to engaging in one-time behaviors with enduring
effects. Instead, individuals must come to believe that these newly adopted behaviors are
the correct and effective way to behave, and so continue to do so, even after the interven-
tion has ended. On a smaller scale, college students continued to conserve water 3 weeks
after a social norms sign encouraging them to do full loads of laundry was posted in their
dorm laundry room (Sparkman & Walton, 2017). In this case, the sign remained pres-
ent for the duration of the intervention. However, even one-shot treatments can persist
 The Social Norms Approach 413

over short periods of time. For example, participants exposed to a descriptive norm mes-
sage for water conservation continued to use less water 1 week later, even with no new
exposure to the message (Richetin, Perugini, Mondini, & Hurling, 2016). Nonetheless,
one-shot treatments do tend to wane over longer periods of time (Ferraro & Price, 2013).
Another demonstrated way to prolong the effects of a social norms intervention is to
couple it with commitment (Jaeger & Schultz, 2017). In a study of water conservation,
households that received a social norms message and made a commitment to use water
efficiently consumed less water 4 months later, compared to those that received a strong
warning reminding them of the penalties associated with violating the water restrictions
and that then made a commitment. The authors argue that these results are caused by
cognitive dissonance resulting from an insufficient justification for making the commit-
ment in the social norms condition. Because social norms interventions are minimally
directive (Walton & Wilson, 2018), households that made a commitment after receiving
the norms message perceived their behavior as freely chosen rather than attributing it to
the coercive nature of the message. As a result, the behavior was more likely to become
intrinsically motivated. In contrast, those in the strong warning condition could attribute
their commitment to the coercive nature of the message and associated laws.
The goal of most interventions is to create long-term changes in behavior that are
intrinsically motivated, and thus do not require external rewards, incentives, or remind-
ers. The take-home message from these studies is that one-shot interventions are likely to
have immediate effects on behavior but may not persist beyond a few days. This may be
because normative beliefs are dynamic and constructed from a continuous flow of inputs
that includes observing the behavior of others and communications about the behavior
of others, as well as one’s own behavior (Miller & Prentice, 1996). As time goes by, the
information provided in a one-shot social norms intervention may be outweighed by
other inputs suggesting that the behavior is less common than was suggested. In contrast,
ongoing campaigns that last for several weeks, months, or years are more likely to persist
far into the future. Like most wise interventions (Walton & Wilson, 2018), the key to
success is to create a durable change in the way people make sense of themselves and/or
the situation. For example, a student who previously saw binge drinking on campus as
normal and expected may reconsider that view after being exposed to an ongoing social
norms campaign. As we mentioned earlier, ongoing exposure to social norms, combined
with repeated production of the behavior, may lead to internalization of those norms
and the development of new habits. When new habits are formed and/or personal norms
are developed, the intervention is no longer needed to spur behavior. Instead, behavior
becomes internally motivated and free from external controls.

Heterogeneity
Like most persuasive efforts, social norms interventions can be more or less effective
depending on important attributes of the message, the behavior, and the target audience.

Attributes of the Message
In order to be effective, messages must use credible sources and advertise social norms
that are believable. Social norms marketing may be less effective, or ineffective, in situ-
ations in which the source of the message can be perceived to have a vested interest and
414 IV. Sustainability

stands to gain personally from participants conforming to the implied request of the
message. For example, participants perceived a grocery store ad promoting natural prod-
ucts to be more deceptive when it included a descriptive norm (Raska, Nichols, & Shaw,
2015). While these ads did successfully change participants’ perception of the norm, they
were rated more negatively, and made participants less willing to purchase the advertised
products. Likewise, descriptive norms must be believable to be effective. Smith, Atkin,
Martell, Allen, and Hembroff (2006) found that normative messages vary in the extent to
which the target audience accepts them as believable and propose that messages that uti-
lize information that falls within the latitude of “noncommitment” will be most effective.
Information that is too easily accepted may not provide a motivation to change, while
information in the latitude of rejection may be dismissed as deceptive.
The most effective social norms interventions often use reference groups that are
meaningful to the individual in some way. Messages that reference ingroups (Abrams,
Wetherall, Cochrane, Hogg, & Turner, 1990) and proximal others (Agerström et al.,
2016; Stok, de Vet, de Ridder, & de Wit, 2016) are more effective than those that refer-
ence outgroups and distal others. Similarly, identifying strongly with the reference group
can increase the impact of social norms messages (Stok, de Ridder, de Vet, & de Wit,
2014), and in general, reference groups that are valued by the individual are better able to
influence behavior. Social identity theory (Tajfel, 1974) predicts that people will be most
inclined to follow the norms of groups that are important to them because they derive
part of their sense of self (and self-­esteem) from these social identities. Conforming to
social norms provides a way to remain a member in good standing and to satisfy our
fundamental need to belong.
Perhaps surprisingly, messages utilizing seemingly meaningless referents, such as
“people who used this soap” (Richetin et al., 2016) and “guests in this room” (Goldstein
et al., 2008; Reese, Loew, & Steffgen, 2014), can also be effective. Indeed, advertis-
ing that a majority of guests that had stayed in a particular hotel room reused their
towels was more effective at motivating guests to reuse their towels than a traditional
appeal to environmental protection or a patriotic social norms message that referenced
citizens. Provincial norms are defined as “the norms of one’s local setting and circum-
stances” (Goldstein et al., 2008, p. 476). Importantly, the results of this initial study
showed that while the provincial norm had the biggest effect on behavior, it was rated as
being the least important to participants’ personal identity. Instead, Goldstein and col-
leagues speculate that adherence to these provincial norms is guided by a desire to behave
effectively in one’s immediate setting. These results are also consistent with predictions
that would be made according to the logic-of-­appropriateness framework (Weber, Kopel-
man, & Messick, 2004): “What does a person like me do in a situation like this?” If the
guest assumes that they are similar to other guests that have stayed in that room, then
the provincial norm provides clear guidance for what a person “like you” has done under
similar circumstances.

Attributes of the Behavior
Two important aspects of the behavior that have been explored are the extent to which
the behavior can be publicly observed and the level of uncertainty associated with what
constitutes correct action in a given situation. Social norms interventions may be more
effective at influencing publicly observable behaviors (Stok et al., 2016), but research has
 The Social Norms Approach 415

shown that they can also be used successfully to promote private or semiprivate behav-
iors, such as hand washing (Lapinski et al., 2013) and home energy consumption (Nolan
et al., 2008). With respect to uncertainty or ambiguity about what constitutes correct
action, the research clearly shows that social norms interventions are more likely to influ-
ence behavior when the situation is ambiguous. Because of our need to understand, when
we are unsure about what constitutes safe, effective, or appropriate behavior we are
more likely to rely on social norms (Gelfand & Harrington, 2015; Higgs, 2015; White &
Simpson, 2013).

Attributes of the Target Audience
What you say in a message is important but so is understanding to whom you are saying
it. In terms of demographic characteristics, social norms interventions tend to be more
effective with younger people (Rivas & Sheeran, 2003), women (Higgs, 2015), and indi-
viduals from collectivistic cultures or those who have a more collectivistic orientation
(Cialdini, Wosinska, Barrett, Butner, & Gornika-­Durose, 1999). Younger people, and
adolescents in particular, may be more susceptible to social norms associated with their
peer groups because this is a developmental period that is heavily focused on identity
development (Erikson, 1950). Women may be more likely to conform because of evolu-
tionary factors that predispose men to conform less as part of a mating strategy to stand
out, but only when nonconformity does not lead to behavior that is objectively less accu-
rate (Griskevicius, Goldstein, Mortensen, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006). In collectivistic
societies, there is greater societal pressure to conform to group norms and to elevate the
needs of the group above self-­interest (Triandis, 1995).
Whether it be energy or alcohol, social norms interventions designed to decrease
undesirable levels of consumption are often more effective among high users. For exam-
ple, high users of water accounted for the bulk of the savings achieved by providing
comparative feedback indicating how an individual’s household water consumption com-
pared to their neighbor’s average consumption (Ferraro & Price, 2013). High-use house-
holds may be more susceptible to social norms interventions for a few reasons. First, the
personal behavior of high users is most discrepant from the advertised norm, which may
produce stronger motivations to correct the deviant behavior. Second, it is easier for high-
use households to identify easy ways to reduce their consumption. Third, high consump-
tion of resources is often associated with greater wealth. These households tend to be less
sensitive to prices, making the social norms approach even more important. Although the
reasoning may be slightly different, a similar pattern has been found in the domain of
alcohol use with heavy drinkers showing the largest reductions in consumption following
exposure to personalized normative feedback (Prince, Reid, Carey, & Neighbors, 2014).
Similarly, social norms interventions designed to increase desirable behaviors are often
more effective among low users. For example, registered voters who had voted infre-
quently or only occasionally in the past were more likely than those who voted often or
always to show greater intentions to vote when told that a majority of voters in the state
had voted in the last election (Gerber & Rogers, 2009).
Highly empathic people and people with low self-­esteem, or who are temporarily
made to feel a lack of social acceptance, are more likely to imitate a confederate, and by
extension may be more likely to conform to social norms (Robinson, Tobias, Shaw, Free-
man, & Higgs, 2011). Similarly, Gelfand and Harrington (2015) argue that low-power or
416 IV. Sustainability

low-­status individuals should be more likely to conform compared to their high-­powered,

high-­status counterparts. The logic here is that those with high status or who have a lot of
power or self-­esteem are less susceptible to criticism for deviating from the group norms,
and more immune to criticism even if it does occur.
Finally, individuals who are made to feel personally responsible for a behavior may
be more susceptible to social norms targeting changes to that behavior. For example,
bathroom users were more likely to turn off the light when leaving if they had to turn it
on when they entered and thus felt more personally responsible for the behavior (Dwyer,
Maki, & Rothman, 2015).

COUSINS

Of course, the social norms approach is not the only one that has been used to promote
desirable behaviors. Two techniques that are similar to social norms and that have been
used to target a similar range of behaviors are “modeling” and “feedback.” Interventions
that use modeling to change behavior are based on Bandura’s (1977) social learning
theory. According to social learning theory, individuals use the behavior of models to
inform their own behavior and are more likely to imitate valued models and behaviors
for which the models are rewarded. For children, these valued models are often parents
and other caregivers, whereas for adolescents, valued models are more likely to be peers.
Modeling can be an effective way to change behavior. For example, in the now classic
study by Aronson and O’Leary (1982–1983), the number of college males who turned
the water off while soaping up in a locker room shower more than doubled to 49%
when a student confederate modeled this behavior, compared to when only a large sign
was present. Compliance “jumped” further to 67% when two confederates modeled the
water-­saving behavior. At first glance, modeling and social norms might seem to be the
same. Both approaches use the behavior of others as a guide to one’s own behavior, so
how are they different? While modeling has its effect by focusing on the behavior of a
particular individual, social norms have their effect by conveying an impression of what
most people do. Cialdini and colleagues (1990) conducted an experiment that nicely
illustrates this distinction. Participants returning to their car in a hospital parking garage
either encountered a confederate who littered a large handbill onto the ground or simply
walked by in the opposite direction. Research on modeling would predict that those who
saw the confederate litter the handbill should be more likely to litter as well. However,
this was the case only when the ground was already littered. When participants saw the
confederate litter the handbill in an otherwise clean garage, they were actually less likely
to litter the handbill they found on their own vehicle, compared to when the confeder-
ate just walked by. Cialdini and colleagues argue that the confederate littering into the
clean environment decreased littering because it made the descriptive antilittering norm
salient. Thus, this example illustrates the importance of norm focus, but also the superior
strength of social norms, compared to modeling by strangers. While both social norms
and modeling can be used to resolve questions related to the need to understand and
the need to belong, modeling may be effective only when the model is a valued other. In
contrast, because social norms convey what most people approve or disapprove of, indi-
viduals can be more confident that conforming to social norms will lead to effective or
socially rewarding behavior.
 The Social Norms Approach 417

Social norms interventions, particularly those that utilize comparative or normative

feedback, are similar to feedback interventions more generally. In everyday life we regu-
larly receive feedback about our behavior. For example, the displays on an automobile
dashboard tell you how fast you are driving, how far the car has traveled over its lifetime
or on a particular trip, and in some cases, how efficiently your car is consuming gaso-
line. Feedback interventions refer to “actions taken by [an] external agent(s) to provide
information regarding some aspect of one’s task performance” (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996,
p. 255). Personalized individual feedback can be an effective way to address many prob-
lematic behaviors, including home energy consumption (Faruqui, Sergici, & Sharif, 2010)
and alcohol consumption among college students (Alfonso, 2015). Normative feedback is
similar to personalized feedback in that both strategies provide feedback about individual
or household behavior. They differ in that normative feedback provides additional infor-
mation about how the individual’s behavior compares to a specified group (e.g., Schultz,
1999).

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

There are a variety of options available for implementing a social norms intervention that
utilizes direct appeals to change behavior and that explicitly references a social norm. For
example, descriptive social norms can be communicated several ways (see Table 18.1 for
sample messages). Probably the most common approach is to advertise that a majority of
people are engaging in the desired behavior, either by saying so directly or by providing
an exact percentage (see Table 18.1, examples A–D). Variations on this approach might
also use other numeric descriptors, such as “most” or “many” to quantify the extent to
which the behavior is commonly done (see example E). A second option is to report that
a specific (desired) frequency of the behavior is common, such as advertising that most
college students have zero to five drinks when they party (see examples B and F). A third
option is to report average usage, either alone, or more often in conjunction with person-
alized feedback (see example G).
As discussed previously, social norms messages can use proximal referents, such
as neighbors or fellow students at a particular university (see example A), or provincial
norms that reference a group that shares a connection to the location (see example D).
There are also options for how to talk about the frequency of the behavior. Research
suggests that using verbal quantifiers with positive polarity, such as “at least” and “a
few” will be more effective at increasing a desired behavior compared to quantifiers with
negative polarity, such as “at most” and “few” (Demarque, Charalambides, Hilton, &
Waroquier, 2015; see example C). In all of these examples the goal of the message is to
convince the reader that the recommended behavior is commonly done and therefore the
right and correct thing to do.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

One of the most important points to remember when designing a social norms interven-
tion is that people conform to social norms whether the advertised behavior is desirable
or undesirable. This has two important implications for practice. First, the common tactic
418 IV. Sustainability

TABLE 18.1.  Sample Messages Used in Social Norms Interventions

Behavior
Reference Message type targeted Message
A Agerström, Majority percentage Donate to “73% of Linnaeus University
Carlsson, charity students who were asked for a
Proximal referent
Nicklasson, & contribution have donated 20
Guntell (2016) crowns to [Swedish] Golomolo.”

B Scribner et al. (2011) Majority percentage Binge “67% of university students have 4
drinking or fewer drinks when they party.”
Frequency of
behavior

C Demarque, Majority percentage Green “70% bought at least one

Charalambides, purchasing ecological product.”
Positive polarity
Hilton, &
verbal quantifier
Waroquier (2015)

D Goldstein, Cialdini, Majority percentage Towel reuse “75% of the guests who stayed
& Griskevicius in this room [#xx] participated in
Provincial norm
(2008) our new resource savings program
by using their towels more than
once.”

E Perkins, Linkenbach, Majority descriptor Drunk “Most Montana young adults [4

Lewis, & Neighbors driving out of 5] don’t drink and drive.”
(2010)

F Robinson, Thomas, Typical referent Vegetable “A lot of people aren’t aware that
Aveyard, & Higgs and fruit the typical student eats their five
Frequency of
(2014) consumption servings of fruits and vegetables
behavior
each day.”

G Ferraro & Price Comparative Water “Your total consumption June to

(2013) feedback consumption October 2006: 50,000 gallons.”
“Your neighbors’ average
consumption June to October
2006: 35,000.”
“You consumed more water
than 72% of your Cobb County
neighbors.”

H Sparkman & Walton Dynamic norm Meat “Some people are starting to limit
(2017) consumption how much meat they eat. . . .
Specifically, recent research has
shown that, over the last 5 years,
30% of Americans have started to
make an effort to limit their meat
consumption. That means that,
in recent years, 3 in 10 people
have changed their behavior and
begun to eat less meat than they
otherwise would.”

I Mortensen et al. Minority norm + Water “48% of [university name]

(2017) trending norm conservation students engage in one or more of
the following water conservation
behaviors. . . . This has increased
from 37% in [2 years previous].”
 The Social Norms Approach 419

of health and environmental messages to advertise undesirable behaviors as “regrettably

frequent” would be contraindicated by research and theorizing about social norms, and
is not recommended (Cialdini et al., 2006). A typical message in this tradition focuses on
how so many people are engaging in a dangerous, unhealthy, or polluting behavior. One
of the most famous examples of advertising undesirable behavior as regrettably frequent
is the “Iron Eyes Cody” public service announcement (PSA) produced by Keep America
Beautiful in the 1970s. The ad showed an actor dressed in traditional American Indian
clothing, paddling his canoe down a litter-­filled river. When he brings the boat ashore
he encounters more litter and a highway filled with car traffic. If it wasn’t already clear,
the high frequency of littering is further emphasized when a driver throws a bag full of
trash out of the car window, landing at the feet of Iron Eyes Cody. To show that this
high frequency of littering is “regrettable,” the PSA ends by showing us a single tear
rolling down the cheek of Iron Eyes Cody. We would do better to follow the example of
the Coca-Cola ad described in the opening lines of the chapter and advertise the desired
behavior as common and/or to focus the target audience on injunctive norms of approval
for the desired behavior.
The second implication of this rule is the importance of baseline behavior, particu-
larly when providing normative feedback about how an individual’s behavior compares to
the average or typical user. Social norms have the constructive power to decrease energy
consumption among above-­average users, but also the destructive power to increase con-
sumption among below-­average users (Schultz et al., 2007). One solution to this problem
is to withhold normative feedback to below-­average consumers if they can be identified
in advance. Another option, suggested by our research, is to harness the reconstructive
power of injunctive norms. Our results showed that incorporating an injunctive norm—a
smiley face that expressed approval for consuming less than the average—­buffered the
tendency of low users to increase their consumption.
Another nuance that can be critical to the effectiveness of a social norms interven-
tion is being aware of situational cues that might undermine the intervention message.
People form beliefs about norms not only from explicit messages that assert the norm
but also from inferences about the world around them. Environmental cues, such as the
presence of litter or graffiti, can send a signal not just about the observed behavior, but
also about the commonness and acceptability of related behaviors (Keizer, Lindenberg,
& Steg, 2008). For example, when trash bags were placed in a prohibited location (sig-
naling disorder), passersby were less likely to mail a lost letter or help a confederate pick
up dropped items (Keizer, Lindenberg, & Steg, 2013). Most relevant to our discussion
of social norms interventions is research showing that prohibition signs against litter
increased the amount of littering when the environment was littered with trash or vandal-
ized with graffiti (Keizer, Lindenberg, & Steg, 2011), and research showing that social
norms marketing campaigns to reduce binge drinking are less effective on campuses with
higher densities of onsite alcohol outlets (Scribner et al., 2011). In the case of the latter,
the credibility of the social norms messages conveying that most students drink in mod-
eration would be undermined by the plethora of bars and restaurants that serve alcohol,
which presumably could not stay in business were they not well patronized.
Social norms interventions may simultaneously provide a heuristic cue for behavior
and a communication input that is likely to alter normative beliefs. However, it may
be difficult to capture these instantaneous changes in normative beliefs without alter-
ing the effects on behavior (e.g., Raska et al., 2015)—that is, while both effects occur
420 IV. Sustainability

simultaneously, inquiring about normative beliefs may call attention to the message in
ways that undermine its effectiveness (Kredentser et al., 2012). Walton and Wilson (2018)
argue that one of the features that makes interventions “wise” is that they are minimally
directive—­that is, it is possible that the covertness of the intervention is part of what
makes it effective. People do not see social norms interventions as motivating, but asking
questions about norms may draw attention to the influence attempt and increase resis-
tance to the request. Taken together, the available research would suggest that while it
is important to make the descriptive norm salient, it is also wise to discourage the target
audience from thinking too much about the message.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

To effectively implement a social norms intervention in the field a series of steps should
be followed. First, survey research should be used to determine the prevalence and/or
frequency of the behavior(s) of interest and the prevailing normative beliefs about those
behaviors among the target audience. Second, survey research can also be used to under-
stand the target audience in terms of demographics and other variables deemed to be
important, including those mentioned in this chapter. Third, structural barriers and
opportunities should be identified. For example, it would not make sense to try to reduce
heating among apartment dwellers who do not have control over their thermostats. The
second and third steps are common to most community-­based social marketing efforts
(McKenzie-­Mohr, Lee, Kotler, & Schultz, 2011). Fourth, a behavior should be selected
that is performed by many people, but misperceived to be infrequent, and that has the
potential to make a substantial impact in terms of units (e.g., pounds of greenhouse
gases, number of students blacking out) deemed to be important by the community or
organization.
Social norms interventions can be delivered effectively through various channels.
In relatively small-scale applications, the intervention is typically delivered via posters,
flyers (Robinson, Fleming, & Higgs, 2014), face-to-face discussion groups, or online
via computer-­mediated feedback (Prince et al., 2014). Small-scale applications might
also manipulate the physical environment to convey social norms (Reese, Loeschinger,
Hamann, & Neubert, 2013)—however, this approach typically requires time and
resources that can make the intervention cost prohibitive. That said, there would be no
harm, for example, in asking a computer lab manager with time on their hands to shut
down unused monitors, knowing that it will make users more likely to turn them off
themselves when they leave (Bator, Tabanico, Walton, & Schultz, 2014). In large-scale
applications, the intervention is typically delivered via media campaigns that include
print, television, and radio advertisements or PSAs (Cialdini, 2003; Perkins et al., 2010),
or by collaborating with companies that already have direct access to customers (and
consumption data), such as electricity, natural gas, and water utility companies (Allcott,
2011). Social norms can also be harnessed in online environments by advertising the
number of times a post or video has been liked and/or shared. For example, participants
who saw a description of a climate change video with a high number of views were
more likely to perceive that climate change was an important issue for “most Americans”
(Spartz, Su, Griffin, Brossard, & Dunwoody, 2017).
One of the questions we are frequently asked when presenting our research is “What
happens when the behavior you want to promote is not performed by a majority of
 The Social Norms Approach 421

people?” and, sometimes, “Why promote behaviors that are already normative? After
all, isn’t it more important to increase the prevalence of unpopular but highly impactful
behaviors?” Indeed, the usefulness of social norms interventions would be severely lim-
ited (although not altogether useless) if they could not be adapted to promote behaviors
that are not descriptively normative. When we first started working on this research in
the early 2000s there were really only two answers to this question: lie (a less than ideal
option when working in field settings) or focus on injunctive norms. While focusing on
injunctive norms is certainly a viable alternative when a behavior is not descriptively
normative, we are happy to report that a flurry of activity in the last decade has pro-
duced additional options for using social norms marketing to promote behaviors that
are not yet descriptively normative. One new option is to use positive polarity numeric
qualifiers (Demarque et al., 2015). For example, a minority of people might be recycling
paper, glass, and plastic each, but a majority of people may be recycling at least one type
of recyclable item. This adaptation is most applicable in domains that consider a sphere
of behaviors or instances of a behavior, rather than one unique behavior at one point in
time. A second new option is to report dynamic or trending norms. Trending norms are
“norms in which the number of people engaging in a behavior is increasing” (Mortensen
et al., 2017; see also Sparkman, Chapter 19, this volume). Trending norms can be used
successfully on their own (see example H in Table 18.1; Sparkman & Walton, 2017), or
they can be added to a message that communicates the minority norm (see example I;
Mortensen et al., 2017).
Like most interventions there is a tension between scaling up versus customizing
social norms messages. This is especially true with respect to choosing a reference group
for the message. Under ideal conditions, messages would be customized to refer to the
group that is most meaningful for the target audience, for which there are data available.
However, if customization is not possible, we would advise using a referent that has broad
appeal among the target audience. If possible, we recommend pilot-­testing messages prior
to large-scale application to ensure that they are well received (though recall that they
need not be perceived as motivational), ideally using a behavioral outcome measure.
The main challenge in conducting a social norms intervention is that it does require
the practitioner to acquire normative information about the target behavior, and not
everyone is in a position to conduct a survey, either due to limited time, money, or
resources. The good news is that many of the behaviors targeted in social norms inter-
ventions are heavily studied by government agencies. For example, in the United States,
information about transportation behavior can be found at www.transportation.gov,
and about energy consumption at www.energy.gov. Public opinion polls can also be a
good source of normative information about health and environmental behaviors.
Below is the story of how the social norms approach was used to reinvent home
energy bills and save more energy than the Hoover Dam produces in a year:

Alex Laskey
Cofounder of Opower

In early 2007, my longtime friend Daniel Yates and I were introduced to the work of Profes-
sors Cialdini and Schultz by Rhea Suh of the Hewlett Foundation. Dan and I had recently
decided to team up and work together to have a positive impact on the environment. At
the time, we were exploring several novel ideas of projects—­both for-­profit and not-for-­
profit—­to work on together. We met with Rhea because we were interested in the work
422 IV. Sustainability

Hewlett was funding to protect temperate rain forests in British Columbia. Toward the end
of our meeting, Rhea asked, “What else are the two of you thinking of working on?” It
was at this point that we shared with her our preliminary idea to reinvent the electric util-
ity bill. We had cooked up this idea while driving in my uncomfortable old Honda Civic,
which we routinely chose to drive instead of Dan’s relatively luxurious Nissan Pathfinder.
We subjected ourselves—­and our wives—to cramped rides in the Civic because we couldn’t
stomach the notion of unnecessarily wasting gasoline. At some point, we wondered out loud,
“Wouldn’t it be ironic if we were driving a Civic around town, but were returning home to
Pathfinder apartments? And shouldn’t everyone have a right to know whether their families
were efficient or inefficient in their homes?”
We were aware that utilities were increasingly incentivized to help their customers save
energy. And we were optimistic that if we helped utilities provide better information to
their customers, we could change behaviors. When we shared this idea with Rhea, she said,
“Surely you’ve read the research we’ve funded about the application of behavioral economics
to conservation, right?” We responded, “No. And what is ‘behavioral economics’?” She then
introduced us to the work of Drs. Cialdini and Schultz, showing how normative information
could reduce energy consumption in hotel guest rooms and suburban households. I remem-
ber very clearly the excitement Dan and I both felt after reading this research and learning
more about the field of behavioral economics. After reading that the communication of
social norms could significantly increase hotel visitors’ likelihood to hang up their towels or
motivate homeowners in the heat of summer to turn off their air conditioners and turn on
their fans, we developed growing confidence that our idea to show homeowners how their
energy use compared to their neighbors might actually make a difference.
Rhea soon connected us with Bob Cialdini. Although it’s not easy to persuade a persua-
sion researcher, because of Bob’s commitment to the environment, he agreed to serve as our
chief scientist during the initial years of the company we formed, known as Opower. Bob
worked closely with our communication team to design home energy reports sent to util-
ity customers that communicated the energy use norms of their neighborhoods. Although
Opower has since been purchased by Oracle, those energy reports, employed by over a
hundred utilities worldwide, have now saved more than 35 billion pounds of CO2 emissions
and more than 23 trillion watts per hour of electricity. What’s more, the energy reports are
presently generating 5 trillion watts per hour per year in savings to utility customers. That
works out to roughly $700 million in bill savings each year. The Hoover Dam, by compari-
son, produces only 4 trillion watts per hour of electricity. It’s remarkable to me that our little
behavioral science experiment is now roughly 20% bigger than the Hoover Dam!

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Research on social norms interventions reveals important qualities of our human nature,
and also the nature of environmental problems. The research presented in this chapter
supports the idea that, as human beings, we use the behavior of others as a guide for our
own behavior. The evidence also suggests that people may not spend a great deal of time
deliberating about daily choices, such as whether or not to recycle or turn the water off
while brushing their teeth. Instead, people rely on heuristic cues, like descriptive norms,
to satisfy their need to understand what is expected and to make these decisions about
everyday behaviors.
There are several ways that the application of the social norms approach has
affected our theoretical understanding of social norms and conformity. For example,
while research does support original theorizing suggesting that individuals prefer to use
 The Social Norms Approach 423

the behavior of proximate, ingroup members to inform their own behavior, additional
research shows that other referents can also be effective. Specifically, provincial or “situ-
ational” reference groups can also inform the behavior of targets. These results suggest
that while meaningful ingroups may be more powerful than outgroups, conformity is not
limited to those groups with which we identify. Instead, we use the behavior of others
who are similar in some way—­either by nature of their group membership or in having
had contact with a particular product or location at different points in time.
Research on trending norms also forces us to reconsider our understanding of con-
formity to social norms. Original theorizing about descriptive social norms suggested
that individuals will go along with what most people seem to be doing. However, research
on trending norms shows that individuals will also conform to the behavior of a trend-
ing minority. This seems to be due in part to a belief that the behavior is moving toward
majority status in the near future or that the changes described are expected to continue.
Thus, conformity to social norms can occur when a behavior has already become norma-
tive, or when there is evidence that it is moving in that direction.
The social norms approach also reveals important qualities of environmental prob-
lems. Environmental problems possess the qualities of social dilemmas—­situations in
which the self-­interest of the individual is at odds with the collective good. The costs
of cooperating are immediate and accrue to the individual (e.g., the inconvenience of
taking the bus vs. driving a personal automobile), while the benefits of cooperating are
delayed and spread across society (e.g., benefits to air quality; see Rogers, Goldstein, &
Fox, 2018, for a more general review of factors, including social norms interventions that
mobilize individuals to cooperate in such situations). In addition, an individual cooperat-
ing alone cannot make much of an impact on large-scale problems such as global climate
change. Individuals are understandably concerned that their efforts to conserve will be
wasted if not enough others take action. One of the reasons why social norms interven-
tions may be so effective at promoting environmental behaviors is that they assure the
target that they will not be alone in their efforts.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

As we have shown in this chapter, the social norms intervention has broad applicability
across different domains of behavior and across populations. Companies like Opower
have also shown that social norms interventions can be adapted for large-scale applica-
tions that benefit society and the environment. In addition, technologies such as smart
thermostats provide yet another opportunity for harnessing the power of social norms.
Indeed, some smart thermostat companies, such as Ecobee, have already incorporated
comparative feedback that provides users with information about how their energy con-
sumption compares to similar households as part of their “home IQ” interface. Future
research should explore how these new technologies can be used to deliver social norms
messages to optimize energy savings.
Going forward there are two key areas that should be explored in greater depth:
boundary conditions of the intervention and the underlying mechanism. With few excep-
tions (e.g., Kormos, Gifford, & Brown, 2015), social norms research to date has focused
primarily on relatively simple, everyday behaviors that must be enacted repeatedly to
have a substantive impact. For example, in the environmental domain, application of the
424 IV. Sustainability

social norms intervention has focused primarily on reducing energy and water use via
curtailment behaviors. These curtailment behaviors are often easy, inexpensive behav-
iors, such as taking shorter showers and doing full loads of laundry. Future research
should explore whether the social norms intervention can be used to influence more
difficult or expensive behaviors, such as purchasing a fuel-­efficient vehicle or planting a
rain garden.
There is also more to learn about the psychological mechanism that drives confor-
mity to social norms. In particular, it would be interesting to explore whether measuring
normative beliefs following exposure to a social norms intervention has the paradoxical
effect of making the intervention less effective. This question could be tested by reviewing
past research that has measured both beliefs and behavior, as well as with new research
specifically designed to test the hypothesis. This prediction could be directly tested by
exposing participants to the same message but asking some of them to report on their
beliefs before versus after the behavior change opportunity is presented. In conducting
the review of research, it would be important to distinguish between studies that mea-
sured behavioral intentions, self-­reported past behavior, and actual behavior. Given the
heuristic nature of social norms interventions, behavioral intentions are less likely to
provide an accurate measure of the interventions’ impact. Interference created by asking
participants to think about the message may be common to other “minimally directive”
techniques that rely on a heuristic mechanism.

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 C H A P TE R 19

Dynamic Norm Interventions

How to Enable the Spread of Positive Change

Gregg Sparkman

Social problems where a majority of people contribute to the problem are especially difficult
to solve. For example, how can we motivate people to live sustainably when many unsustain-
able behaviors are currently the norm? More generally, how can we dislodge problematic
and widely endorsed norms? One answer is to focus people’s attention on dynamic norm
information: changes in others’ behavior or attitudes over time. The research on dynamic
norms reviewed here finds that drawing attention to positive changes in others can inspire
observers to change their ways even when that change goes against the current norm.
Further, dynamic norm interventions have a variety of strengths that may make them more
effective than traditional norm interventions that focus solely on static information about the
norms in the present moment. These findings substantially extend the contexts in which
social norm interventions can be employed to those where current norms are problematic
and give a clearer understanding of how social influence may perpetuate social problems,
as well as solve them.

BACKGROUND

Social norms constitute one of the most reliable and powerful sources of influence on
human behavior (Asch, 1952; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). Given their influence, social
norms have been used in interventions across a wide range of contexts, including those
related to health (Lewis & Neighbors, 2006), environmental sustainability (Goldstein,
Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius,
2007), intergroup conflict (Paluck, 2009), civic action (Gerber & Rogers, 2009), and
more (Tankard & Paluck, 2016; Miller & Prentice, 2016). Generally, these interven-
tions operate by highlighting a positive norm—that others typically act in an appropriate
way—in order to sway people to abandon counternormative behaviors or attitudes that

429
430 IV. Sustainability

are problematic. For instance, one might send a letter to those who are late in paying their
taxes that includes a statement that most people have already paid their taxes, and they
are part of a very small minority of people who have not, in order to increase the payment
rates of recipients (see Hallsworth, List, Metcalfe, & Vlaev, 2017).
But what can you do if the current norm is not “good”? In some cases, behaviors
we hope to encourage may be done by the population very infrequently, done by only
a small minority, or otherwise be counternormative. Similarly, current norms may be
problematic or maladaptive, and do not reflect the desired outcome for those designing
interventions. This is the case for many social problems. Indeed, severe social problems
are, almost by definition, contexts where many or most people contribute to the problem.
In such cases, conformity to existing norms can perpetuate the problem and forestall
change. Fortunately, recent research on social influence has provided a possible solution:
Learning that norms are changing over time and heading in a positive direction can help
motivate people to abandon current norms to create positive social change (Sparkman &
Walton, 2017). In other words, learning that others are changing can motivate people to
follow suit, even if it means going against the current norm.
This form of intervention requires differentiating between static and dynamic norm
information. Static norms refer to information about the behaviors and attitudes of oth-
ers in the present moment (e.g., “Many people text while driving”). Dynamic norms refer
to information about the trends in norms or changes in others’ behavior and attitudes
over time (e.g., “More and more people are starting to avoid texting while driving”). This
conceptual distinction is fairly recent, and, upon reflection, nearly all past work in social
influence and related interventions has focused on static norms. Prior research has shown
that people conformed to whatever norm information their attention was focused on,
whether it be about others’ attitudes or behavior (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991). But
until recently, it was unknown whether people also conformed to information that other
people are changing.
This question was initially pursued in a behavioral context with substantial envi-
ronmental and health impacts: high levels of meat consumption (see Gerber et al., 2013;
Nijdam, Rood, & Westhoek, 2012). In countries like the United States, meat consump-
tion is a salient and well-­reinforced norm: People eat meat in social and public settings
and the norm is echoed by default options at almost all restaurants. However, there was
a substantial multiyear decline in meat consumption per capita in the United States start-
ing in the late 2000s (Bittman, 2012). Would drawing people’s attention to this dynamic
norm increase their interest in eating less meat, even though that behavior was coun-
ternormative? A series of studies compared the effects of static and dynamic norms by
randomizing participants to either learn about the static norm that some people make an
effort to limit how much meat they eat, or learn about the dynamic norm that, in recent
years, some people had changed and started to make an effort to eat less meat (Spark-
man & Walton, 2017). We found that learning about the dynamic norm—that others
were changing over time—was more influential and piqued people’s interest in eating less
meat, even though only a minority of people currently did so. In other words, the actions
of a minority were more influential when people knew it was a growing minority (see also
Mortensen et al., 2017).
These findings show that a growing minority can help entice people to abandon prob-
lematic norms. More generally, they showed that people were sensitive to information
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 431

about others changing over time. This raised another possibility: In cases where the cur-
rent norms are already desirable, would learning about a growing majority be more influ-
ential than learning about a static majority? Further research, discussed below, suggests
this is the case. Thus, the broad implications of dynamic norms for interventions are
twofold: first, dynamic norm interventions can help create change that goes against the
grain of current norms; second, in contexts where current norms already reflect desirable
outcomes, dynamic norm interventions can strengthen traditional norm interventions by
adding information about positive changes in others’ behavior over time.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Dynamic norms are influential for many of the same reasons that past research has found
static norm information to be influential. When we witness a majority of people behav-
ing a certain way, we are likely to infer that this behavior is effective, efficient, or wise.
We may also suspect that most people disapprove of those who act in a counternormative
way. Therefore, norms are said to possess both “informational influence” and “norma-
tive influence” (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Essentially, we may be persuaded to conform
to a norm we see because we assume there is good reason it is the norm (informational
influence), and because we may fear the reputational costs of going against the grain
(normative influence). Indeed, motives to be accurate and to be liked by others drive con-
formity to norms across a wide range of contexts (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Cialdini
& Trost, 1998). Just as someone may infer that something is the norm for a good reason,
they may also infer that widespread changes are happening for a good reason. And just as
someone may be worried that acting against the group will lead to social rejection, they
may also worry that if they do not keep up with trends, they will be “left behind” and
fall out of favor with others.
Although there are some similarities in how static and dynamic norms function,
there are also unique inferences people may draw from dynamic norms that make them
especially suited to encourage people to change. For instance, when we learn that some-
thing is becoming more popular, we may infer that a larger number of people will act
that way in the future (Mortensen et al., 2017). In the aforementioned work on meat
consumption, participants who read a dynamic norm message were more likely to assume
that a larger number of people would make some effort to eat less meat in the coming
years as well (Sparkman & Walton, 2017). Further, believing that more people would be
cutting back on meat in the future increased people’s interest in reducing one’s own meat
consumption. More generally, seeing people change now invites us to consider a future
world where those trends have continued and where the norms may be different. Then we
may conform to those anticipated changes as if they were a current reality. This process
is referred to as “preconformity,” and enables dynamic norms to encourage conformity
to future norms that have not yet arrived. Consistent with this theory, we found in a
follow-­up study that when people were told about the recent decline in meat consump-
tion, but then told that the trend was not expected to continue, this information was no
longer influential.
Further, dynamic norms may be especially well equipped to address a variety of
potential concerns about change. Consider the wide variety of psychological barriers that
432 IV. Sustainability

could stand in the way of change: people may doubt that change is possible, that change
is important enough to pursue, that change is “for people like me,” or have other identity-­
related concerns. Imagine you shared these concerns, but then witnessed many people
changing: Would it still seem like change wasn’t possible if many people were doing it?
Would it still feel unimportant if people, en masse, put in the effort to alter their habits
and make changes? If the people changing are people who, like you, did not do it before,
would it still seem incompatible with the kind of person you are? Broadly, dynamic norms
convey that others have changed despite whatever reasons were anticipated to stand in
the way. By providing social proof that contradicts our expectations, dynamic norms
invite us to reconsider these common psychological barriers to change.
Further, the barriers that loom largest in a context are the ones that should be called
into question when we learn that other people are changing. This would suggest that
dynamic norms operate by resolving whichever barriers people anticipate in a given con-
text. A series of experiments explored this idea (Sparkman & Walton, 2019). One study
examined the context of quitting smoking, where doubts of being able to quit often pre-
vent people from trying. Here, we found that learning that others were successful in their
attempts to change led participants to believe they could succeed in changing, too.
Another study examined a very different context, where identity-­related barriers
are present: men identifying as feminist and supporting feminist legislation. Here, we
found that learning that some men were changing and starting to identify as feminist
helped men see feminism as more compatible with their own identity, increased self-­
identification as feminist, and increased policy support for the Paycheck Fairness Act. In
these and other contexts, dynamic norms signal that others overcame expected barriers
to change, or that the barriers they imagined were perhaps not barriers at all (see Table
19.1). Moreover, across all of these studies, static norms alone did not help resolve these
barriers, or did so significantly less than dynamic norms. Thus, it appears that dynamic
norms have a unique ability to challenge these barriers in contexts where they loom large.
In a follow-­up study designed to experimentally assess whether dynamic norms help
resolve barriers that are more salient or loom large, participants read about late-night
screen use, including an op-ed that discussed how it can disrupt one’s quality of sleep
(Sparkman & Walton, 2019, Experiment 5). Participants saw one of four versions of this
op-ed, each written to highlight a different barrier that made it hard to avoid late-night
screen use. One version, for example, was written to raise concerns that participants
might lack the ability to change this habit. In it, participants read about how experts
thought late-night screen use was similar to an addiction. It also included testimonies

TABLE 19.1.  Dynamic Norm Effects on Different Psychological Barriers

to Change
Psychological barrier (and example context) Effects of dynamic norms
“Change is not possible” (e.g., quitting smoking). Increased belief that change is possible

“Change is not important enough to pursue” Increased belief that others feel change
(e.g., late-night screen use). is important enough to pursue

“Change is not for people like me” (e.g., men Increased belief that a change would be
identifying as feminist). consistent with one’s sense of identity

Note. In each context, dynamic norms help whichever barrier looms large within these contexts.
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 433

from people who had tried to quit late-night screen use but had repeatedly failed to do
so despite its negative impacts on their lives. In a different version of the op-ed designed
to highlight identity-­related concerns, participants read about how experts thought that
late-night screen use had become a normal part of people’s lives and identities. It also
gave testimonies from people who remarked that the only people they knew who did not
look at screens at night were people they did not identify with, such as Luddites or older
adults. Next, half of the participants read a dynamic norm statement about how many
people had recently changed and started to avoid late-night screen use. Those who only
saw the op-ed, but did not learn that people had changed, were more likely to be con-
cerned about whichever psychological barrier that had been discussed in the op-ed (e.g.,
if they read that people had struggled to quit, they were less likely to believe they could
quit, too). But those who read about these concerns in the op-ed, and then read about
the dynamic norm, no longer showed concern over the barrier that had been discussed
in the op-ed. Notably, dynamic norms helped improve perceptions only about whichever
barrier had been discussed in the op-ed, and did not help with the barriers that seemed
irrelevant. This study helps confirm that dynamic norms operate by calling into question
whichever barriers loom largest for people. More generally, these findings highlight how
dynamic norms can help resolve a variety of different psychological barriers that stand in
the way of change and may be helpful across a wide range of contexts.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Dynamic norm interventions have been developed in a variety of domains. In one field
experiment aimed at encouraging people to act against current meat-­ eating norms,
participants waiting in line to order lunch at a café were given a survey in exchange
for a discount on lunch. Surveys were randomized to include either static or dynamic
norm information about meat consumption, or information about something irrelevant
to meat consumption as the control group. Those in the static norm read that “Recent
research has shown that 30% of Americans make an effort to limit their meat consump-
tion. That means that 3 in 10 people eat less meat than they otherwise would.” Those in
the dynamic norm read “Recent research has shown that, over the last 5 years, 30% of
Americans have started to make an effort to limit their meat consumption. That means
that, in recent years, 3 in 10 people have changed their behavior and begun to eat less
meat than they otherwise would.” In the control survey, participants read about a decline
in Facebook use. When the survey was complete, participants were given a coupon for
a discount on lunch. Unbeknown to participants, each coupon could be used to identify
their experimental condition and track their food-­ordering behavior later. Orders among
the static norm and control conditions were roughly similar—­about one in six persons
bought a meatless lunch. But these numbers doubled in the dynamic norm condition,
with one in three persons buying a meatless lunch (Sparkman & Walton, 2017).
Dynamic norms research conducted independently by Mortensen and colleagues
(2017) has examined the effects of being told about a growing minority, but in this case
in the domain of conserving water. In one study, they found that people were more likely
to conserve water in the laboratory when they learned that a growing minority had done
so than when simply learning about a static norm that a minority had done so. In a
second study, they found that participants were more likely to donate their time to an
434 IV. Sustainability

environmental charity when they had learned that a growing minority of people had
done so, as compared to both a neutral control, and that a (static) minority had done so.
These studies examined contexts of “trending norms” in which the minority was on the
precipice of becoming a majority (48%, specifically).
This work has found that a dynamic norm message about a growing minority was
more influential than a static norm about a minority.1 But what about in contexts where
the desired behavior is already the norm and done by a majority? Is there some benefit of
adding dynamic norm information here as well? In other words, can a growing majority
be more influential than a static one? One study examined whether dynamic norms would
help encourage water conservation during a drought by encouraging university residents
to use full loads of laundry (Sparkman & Walton, 2017). In this randomized controlled
trial, residential buildings were either assigned to a static norm, dynamic norm, or con-
trol condition. In the static and dynamic norm conditions, signs were hung in the laundry
facilities with conservation messages. The static norm signs highlighted that most resi-
dents used full loads of laundry, while the dynamic norm signs highlighted that residents
were changing and now most used full loads of laundry. The static norm messages led to
a (nonstatistically significant) 10% reduction in water use over the 3-week intervention
period, while the dynamic norm messages led to a (significant) 29% reduction in usage.
This work demonstrates that dynamic norms can strengthen traditional norm interven-
tion approaches.

MECHANISM

How are dynamic norms able to achieve these behavioral outcomes? As discussed,
research has found that dynamic norms can impact several psychological factors that
are important to behavior change. In the context of meat consumption, for instance,
research finds that learning that others are changing and eating less meat leads them to
infer that others must have put in some effort to make this change because they felt it was
of substantial importance (Sparkman & Walton, 2017). Therefore, dynamic norms can
help shift perceptions of prescriptive norms that others care about this behavior change
enough to pursue it. As mentioned, “preconformity” was also a source of influence in
this context: It was found that information about others eating less meat also led partici-
pants to infer that the norm in the future would be different (i.e., that the trend of eating
less meat would continue), which increased their motivation to eat less meat. Further,
expectations of future norm levels were also shown to be a driving factor in motivating
participants to conserve water in the laboratory research conducted by Mortensen and
colleagues (2017). However, given that dynamic norms can impact a variety of important
psychological processes, depending in part on which barriers loom largest, it is important
to note that different mechanisms are likely to drive conformity to dynamic norms in
different contexts.

1 Sincethese original findings others have conducted conceptual replications and found similar results.
For instance, one intervention found that posting signs in a café that contained a dynamic norm message
about an increase in people choosing to use a reusable coffee mug (something done only by a minority)
led to more people choosing to use a reusable mug and reduced the number of disposable cups used
(Loschelder, Siepelmeyer, Fischer, & Rubel, 2019).
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 435

EFFECTS OVER TIME

Prior research finds that social norms are a prevalent factor in our decision making
(Ajzen, 1985; Terry, Hogg, & White, 1999). However, this literature also emphasizes
that norms have to be salient in order to have effects (Cialdini et al., 1991). This would
suggest that norm interventions will have direct influence over others over time to the
extent they maintain salience in people’s minds. For instance, research on home energy
interventions where households are sent monthly reports comparing their home energy
use to their neighbors finds positive effects persist over the course of years so long as
the reports continue to be sent (Allcott, 2011). Work on dynamic norms specifically has
mostly examined effects on immediate behaviors. In one notable exception, the research
on water conservation in laundry usage assessed repeated behavior over a course of 2–3
weeks and did not find any attenuation of effects during that time (Sparkman & Wal-
ton, 2017). More generally, the pattern of effects for dynamic norms over time could be
similar to the broader body of norms research, which finds that repeated exposure can
generate longitudinal effects.
Given that dynamic norms deal with contemporary trends and changes in behavior,
those designing interventions need to consider how to give “booster shots” of the inter-
vention that still feel contemporary. For instance, consider the aforementioned interven-
tion where signs were hung in residential laundry facilities that mentioned that many
people had changed and now most used full loads to reduce water consumption. If those
signs were still up 6 months or a year later, should we assume that residents will look at a
dusty sign and still believe this trend is continuing? Would people even notice the signs if
they became a long-term part of the landscape? Perhaps not. In this case, new signs with
updated norm content could need to be put up from time to time both to increase salience
of the signs, and to help the perception that the trends being reported are, in fact, credible
and contemporary ones. The general takeaway here is that the content of dynamic norm
messages, especially if that content discusses “recent” or “current” changes in others, or
responses of others to current events, may need to be edited over time to ensure it is still
perceived to be true and relevant at the time it is being seen.
In some cases, we are able to intervene only once in a given population. To what
extent can we expect a onetime norm intervention to permanently change behavior? Prior
research suggests this is by no means guaranteed, as brief norm messages may be later
forgotten and lose impact. But a few general approaches may be considered to extend the
duration of a onetime dynamic norm intervention where booster shots are not feasible.
First, one may try to incorporate the perception of dynamic norms into people’s general
day-to-day experiences and meaning-­making process. One way to do this would be to
create a reminder of the dynamic norm perception that is reinforced every time the behav-
ior in question is observed. For instance, in the context of meat consumption intervention
materials one could say, “Every time you see someone eating a meatless dish or see veg-
etarian dishes listed at a restaurant, remember that’s the direction things are heading,”
or similarly, “Every time you see someone who eats large amounts of meat for every meal
and refuses to try a vegetarian dish from time to time, remember that you are seeing
something that is quickly becoming ‘old-­fashioned.’ ” There are certainly cases where
people look at some behavior and think, “Oh, I have noticed more and more people doing
that,” or cases where people see something and think, “Wow, how out of touch!” To the
extent that dynamic norms interventions can manipulate these beliefs, they may have
436 IV. Sustainability

long-term effects. Much like work on “goal priming” and “goal-­relevant cues” (Papies,
2016), the idea here is to help create cues or help people recognize existing cues in their
environment that lead them to think about the dynamic norm at or before the point of
decision making, so effects persist over time.
One method to achieve long-term outcomes may be to use dynamic norms to change
beliefs that underlie important goals, such as goals related to one’s well-being or one’s
identity. For example, as previously noted, dynamic norms about many people success-
fully quitting smoking can lead smokers to believe that quitting smoking is easier than
they imagined (Sparkman & Walton, 2019). So even while the trend of people quitting
may lose salience over time or even be forgotten, the belief that they may be able to quit
smoking may persist, which could help smokers attempt to quit. Similarly, men who
learned that other men are changing and starting to identify as feminist can come to
believe that being a feminist is not at odds with who they are. And while the trend may
quickly decline in salience, the notion that being a feminist is “for people like me” could
persist. This may lead them to be more open or feel more comfortable engaging when
issues pertaining to gender inequality come up, like discussions in the classroom or work-
place. More generally, the duration of dynamic norm effects will likely depend on how
long lasting the dynamic norm’s impact is on beliefs that are of major consequence to the
behaviors one is trying to intervene on.
Another approach used by many interventions is to operate as a “foot in the door”
for a lengthier commitment that comes next. For instance, one could first offer partici-
pants a dynamic norm about meat consumption, and then once their interest in eating
less meat is piqued, get them to sign up for a weekly e-mail letter that gives tips on how
to cook more vegetarian dishes and highlights local restaurants that have well-­reviewed
plant-based options. In the laundry context, one could imagine first using the dynamic
norm message, and then once residents are motivated to conserve water, offer them a
larger laundry bin that has a “full” line indicating when they have enough laundry to do
a load. Here, dynamic norms may be especially effective as the first step in a two-part
intervention that is followed by an “implementation-­intention intervention” (see Leven-
thal, Singer, & Jones, 1965, for an example). This would work by using dynamic norms
to motivate people to create an intention to change their behavior, and then intervening
to channel those intentions into a concrete plan that makes it simple to follow through on
their actions in the long haul.
Finally, it is worth noting that in many cases, onetime behaviors have long-term ben-
efits. Deciding to install solar panels or water-­saving shower heads, or persuading voters
to pass a ballot measure, may only require an appeal to succeed once. Dynamic norm
interventions, such as those in the existing literature, can be readily translated to these
kinds of structural or political decision-­making contexts without as much concern over
how to maintain the longevity of the desired effects.

HETEROGENEITY

In what contexts should dynamic norms be effective, and when will they be less helpful?
One obvious context where dynamic norms should not be effective are cases where key
barriers to personal change are structural or otherwise not psychological. For instance,
if an intervention sought to increase the use of mass transit in a city, but the city’s mass
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 437

transit system was inaccessible to the target audience, dynamic norms about an increase
in people using mass transit would not be likely to help. Generally, dynamic norms are
unlikely to enable change or challenge salient barriers if people have no real affordance
to change.
Even where change is technically possible, the effectiveness of dynamic norms may
still depend on contextual factors. Existing research on dynamic norms shows they are
effective largely because they signal inferences that can help encourage personal change,
such as altering perceptions of future norms, self-­efficacy beliefs, identity-­related beliefs,
and so on. While this work suggests dynamic norms should be effective against a variety
of psychological barriers in a variety of contexts, it is also possible that certain contex-
tual factors will impede these change-­promoting inferences and impact the effectiveness
of dynamic norm interventions. In particular, existing narratives about change in a given
behavioral context (such as beliefs about why or how a change is happening) are likely to
have a dramatic impact on the inferences people draw from dynamic norms. For instance,
a smoker who learns that others are succeeding in quitting smoking may doubt that they
too can quit if a common narrative conveys that only a privileged few can quit smok-
ing, such as those who are wealthy enough to purchase helpful resources, or who live
less stress-­filled lives because of relative high status. Generally, we have to interpret the
changes we see, and as we attempt to make sense of change, we are likely to reach for
existing narratives to help us explain that change. In behavioral contexts with narratives
that steer people away from inferences that encourage personal change, we should not
expect dynamic norms to be effective.
Just as behavioral contexts vary in their existing narratives for change, so too do
individuals vary in their personal narratives and existing understandings of what a par-
ticular change may mean. For example, if some men have an existing narrative that the
only reason other men are starting to identify as feminist is because they feel pressured
to do so, they may not find it compatible with their identity to follow suit. Generally, we
should expect dynamic norms to be more effective for subpopulations that do not possess
narratives that hamper change-­promoting inferences.
However, dynamic norm interventions dealing with behavioral contexts or individu-
als who have problematic existing narratives of change are not a lost cause. Those design-
ing an intervention could hone the dynamic norm content to actively resist such narra-
tives. Using the prior smoking example, one could highlight that many of the people who
quit were, in fact, low income. In the feminism example, one could highlight that a lot
of men began to identify as feminist not because they felt pressured to do so but because
they were finally willing to stand up for their beliefs despite being pressured not to do so.
In any event, successful dynamic norm interventions will have to be aware of the existing
narratives of change for the behavioral context and across individuals in order to better
understand how the dynamic norm will be understood, and whether that understanding
will help promote change.
Some may wonder whether dynamic norms are more effective for those thought to
be more favorable to any kind of social change, such as those who are politically liberal
or young in age. Thus far, dynamic norms examined in the contexts of meat consump-
tion, quitting smoking, avoiding late-night screen use, avoiding sugary beverages, and
endorsing feminist politics have not found any moderation by political orientation, age,
or gender. In all of these contexts, dynamic norm effects on interest in personal change
were found to have similar effect sizes across these demographic dimensions. However,
438 IV. Sustainability

for a given behavioral context, if a particular demographic is more likely to have an inter-
pretation of change that does not promote personal change, we should expect weaker
effects for that group.
Further, in some contexts, it may be easier or harder to manipulate the salience of
the dynamic norm as desired. Even when a dynamic norm is stated directly, it does not
guarantee a rise in salience (e.g., see Sparkman, Weitz, Robinson, Malhotra, & Walton,
2020, Studies 5–7). In some contexts, dynamic norm information may already be highly
salient, in which case the intervention is effectively redundant with naturally occurring
norm observations. In such cases, the salience of a dynamic norm may effectively be at
ceiling level and unable to be raised. Alternatively, discussing the rise of an unfamiliar
behavior that is highly unusual may, ironically, lead people to fixate on the counternor-
mative status of that behavior (the static norm), instead of the information about change.
For instance, consider the dynamic norm statement “More and more people are install-
ing composting toilets in their home.” This behavior is so deviant from the present norm
that people may not even process this as information about norms changing over time, or
many individuals changing, but simply get stuck thinking about how strange or unusual
composting toilets may be. Therefore, raising the salience of dynamic norms may prove
difficult for behavior changes that are either already salient, or completely unknown.
Conceptually, dynamic norm interventions aim not just to provide information about
change but to make the fact that others are changing stand out more than it otherwise
would.

COUSINS

Dynamic norm interventions are an extension of prior norm interventions research. The
core features of these interventions are similar as they both utilize information about
others to instigate personal change. But what makes dynamic norms unique is that, at
their core, they deal with representations of others’ change. As such, they can serve as
a psychological road map of how to get from point A to point B. This provides some
advantages over traditional static norm interventions. Specifically, three benefits have
thus far been mentioned. First, one can use dynamic norm interventions in cases where
the desired behavior is obviously counternormative, so long as there is improvement
over time. Second, in contexts where the desired behavior is already normative, learning
about a growing majority may be more influential than just a static one. And third, that
information about others changing can convey inferences helpful for others considering
change (e.g., that change is possible; that others feel that something is important enough
to change for; and that it is normal for “people like me,” who have never done something
before to change, to start changing).
A fourth potential benefit is that dynamic norm interventions may be able to avoid
condemning those who have not yet changed and thereby may avoid making people feel
defensive. Consider the basic conceptual appeal (implicit or explicit) of a typical static
norm message hoping to change someone’s behavior: “Most people do this, and if you are
in the minority of people who do not do this, you are wrong and should change.” This
may be problematic as people often struggle to accept negative information about them-
selves or their current behavior (Sherman & Cohen, 2006; Sherman, Nelson, & Steele,
2000) that can prevent people from being inspired by others’ actions (Minson & Monin,
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 439

2012; Sparkman & Attari, 2020) and hamper positive behavior change (Armitage, Har-
ris, & Arden, 2011; Epton & Harris, 2008). In fact, norm messaging that leads people
to feel overly pressured can, ironically, be less effective (Howe, Carr, & Walton, 2020).
By contrast, dynamic norm appeals essentially convey that “others are changing, and you
should, too.” So, while static norms convey that one is outside of the majority and ought
to change to conform to it, dynamic norms convey that people like you are currently
changing and thereby avoid the implication that you were foolish for not having changed
yet. Dynamic norms are therefore unique as they can still apply social pressure to change,
but without positioning the target of the intervention as a member of a mistaken minor-
ity. In contexts where people are likely to be defensive, dynamic norms may allow for an
approach to get people to consider change that is more sympathetic to their current state.
However, there may also be some drawbacks of using a dynamic norm intervention
rather than a static norm intervention. For instance, if a problematic behavior is done by
a growing minority of people, highlighting this negative change could yield ironic effects.
Instead, one should use a static norm intervention to motivate conformity to the present
norm and curb the negative changes. Additionally, in some cases, the rapid adaptation of
a behavior can serve as a sign that it is a fad and will soon pass; such is the case with the
rapid rise in popularity of specific baby names (Berger & Le Mens, 2009). In cases where
existing beliefs about change strongly suggest something is a fad, a static norm may be
more persuasive.

INTERVENTION CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION

How was information about dynamic norms constructed and delivered in past inter-
ventions? As mentioned in the café study, participants encountered the dynamic norm
materials in a survey where they were paid to closely examine it and respond to it shortly
before they chose something for themselves for lunch. Participants therefore had a high
level of engagement with the materials, which they experienced immediately before the
point of decision making in order to maximize impact. The full dynamic norm statement,
as it was presented, read:

Some people are starting to limit how much meat they eat. This is true both nationally
and here at Stanford.
Specifically, recent research has shown that, over the last 5 years, 30% of Americans
have started to make an effort to limit their meat consumption.
That means that, in recent years, 3 in 10 people have changed their behavior and begun
to eat less meat than they otherwise would.

Each sentence directly indicates that people are changing or have changed. The first
statement is meant to help participants recognize that the change is large in magnitude to
emphasize the importance of the matter (“nationally”), while still pertaining to a relevant
ingroup (“and here at Stanford”), which has been shown to strengthen norm statements
(Rimal & Real, 2005). Subsequent statements add detail that clarify that these changes
are due to people who have intentionally altered their behavior, which was chosen to
convey that others believe this is something worth changing for. Participants were then
440 IV. Sustainability

asked, “Why do you think this is?” in order to guide them in elaborating the reasons why
one would change. In doing so, we are inviting participants to articulate reasons they find
to be compelling to change and eat less meat.
In the study targeting full loads of laundry, participants in the dynamic norm condi-
tion read the following message on signs hung in laundry facilities: Stanford R esidents
A re C hanging: Now Most Use F ull Loads! accompanied by an illustration of a
laundry machine with a “full” line indicated, and H elp Stanford Conserve Water!
Similar to the café study, the first line clearly articulates that a relevant ingroup is making
intentional changes in their behavior, and this change is portrayed as substantial (such
that with these changes, those who use full loads now constitute a majority). The signs
were hung on the wall behind the laundry machines so that seeing them would occur
naturally as one was about to do laundry. Thus, the information was available immedi-
ately before deciding whether to combine different types of clothing into a full load, or
divide up one’s clothing into many smaller loads (lights, darks, delicates, etc.). In the sec-
tion below, I further articulate the logic behind these choices and how to create effective
dynamic norm interventions.

NUANCES AND MISCONCEPTIONS

In designing the content to be used in a dynamic norm intervention, one must make
decisions about how to represent social change. For instance, should one simply give a
qualitative description of the trend? “More and more people are doing this.” Or would
a detailed quantitative representation be more effective? “In the past 5 years, 20% of
people have started doing this.” Or would a visual representation of the change, such as
a line graph over time, be better yet? Further, one needs to decide exactly which dynamic
norm information to include: simply the direction of change? The direction, duration,
and pace of change? Who is changing and who is not? How are people making this
change? Are people successful or not in making this change? Are they making this change
intentionally or not? Should it be said or implied that the change is intrinsically motivated
(e.g., people really care about this), or extrinsically motivated (e.g., people are responding
to a financial incentive or legal punishment)? Additionally, one must decide whether and
how to present peripheral information, such as the source of the information, who the
messenger is, and what their motives are. Aside from the content of the dynamic norm,
there is also a choice of medium (Posters hung in public places? Letters sent to homes?
E-mails?) and a variety of aesthetic choices. The answer to all of these questions likely
depends in large part upon the population one is working with, the behavioral context,
and practical limitations, such as the project budget. However, there are some general
guidelines in designing successful dynamic norm interventions that are discussed below,
including having the message be believable, easily noticed, personally elaborated (by the
target audience), signaling intentionality, and being delivered at relevant times for the
decision-­making process. While these guidelines are informed by prior research in other
domains, it is important to note that they remain a prospect for future research to better
ascertain how important each is for dynamic norm interventions.
The intervention materials should be believable. When people feel they are asked
to change something substantial, the credibility and quality of the message is a key fac-
tor in their decision making (Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978; Petty, Cacioppo, &
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 441

Goldman, 1981). If the information provided seems unbelievable to the target audience,
it is very possible that it will simply be dismissed. In some cases, providing supporting
evidence may be necessary. For example, someone reading the statement “More men are
starting to consider themselves feminist” may wonder what exactly they were just told:
Is this supposed to be the author voicing their opinion? Is it grounded in some truth?
And if it is true, how did the author come to know this information? It is not simply vis-
ible by looking around a public space. Further, is the change due to cohort differences
(younger men identify as feminist more than older ones)? Or is it that specific men have
actually changed? Readers may better understand that the message contains dynamic
norm information and have fewer lingering questions if they read “More men are start-
ing to identify as feminist. Specifically, a recent poll finds that many men, who did not
consider themselves feminist before, have changed and now do.” While no quantitative
numbers were introduced, and no specific sources were listed (or a specific time frame or
population, for that matter), the information presented does give a simple and complete
narrative regarding what kind of social change has occurred and how we know about it.
Of course, skeptics may still want to know details, such as what the actual percentage of
change was, in what population, who conducted the poll, when it was conducted, how
“feminist” was defined in the poll, and so on. But in cases where the population will take
the information that is presented at face value, a short and coherent message is likely best.
The intervention materials should be noticed and, ideally, contemplated. People con-
form to norm information more when it is salient to them (Cialdini et al., 1991). How-
ever, getting people to open a letter that was mailed to them, or read a sign in public, is
not easy to do. It is harder yet to get people to take their time and actively engage with
intervention materials so that they understand the social change being conveyed and
arrive at specific inferences that will induce personal change. In a survey context, one
can explicitly ask respondents to discuss why they think a change is happening or what
that change means in order to ensure they give it adequate attention and time. But in the
context of a sign hung in a hallway, or a billboard along a roadway, there is no captive
audience—­the content has to be visually interesting and sufficiently brief to engage the
observer. In some contexts where people are so busy that contemplation is unlikely, like
a billboard next to a freeway, it may be ideal to explicitly state the important inferences
alongside the dynamic norm: M any P eople A re Quitting Smoking, and You Can
Too. The advantage being that we do not need to gamble on whether busy drivers reach
the important inference on their own. But, this does come at a cost: had they made the
inference on their own that they could quit, they might more strongly believe it to be true,
as discussed below.
The intervention materials should lead observers to generate a persuasive argument
to change on their own, rather than explicate the full argument for them. In many cases,
when people are directly told what to do, they may rebel in order to maintain a sense of
freedom and personal choice (Brehm, 1966). Imagine you read a billboard that said Stop
Looking at Electronic Devices before Going to Bed, It’s Bad for Your Sleep!
This might invite someone to think, “C’mon, how bad could it really be?” Or perhaps
they’ll think, “Thanks, Mom,” and reject the nagging tone of the message. To avoid such
a reaction, interventions should gently guide people to a point where they draw conclu-
sions that are favorable to change on their own so that they engage in “self-­persuasion”
(see Aronson, 1999). Dynamic norms can enable this process: others’ change often gar-
ners our attention, and may lead us to wonder how or why are people changing as we try
442 IV. Sustainability

to make sense of the world around us. Those designing interventions should capitalize on
people’s intrigue with change, and use it to get the audience to create persuasive reasons
for why others are changing. Consider the following message: “More and more people
are choosing to avoid looking at their electronic devices at night before going to bed.”
After reading this, people are likely to automatically start trying to explain why many
people would do this, and try to recall whether they have heard anything about the detri-
ments of looking at electronic screens late at night. They might recall an article they once
saw saying it disrupted sleep, or maybe they think about their own late-night device use,
and how it often keeps them up later than they want to be. If so, they are more likely to
internalize the idea that it may not be such a good idea to spend hours at night looking
at a screen before bed.
Importantly, some dynamic norm messages may be better than others at leading
people to identify reasons to change behavior. For instance, imagine you read that “Time
spent using electronic devices late at night has declined in recent years.” Compared to the
prior dynamic norm message on screen use, this one does not remark on decision making
or intentionality of others, and is generally distant from the psychological experience of
people choosing to change their behavior. People reading this may wonder whether oth-
ers are losing interest in smartphones and tablets given their waning novelty, or whether
other late-night activities have become more popular. Critically, it does not lead the
reader to envision strong reasons to avoid or change this behavior. Further, in cases where
one learns about a decline in smoking, it may be ambiguous whether that decline is due
to smokers actually quitting, or simply to younger generations not smoking as much as
prior ones. The latter interpretation would not lead one to believe in others’ or their own
ability to quit. Generally, in order for dynamic norms to lead to helpful inferences about
personal change, they should be written to clearly convey that social changes are due to
many people intentionally making changes in their lives.
The intervention materials should be delivered in a place and time that facilitate
change. In many cases, it is ideal to deliver information about others’ changes just before
the point of decision making. Consider the café study mentioned earlier where we gave
people dynamic norm information as they waited in line before reaching the café’s menu
stand. Had the message come much earlier, such as on a billboard they read that morn-
ing, people may simply have forgotten about the dynamic norm information, and any
positive shifts in opinion they had may have faded away before they had the opportunity
to act. If we had given them the message after they reached the menu stand and already
made a selection for lunch, then the task of encouraging change would have been much
harder: We would no longer be trying to persuade someone that it is a good idea to
order a meatless dish, but instead we would have to persuade participants to abandon
their existing preference, even though they were already anticipating eating that dish.
Generally, dynamic norm interventions should review when and where people are mak-
ing decisions in order to find the proper moment to interject information about others’
change.
Taken together, one should think carefully about how to deliver the dynamic norm
information in a way that attracts attention and succeeds in getting people to engage with
the content. That content should ring true to observers, and lead them to think about why
change would be suitable for themselves. This process should occur in a time and a place
shortly before important junctions in their decision making for that behavior.
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 443

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

As mentioned, it may be wise to combine dynamic norm interventions with implementation-­

intention interventions to create longer-­lasting effects. However, this point is also impor-
tant in interventions that target immediate behavior. Designing a successful intervention
will require making sure other basic prerequisites to change behavior are met: Even if
sufficiently motivated by the dynamic norm content, people must also be informed and
knowledgeable about how to change behavior, and capable of changing behavior. This
means likely having to assess the gaps in people’s knowledge about how to change their
behavior, and provide information to remove any ambiguity. For example, in the inter-
vention targeting water conservation through using full loads of laundry, talking to resi-
dents led us to discover that many were unsure of how full a “full load” was supposed
to be. Many also thought that loads that were near full were actually “overfilled,” such
that the clothing would not get cleaned. This meant that some people thought a “full
load” was actually about half or two-­thirds full, when in actuality it was about seven-­
eighths full, very near the top. Therefore, in addition to hanging highly visible signs with
dynamic norm information, we also placed stickers directly on the machines in both
norm conditions that indicated when a load was full, and another sticker indicating that
the load was not full roughly near the half-full line. While perhaps seeming obvious,
these stickers helped ensure that people were sufficiently informed about how to do a full
load. Had we hung the signs without adding the stickers, it is possible that people would
have been motivated to do full loads, but may not have reliably translated that motivation
into behavior change. They could look at a three-­quarter-­filled load or even a half-­filled
load and think, “I guess that’s full enough.” When in doubt, make things foolproof by
providing people with enough information so that the desired behavior is clear and how
to enact it is obvious.
While I have largely discussed how to use text to display dynamic norm information,
other mediums may be just as, or more, effective. In some cases, having people physically
model the desired changes in behavior in the real world may be more effective than simply
presenting written statements telling people that others are changing (see Dorn & Stöckli,
2018, for an example). We might imagine, for example, that reading signs saying that
more grocery store customers are beginning to use reusable bags may be influential, but
seeing each person in front of you in line purchase a reusable bag when given the option
may be a stronger signal. Physical manifestations of norm information may also be highly
noticeable, and if they are naturalistic, they may be highly influential as well (e.g., Keizer,
Lindenberg, & Steg, 2008). Seeing many homes in your neighborhood install bars on the
windows, for instance, may be a strong signal that your neighborhood is becoming more
dangerous. While it may be hard to envision how an intervention would be able to manip-
ulate such mediums without a massive undertaking, it is possible to shift the salience of a
dynamic norm without physically changing the context dramatically. For example, imag-
ine that solar installers targeted and prioritized installations for highly salient homes at
visible intersections because it would lead people to believe that more and more people
in their neighborhood were getting solar power. Shifting perceptions of norms through
changes in the physical environment, media, or institutional signals rather than actual
norm levels is employed in a variety of norm interventions (see Tankard & Paluck, 2016,
for a review) and can be done for dynamic norm interventions as well.
444 IV. Sustainability

IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

What do dynamic norms teach us about how people think and how to solve social prob-
lems? We have long known that people are highly attentive to others and often conform
to how they act, and what they believe. It has been argued that our interest and confor-
mity to others is driven by a fundamental psychological need to share common ground
with others in understanding and purpose (Asch, 1952; Hardin & Higgins, 1996). We
feel compelled to see things the way others do, and for them to see things the way that
we do. People therefore converge on a common shared reality from which any divergence
is acting against the grain. But research on dynamic norms suggests that this is not the
whole story. It demonstrates that social influence is an evolving process—­one where peo-
ple are particularly sensitive to information about other people changing in ways that can
drive people to alter how they see the world and how they decide to act. Therefore, social
influence is not only a force of greater convergence on current norms, it is also a force
that can be harnessed for social change. Indeed, looking at wide-scale social changes that
have taken place historically, large numbers of people often change rapidly, abandoning
prior norms and converging on new ones.
It is notable that dynamic norms can help resolve diverse barriers to change in a
variety of contexts, and do so by helping resolve the barriers that loom largest for people.
Thus, dynamic norms interventions may be a particularly flexible and resilient way to
create change, and those designing interventions may not need to identify the specific
barriers to change in a given context, so long as they seem more surmountable when oth-
ers change.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Many important areas for future research on dynamic norm interventions have already
been discussed, including the need to design and assess interventions aimed at longitudi-
nal outcomes, and systematically test which presentations of dynamic norm information
are the most effective. In addition, further research can help clarify how to translate
dynamic norm effects into highly scalable formats, how understanding dynamic norm
effects can help curb undesirable behaviors that are becoming more popular over time,
and whether dynamic norm interventions can improve the effectiveness of current inter-
ventions that typically rely on static norms.
Scaling up dynamic norm interventions presents a number of questions to be further
explored. In the context of reducing meat consumption, for instance, it may be possible
to incorporate dynamic norm information about the rise in popularity of meatless dishes
into restaurant menus. While highly scalable, and delivered very near the point of deci-
sion making, such an intervention would no longer be able to ensure that people notice or
actively engage customers. Generally, more research is needed to better understand how
dynamic norm messages can be translated to passive reading contexts and still manage
to actively engage the target audience to elucidate psychological inferences that have been
shown to drive effects.
Dynamic norms may hold the answer to another kind of important intervention con-
text besides those investigated here: What should one do when undesirable behaviors are
becoming more popular over time? Understanding how the direction of change influences
 Dynamic Norm Interventions 445

others may hold the key to stopping problematic changes before they spread. The cur-
rent research suggests that making novel problematic behaviors less salient should help.
It also suggests that it may be worth assessing whether portraying changes as likely to be
short-lived (“a fad”), or done for reasons that go against the target audience’s broader val-
ues, would be helpful. However, research has not yet assessed a dynamic norm interven-
tion aiming to intervene on existing norm changes to halt them. Further, more research
is needed to understand whether regressive changes spread via the same psychological
mechanisms as those discussed here or because of novel processes.
Further, there are a number of places where static norm interventions are presently
used that might be strengthened by using dynamic norm information instead. Many util-
ity companies, for instance, provide static social norm feedback to their customers that
compares their home’s energy use to their neighbors’ energy use in order to encourage
users to decrease their monthly usage. If results are similar to those examined in the
studies here, providing dynamic norm information about the positive changes in one’s
neighbors’ energy savings over time may improve the effects of such interventions. Given
how widely social norm interventions are used, there are many areas where compar-
ing the effectiveness of dynamic and static norm interventions may highlight areas for
improvement.

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 Author Index

Abel, M. R., 309 Anderson, C. L., 206

Abenavoli, R., 315 Anderson, J. E., 392, 394, 397
Abrams, D., 414 Anderson, K. G., 288
Abramson, L. Y., 248 Andreoni, J., 412
Achor, S., 23, 220, 229, 248, 287, 316, 373 Andrews, T. M., 405
Adams, G., 67 Ang, S., 143
Adams, G. S., 273 Apfel, N., 68, 70, 92, 172, 319, 334
Adams, M., 139 Arden, M. A., 439
Adler, M. G., 202 Ardito, G., 288
Afshin, A., 287 Armenta, C. N., 198
Agaliotis, I., 342 Armitage, C. J., 439
Agerström, J., 408, 414, 418 Arndt, J., 81, 202
Aggarwal, A., 287, 293 Aron, A., 110, 360
Ahn, J. N., 155 Aron, E. N., 110
Ainslie, G., 260, 261 Aronow, P. M., 280, 341
Ajzen, I., 435 Aronson, E., 24, 40, 49, 66, 78, 109, 230, 264, 273,
Akinola, M., 221, 227, 228, 229, 240, 249 275, 280, 311, 416, 441
Aknin, L. B., 196 Aronson, J. M., 9, 14, 15, 16, 24, 38, 39, 66, 67, 70, 74,
Aldridge, V., 287 78, 154, 174, 311, 316
Alfert, E., 369 Asberg, K., 178
Alfonso, J., 417 Asch, S. E., 261, 272, 279, 429, 444
Algoe, S. B., 197, 198, 203, 206 Ashcraft, M. H., 171
Algom, D., 224 Asher, E. R., 203
Allard, L. M., 386 Aslin, R. N., 261
Allcott, H., 18, 409, 412, 420, 435 Astin, A. W., 127
Allen, J., 109 Atkin, C. K., 414
Allen, M. T., 239 Atkins, D. C., 68
Allen, N. B., 319 Attari, S. Z., 439
Allen, R., 414 Aveyard, P., 408, 418
Allport, G. W., 360 Aydin, N. T., 288
Altabe, M., 267 Ayduk, O., 43, 369
Altose, A. J., 228, 242 Ayers, S., 82
Amato, P., 367
Amirkhan, J. H., 224 Bachman, B. A., 355
Anastasio, P. A., 355 Badea, C., 67, 68
Andersen, S. C., 22 Baik, J., 294

448
 Author Index 449

Balchen, S., 398 Blascovich, J., 228, 240, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 251,
Banaji, M. R., 299 254, 310, 318
Bandura, A., 103, 156, 195, 360, 416 Block, D. R., 239
Banko, K. M., 81 Block, J. P., 298
Barbash, F., 405 Bloom, H. S., 20, 51
Bargh, J. A., 288 Blumberg, S. J., 65
Barnett, W. S., 11 Boaler, J., 28
Barnoya, J., 294 Boals, A., 369
Barrett, D. W., 415 Boehm, J. K., 194, 198, 203, 378
Barrett, L. F., 249, 250 Boergers, J., 306
Barron, K. E., 100, 103, 105, 106, 113, 116, 120, 155 Bolen, D., 150
Barsalou, L. W., 250 Boles, D. Z., 233, 291
Bar-Tal, D., 347, 358, 359, 361 Bolier, L., 192, 197, 201, 211
Bartholomew, J. B., 242 Bolton, G. E., 351
Bartke, S., 411 Boniecki, K. A., 61
Bartlett, M. Y., 199 Booth, R. J., 392
Basil, M., 287 Borman, G. D., 42, 44, 46, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80
Bass, B. M., 356 Borren, I., 385
Bastian, B., 130 Boswell, R. G., 298
Bator, R. J., 420 Boulay, B., 20, 21
Batson, C. D., 355 Bowen, N. K., 78
Baucom, D. H., 368 Bowman, N. A., 130
Baumeister, R. F., 39, 53, 196, 202, 260, 278, 386 Boykin, C. M., 43
Beach, S. R. H., 367, 368 Boynton, M. H., 325
Beaulieu, D. A., 374 Braams, B. R., 262, 268
Beck, A. T., 308, 309, 318 Bradbury, T. N., 386, 398
Beck, J. S., 210 Bradley, R. T., 239, 251
Beilock, S., 242 Bradshaw, C. P., 342
Bell, L. A., 139 Brady, S. T., 2, 3, 36, 38, 39, 43, 45, 53, 68, 82, 83,
Bellavia, G. M., 375, 386, 392 109, 155, 218, 228, 233, 242, 245, 247, 253, 316
Beltzer, M. L., 242, 244 Bragg, M. A., 288
Bembenutty, H., 167 Brandstätter, V., 174
Benartzi, S., 279 Brannon, T. N., 127, 131, 142
Bengtsson, H., 386 Bransford, J. D., 119
Ben-Zeev, A., 139 Bratter, J. L., 70
Ben-Zeev, T., 74 Braz, M., 408
Berg, J., 351 Brehm, J. W., 358, 441
Berger, J., 298, 439 Brewer, M. B., 141
Berger, R., 25, 28 Brick, C., 67
Bergin, S., 168 Brickman, P., 150
Bergsieker, H. B., 277 Briñol, P., 83
Berkowitz, A. D., 407 Brock, T., 51
Bernecker, K., 23 Brockner, J., 68
Berns, G. S., 260, 261 Broda, M., 17, 41, 46, 53
Bertoldo, J. D., 296, 297 Brody, G. H., 54, 367
Bettinger, E. P., 18, 22 Bronfenbrenner, U., 159
Bialkova, S., 287 Bronk, K. C., 263
Biegel, G. M., 229 Broockman, D., 355
Bieler, A., 347 Brookfield, J., 66
Bilali, R., 349 Brooks, A. W., 240, 251, 254
Bilewicz, M., 356 Brossard, D., 420
Billings, A. G., 218 Browman, A. S., 82, 151, 161
Binet, A., 12 Brown, A. L., 119
Binning, K. R., 41, 44, 46, 51, 67, 68, 70, 82, 83 Brown, E., 423
Birch, L. L., 287 Brown, E. R., 108, 109, 121
Bittman, M., 430 Brown, J., 198
Bjork, R. A., 168 Brown, J. S., 176
Black, A. R., 20 Brown, K. W., 229
Blackstock, E., 228, 229, 242 Brown, R., 360
Blackwell, K. L., 228 Brownell, K. D., 220, 265, 287, 288, 294
Blackwell, L. S., 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 25, 128, 155, Brownley, K. A., 243
173, 174, 355 Bruch, S. K., 75
Blair, S. S., 70 Bruckner, H., 325
Blank, A., 440 Brumberg, A., 294
Blanton, H., 79 Brummelman, E., 395, 398
450 Author Index

Bryan, C. J., 2, 3, 156, 230, 259, 260, 262, 263, 266, Chatman, J., 127
273, 294, 378, 388 Chavez, O., 167, 171
Brzustoski, P., 70, 92, 319, 334 Chen, E., 54, 159
Buehler, C., 367 Chen, J., 155
Buffardi, L. E., 140 Chen, P., 2, 3, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174,
Bugental, D. B., 374 175, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 185
Bunyan, D. P., 67 Cheng, C. M., 270
Burack, J. A., 24 Cheng, K. M., 179
Burger, J. M., 77, 408 Cheryan, S., 161
Burman, B., 367 Cheung, A. C. K., 20, 21
Burn, F., 82 Chezzi, C., 369
Burnette, J. L., 22, 193, 208 Chiu, C. Y., 11, 29, 130, 143, 227, 307, 308, 354, 355,
Burson, A., 71 411
Burton, C. M., 198, 202, 204, 211 Choi, I., 194
Bushman, B. J., 393, 395 Chong, E. S. K., 325
Busseri, M. A., 197 Christensen, A., 386
Butler, E. A., 250, 369 Chukhray, I., 70
Butner, J., 415 Chung, C. K., 76
Butterfield, B., 220 Cialdini, R. B., 2, 275, 335, 405, 406, 407, 409, 410,
Bybee, D., 151 415, 416, 419, 420, 421, 422, 429, 430, 431, 435,
441
Cable, D. M., 127 Cienfuegos, C., 296
Cabrera, N. L., 130 Cikara, M., 349, 356
Cacioppo, J. T., 440 Cimpian, A., 318
Cahill, L., 229 Clapp, J. D., 407, 411
Cain, K. M., 307 Clark, E. K., 108
Cairns, G., 265 Clark, M. S., 196, 199, 250, 387, 397, 398
Calhoun, L. C., 219, 229, 231 Claro, S., 79
Calvete, E., 313 Clayton, J., 128
Cameron, J. J., 386, 398 Cochrane, S., 414
Campbell, J. D., 386 Cocking, R. R., 119
Canning, E. A., 22, 27, 28, 30, 70, 102, 105, 106, 107, Coffey, K. A., 199
112, 115, 121, 155, 158 Cohen, D., 380
Cantor, N., 261, 347 Cohen, G. L., 2, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49,
Capó Crucet, J., 131 50, 53, 54, 58, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72,
Cappeliez, P., 369 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 92, 109,
Carey, K. B., 415 120, 127, 136, 139, 154, 167, 169, 172, 184, 195,
Carlsmith, J. M., 78, 275 199, 204, 207, 260, 307, 316, 319, 334, 378, 393,
Carlsson, R., 408, 418 397, 438
Carr, D., 367 Cohen, J. F. W., 296
Carr, P. B., 23, 53, 439 Cohen, L. H., 229
Carstensen, L. L., 203 Cohen, L. J., 225
Carswell, K. L., 151 Cohen, S., 54, 229, 240, 313, 371
Carver, C. S., 218, 225 Cohen-Chen, S., 348, 350, 352
Case, K. A., 130 Cohn, M. A., 199, 200, 201, 202
Casey, B. J., 262, 268 Cole, E. R., 130, 139
Caspit, B., 349 Cole, S. W., 205
Castillo, C., 159 Coleman, J. S., 306
Catalino, L. I., 206 Collins, A., 176
Caudle, K., 262 Collins, N. L., 386
Cehajic-Clancy, S., 67, 68 Colyar, J. E., 149
Centola, D., 361 Coman, A., 361
Chacon, V., 294 Connell, J. P., 171
Chaiken, S., 66 Conner, A. L., 139, 143, 233, 288
Chajut, E., 224 Connor-Smith, J., 225
Chambaron, S., 288 Contreras, F., 79
Chancellor, J., 196, 203, 210 Cook, A., 81
Chandon, P., 83 Cook, J. E., 45, 71, 76, 78, 80
Chang, J., 355 Cooke, I., 287
Chanowitz, B., 440 Cooper, H., 116, 141
Chao, M. M., 130 Coppola, B. C., 167
Charalambides, L., 417, 418 Corbin, W. R., 220, 287
Charbonneau, A. K., 342 Cordova, D. I., 110
Charles, S. T., 203 Cordray, D. S., 115
Charney, D. S., 226 Cornell, D., 342
 Author Index 451

Cornil, Y., 83 Denson, N., 130

Cornman, J. C., 367 Desmarais, S. L., 22
Corwin, Z. B., 149 DeSteno, D., 199
Costa, P. T., 201 Destin, M., 2, 3, 4, 54, 108, 127, 132, 135, 148, 150,
Couch, K. A., 325 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162
Covarrubias, R., 24, 127 Detweiler-Bedell, J., 62, 225
Covault, J., 325 Deutsch, M., 431
Coyne, J. C., 367 Devers, C., 46, 51
Cozzarelli, C., 386 Dewey, J., 103, 105
Crain, A. L., 273 Dewey, N. A., 70
Crenshaw, K., 139 Diamond, A., 11
Creswell, J. D., 67, 68, 76, 218 Dicke, A., 116
Crisp, R. J., 348, 352 Dickens, L. R., 197, 198
Critcher, C. R., 71 Dickerhoof, R. M., 194, 195, 200, 202, 378
Crocker, J., 71, 139, 208 Dickerson, S. S., 310
Croizet, J. C., 127 Dickhäuser, O., 42
Crone, E. A., 262, 268 Dickhaut, J., 351
Crosnoe, R., 306, 307 Diekman, A. B., 108, 121
Croson, R., 247 Diener, E., 191, 192, 197, 225, 371
Cross, M. P., 202 Diener, M. L., 191
Crow, M. M., 25, 28 Dienstbier, R. A., 219, 229, 240, 242
Crozier, G., 128 Dighe, S., 288
Crum, A. J., 1, 2, 3, 4, 22, 23, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, Disabato, D. J., 197
224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 240, Dittmann, A. G., 136
248, 249, 254, 271, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, Ditto, P. H., 66
293, 316, 373 Dobbin, F., 141
Csikszentmihalyi, M., 192 Dodge, K. A., 316, 318
Cumberland, A., 193 Dodson, J. D., 226
Curry, O. S., 198 Dolan, P., 75
Curtin, N., 130 Donnelly, G. E., 298
Cwir, D., 53, 307 Doraiswamy, P. M., 210
Dorn, M., 443
Dabars, W. B., 25, 28 Doss, B. D., 386
Dahl, R. E., 230, 262, 263, 278, 310, 319 Dover, T. L., 140
Daiuto, A. D., 368 Dovey, T. M., 287
Damiani, M., 40 Dovidio, J. F., 141, 355
Damon, W., 263 Downey, G., 38, 325
Daniel, D. B., 106, 113, 155 Drach, R. D., 361
Danielsson, M., 386 Drewnowski, A., 287
Dannals, J. E., 134, 199 Dube, L., 288, 294
Darley, J. M., 39 Duckworth, A. L., 46, 174
Datu, J. A. D., 198 Dumas-Hines, F., 307
Davidson, R. J., 204 Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R., 140
Davies, P. G., 161, 218 Dunlosky, J., 168
Davis, A., 38, 325 Dunn, E. W., 196
Davis, D. E., 197 Dunn, L., 280
Dawis, R. V., 127 Dunning, D., 65, 71
de Araujo, I. E., 287 Dunwoody, S., 420
De Groot, E. V., 167 Durik, A. M., 102, 108, 120
De Houwer, J., 298 Dutcher, J. M., 67, 71
de Jong, E. M., 70 Dweck, C. S., 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18,
de Jong, P. F., 70 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 45, 51, 78, 79, 81, 109, 128, 155,
De Poot, C. J., 387 156, 167, 173, 184, 220, 227, 228, 230, 254, 273,
de Ridder, D. T., 414 278, 287, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 315, 316,
de Vet, E., 414 318, 348, 349, 354, 355, 361, 388
de Wit, J. B., 414 Dwyer, P. C., 416
Debrosse, R., 154 Dyches, T. T., 340
deCharms, R., 103 Dynarski, S. M., 20
Deci, E. L., 103, 193, 196, 208, 263, 307, 310, 378
Dee, T. S., 70, 75, 130, 340 Earley, P. C., 143
Delgado, R., 140 Easterbrook, M. J., 75
Della Porta, M. D., 208, 209 Eberhardt, J. L., 130, 233, 325, 327, 340
Demarque, C., 417, 418, 421 Eccles, J. S., 68, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108
DeMarree, K. G., 83 Edwards, J. R., 127
DeNisi, A., 417 Effron, D. A., 67
452 Author Index

Egalite, A. J., 342 Fisher, O., 150

Ehrenreich, S. E., 306 Fiske, S. T., 50
Ehret, P. J., 65, 66, 68, 69 Flammer, L. J., 287
Eibach, R. P., 333 Fleming, A., 420
Eisenberg, N., 193 Fleming, S. M., 168
Elbel, B. D., 288 Flukes, J., 318
Elder, G. H., 72 Focella, E., 66, 82
Eldridge, K., 386 Folkman, S., 218, 369
Elizee, J., 288 Fong, G. T., 271
Elliot, A. J., 242, 245, 253, 254 Forbes, C. E., 38, 218, 247
Ellsworth, P. C., 78, 387 Ford, M., 386
Elmore, K., 150 Fordyce, M. W., 192
Eloul, L., 277 Forouzanfar, M. H., 263
Elzinga, B. M., 314 Forsyth, R. B., 22
Emmons, R. A., 192, 194, 198, 204, 371 Fox, C. R., 423
Engeser, S., 81 Fox, K. J., 75
Epel, E. S., 219, 226, 229, 240, 309 Frame, C. L., 316
Epley, N., 340 Francis, M. E., 392
Epstein, N., 368 Fraser, S. C., 77
Epton, T., 66, 68, 77, 439 Frederick, S., 261
Erdley, C. A., 307, 309 Fredrickson, B. L., 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 225,
Ericsson, K. A., 178 242
Erikson, E. H., 415 Freedman, J. L., 77
Ernst, D., 129 Freedman, V. A., 367
Escher, T., 408 Freeman, E., 415
Eskreis-Winkler, L., 46 Freeman, P., 242
Espelage, D. L., 306 Freeman, Z., 242
Espinoza, J., 79 Frenz, F., 308
Etheridge, B., 178 Fried, C. B., 9, 174, 273, 311
Ettlinger, J., 409 Friedl, A., 411
Evans, J. F., 76 Frith, C. D., 168
Eyal, T., 340 Fritz, M. M., 198, 208
Fryberg, S. A., 24, 28, 127, 129, 143, 277, 298
Fabelo, T., 325 Fryer, J. W., 253
Fabrigar, L. R., 411 Fu, J. H., 355
Fagley, N. S., 202 Fucito, L. M., 379
Fairlie, R., 325 Fulmer, C. A., 127
Falk, E. B., 68 Fulton, K., 411
Fan, X., 342
Fang, F. F. A., 155 Gable, S. L., 203
Faruqui, A., 417 Gaertner, S. L., 141, 355
Fassiotto, M., 54 Gaetz, R., 398
Fatemi, H., 288 Gakidou, E., 263
Fath, S., 221, 229, 240 Galinsky, A. D., 68, 247, 349, 355, 356
Fava, G. A., 202, 204 Gallardo, I., 83
Fay, D., 219, 229 Galton, F., 11
Fazio, R. H., 394 Gamoran, A., 75, 149
Federico, C. M., 354 Gandara, P., 79
Fein, S., 67 Gander, F., 200
Feldman, S., 261 Garcia, J., 45, 68, 70, 71, 72, 92, 172, 319, 334
Fenko, A., 287 Garcia, T., 167, 168
Ferguson, R. F., 325 Garnett, F. G., 140
Ferguson, Y. L., 199, 207 Garst, J., 412
Ferraro, P. J., 409, 413, 415, 418 Gaspard, H., 106, 110, 115, 116
Ferrer, R. A., 66, 68, 72, 73, 76, 83 Gaucher, D., 394
Festinger, L., 66, 275 Geana, A., 361
Fiedler, K., 387 Gebhardt, M., 80
Fincham, F. D., 197, 198, 367, 368, 386, 398 Gelfand, M. J., 415
Fine, R. D., 242 Gelhaar, F., 411
Finez, L., 68 Gelman, S. A., 129, 273, 317, 318
Finkel, E. J., 370, 371, 386, 397 Gelsomin, E. D., 298
Finkel, S. M., 199 George, M. J., 306
Finkelstein, S. R., 287 Gerard, H. B., 431
Fischer, D., 434 Gerber, A. S., 408, 415, 429
Fishbach, A., 46, 287, 289, 293, 295, 298 Gerber, P. J., 430
Fisher, A. N., 389 Gervey, B. M., 308
 Author Index 453

Giffen, C. J., 70 Gunderson, B., 167, 171

Gifford, R., 423 Gunnar, M. R., 218, 310, 314
Gilbert, D. T., 65, 203 Guntell, L., 408, 418
Gilovich, T., 206 Gunz, A., 380
Glanz, K., 287, 293 Gurin, P., 136, 139, 141, 142
Glaser, J., 342 Gustavson, K., 385, 399
Glass, G. V., 192
Glenn, N. D., 367, 370 Hadden, I. R., 75
Glick, P., 50 Haidt, J., 354, 412
Gneezy, U., 247 Haimovitz, K., 23
Göckeritz, S., 410, 411 Haines, M. P., 408
Godes, O., 101, 106 Halford, J. C. G., 287
Godwin, J., 316 Halford, W. K., 386
Goffman, E., 38, 66 Hallsworth, M., 430
Goldberg, J., 287 Halperin, E., 2, 22, 67, 307, 310, 346, 347, 348, 349,
Goldenberg, A., 2, 3, 22, 346, 347, 348, 351, 360 350, 352, 355, 358, 359
Goldin, P. R., 379 Hamann, K., 420
Goldman, R., 441 Hambarchyan, M., 68
Goldstein, N. J., 2, 275, 335, 405, 409, 410, 414, 415, Hamedani, M. G., 2, 45, 108, 126, 127, 129, 132, 143,
418, 423, 429, 431 277
Gollwitzer, A., 174 Hameiri, B., 347, 359
Gollwitzer, P. M., 156, 174, 177, 178, 184 Hamm, J. M., 44
Gonzales, M. H., 78 Hammen, C., 218, 306, 313
Good, C., 9, 14, 15, 22, 174, 220, 311 Hamre, B. K., 334
Goodman, F. R., 197 Hancock, P. A., 229
Goodyer, I. M., 314 Handley-Miner, I. J., 2, 22, 23, 217
Gornik-Durose, M., 415 Hangen, E. J., 2, 3, 228, 239, 240, 242, 247, 310, 373
Gorski, L., 229 Hanks, A. S., 294
Gortmaker, S. L., 287 Hannigan, E. C., 149
Gottfried, M. A., 325 Hanselman, P., 42, 70, 74, 75, 78
Gottman, J. M., 368, 396 Hansenne, M., 203
Goudeau, S., 127 Harackiewicz, J. M., 2, 70, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105,
Govorun, O., 270 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119,
Goyer, J. P., 41, 43, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 70, 72, 73, 75, 120, 121, 155, 158, 173, 184, 294, 295, 341
77, 82, 121, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 240, 249, 325, Hard, B. M., 218, 242
328, 332, 342 Hardin, C. D., 444
Graham, J., 354 Harmsen, A. G., 121
Granger, S., 386 Harrington, J. R., 415
Grant, A. M., 294, 295 Harris, J. L., 265, 288, 294
Grant, H., 174 Harris, P. R., 66, 67, 68, 77, 83, 439
Gray, H. M., 240 Harris, S. E., 412
Gray, K., 354 Hartson, K. A., 71
Green, D. J., 22 Harvey, V. L., 128
Green, D. P., 360 Haslam, N., 129, 130, 260, 261
Green, S. A., 360 Hastings, G., 265
Greenberg, J., 68, 311 Hattie, J., 173, 184
Greenberg, M. T., 315 Hawkes, C., 287
Greenwald, A. G., 299 Hawley, P. H., 306
Greenwood, E. J., 228, 242 Haworth, C. M., 209
Gregory, A., 325, 342 Hazan, C., 250
Griffin, D. W., 375, 386, 392 Hecht, C. A., 107, 120, 121
Griffin, P., 139 Heeter, C., 11
Griffin, R., 420 Heim, C., 218, 310
Griffin, S., 371 Heimpel, S. A., 387
Grigg, J., 70, 74 Heinberg, L. J., 267
Gripshover, S., 28 Heine, S. J., 277
Griskevicius, V., 275, 335, 409, 410, 415, 418, 429 Heintzelman, S. J., 208
Gross, J. J., 2, 22, 71, 161, 218, 228, 242, 245, 246, Heitland, K., 67
249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 307, 346, 348, 352, 369, Helgeson, V. S., 229
370, 371, 386 Heller, D., 367
Gross, P. H., 39 Hellhammer, D. H., 244, 314
Grunberg, R., 221, 249 Helms, H. M., 367
Gu, Y., 242 Hembroff, L., 414
Guichard, A. C., 386 Henderson, K., 142
Guinard, J. X., 296 Hendricks, B., 101, 106
Gump, B. B., 239 Hendricks, L. A., 408
454 Author Index

Henrich, J., 277 Ironson, G., 218, 229

Herbert, J., 314 Isaacowitz, D. M., 203
Herbert, T. B., 229 Iserman, E. C., 218
Herman, K. C., 326
Hernandez, I. A., 2, 3, 4, 148 Jackowska, M., 198
Herrnstein, R. J., 37, 53 Jackson, C. K., 149
Hershfeldt, P. A., 342 Jackson, G. L., 380
Hershfield, H. E., 279 Jackson, M., 217, 218
Hertzer, C., 288 Jacobs Bao, K., 210
Hewstone, M., 360 Jacobson, L., 334
Heyman, G. D., 273 Jacobson, R. P., 410, 411
Heyman, R. E., 368 Jacquart, J., 242
Hidi, S., 103, 105 Jaeger, C. M., 413
Hies, R., 367 James, L., 151
Higginbotham, G. D., 142 Jamieson, J. P., 2, 3, 22, 227, 228, 229, 239, 240, 242,
Higgins, E. T., 444 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253,
Higgs, S., 408, 410, 415, 418, 420 254, 305, 310, 315, 318, 373
Hilal, J., 351 Janicki-Deverts, D., 54
Hill, C. J., 20 Janis, I. L., 169
Hill, L., 178 Janke, S., 42
Hilton, D. J., 417, 418 Janoff-Bulman, R., 308
Himmelstein, K. E. W., 325 Jaquette, O., 130
Hinojosa, C. P., 260, 262, 266 Jarden, A., 197
Hirsch, A. A., 140 Jaremka, L. M., 67
Hirschi, Q., 42 Jarvis, B., 311, 312
Hodges, S. D., 349 Jarvis, S. N., 43
Hofmann, D. A., 294, 295 Jefferson, A. L., 239, 242
Hogg, M. A., 414, 435 Jellesma, F. C., 70
Hollander, M., 273 Jencks, C., 79
Holmes, J. G., 250, 375, 386, 387, 388, 390, 391, 392 Jenkins, B. N., 198
Holum, A., 176 Jensen, A. R., 11
Holzberg, A. D., 65 Jessop, D. C., 82
Hong, J. S., 306 Jesus, S. N., 247
Hong, Y. Y., 11, 12, 13, 130, 227, 307, 308, 354, 355, Jiang, L., 68
411 Job, V., 23
Hooley, J. M., 263 Jobs, S., 357
Hoplock, L. B., 389, 398 Joh, J., 143
Horn, L., 127 John, E. M., 279
Horne, C., 412 John, L. K., 298
Horowitz, E., 160 John, O. P., 369
Housel, T. H., 128 John, P., 408
Howe, L., 439 John-Henderson, N. A., 242, 247, 252
Hoyer, W. D., 287 Johns, M., 38, 68, 218
Hoyle, R. H., 150 Johnson, C. S., 127
Hoyt, C. L., 22 Johnson, D. R., 367
Huberth, M., 179, 182 Johnson, E., 151
Huesmann, R., 355 Johnson, J., 325, 327, 334, 342
Hugenberg, K., 348 Johnson, M. B., 411
Hughes, S., 298 Johnson, R. C., 149
Hulleman, C. S., 2, 42, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, Johnston, A. M., 108
107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, Joiner, T. E., 225, 306
155, 173, 184, 294, 295, 341 Jones, J., 386
Hulleman, T. K., 102, 119 Jones, S., 177, 436
Hummel, M., 140 Jordan, W. J., 325
Hunter, S. B., 228, 240 Josephs, R. A., 310
Hurling, R., 413 Jost, J. T., 354
Hurwitz, B. E., 243 Juliano, L. M., 379
Hyde, J. S., 70, 102, 106, 109, 112, 155, 341 Jurafsky, D., 233, 288
Just, D. R., 294
Ickovics, J. R., 219, 229 Juster, R. P., 252, 310
Ikizer, E. G., 79
Imada, S., 412 Kabat-Zinn, J., 203
Impett, E. A., 203 Kahn, D. T., 354
Inkles, M. P., 140 Kahn, M., 218
Inzlicht, M., 14, 39, 74 Kaiser, C. R., 71, 140
Irmak, C., 293 Kalev, A., 141
 Author Index 455

Kalla, J., 355 Kraft, M. A., 20

Kallgren, C. A., 406, 407, 430 Kraft, T. L., 202
Kamarck, T., 240, 313, 371 Kray, L. J., 247
Kamins, M. L., 355 Kredentser, M. S., 411, 420
Kane, R., 66 Kroeper, K. M., 51
Kangas, S. E. N., 149 Kross, E., 369, 374
Kanno, Y., 149 Krueger, J. I., 386
Karabenick, S. A., 168 Ku, G., 68, 356
Karevold, E., 385 Kubzansky, L. D., 198
Karney, B. R., 367, 386 Kukla, A., 10
Karnilowicz, H. R., 250 Kunda, Z., 46, 47, 50, 65, 66, 272
Kashdan, T. B., 197 Kung, F. Y., 130
Kasser, T., 206 Kunst, J. R., 355
Kathmandu, A., 68 Kurtz, J. L., 196, 200, 203
Katok, E., 351 Kurzer, A., 296
Katragadda, K. R., 167 Kusche, A. G., 392
Katz, J., 367
Keefer, L. A., 151 LaBrie, J. W., 65
Keinan, G., 229 Lafortune, J., 149
Keizer, K., 419, 443 Lähteenmäki, L., 287
Keller, J., 130 Laibson, D., 260
Kelley, H. H., 318, 387 Lamb, J., 220
Kelly, B., 288, 298 Lambert, L. S., 127
Kemeny, M. E., 309, 310 Lambert, N. M., 197, 198
Kenneth, T., 356 Landau, M. J., 151
Kenrick, D. T., 415 Lange, J. E., 411
Keough, K. A., 67 Langer, E. J., 220, 233, 440
Kerr, N. L., 412 Lapinski, M. K., 408, 415
Kerr, S. L., 196, 198, 205 Lara, J., 325
Kersten, L., 287 Large, L., 409
Kessler, D. A., 262, 263, 265, 274 Larimer, M. E., 411
Ketelaar, T., 193, 202 Larsen, R. J., 193, 202, 371
Keysar, B., 380 Larson, G. M., 369
Kidd, C., 261 LaSalvia, C. T., 408
Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., 367 Laskey, A., 421
Kim, H. S., 67 Latham, G. P., 102
Kim, S., 141, 367 Layous, K., 2, 75, 191, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201,
Kimel, S. Y., 355 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210
King, B. T., 169 Lazarus, R. S., 218, 240, 369
King, K. B., 367 Le, K., 229
King, L. A., 192, 198, 202, 203, 204, 211, 225 Le Mens, G., 439
King, M. L., Jr., 357 Leaf, P. J., 342
King, R. B., 198 Leary, M. R., 39, 53, 196, 202, 260, 278
Kinias, Z., 70 Lee, H., 194, 204, 205, 209, 210
Kiosses, D. N., 379 Lee, H. Y., 2, 3, 4, 9, 22, 45, 240, 249, 305, 307, 310,
Kipling, R., 166 314, 315
Kirby, T., 174 Lee, J. W., 387
Kirk, E. P., 171 Lee, K. H., 263
Kirschbaum, C., 244, 314 Lee, M., 106, 111, 113
Kisida, B., 342 Lee, N. R., 420
Kitayama, S., 28 Lee, O., 81
Kizilcec, R. F., 82, 109 Lee, S. L., 143
Klein, W. M. P., 67, 77 Lee, Y. H., 11
Kluger, A. N., 417 Leggett, E. L., 10, 11, 227, 228, 307, 318
Kober, H., 298 Leibowitz, K. A., 22
Koffka, K., 261 Leitner, J. B., 43
Kohn, M., 127 Lemay, E. P., Jr., 387, 397, 398
Kolts, R. L., 198 Lens, W., 208, 247, 263, 310, 378
Koo, M., 203 Lepper, H. S., 197
Koomen, H. M. Y., 70 Lepper, M. R., 68, 78, 110
Kopelman, S., 414 Letona, P., 294
Kormos, C., 423 Leuenberger, A., 65
Koslov, K., 248 Leung, A. K., 143
Kosovich, J. J., 105, 106, 108, 111, 113, 116, 155 Leung, K., 143
Kotler, P., 420 Leventhal, H., 177, 436
Kovacs, M., 313 Levine, J. M., 67
456 Author Index

Levy, D. E., 298 Major, B., 71, 139, 140, 240, 248
Levy, S. R., 307 Maki, A., 416
Lewandowski, D. A., 412 Malhotra, N., 438
Lewin, K., 64, 79, 261 Mallett, R. K., 39
Lewis, M. A., 408, 411, 418, 429 Maloney, E. K., 408
Lewis, N. A., 149 Mang, J., 80
Liau, A. K., 201, 203 Mangels, J. A., 220
Libby, L. K., 333 Mann, T., 287, 296
Liberman, A., 66 Manzo, V., 132
Liberman, V., 67, 261 Maoz, I., 356, 360
Lickel, B., 228 Margetts, H., 408
Lieberman, J. D., 311 Margolin, G., 367
Liem, D., 288 Margolis, S., 196, 210
Lim, S. S., 286 Marigold, D. C., 2, 53, 375, 380, 385, 388, 389, 390,
Lin, D. M. S., 11, 354 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397
Lindenberg, S., 419, 443 Marisa, E. M., 227
Linder, J. A., 408, 412 Markman, E. M., 318
Linkenbach, J. W., 408, 418 Markman, H. J., 386
Lin-Siegler, X., 155 Marksteiner, T., 42
Linville, P. W., 72, 77, 155, 228 Markus, H. R., 28, 67, 127, 129, 135, 139, 141, 142,
Lipsey, M. W., 20 143, 150, 233, 277
List, J. A., 430 Marotta, M. E., 240
Liu, T. J., 65 Martell, D., 414
Liu, Z., 411 Martens, A., 68
Lobstein, T., 265 Martin, A., 221, 229, 240
Locke, E. A., 102 Martin, C., 68
Lockwood, P., 46, 47, 50 Martin, G. N., 306
Loeschinger, D. C., 420 Martinez-Pons, M., 167
Loew, B., 174 Marty, L., 288
Loew, K., 414 Marx, R. W., 130
Loewenstein, G., 260, 261 Mason, A. E., 369
Logel, C., 39, 45, 58, 68, 71, 78, 207, 218, 378, 393, 397 Mason, A. Z., 121
Lokhande, M., 2, 45, 63, 79, 80, 81, 154, 393 Master, A., 68, 92, 172, 227, 273, 388
Long, S. M., 127, 131 Mathews, A., 244
Loomis, C. C., 307 Matthews, K. A., 239, 242
Lopez, D. F., 66 Matzel, L. D., 12
Lopez, M. H., 79 Mauss, I. B., 206
Lord, S., 68 McCabe, K., 351
Loschelder, D. D., 434 McCaul, K. D., 77
Losen, D. J., 324, 325 McCauley C., 360
Lovenheim, M. F., 149 McCoy, S., 248
Lowery, L., 412 McCrae, R. R., 201, 218
Lu, J., 288 McCullough, M. E., 192, 194, 198, 204
Lucas, R. E., 191 McCurley, J. L., 298
Luchies, L. B., 2, 3, 333, 366, 370, 371, 386 McDonnell, A. L., 407
Ludden, J., 38 McEwen, B. S., 218, 219, 229, 252, 310
Ludvigsen, S., 18 McGinn, M. M., 367
Luna-Lucero, M., 155 McGonigal, K., 218
Lundberg, K., 270 McGregor, H. A., 254, 311
Lundberg, U., 239 McKay, T. A., 179
Lupien, S. J., 218, 252, 310 McKeachie, W. J., 167
Luykx, A., 81 McKenzie-Mohr, D., 420
Lykken, D., 192 McPartland, J. M., 325
Lyubomirsky, S., 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, McQueen, A., 77
199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, Medrano, F. N., 268, 269
209, 225, 378 Mehdipour, T., 408
Mehl, M. R., 369
Ma, J., 149 Meissner, L., 159
MacDonald, G., 387 Melander, E., 347
MacInnis, C. C., 360 Mendes, W. B., 228, 229, 240, 241, 242, 247, 248, 250,
Mackie, D. M., 348 251, 254, 310, 373
MacLeod, C., 244 Mendoza-Denton, R., 38, 39, 43, 72, 240, 242, 325
Maibach, E., 287 Menon, J., 263
Maier, S. F., 10 Mermelstein, R., 240, 313, 371
Maimaran, M., 289 Messick, D. M., 414
 Author Index 457

Metcalfe, J., 11, 168 Nail, P. R., 66

Metcalfe, R. D., 430 Napier, J. L., 354
Meyer, W. U., 25 Napper, L., 66, 68, 77
Meyerowitz, J. A., 65 Naylor, R. W., 287
Micha, R., 287 Neal, D., 79
Mickelson, R. A., 149 Neel, R., 23
Midgley, C., 68 Neff, L. A., 367, 386
Miele, D. B., 11 Neighbors, C., 408, 411, 415, 418, 429
Milem, J. F., 130 Nelson, G., 110
Miller, A. N., 288 Nelson, J. E., 127
Miller, D. T., 49, 129, 134, 142, 199, 201, 413, 429 Nelson, L. D., 66, 438
Miller, G. E., 54 Nelson, S. K., 203, 205, 206, 208, 210
Miller, N., 141 Nelson Laird, T. F., 130
Miller, R. L., 150, 156 Nestle, M., 265
Mills, J., 280 Netanyahu, B., 347
Minson, J. A., 438 Netherton, C. M., 314
Mischel, W., 261, 369 Nets-Zehngut, R., 347
Mischkowski, D., 71 Neubert, S., 420
Mitchell, D. E., 79 Neudeck, E. M., 408
Mitra, D. L., 140 Newby-Clark, I. R., 387
Miu, A. S., 22, 308, 310, 312, 313, 315, 318, 319, 355 Newton, T. L., 367
Miyake, A., 74 Nichols, B. S., 414
Molden, D. C., 11, 68, 128, 184, 307, 318 Nicklasson, L., 408, 418
Mollen, S., 411 Nicklaus, S., 288
Momennejad, I., 361 Niederle, M., 247
Mondini, D., 413 Nielsen, H. S., 22
Monin, B., 273, 438 Nieuwenhuis, M., 75
Monnery-Patris, S., 288 Nijdam, D., 430
Monsivais, P., 287 Nilly, M., 224
Moore, L. J., 242 Nisbett, R. E., 53, 177, 339, 341
Moos, R. H., 218 No, S., 130
Mor, N., 206 Nock, M. K., 242, 248, 373
Mor, S., 143 Noh, M. S., 102
Moran, T. P., 11 Nokelainen, P., 309, 355
Morrell, E., 140 Nolan, J. M., 2, 405, 409, 410, 411, 415, 429
Morris, M. W., 143, 411 Nora, A., 127
Mortensen, C. R., 410, 415, 418, 421, 430, 431, 433, 434 Norem, J. K., 347
Moser, J. S., 11 Norenzayan, A., 277
Moskowitz, G. B., 349, 355 Norton, M. I., 196
Moskowitz, J. T., 198 Nosek, B. A., 299, 354
Moss, M., 262, 263, 265, 274 Novin, S., 150
Moss-Racusin, C. A., 139 Nuñez, A. M., 127
Mottet, C., 203 Nurius, P., 150
Moya, P. M., 129 Nussbaum, A. D., 11, 13, 355
Moyer, A., 360
Mozaffarian, D., 287 Obama, M., 38, 39
Mueller, C., 22 Oberle, E., 210
Muenks, K., 22 O’Brennan, L., 342
Mueser, K. T., 368 O’Brien, J., 273
Mukherjee, S., 74 O’Brien, L. T., 67
Mukhopadhyay, A., 23 Ocampo, J. M., 242
Mullainathan, S., 218 Ochsner, K. N., 369
Müller, T., 2, 45, 63, 79, 80, 81, 109, 154, 393 Odgers, C. L., 306
Munro, S., 12 O’Donoghue, T., 261
Muragishi, G., 109 O’Donovan, A., 196, 309
Murch, R. L., 229 Oettingen, G., 174, 178
Murphy, M. C., 22, 27, 28, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 58, O’Hara, R. E., 325
71, 161 Okonofua, J. A., 3, 324, 325, 327, 328, 331, 334, 336,
Murray, C., 37, 53 337, 340, 374
Murray, S. L., 375, 386, 387, 392, 396 O’Leary, M., 416
Myers, D. G., 366, 385, 399 Oliverez, P. M., 149
Olivola, C. Y., 279
Nachtigal, D. J., 287 Olson, C., 178
Nagda, B. A., 136, 141 Omi, M., 129
Nagengast, B., 115 Ong, D. C., 167, 168, 171
458 Author Index

Oren, N., 347 Peterson, C., 192, 203, 210

Orobio de Castro, B., 393, 395 Peterson, R. D., 347
Orosz, G., 26 Pettersson, T., 347
Orr, R., 356 Pettigrew, S., 288
Orth, U., 386 Pettigrew, T. F., 360
Ortosky, L., 66 Petty, R. E., 83, 440
Oseguera, L., 127 Pfattheicher, S., 349
Ostrove, J. M., 127, 131 Phelps, J., 106, 111, 113
Otake, K., 205 Phelps, K., 409
Otsui, K., 205 Philipoom, M., 105, 106
Ott, A. N., 325 Phillips, M., 79
Outes, I., 18, 22, 341 Pianta, R. C., 334
Oveis, C., 242, 250 Pierce, R. S., 208
Overall, N. C., 251 Pietrzak, J., 38, 325
Overbeek, G., 395, 398 Pinel, E. C., 65
Oyserman, D., 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 159, Pintrich, P. R., 167, 168, 174
160, 298 Pirke, K. M., 244, 314
Ozier, E. M., 51 Plaks, J. E., 307, 308
Plant, E. A., 178
Page-Gould, E., 360 Platsidou, M., 342
Pager, D., 325 Plaut, V. C., 140, 161
Palmeri, H., 261 Pliskin, R., 347
Pals, J. L., 11, 12 Podolsky, P., 347
Paluck, E. L., 280, 341, 347, 359, 360, 429, 443 Pomeranz, J. L., 265
Papies, E. K., 293, 436 Porat, R., 347, 359
Papini, S., 242 Posner, M. I., 12
Park, C. L., 221, 229 Posner, R. A., 412
Park, J., 241, 242, 310 Postmes, T., 361
Park, J. K., 82, 155 Poteat, V. P., 325
Park, L. E., 208 Powers, J. T., 83, 167, 312, 341, 355
Park, N., 192 Prater, M. A., 340
Park, R. J., 314 Prentice, D. A., 49, 129, 413, 429
Parker-Pope, T., 366 Pressman, S. D., 198, 202, 208
Parks, A. C., 202, 208, 209 Price, M. K., 409, 413, 415, 418
Parks-Yancy, R., 68 Priebe, C. S., 408
Pas, E. T., 342 Prince, M. A., 415, 420
Pascarella, E. T., 127 Priniski, S. J., 102, 106, 107, 112, 115, 116, 121, 155
Pastor, D. A., 101 Prinstein, M. J., 306
Patall, E. A., 116, 141 Protzko, J., 70, 78
Paternoster, R., 325 Proulx, C. M., 367
Pauker, K., 23 Proyer, R. T., 200, 202
Paunesku, D., 9, 16, 17, 18, 21, 27, 28, 51, 78, 79, 155, Purdie-Vaughns, V., 38, 45, 70, 71, 92, 319, 325, 334
172, 174, 183, 184, 227, 228, 328, 331, 336, 337, Pyne, J., 42
359, 374
Pawson, R., 73 Quevedo, K., 314
Payne, K., 270 Quinn, D. M., 38, 218
Peach, J. M., 39, 68 Quoidbach, J., 203
Pearce, Z. J., 386
Pek, J., 199 Radloff, L. S., 371
Penalvo, J. L., 287 Raghunathan, R., 287, 289, 294
Pender, M., 149 Ramirez, G., 242
Penley, J. A., 218 Ramsden, S., 12
Pennebaker, J. W., 76, 392 Rand, L., 298
Penner, E., 130, 340 Randall, A. K., 250
Penninx, B. W., 314 Rashid, T., 202
Peper, J. S., 262 Raska, D., 414, 419
Pepping, C. A., 196 Rasmusen, E. B., 412
Pernuovic, W. Q. E., 387 Rattan, A., 22, 23, 28, 308
Perry, M. A., 288 Rauch, D., 80
Perry, R. P., 44 Ray, D., 348
Persico, C., 149 Ray, R. D., 374
Perugini, M., 413 Ready, D. D., 79
Peters, B. J., 228, 242, 250, 251 Real, K., 439
Peters, M. L., 209 Ream, R. K., 79
Peters, S., 268 Reardon, S. F., 79
 Author Index 459

Reay, D., 128 Rozek, C. S., 42, 70, 102, 109, 242, 341
Redwine, L., 198 Rozin, P., 412
Reese, G., 414, 420 Rubel, J. A., 434
Rege, M., 12, 18, 20 Ruch, W., 200
Reh, L., 411 Rueda, M. R., 12
Rehm, C. D., 287 Ruini, C., 202, 204
Reich, J., 82 Ruiz, M., 3, 324
Reid, A., 415 Rumberger, R. W., 325
Reiff, J. S., 279 Russel, C., 411
Reijntjes, A., 393 Russell, A. G., 22, 307, 348
Reilly, R., 168 Rust, M. C., 355
Reinke, W. M., 326 Ruvolo, A. P., 150
Reis, H. T., 203, 250, 367 Ryan, A. M., 307
Reissfelder, S., 408 Ryan, R. M., 103, 193, 196, 206, 307
Renner, B., 411 Ryan, S., 79
Renninger, K. A., 103, 105 Ryda, C., 82
Reno, R. R., 406, 407, 430 Rydell, R. J., 348, 352
Rheinberg, F., 81
Rheinschmidt-Same, M., 72, 135, 242 Saad, L., 219
Richards, J. M., 369 Sadava, S. W., 197
Richeson, J. R., 135 Saguy, T., 350
Richetin, J., 413, 414 Salomon, K., 240
Riggs, L., 131 Salovey, P., 23, 220, 225, 229, 248, 287, 316, 373
Rimal, R. N., 439 Saltarelli, A. J., 82
Rios, D., 130 Sälzer, C., 80
Rivas, A., 415 Sammy, N., 242
Rivlin, R., 359 Samuels, S. M., 261
Roberto, C. A., 287, 294, 298 Sánchez, A., 18, 341
Robins, R. W., 11, 12, 386 Sanchez-Burks, J., 140
Robinson, E., 408, 415, 418, 420 Sandstrom, G. M., 196
Robinson, J. A., 369, 379 Sansone, C., 103
Robinson, J. C., 141 Santerre, C., 65
Robinson, M. L., 38 Santoro, E. W., 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230
Robinson, S. R., 293 Sapolsky, R. M., 67, 218, 229, 314
Robinson, T. N., 263, 438 Sasaki, S. J., 349, 356
Robles, T. F., 367 Sassenrath, C., 349, 356
Rochkind, J., 325 Sauce, B., 12
Rocque, M., 325 Savino, N. S., 206
Rogers, L. O., 154 Sbarra, D. A., 250, 369, 379
Rogers, M. L., 306 Schanzenbach, D. W., 149
Rogers, T., 156, 273, 388, 408, 412, 415, 423, 429 Scheer, J. R., 325
Rokeach, M., 76, 77, 82, 272, 273 Scheier, M. F., 218
Romero, C., 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 21, 27, 227 Schein, C., 354
Ronaldson, A., 198 Schimel, J., 68, 81
Rood, T., 430 Schkade, D., 192
Rose, J., 325 Schleider, J. L., 22, 309, 313, 314, 315, 317
Rose, P., 375, 386, 392 Schmader, T., 38, 139, 218, 228, 229, 242, 247
Rosenthal, L., 139 Schmeichel, B. J., 71, 82, 94, 155
Rosenthal, R., 72, 334 Schneider, B., 149
Rosenzweig, E. Q., 100, 106, 108, 113, 116 Schneiderman, N., 218, 229, 243
Ross, L. D., 53, 67, 68, 78, 139, 177, 261, 339, 341, 347 Schoebi, D., 367
Ross, M., 375, 387, 388, 390, 391, 392 Schonert-Reichl, K. A., 159, 210
Rossignac-Milon, M., 154 Schreier, H. M. C., 159
Roth, S., 225 Schroder, H. S., 11
Rothbart, M. K., 12 Schultz, P. W., 2, 405, 409, 410, 413, 417, 419, 420,
Rothman, A. J., 225, 416 421, 422, 429
Rothschild, L., 129 Schuman, H., 178
Rothstein, J., 149 Schumann, K., 22
Rothstein, R., 79 Schunk, D. H., 156, 176
Rouse, D. I., 70 Schwabe, L., 229
Routledge, C., 202 Schwalbe, M., 70
Rowe, M. L., 22 Schwartz, G. E. R., 229
Rowland, J., 356 Schwartz, S. H., 412
Rowley, K. J., 70 Schwarz, N., 94, 367
Røysamb, E., 385 Scillitoe, J., 68
460 Author Index

Scott, D., 325 Sleeter, C. E., 130, 140

Scribner, R. A., 418, 419 Slotter, E. B., 2, 3, 333, 366, 369, 370, 371, 379, 386
Sears, D. O., 277 Small, D. M., 287
Sedikides, C., 200, 202 Smallets, S., 127
Seery, M. D., 247 Smith, D. A. F., 167
Sekaquaptewa, D., 74 Smith, E. N., 2, 22, 23, 217, 221, 227, 228, 232, 373
Seligman, M. E. P., 10, 192, 200, 202, 203, 204, 210, Smith, E. R., 150
248 Smith, G. C., 150, 151
Selye, H., 217, 218, 219, 234 Smith, J. L., 109, 121
Semin, G. R., 150, 387 Smith, M. L., 192
Senf, K., 201, 203 Smith, S. M., 411
Seo, E. J., 309, 310 Smith, S. W., 414
Sergici, S., 417 Smits, J. A., 242
Sevier, M., 386 Snyder, D., 287
Shafir, E., 218, 279 Solli, I. F., 18
Shamir, Y., 347 Solomon, S., 311
Shapiro, D. E., 229 Somerfield, M. R., 218
Shapiro, J. R., 23, 68 Somogyi, A., 218
Shapiro, S. L., 229 Son, L. K., 11
Sharif, A., 417 Sonnentag, S., 219, 229
Shaw, D., 414 Sorensen, N., 160
Shaw, L., 415 Sotomayor, S., 38
Shechter, O., 102 Sparkman, G., 2, 4, 412, 418, 421, 429, 430, 431, 432,
Sheeran, P., 66, 156, 415 433, 434, 435, 436, 438, 439
Sheldon, K. M., 192, 194, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, Spartz, J. T., 420
206, 207, 208, 263, 310, 378 Spears, R., 361
Shelton, N., 40 Spencer, K. B., 342
Shepherd, H., 280, 341 Spencer, M., 296
Shepherd, S., 393 Spencer, S. J., 38, 39, 53, 67, 68, 74, 139, 218, 270, 307
Sherif, M., 412 Spijker, A. T., 314
Sherman, D. A., 65 Spink, K. S., 408
Sherman, D. K., 2, 3, 45, 53, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, Spinrad, T. L., 193
70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 82, 92, 109, 120, 154, Springer, K. W., 367
195, 199, 207, 234, 260, 393, 438 Springer, L., 127
Sherrill, M. R., 150 Stanat, P., 80
Shillington, A., 411 Stanley, S. M., 386
Shim, S. S., 307 Star, J. R., 273, 318
Shimai, S., 205 Staub, E., 261
Shipp, A. J., 127 Staufenbiel, S. M., 314
Shoham, V., 368 Steel, P., 245
Short, J. L., 197 Steele, C. M., 38, 53, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 74, 75, 79,
Shulman, H. C., 408 139, 140, 142, 154, 161, 260, 325, 438
Siegel, P. A., 68 Steen, T. A., 192
Siegel, S. D., 218, 229 Stefancic, J., 140
Siegle, G. J., 263 Steffel, M., 340
Siepelmeyer, H., 434 Steffgen, G., 414
Silbert-Geiger, A., 374 Steg, L., 419, 443
Silk, J. S., 263 Steinberg, L., 262
Silver, N., 396 Stephens, N. M., 2, 3, 4, 45, 47, 48, 108, 126, 127, 129,
Silverman, A. M., 78, 207, 208, 378, 397 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 277
Sim, J., 70 Steptoe, A., 198
Simmons, W. K., 250 Sternberg, E. M., 226
Simons, J., 208, 263, 310, 378 Stevenson, D., 149
Simpson, B., 415 Steward, W., 225
Sin, N. L., 192, 197, 200, 209 Stewart, B. D., 270
Singal, J., 387 Stickle, T. R., 368
Singer, R., 177, 436 Stillman, T. F., 198
Sirin, S. R., 127 Stinson, D. A., 389, 393, 398
Sirleaf, E. J., 357 Stittinger, C., 347
Sivanathan, N., 68 Stöckli, S., 443
Skiba, R. J., 325 Stok, F. M., 411, 414
Skinner, E. A., 171 Stone, J., 66, 82, 273
Slatcher, R. B., 367 Stone, T., 198
Slavich, G. M., 309 Stormont, M., 326
Slavin, R. E., 20, 21 Storms, M. D., 77
 Author Index 461

Strahan, E. J., 267 Trombello, J. M., 367

Stroessner, S. J., 307 Trope, Y., 71
Su, L. Y. F., 420 Tropp, L. R., 360
Sublett, K., 42 Trost, M. R., 406, 431
Sugie, N., 325 Trzesniewski, K. H., 9, 15, 22, 128, 155, 173, 228,
Suh, R., 421, 422 307, 309, 311, 312, 348, 349, 355
Suher, J., 287, 294 Tudor, M., 110
Suleiman, A. B., 319 Tugade, M. M., 242
Sullivan, K. T., 386 Turner, J. C., 414
Sümer, N., 386 Turnwald, B. P., 2, 3, 4, 233, 271, 286, 288, 289, 290,
Sun, K. L., 28 291, 292, 293, 295, 296
Sun, W., 298 Twenge, J. M., 306
Sunstein, C. R., 296
Suzuki, S., 298 Uebelacker, L. A., 386
Svirsky, D., 298 Underwood, M. K., 306
Svoboda, R. C., 102, 109, 151, 160
Swanson, K. L., 369, 379 Vakis, R., 18, 341
Swinburn, B. A., 265 Valdesolo, P., 242
Szabo, S., 218 Valle, A., 168
Vallen, B., 293
Tabanico, J. J., 420 Van Bever, F., 369
Tache, Y., 218 Van Boven, L., 206
Tajfel, H., 414 Van Dessel, P., 298
Tamir, M., 206 van Duijvenvoorde, A. C. K., 262, 268
Tan, M. L., 143 Van Dyne, L., 143
Tanaka-Matsumi, J., 205 van Koningsbruggen, G. M., 66
Tankard, M. E., 429, 443 Van Mechelen, I., 369
Tantleff-Dunn, S., 267 van Rossum, E. F., 314
Taylor, D. M., 154 Van Tongeren, D. R., 193, 207
Taylor, V. J., 142 van Zomeren, M., 350, 361
Teasdale, J. D., 248 VanLaningham, J., 367, 370
Tedeschi, R. G., 219, 229, 231 Vansteenkiste, M., 208, 263, 310, 378
Tellegen, A., 192 Vasey, M. W., 394
Tennen, H., 325 Veldhuizen, M. G., 287
Terenzini, P. T., 127 Veling, H., 293
Terman, L. M., 11, 37 Venegas, K. M., 149
Terry, D. J., 435 Verduyn, P., 369, 379
Terry, K., 151 Verghese, A., 22
Thaler, R. H., 261, 279, 296 Verkooijen, K. T., 411
Themner, L., 347 Verlhiac, J., 67
Thomaes, S., 393, 395, 398 Vernberg, E. M., 306
Thoman, D. B., 109, 116, 121 Vesterlund, L., 247
Thomas, F. N., 22 Vilen, A., 25
Thomas, J., 11, 408, 418 Vine, S. J., 242
Thompson, J. K., 267 Vlaev, I., 430
Thompson, L., 247 Voas, R. B., 411
Thompson, M., 74 Vohs, K. D., 71, 82, 94, 155, 386
Thorndike, A. N., 298 Voigt, R., 79
Tibbetts, Y., 70, 77, 102, 105, 106, 112, 121, 155 Vollhardt, J. R., 349
Tilley, N., 73 Vorauer, J. D., 349, 356
Tipton, E., 18
Tirri, K., 309, 355 Wakslak, C. J., 71
Tobias, T., 415 Wald, J. M., 324
Toll, B. A., 379 Walsh, E., 178
Tomaka, J., 218, 310, 318 Walsh, L. C., 196, 198, 205
Tomiyama, A. J., 287 Walton, G. M., 1, 2, 3, 4, 17, 21, 23, 27, 29, 36, 38, 39,
Tong, J. Y., 355 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53,
Tormala, T. T., 67 54, 58, 65, 68, 71, 72, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 109, 127,
Torvik, F. A., 385 128, 132, 134, 136, 142, 143, 152, 155, 156, 169,
Townsend, S. S. M., 2, 45, 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 172, 174, 184, 192, 193, 196, 199, 204, 219, 220,
143, 277 227, 232, 252, 255, 273, 275, 276, 279, 288, 307,
Traynor, D., 168 310, 316, 317, 319, 325, 328, 331, 333, 334, 336,
Trendel, O., 288 337, 340, 341, 368, 370, 371, 374, 379, 386, 388,
Triandis, H. C., 415 393, 398, 408, 412, 413, 418, 420, 421, 430, 431,
Tritz, J., 179 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 438, 439
462 Author Index

Walton, M. L., 420 Wilson, T. D., 1, 29, 40, 42, 44, 49, 53, 65, 72, 77, 79,
Wan, W., 11, 354 109, 128, 136, 143, 152, 155, 169, 172, 174, 184,
Wang, C. S., 356 192, 193, 196, 199, 203, 219, 220, 227, 228, 232,
Wang, L., 210 252, 255, 275, 276, 279, 288, 310, 317, 319, 333,
Ward, A., 68, 78, 261, 287 337, 341, 368, 371, 379, 393, 398, 408, 413, 420
Ward, D. E., 369, 379 Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., 250
Wardle, J., 287 Winant, H., 129
Waroquier, L., 417, 418 Wingate, U., 173, 174
Waters, S. F., 250 Winquist, J., 206, 224
Watkins, P. C., 198 Winslow, M. P., 273
Watson, D., 367 Winters, M. A., 342
Watt, L. M., 369 Wohl, M. J. A., 348, 350
Weaver, J. L., 229 Wolf, O. T., 229
Webber, K. C., 78 Wolf, W., 314
Weber, E. U., 279 Wolfe, C., 139
Weber, J. M., 414 Wood, J. V., 387, 395
Weeks, L., 38 Woodfin, L., 25
Wegmann, K. M., 78 Woodward, K., 198
Weiner, B., 10, 308, 318 Woolley, K., 293, 295, 298
Weinstein, R. S., 325 Wormington, S. V., 105, 106
Weintraub, J. K., 218 Wosinska, W., 415
Weisbuch, M., 247 Wright, D. L., 79
Weiss, M. J., 51 Wu, S., 380
Weiss, R. L., 368 Wurf, E., 150
Weisz, E., 22 Wynn, S. R., 116
Weisz, J. R., 22, 309, 314, 317
Weitz, E., 438 Yaeger, P., 127
Welch, M., 149 Yang, M., 307
Wellborn, J. G., 171 Yarrow, A., 325
Wellenzohn, S., 200 Yates, D., 421, 422
Werle, C. O. C., 288, 294 Yeager, D. S., 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22,
Wesley Perkins, H., 407, 408, 418, 420 23, 27, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 58,
West, T. V., 250 72, 78, 81, 109, 110, 121, 132, 134, 142, 143, 155, 156,
Western, B., 325 172, 173, 174, 183, 184, 199, 220, 228, 230, 233, 234,
Westhoek, H., 430 240, 249, 255, 260, 262, 263, 266, 272, 273, 276, 278,
Wetherall, M., 414 294, 295, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314,
Wheatley, T. P., 65 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 325, 337, 341, 349, 355, 359
Whillans, A., 280 Yerkes, R. M., 226
Whisman, M. A., 367, 386 Yeung, C. W. M., 23
White, K. M., 415, 435 Yoder, N., 160, 298
Widman, K. F., 386 Young, M. D., 221
Wiebe, J. S., 218
Wiesenfeld, B. M., 68 Zajonc, R. B., 83
Wigfield, A., 100, 103, 106, 108, 113, 116 Zaki, J., 22, 349, 356
Wilbrecht, L., 319 Zandstra, E., 288
Wilder, L. K., 340 Zanna, M. P., 39, 68, 270, 393
Wildschut, T., 200, 202 Zatz, L. Y., 298
Wilkins, C. L., 140 Zhang, S., 247
Williams, A. M., 68 Zhou, S., 360
Williams, C., 42 Zilca, R., 208
Williams, J. M. G., 244 Zimmerman, B. J., 167, 169, 184
Williams, K. D., 311, 312 Zion, S. R., 224, 225
Williams, M. J., 130 Zlatev, J. J., 134, 199
Williams, R. M., 360 Zuckerman, B., 22
Williamson, G. M., 196, 199 Zunick, P. V., 394
Williamson, I. O., 127 Zúñiga, X., 136
Wilson, M. R., 242 Zwick, R., 351
 Subject Index

Note. f, n, or t following a page number indicates a figure, note, or a table.

Ability, 10, 14–21, 15f, 25–27. See also Intellectual Achievement, 27–29, 245–246, 253–254
abilities Achievement gap, 17–18, 22, 127. See also Social class
Abstract reframing intervention (ARI) achievement gap
background, 385–388 Action readiness, 150
content and implementation of, 394–395 Acts of kindness. See Happiness interventions;
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) Kindness, acts of
intervention and, 375 Acute stress, 251–252. See also Stress
cousins of, 393–394 Adaptive outcomes, 73f. See also Outcomes
effects over time, 390–392, 391f Affect misattribution procedure (AMP), 270, 271f
evidence for, 390–393, 390f, 391f Affirmation interventions. See also Self-affirmation
future directions in, 398–399 interventions
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 393 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 393–394,
implications for practice and, 396–397 397
implications for psychological theory and, 398 future directions in, 82–83
mechanisms of, 392 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 79
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 395–396 overview, 83–84
outcomes associated with, 390, 390f social-belonging intervention and, 45
overview, 385 African American students, 70, 71, 73, 74–75. See also
psychological processes and, 388–389 Black individuals
study materials for, 402 Aggression, 311–312
Academic motivation, 153–154, 154f. See also Anxiety, 247–248
Motivation Appraisals. See also Couples Activity for Reappraising
Academic outcomes. See also Intellectual abilities; Emotions (CARE) intervention; Stress reappraisal
Outcomes interventions
difference-education intervention and, 133–134 of coping resources, 244
growth-mindset interventions and, 14–21, 15f empathic-discipline intervention and, 333–334
incremental theory of personality and, 313, group malleability and, 348
314–315, 318–319 incremental theory of personality and, 314–315,
mindset research and, 12, 12f 315f
pathways intervention and, 153, 154f stress-mindset intervention and, 228
self-affirmation interventions and, 69–70 Asian individuals, 74–75
social class achievement gap and, 127–130 Attribution theory. See also Attributions
social functioning and, 306–307 incremental theory of personality and, 313, 314, 318
social-belonging intervention and, 42f, 43 mindset research and, 10–13, 12f
strategic resource use intervention and, 167, 173 overview, 10
utility-value intervention and, 105–108, 106t Attributional retraining interventions, 40, 44, 155–156

463
464 Subject Index

Attributions. See also Attribution theory taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 287, 296
incremental theory of personality and, 308–310, 314 utility-value intervention and, 116, 120, 121
overview, 10 Chronic stress, 251–252. See also Stress
relationship problems and, 386–387 Classroom contexts, 54, 68–69, 69t, 77–78, 105. See
self-affirmation interventions and, 64–65 also Educational interventions
strategic resource use intervention and, 183 Clinical implications. See Practice implications
Autonomy, 310–311 Cognitive approaches, 173–174, 218–219
Cognitive dissonance theory, 66
Background information for interventions Cognitive learning strategies, 173–174
abstract reframing intervention (ARI), 385–388 Communal-value intervention, 109
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) Compliments, 396–397
intervention, 366–368 Conflict resolution, 358, 359–360, 392–393. See also
difference-education intervention, 127–130 Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
dynamic norm interventions, 429–431 intervention; Marital quality and interventions
empathic-discipline intervention, 324–327, 326f Conflicts, intergroup, 346–349. See also Group-
group-malleability intervention, 346–347 malleability intervention
happiness interventions, 191–193 Connection. See also Belongingness; Relationships
incremental theory of personality, 306–307 gratitude interventions and, 196–197
mindset research, 10–13, 12f happiness interventions and, 202, 210–211
overview, 2 kindness interventions and, 196–197
pathways intervention, 148–149 needs for, 196–197
self-affirmation interventions, 63–64 Construal. See also Interpretations; Mindsets and
social norms approach, 406–408, 407f mindset research; Perceptions
social-belonging intervention, 36–37, 37f incremental theory of personality and, 314
strategic resource use intervention, 166–167 values-alignment interventions and, 261–262,
stress reappraisal interventions, 240–242, 241f 268–270, 269f, 271f, 278–279
stress-mindset intervention, 217–219 Constructionist models, 250
taste-focused-labeling intervention, 286–288 Contagion, 250
utility-value intervention, 100–101 Content and implementation of an intervention. See
values-alignment interventions, 259–260 also Practice implications
Beliefs. See also Interpretations; Mindsets and mindset abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 394–395
research; Perceptions Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
dynamic norm interventions and, 431–433, 432t intervention and, 375–377
mindset research and, 10–11 difference-education intervention and, 137–138
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 440–441 dynamic norm interventions and, 439–440
social norms approach and, 411 empathic-discipline intervention and, 334–338,
social-belonging intervention and, 42–43, 42f 336t, 337t
Belonging Guide, 45, 58–60 group-malleability intervention and, 356–358, 356t
Belonging uncertainty. See also Threat growth-mindset interventions and, 23–25
incremental theory of personality and, 316 happiness interventions and, 204–205
self-affirmation interventions and, 71 overview, 3–4
social-belonging intervention and, 38–40, 53, 54 pathways intervention and, 156–157
stories from others regarding, 46–49 self-affirmation interventions and, 77–78
Belongingness, 193, 196–197. See also Connection social norms approach and, 417, 418t
Belongingness interventions, 136. See also Social- social-belonging intervention and, 45–50, 58–60
belonging intervention strategic resource use intervention and, 175–178
“Best possible self” intervention, 203. See also taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 295–296
Happiness interventions utility-value intervention and, 110–117, 111f, 112f,
Bias, 23, 65, 141–142 113f, 114f, 121
Biopsychosocial model (BPS) values-alignment interventions and, 273–276
incremental theory of personality and, 310, Context-personalization interventions, 110
312–313, 318–319 Contextual factors
stress reappraisal interventions and, 240–242, 241f empathic-discipline intervention and, 339–340
Bisexual individuals, 325 growth-mindset interventions and, 19
Black individuals. See also African American students happiness interventions and, 209–210
belonging uncertainty and, 38–40 self-affirmation interventions and, 73f
empathic-discipline intervention and, 325, 342–343 social group differences and, 127
social-belonging intervention and, 36–37, 37f, 40–43 social norms approach and, 419
Build Connections intervention, 114, 114f, 117, 118– social-belonging intervention and, 54
119, 118f, 119f. See also Utility-value intervention strategic resource use intervention and, 175
Contextual influence, 158–161, 159f
Career outcomes, 43, 173. See also Outcomes Contextual theory
Choice. See also Content and implementation of an difference-education intervention and, 131–132,
intervention 131f, 133, 134, 138
difference-education intervention and, 140–141 essentialist theory and, 129–130
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 440–442 incremental theory of personality and, 315
 Subject Index 465

Coping strategies, 239–240, 244, 318–319 evidence for, 132–136

Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) future directions in, 142–143
intervention heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 134–136
background, 366–368 implications for practice and, 140–141
content and implementation of, 375–377 implications for psychological theory and, 141–142
cousins of, 373–375 mechanisms of, 133–134
effects over time, 372–373 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 138–140
evidence for, 370–373, 371f, 372t outcomes associated with, 132–133
future directions in, 379–381 overview, 126–127
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 373 psychological processes and, 130–132, 131f
implications for practice and, 378–379 social-belonging intervention and, 45
implications for theory and, 379 Discipline, 324–327, 326f. See also Empathic-discipline
mechanisms of, 372 intervention
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 377–378 Discrimination, 129, 141–142
outcomes associated with, 370–371, 371f, 372t Distress, 219. See also Stress
overview, 366, 381 Diversity, 36–37, 37f. See also African American
psychological processes and, 368–370 students; Black individuals; Cultural contexts;
Couples interventions. See Abstract reframing Gay individuals; Gender difference; Group
intervention (ARI); Couples Activity for differences; Heterogeneity of intervention
Reappraising Emotions (CARE) intervention outcomes; Individual differences; Lesbian
Cousins of an intervention individuals; Minority group status; Transgender
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 393–394 individuals
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) Dosage of an intervention, 115, 121. See also Content
intervention and, 373–375 and implementation of an intervention
difference-education intervention and, 136 Dynamic norm interventions. See also Social norms
dynamic norm interventions and, 438–439 approach
empathic-discipline intervention and, 333–334 background, 429–431
growth-mindset interventions, 21–23 content and implementation of, 439–440
happiness interventions and, 202–204 cousins of, 438–439
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 354–356 effects over time, 435–436
incremental theory of personality and, 316 evidence for, 433–434
overview, 3 future directions in, 444–445
pathways intervention and, 154–156 heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 436–438
self-affirmation interventions and, 76–77 implications for practice and, 443
social norms approach and, 416–417 implications for psychological theory and, 444
social-belonging intervention, 44–45 mechanisms of, 434
strategic resource use intervention and, 173–174 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 440–442
stress reappraisal interventions and, 248–250 outcomes associated with, 435–436
stress-mindset intervention and, 227–228 overview, 429
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 294–295 psychological processes and, 431–433, 432t
utility-value intervention and, 109–110
values-alignment interventions and, 271–273 ECoach platform, 182–183
Cultural contexts. See also Group differences; Minority Economic contexts, 73f. See also Socioeconomic
group status; Individual differences backgrounds
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) “Edgy Veggies” toolkit, 295, 297. See also Taste-
intervention and, 380 focused-labeling intervention
empathic-discipline intervention and, 342–343 Educational interventions, 287, 335, 386
happiness interventions and, 209–210 Effectiveness of an intervention, 3, 14–21, 15f. See also
higher education and, 127–128 Effects over time; Evidence for an intervention
multicultural education, 130 Effects over time. See also Effectiveness of an
self-affirmation interventions and, 73f intervention; Evidence for an intervention;
sociocultural context, 36–37, 37f, 129 Mechanisms involved in an intervention;
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 287–288, Outcomes
293–294, 298–299 Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
intervention and, 372–373
Delay of gratification, 260–262 difference-education intervention and, 134
Demands, 241, 241f, 244, 248–249 dynamic norm interventions and, 435–436
Depression, 197–198, 210, 312–313 empathic-discipline intervention and, 332
Desegregation, 36–37, 37f group-malleability intervention and, 353–354
Developmental timing, 319 growth-mindset interventions and, 19–21
Diet interventions. See Healthy-eating interventions happiness interventions and, 199–201
Difference-education interventions heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 172–173
background, 127–130 incremental theory of personality and, 315
content and implementation of, 137–138 overview, 3
cousins of, 136 pathways intervention and, 153–154
effects over time, 134 self-affirmation interventions and, 72–73, 73f
466 Subject Index

Effects over time (cont.) growth-mindset interventions, 14–21, 15f

social norms approach and, 412–413 happiness interventions and, 197–202
social-belonging intervention and, 42f, 43–44 incremental theory of personality and, 311–315, 315f
strategic resource use intervention and, 172 overview, 3, 14–21, 15f
stress reappraisal interventions and, 245–246 pathways intervention and, 152–154, 154f
stress-mindset intervention and, 226–227 self-affirmation interventions, 67–70, 69t
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 292–293 social norms approach and, 408–416, 410t
utility-value intervention and, 107–108 social-belonging intervention and, 40–44, 42f
values-alignment interventions and, 265–267, 266f strategic resource use intervention and, 169–173
Emotion regulation, 193–194, 249–250 stress reappraisal interventions and, 243–248
Emotional reappraisal, 368–370. See also Couples stress-mindset intervention and, 221–227, 223f
Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 290–292,
intervention; Reappraisals 290t
Emotions utility-value intervention and, 105–109, 106t
growth-mindset interventions and, 22–23 values-alignment interventions and, 263–271, 266f,
happiness interventions and, 199–200 269f, 271f
stress reappraisal interventions and, 249–250 Exam Playbook, 182–183
stress-mindset intervention and, 227–228 Exclusion, 319
Empathic mindset, 326–329, 326f Exclusionary discipline, 324–327, 326f. See also
Empathic-discipline intervention Discipline
background, 324–327, 326f Expectancies, 103, 104f
content and implementation of, 334–338, 336t, 337t Expectancy-value framework, 101, 102
cousins of, 333–334 Expressive writing interventions, 76. See also Writing
effects over time, 332 activities
evidence for, 329–333, 331f Expulsion, 325. See also Discipline
future directions in, 341–343 Extended process model of emotion regulation,
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 332–333 249–250
implications for practice and, 339–341 Externalizing behavior, 311–312
implications for psychological theory and, 341 Extraversion, 201–202. See also Personality
mechanisms of, 330, 332
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 338–339 Feedback, 396–397, 416, 417, 419
outcomes associated with, 329–330, 331f Felt security, 390, 390f
overview, 324 Financial aid programs, 157
psychological processes and, 327–329 Fixed mindsets. See also Mindsets and mindset
Empathy, 22–23, 415–416. See also Empathic- research
discipline intervention incremental theory of personality and, 314
Empowerment intellectual ability and, 25–26
difference-education intervention and, 127, 134, 143 mindset research and, 11, 12–13, 12f
giving voice to underrepresented narratives and, 140 psychological processes and, 13–14
social group differences and, 131–132 Fixed-trait attributions, 318
Engagement Frequency of interventions, 115, 121. See also Content
growth-mindset interventions and, 27–29 and implementation of an intervention
social-belonging intervention and, 42f, 43 Friendships, 50
utility-value intervention and, 105, 117 Future directions for an intervention
Entity theory of personality, 307–311. See also abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 398–399
Personality Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
Environmental problems, 405–424, 429–430, 434, intervention and, 379–381
436, 443 difference-education intervention and, 142–143
Essentialist theory, 128–129, 135–136, 317–318 dynamic norm interventions and, 444–445
Ethnic studies courses, 130 empathic-discipline intervention and, 341–343
Ethnicity. See Cultural contexts; Group differences group-malleability intervention and, 361
European American individuals, 39, 40–42, 71, 74–75. growth-mindset interventions, 30–31
See also Group differences; White individuals happiness interventions and, 210–211
Eustress, 219. See also Stress incremental theory of personality and, 319
Evidence for an intervention. See also Effects over overview, 4
time; Heterogeneity of intervention outcomes; pathways intervention and, 162
Outcomes self-affirmation interventions and, 82–83
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 390–393, social norms approach and, 423–424
390f, 391f social-belonging intervention and, 53–54
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) strategic resource use intervention and, 184–185
intervention and, 370–373, 371f, 372t stress reappraisal interventions and, 254–255
difference-education intervention and, 132–136 stress-mindset intervention and, 233–234
dynamic norm interventions and, 433–434 taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 298–299
empathic-discipline intervention and, 329–333, 331f utility-value intervention and, 120–121
group-malleability intervention and, 349–354, 350f, values-alignment interventions and, 279–280
352f, 353f Future goals. See Goals
 Subject Index 467

Gay individuals, 325 Happiness interventions

Gender differences, 247. See also Individual differences background, 191–193
Genetic factors, 209 content and implementation of, 204–205
German educational system, 79–81, 98–99 cousins of, 202–204
Global self-integrity, 65 effects over time, 199–201
Goals. See also Pathways intervention evidence for, 197–202
goal direction, 178, 180t, 183 heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 201–202
health-related, 293–294 implications for practice and, 208–209
motivation and, 151 implications for theory and, 209–210
overview, 148–149 mechanisms of, 198–199
pathways intervention and, 153, 154–155, 154f nuances and misconceptions regarding, 206–208
values-alignment interventions and, 260–262, 278–279 outcomes associated with, 197–198
Goal-setting interventions, 156, 178, 180t, 183 overview, 191
Gratification delay, 260–262 psychological processes and, 193–197
Gratitude. See also Happiness interventions Health contexts, 430. See also Healthy-eating
cultural contexts and, 210 interventions
implementation of, 204–205 Healthy-eating interventions. See also Physical health;
implications for practice and, 209 Taste-focused-labeling intervention; Values-
interventions that focus on, 194–195 alignment interventions
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 206–208 content and implementation of, 273–276
outcomes associated with, 197–201 dynamic norm interventions and, 430
self-integrity and, 195–196 evidence for, 263–271, 266f, 269f, 271f
Group differences, 325, 342–343. See also Cultural nutritional labeling and, 287
contexts; Difference-education interventions; Heterogeneity of intervention outcomes. See also
Minority group status; Social group differences; Effects over time; Evidence for an intervention;
Individual differences Mechanisms involved in an intervention; Outcomes
Group malleability, 347–349. See also Group- abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 393
malleability intervention Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
Group-malleability intervention intervention and, 373
background, 346–347 cousins of, 354–356
content and implementation of, 356–358, 356t difference-education intervention and, 134–136
effects over time, 353–354 dynamic norm interventions and, 436–438
evidence for, 349–354, 350f, 352f, 353f effects over time, 227
future directions in, 361 empathic-discipline intervention and, 332–333
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 354 group-malleability intervention and, 354
implications for practice and, 358–360 growth-mindset interventions and, 18–19
implications for psychological theory and, 360–361 happiness interventions and, 201–202
mechanisms of, 351–353, 352f, 353f incremental theory of personality and, 315
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 358 overview, 3
outcomes associated with, 349–351, 350f pathways intervention and, 154
overview, 346 self-affirmation interventions and, 74–75
psychological processes and, 347–349, 350–351 social norms approach and, 413–416
Growth mindset, 109, 183–184 social-belonging intervention and, 44
Growth-mindset intervention. See also Mindsets and strategic resource use intervention and, 172–173
mindset research stress reappraisal interventions and, 246–248, 251
background, 10–13, 12f taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 289n,
content and implementation of, 23–25 293–294
cousins of, 21–23 utility-value intervention and, 108–109
effects over time, 19–20 values-alignment interventions and, 270–271
evidence that supports, 14–21, 15f Heuristic mechanisms, 408, 410–411, 419–420
future directions in, 30–31 High-self-esteem individuals (HSEs). See also Self-
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes and, 18–19 esteem
implications for practice and, 27–29 conflict resolution and, 392–393
implications for psychological theory and, 29–30 implications for practice and, 396–397
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 25–27 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 395–396
overview, 9–10, 23–25 outcomes associated with, 390–393, 390f, 391f
psychological processes and, 13–14 relationship problems and, 386–389
Growth-mindset-of-intelligence interventions. See also Hormonal factors, 226, 229–230
Growth mindset; Growth-mindset intervention Hostile attributional bias, 316
incremental theory of personality and, 311 Hypothesis-confirming processes, 39
overview, 22
pathways intervention and, 155 Identity
social-belonging intervention and, 44–45 dynamic norm interventions and, 432
strategic resource use intervention and, 183–184 pathways intervention and, 150–151, 154f, 156–157,
Growth-mindset-of-personality interventions, 22. See also 158, 161
Growth mindset; Growth-mindset intervention self-affirmation interventions and, 65–66, 67
468 Subject Index

Identity salience, 150–151, 153, 158 implications for practice and, 208–209
Implementation of an intervention, 3–4, 334–338, nuances and misconceptions regarding, 206–208
336t, 337t. See also Content and implementation outcomes associated with, 197–201
of an intervention overview, 195–196
Implementation-intention interventions, 156
Implications. See Practice implications; Theory Labeling, nutritional, 287. See also Taste-focused-
implications labeling intervention
Incremental theory of intelligence, 316 Latino American students, 72, 74–75, 325
Incremental theory of personality Leadership content, 356–357
background, 306–307 Learned helplessness, 10
cousins of, 316 Learning goals, 11, 105
effects over time, 315 Learning processes. See also Strategic resource use
evidence for, 311–315, 315f intervention
future directions in, 319 learning strategies, 167
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 315 metacognition and, 167–168
implications for practice and, 317–318 strategic resource use intervention and, 172–174,
implications for theory and, 318–319 180t, 181–182
mechanisms of, 313–315, 315f Legal contexts, 73f
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 317 Length of interventions, 115–116, 121. See also
outcomes associated with, 311–313 Content and implementation of an intervention
overview, 305–306 Lesbian individuals, 325
psychological processes and, 307–311 Letter writing activities. See Writing activities
Individual differences. See also Cultural contexts; Life satisfaction, 197–198, 367. See also Well-being
Group differences; Student factors and individual Low-self-esteem individuals (LSEs). See also Self-
differences esteem
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) conflict resolution and, 392–393
intervention and, 380 implications for practice and, 396–397
empathic-discipline intervention and, 325 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 395–396
happiness interventions and, 193–194 outcomes associated with, 390–393, 390f, 391f
stress reappraisal interventions and, 247–248 relationship problems and, 386–389
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 298–299 social norms approach and, 415–416
values-alignment interventions and, 277, 278
In-person experiences, 51–52 Make It True exercise, 275–276
Institutional climate, 159f, 160–161 Malleability, group. See Group malleability; Group-
Integrative approaches, 254–255 malleability intervention
Intellectual abilities. See also Ability Marital quality and interventions, 366–368, 377,
growth-mindset interventions and, 14–21, 15f, 381. See also Abstract reframing intervention
23–27 (ARI); Conflict resolution; Couples Activity for
mindset research and, 10–12, 12f Reappraising Emotions (CARE) intervention
psychological processes and, 13–14 Mastery-oriented strategies, 11
stress-mindset intervention and, 227–228 Meaning systems, 307–308, 408. See also Mindsets
Intentionality, 207–208 and mindset research
Interactive change processes, 72–73, 73f Mechanisms involved in an intervention. See also
Interest, 103 Effects over time; Heterogeneity of intervention
Intergroup conflicts. See also Group-malleability outcomes; Psychological processes addressed by
intervention an intervention
conflict resolution and, 359–360 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 392
overview, 346–347 Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
perspective taking and, 348–349, 353–354, intervention and, 372
355–356, 359–360 difference-education intervention and, 133–134
psychological processes and, 347–349 dynamic norm interventions and, 434
Internalization mechanisms, 408, 412 empathic-discipline intervention and, 330, 332
Internalizing symptoms, 312–313 group-malleability intervention and, 351–353, 352f,
International context, 79–81 353f
Interpersonal factors, 250, 368, 369–370. See also happiness interventions and, 198–199
Relationships; Social functioning incremental theory of personality and, 313–315,
Interpretations, 1–2, 10, 150–151. Construal; Mindsets 315f
and mindset research; Perceptions overview, 3
Intervention processes, 103, 104f pathways intervention and, 153, 154f
Introversion, 201–202. See also Personality self-affirmation interventions and, 70–76, 73f
Involvement, 103 social norms approach and, 410–412
IQ testing, 11–12 social-belonging intervention and, 42–43, 42f
strategic resource use intervention and, 170–171,
Kindness, acts of. See also Happiness interventions 171f
cultural contexts and, 210 stress reappraisal interventions and, 244–245
implementation of, 204–205 stress-mindset intervention and, 222–226, 223f
 Subject Index 469

taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 292–293 motivational immediacy, 260

utility-value intervention and, 103, 105 motivational response, 241–242, 241f
values-alignment interventions and, 268–270, 269f pathways intervention and, 151, 153, 154f, 161
Meditation, 203–204. See also Mindfulness-based strategic resource use intervention and, 167
interventions stress-mindset intervention and, 225
Meditation models, 314–315, 315f, 352–353, 353f Multicultural education, 130. See also Cultural
Mental health, 210, 367. See also Well-being contexts
Mentor relationships, 43, 159f, 160 Myopia, 260–262, 278–279
Mentorship, peer. See Peer stories and testimonials
Metacognition, 167–168, 179–181, 180t, 185 National Study of Learning Mindsets, 18–20, 27, 27f
Meta-stress, 218–219, 234. See also Stress Needs, 193–195, 193–197, 195–196, 196–197. See also
Mindfulness-based interventions, 203–204 Motivation
Mindset meaning systems, 12, 12f. See also Mindsets Negative affect reciprocity, 368, 369, 375
and mindset research Negotiation skills, 357–358
Mindset × context theory, 315, 319 Norms, social. See also Dynamic norm interventions;
Mindsets and mindset research. See also Fixed Social norms approach
mindsets; Growth-mindset intervention; Stress- beliefs and, 411
mindset intervention conformity to, 422–423
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 397 overview, 405–406, 410–411, 438
background, 10–13, 12f peer norms, 19–20
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) Nuances about an intervention
intervention and, 373–374 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 395–396
empathic-discipline intervention and, 326–327, 326f Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
future directions in, 30–31 intervention and, 377–378
group-malleability intervention and, 347–348, difference-education intervention and, 138–140
354–358 dynamic norm interventions and, 440–442
implications for practice and, 27–29 empathic-discipline intervention and, 338–339
incremental theory of personality and, 307–308, group-malleability intervention and, 358
314, 315, 316, 319 growth-mindset interventions, 25–27
intergroup conflict and, 346–347 happiness interventions and, 206–208
overview, 9–10, 233 incremental theory of personality and, 317
psychological processes and, 13–14 overview, 4
stress and, 220–221, 222, 223f, 227–228, 232–233, pathways intervention and, 158
248, 249 self-affirmation interventions and, 79
stress reappraisal interventions and, 248, 249 social norms approach and, 417, 419–420
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 287–288, social-belonging intervention and, 50
299 strategic resource use intervention and, 178
Minority group status, 325, 342–343. See also Group stress reappraisal interventions and, 251–252
differences stress-mindset intervention and, 231–232
Misconceptions about an intervention taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 296
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 395–396 utility-value intervention and, 116–117
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) values-alignment interventions and, 276–278
intervention and, 377–378 Nutritional labeling, 287. See also Healthy-eating
difference-education intervention and, 138–140 interventions; Taste-focused-labeling intervention
dynamic norm interventions and, 440–442 Nutrition-focused interventions. See Healthy-eating
empathic-discipline intervention and, 338–339 interventions
group-malleability intervention and, 358
growth-mindset interventions, 25–27 Online interventions. See also Strategic resource use
happiness interventions and, 206–208 intervention; Technology
incremental theory of personality and, 317 empathic-discipline intervention and, 334–335
overview, 4 social-belonging intervention and, 51
pathways intervention and, 158 utility-value intervention and, 117, 118f
self-affirmation interventions and, 79 Optimism, 197–198
social-belonging intervention and, 50 Organizational mindsets, 22
strategic resource use intervention and, 178 Outcomes. See also Academic outcomes; Career
stress reappraisal interventions and, 251–252 outcomes; Effects over time; Evidence for an
stress-mindset intervention and, 231–232 intervention; Heterogeneity of intervention
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 296 outcomes; Relational outcomes
utility-value intervention and, 116–117 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 390, 390f
values-alignment interventions and, 276–278 Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
Moderators of intervention outcomes, 247–248, 315, intervention and, 370–371, 371f, 372t
397. See also Heterogeneity of intervention difference-education intervention and, 132–133
outcomes dynamic norm interventions and, 435–436
Motivation. See also Needs empathic-discipline intervention and, 329–330, 331f
academic motivation, 153–154, 154f happiness interventions and, 197–198
growth-mindset interventions and, 27–29 incremental theory of personality and, 311–313
470 Subject Index

Outcomes (cont.) Planning interventions, 178, 180t, 185

overview, 3 Policy factors, 20, 162, 340–341
pathways intervention and, 152–153 Positive activity interventions (PAIs), 191. See also
social norms approach and, 408–409, 410f Happiness interventions
social-belonging intervention and, 40–42, 53 Positive affect, 197–198. See also Emotions
strategic resource use intervention and, 169–170 Positive effort beliefs, 11
stress reappraisal interventions and, 243–244 Positive psychology interventions (PPIs), 191. See
stress-mindset intervention and, 221–222 Happiness interventions
utility-value intervention and, 104f, 105–107, 106t, 115 Posttraumatic growth, 219
Power, 415–416
Parents, 109, 160, 193–194, 380 Practice implications. See also Content and
Pathways intervention implementation of an intervention
background, 148–149 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 396–397
content and implementation of, 156–157 Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
cousins of, 154–156 intervention and, 378–379
effects over time, 153–154 difference-education intervention and, 140–141
evidence for, 152–154, 154f dynamic norm interventions and, 443
future directions in, 162 empathic-discipline intervention and, 339–341
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 154 group-malleability intervention and, 358–360
implications for practice and, 158–161, 159f growth-mindset interventions and, 27–29
implications for theory and, 161–162 happiness interventions and, 208–209
mechanisms of, 153, 154f incremental theory of personality and, 317–318
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 158 overview, 4
outcomes associated with, 152–153 pathways intervention and, 158–161, 159f
overview, 148 self-affirmation interventions and, 79–81
psychological processes and, 150–151 social norms approach and, 420–422
Peer norms, 19–20. See also Norms, social social-belonging intervention and, 50–52
Peer relationships, 50. See also Friendships; strategic resource use intervention and, 179–183,
Relationships 180t
Peer stories and testimonials. See also Stories from stress reappraisal interventions and, 252–253
others stress-mindset intervention and, 232–233
difference-education intervention and, 133 taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 296–297
empathic-discipline intervention and, 335, 336t utility-value intervention and, 117–119, 118f, 119f
in growth-mindset interventions and, 24 values-alignment interventions and, 278
incremental theory of personality and, 311 Prediction of focus theory, 406–407
pathways intervention and, 159f, 160 Prejudice, 23, 129, 141–142, 355–356
self-affirmation interventions and, 69, 69t Preventative interventions, 315
social-belonging intervention and, 40, 46–49, 58–60 Problem solving, 374, 385–386, 444
Peer victimization, 319 Procrastination, 245–246
Perceptions. See also Beliefs; Interpretations; Mindsets Prosocial purpose intervention, 109
and mindset research Proximal goal interventions, 156
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 397 Psychological processes addressed by an intervention.
attribution theory and, 10 See also Mechanisms involved in an intervention
belonging uncertainty and, 38–39 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 388–389
group malleability and, 348–349, 355–356 biopsychosocial model (BPS) and, 241f
social-belonging intervention and, 42–43, 42f Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
Performance, 105, 228, 253–254 intervention and, 368–370
Performance goals, 11 difference-education intervention and, 130–132,
Performance-avoidance goals, 11 131f
Personality, 23, 193–194, 201–203, 209, 308–310. See dynamic norm interventions and, 431–433, 432t
also Incremental theory of personality empathic-discipline intervention and, 327–329
Perspective taking group-malleability intervention and, 347–349,
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) 350–351
intervention and, 377–378 growth mindset approach and, 13–14
group-malleability intervention and, 348–349, happiness interventions and, 193–197
353–354, 355–356, 359–360 incremental theory of personality and, 307–311
Physical health, 367, 381. See also Healthy-eating overview, 2–3
interventions pathways intervention and, 150–151
Physiology self-affirmation interventions and, 64–67, 70–71,
biopsychosocial model (BPS) and, 241–242, 241f 78
incremental theory of personality and, 309–310, social norms approach and, 408
314–315, 315f social-belonging intervention and, 38–40, 42f
stress reappraisal interventions and, 242–243, strategic resource use intervention and, 167–169,
244–245 180t, 181–182
stress-mindset intervention and, 225–226, 228 stress reappraisal interventions and, 242, 245–246
 Subject Index 471

stress-mindset intervention and, 220–221 implications for practice and, 79–81

taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 288–289, implications for theory and, 82
289f mechanisms of, 70–76, 73f
utility-value intervention and, 102–103, 102f, 104f nuances and misconceptions regarding, 79
values-alignment interventions and, 260–263, 262f, overview, 63, 83–84
275–276 pathways intervention and, 154–155
Psychological theory implications. See Theory psychological processes and, 64–67
implications Self-affirmation theory, 63–66, 83–84
Psychological threat, 74–75, 82–83. See also Threat Self-attributions, 314. See also Attributions
Public policy, 162. See also Policy factors Self-concept, 150–151
Punitive discipline, 324–327, 326f. See also Discipline Self-consistency, 66
Punitive mindsets, 326f, 327 Self-distancing strategies, 374
Self-efficacy, 167
Race, 298–299, 342–343. See also Cultural contexts; Self-esteem. See also High-self-esteem individuals
Group differences (HSEs); Low-self-esteem individuals (LSEs)
Reading exercises, 252–253 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 390–392,
Reappraisals, 228, 244, 333–334. See also Appraisals; 390f
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
(CARE) intervention; Stress reappraisal intervention and, 375
interventions implications for practice and, 396–397
Reciprocity, 369 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 395–396
Recursive processes, 72–73, 73f relationship problems and, 386–387
Reflection exercises, 192. See also Self-reflection self-affirmation interventions and, 67
Reinforcement, 75, 200, 416 social norms approach and, 415–416
Related interventions. See Cousins of an intervention Self-integrity, 193, 195–196
Relational outcomes, 42f. See also Outcomes Self-oriented interventions, 202–204. See also
Relationships. See also Abstract reframing intervention Happiness interventions
(ARI); Connection; Friendships; Interpersonal Self-persuasion, 441–442
factors; Marital quality and interventions; Peer Self-protection, 375
relationships; Social functioning Self-reflection, 170–171, 171f, 173, 176–177, 178, 183.
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) See also Reflection exercises
intervention and, 375 Self-regulation
empathic-discipline intervention and, 333–334 resource regulation, 168–169
happiness interventions and, 196–198, 210–211 strategic resource use intervention and, 167–168,
incremental theory of personality and, 319 174, 184–185
social-belonging intervention and, 53 stress reappraisal interventions and, 253–254
stress reappraisal interventions and, 250 Self-resources, 71
teacher–student relationships, 325 Situated cognition, 150–151
Relevance affirmation intervention, 109–110 Situational factors, 1, 419
Resilient attributions, 11 Skill building
Resource regulation, 168–169, 178, 180t, 183, 185 empathic-discipline intervention and, 340–341
Resources, 241, 241f, 244, 248–249 pathways intervention and, 157
Rewards, 260–262 strategic resource use intervention and, 173–174,
Role models, 50, 156–157. See also Stories from others 185
Social class achievement gap, 127, 128–132, 131f.
Savoring interventions, 202–204 See also Achievement gap; Difference-education
Saying-is-believing aspect of interventions interventions; Social group differences
belonging, 40, 49–51, 54, 58, 109 Social contexts, 73, 75
empathic discipline, 337 Social fit, 127–128, 143
growth mindset, 14, 24, 109 Social functioning, 306–307, 309–310, 319. See also
theories of personality, 311–312 Incremental theory of personality; Interpersonal
School contexts, 54, 68–69, 69t, 77–78, 105 factors; Relationships
Segregation, 36–37, 37f Social group differences. See also Difference-education
Self system, 73f, 150–151 interventions; Social class achievement gap
Self-affirmation interventions. See also Affirmation heterogeneity of intervention outcomes and,
interventions 135–136
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 393–394, implications for psychological theory and, 141–142
397 negatives and positives of, 139
annotated materials for, 92–99 overview, 126–130
background, 63–64 psychological processes and, 130–132, 131f
content and implementation of, 77–78 relevance of to everyone, 139–140
cousins of, 76–77 taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 298–299
effects over time, 72–73, 73f Social identity, 67, 156–157. See also Identity
evidence for, 67–70, 69t Social justice education, 130, 276–278
future directions in, 82–83 Social learning theory, 416
472 Subject Index

Social norms approach. See also Dynamic norm Strategic resource use intervention
interventions background, 166–167
background, 406–408, 407f content and implementation of, 175–178
content and implementation of, 417, 418t cousins of, 173–174
cousins of, 416–417 effects over time, 172
effects over time, 412–413 evidence for, 169–173
evidence for, 408–416, 410t future directions in, 184–185
future directions in, 423–424 implications for practice and, 179–183, 180t
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 413–416 implications for theory and, 183–184
implications for practice and, 420–422 mechanisms of, 170–171, 171f
implications for psychological theory and, 422–423 mistakes in implementation of, 181–182
mechanisms of, 410–412 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 178
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 417, outcomes associated with, 169–170
419–420 overview, 166, 185
outcomes associated with, 408–409, 410f psychological processes and, 167–169, 180t, 181–182
overview, 405–406 Strategizing, 171–172
psychological processes and, 408 Stress. See also Stress management and reduction
Social policy, 162. See also Policy factors approaches; Threat
Social system, 73f beneficial effects of, 219–220
Social-belonging intervention Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
background, 36–37, 37f intervention and, 373–374
content and implementation of, 45–50, 58–60 empathic-discipline intervention and, 342
cousins of, 44–45 implications for practice and, 232–233
effects over time, 42f, 43–44 incremental theory of personality and, 309–310,
evidence for, 40–44, 42f 312–313, 314–315, 315f
future directions in, 53–54 new perspective on, 219–220
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 44 overview, 217–219, 231–232, 239–240, 251–252
implications for practice and, 50–52 relationship problems and, 386
implications for theory and, 53 Stress management and reduction approaches. See also
incremental theory of personality and, 316 Stress; Stress reappraisal interventions; Stress-
mechanisms of, 42–43, 42f mindset intervention
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 50 implications for practice and, 232–233
outcomes associated with, 40–42 overview, 218–219, 231
overview, 2, 36 relationship problems and, 386
pathways intervention and, 155 self-affirmation interventions and, 66–67
practitioner experiences, 52, 61–62 stress reappraisal interventions and, 251
psychological processes and, 38–40 Stress Mindset Measure (SSM), 221
Sociocultural context, 36–37, 37f, 129 Stress mindsets, 249, 373–374. See also Mindsets and
Socioeconomic backgrounds mindset research
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) Stress reappraisal interventions. See also Appraisals;
intervention and, 380 Reappraisals
pathways intervention and, 148–149, 151, 153, 161 background, 240–242, 241f
self-affirmation interventions and, 73f cousins of, 248–250
taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 298–299 effects over time, 245–246
values-alignment interventions and, 277, 278 evidence for, 243–248
Special education, 325 future directions in, 254–255
Stereotypes heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 246–248,
difference-education intervention and, 138–139, 251
141–142 implications for practice and, 252–253
empathic-discipline intervention and, 342 implications for psychological theory and, 253–254
gender differences and, 247 mechanisms of, 244–245
self-affirmation interventions and, 65–66, 68, nuances and misconceptions regarding, 251–252
74–75 outcomes associated with, 243–244
stereotype threat, 38 overview, 239–240
Stigmatized groups, 325. See also Group differences physiological processes and, 242–243, 244–245
Stories from others. See also Peer stories and psychological processes and, 242, 245–246
testimonials Stress-is-debilitating mindset, 248–249, 373–374
difference-education intervention and, 133 Stress-is-enhancing mindset, 248–249, 316, 373–374
empathic-discipline intervention and, 335, 336t Stress-mindset intervention. See also Mindsets and
giving voice to underrepresented narratives and, 140 mindset research
in growth-mindset interventions and, 24 background, 217–219
incremental theory of personality and, 311 content and implementation of, 228–231, 229t
social norms approach and, 421–422 cousins of, 227–228
social-belonging intervention and, 40, 46–49, effects over time, 226–227
58–60 evidence for, 221–227, 223f
 Subject Index 473

future directions in, 233–234 stress reappraisal interventions and, 253–254

heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 227 stress-mindset intervention and, 233
implications for practice and, 232–233 taste-focused-labeling intervention and, 297–298
implications for theory and, 233 utility-value intervention and, 119–120
mechanisms of, 222–226, 223f values-alignment interventions and, 278–279
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 231–232 Theory of constructed emotion, 249–250
outcomes associated with, 221–222 Theory-of-personality interventions, 45
overview, 217, 234 Therapeutic implications. See Practice implications
psychological processes and, 220–221 Threat. See also Belonging uncertainty; Stress
Structural factors, 29–30 difference-education intervention and, 142
Student factors and individual differences, 184, 185. incremental theory of personality and, 310, 312–313
See also Individual differences overview, 218
Study strategies, 173–174, 178 self-affirmation interventions and, 65–67, 71–72,
Subjective well-being, 197, 198. See also Happiness 74–75, 82–83
interventions; Well-being stress reappraisal interventions and, 250
Suspensions, 324–327, 326f. See also Empathic- Timing of an intervention, 115, 121, 175. See also
discipline intervention Content and implementation of an intervention
Systemic change, 158–161, 159f. See also Social norms Training, 118, 119f
approach Transgender individuals, 325, 355–356
Transitions, 319
Talent, 26–27 Treatment implications. See Practice implications
Task engagement, 241, 241f Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), 314
Taste-focused-labeling intervention
background, 286–288 Uncertainty, belonging. See Belonging uncertainty
content and implementation of, 295–296 Understanding, 193–195
cousins of, 294–295 Universal interventions, 315
effects over time, 292–293 Untethering process, 71. See also Belonging uncertainty
evidence for, 290–292, 290t Utility value, 102, 103, 104f
future directions in, 298–299 Utility-value intervention
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 289n, background, 100–101
292–293, 293–294 content and implementation of, 110–116, 111f, 112f,
implications for practice and, 296–297 113f, 114f
implications for psychological theory and, 297–298 cousins of, 109–110
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 296 effects over time, 107–108
overview, 286, 299 evidence for, 105–109, 106t
psychological processes and, 288–289, 289f future directions in, 120–121
values-alignment interventions and, 271–272 heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 108–109
Teachers implications for practice and, 117–119, 118f, 119f
empathic-discipline intervention and, 325, 334–339, implications for psychological theory and, 119–120
336t, 337t, 340–341, 342 mechanisms of, 103, 105
pathways intervention and, 159f, 160 nuances and misconceptions regarding, 116–117
strategic resource use intervention and, 185 outcomes associated with, 105–107, 106t
teacher mindset and, 326, 326f overview, 100
Teacher–student relationships, 325, 328, 333–334. See pathways intervention and, 155
also Relationships psychological processes and, 102–103, 102f, 104f
Technology, 208, 229–230, 229t, 379, 380. See also
Online interventions; Video-based interventions Values. See also Utility-value intervention; Values
Testimonials. See Peer stories and testimonials affirmation; Values-alignment interventions
Theory implications confrontation of, 76–77
abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 398 expectancy-value framework and, 101
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) overview, 100–101, 261–262
intervention and, 379 stress reappraisal interventions and, 250, 253
difference-education intervention and, 141–142 Values affirmation. See also Self-affirmation
dynamic norm interventions and, 444 interventions; Values; Values-alignment
empathic-discipline intervention and, 341 interventions
group-malleability intervention and, 360–361 annotated materials for, 92–97
growth-mindset interventions and, 29–30 implications for practice and, 79–81
happiness interventions and, 209–210 overview, 2
incremental theory of personality and, 318–319 value-affirmation interventions, 45, 109–110
overview, 4 Values-alignment interventions. See also Values; Values
pathways intervention and, 161–162 affirmation
self-affirmation interventions and, 82 background, 259–260
social norms approach and, 422–423 content and implementation of, 273–276
social-belonging intervention and, 53 cousins of, 271–273
strategic resource use intervention and, 183–184 effects over time, 265–267, 266f
474 Subject Index

Values-alignment interventions (cont.) happiness interventions and, 197–201, 211

evidence for, 263–271, 266f, 269f, 271f incremental theory of personality and, 314
future directions in, 279–280 marital quality and, 366–367
heterogeneity of intervention outcomes, 270–271 mental health and, 210, 367
implications for practice and, 278 stress-mindset intervention and, 228
implications for psychological theory and, 278–279 White individuals, 39, 40–42, 71, 74–75. See also
mechanisms of, 268–270, 269f, 271f European American individuals
nuances and misconceptions regarding, 276–278 Wise intervention approach in general, 1–5. See also
overview, 259, 281 individual interventions
psychological processes and, 260–263, 262f, Writing activities
275–276 abstract reframing intervention (ARI) and, 394, 402
Variety, 116, 121. See also Content and implementation Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE)
of an intervention; Heterogeneity of intervention intervention and, 370, 375–376
outcomes in growth-mindset interventions and, 24
Video-based interventions, 229–230, 229t. See also happiness interventions and, 194–195, 204–205,
Technology 207–208, 209
Voluntary participation, 140–141 self-affirmation interventions and, 69, 69t, 76
social-belonging intervention and, 40
Well-being. See also Outcomes utility-value intervention and, 110, 111f, 112f, 113f
Couples Activity for Reappraising Emotions (CARE) values-alignment interventions and, 275–276
intervention and, 371
cultural contexts and, 209–210 Zero-tolerance policies, 325