#219 Today's guest is Greg Walton— the Michael Forman University Fellow and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His research investigates psychological processes that contribute to major social problems and how “wise” psychological interventions can address such problems and help people flourish. In this episode, we discuss:
+ stereotyping & how it can affect academic performance
+ the current gap in academics between girls & boys
+ challenges faced by students of color in our education system
+ interventions that help with belonging & achievement in school
+ what every freshman should know before starting college
+ the value of having a mentor as a student
+ gen z’s mental health crisis & what can be done
+ having honest conversations about mental health
+ reframing common mental health struggles that students experience
+ recent DEI policy shifts & those impacts on our education system
+ how our society makes it difficult to feel a sense of belonging
MENTIONED
+ Share your story of ordinary magic
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Sheep Assisted, the Gen.
Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton.
Let's get into it. People come to college at least
in part because they see that space as a space that can help
them become the kind of adult that they want to be, to have
the kind of impact that they want to have on the world, to
explore the kinds of questions that they want to explore and do
what they want to do. And so to belong within the
(00:22):
college environment is to belongto that journey, to that process
of becoming. And that's really foundational
for mental health and mental well-being.
Like that's you becoming the right kind of person for you.
Hello. Hello you guys, and welcome back
to Sheep Persisted. I am so excited you're here
today. We have a really incredible
episode. We have Greg Walton on the show.
(00:43):
He's the Michael Foreman University Fellow and professor
of psychology at Stanford University.
His research looks at psychological processes
contributing to major social problems and how wise
psychological interventions thattarget these processes can
address such problems and help people flourish over long
periods of time. He's also the author of a book
that just came out called Ordinary Magic, The science of
(01:04):
how we can Achieve big change with Small acts.
The link to that will be in the show notes.
This is just such an incredible conversation, an one that I've
been looking forward to for a long time.
You guys have heard me talk about the Tanford study that
targeted belonging and priming for adversity in College in so
many episodes. It's something I heard about in
(01:24):
my positive psychology class andit's just stuck with me.
And this is his research. And so it was just such a full
circle, incredible moment to getto talk to him about his work,
how important it is to have a sense of belonging, how we can
improve mental health in college.
What Gen. Z is struggling with, how
interventions can be applied on a large scale to address these
(01:44):
types of challenges. We talk about biases and
overcoming biases, how the way that we mentally navigate
situations and attribute things has such a huge impact on their
outcome. And so I'm so grateful to Doctor
Walton for joining me on the podcast.
And without further ado, let's dive in.
Thank you so much for joining metoday on Cheaper Assistant.
I'm so incredibly excited to have you on the show.
(02:06):
And I think this conversation isgoing to have so much value for
young adults and also the communities that support them,
teachers and parents. So thank you for joining me.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Of course. So to get started, I'd love to
get into your background, how you came into this area of
psychology, focusing on interventions and this
particular demographic because it's definitely a more unique
(02:27):
area. And so I'd love to get your
background and how you decided to specialize in this area of
research. Yeah, I mean, I was a high
school student and I was part ofa student group that went into
middle school classrooms and LEDrole-playing exercises and games
and things around inequality andidentities and things like race
and class and gender. And it was in the in the context
(02:49):
of that, this was this was in the 1990s that I read some of
the first research about stereotype threat.
And at the time, you know, I waslearning in history class about
the persistence of racial inequality in American education
that there been this thing called the Great Society program
in the 60s. And there's this big federal
investment in increasing supportfor lower income students and
(03:12):
for racial and ethnic minority students and the whole civil
rights movement and desegregation.
And yet you saw that racial inequalities and in math and
science, gender inequalities hadreally maintained and they
hadn't hadn't reduced over time.So it felt like a very dark
time. It felt very discouraging at
that time to think about those problems.
(03:33):
And then along came this work bymy now colleague Claude Steele,
who showed that you could just change how you represented a
test in a laboratory setting. And you could see inequalities
between men and women in a math context or between black and
white students in a in an intellectual reasoning context
appear or disappear. And it was like magic.
I thought, that's incredible. Like, how is that possible?
(03:55):
How does that work? And what can we learn from that?
How could we take that to the real world to make the real
world more like the psychologically safe conditions
and less like the psychologically threatening
conditions that produces inequalities?
It seemed to me like, you know, I grew up as a middle class kid
in a, in a stable household. I'm, you know, I'm a white man.
(04:16):
And it just felt profoundly unfair that the American dream
was not a reality for so many people, that there was this
persistent inequality. It just felt profoundly wrong
and that we needed to find some some way to approach that
problem and solve it. And I'm curious, you talked
about this like magical way thatwe were able to shift outcomes
(04:38):
based on the way that the information was presented and if
people took Indro to psych classes.
Claude Steel's work is so interesting.
You probably got an overview, But for people who haven't read
those studies or aren't aware ofhow those conditions shifted
such meaningful outcomes, can you give us a little overview of
how powerful that messaging is? Yeah.
So Claude and his collaborators at the time was thinking about
(05:00):
the idea that when you walk intoa setting and there's a
stereotype about your group and you're trying to perform in that
environment, you're kind of laboring in the context of that
stereotype. That if you're a woman going in
to take a really difficult math test and there's all these
people, maybe these men looking at you and thinking you're going
to be like the dumb girl, then it creates this extra pressure.
(05:23):
It creates this feeling that if you were to do badly, it would
take the risk of confirming thatmaybe these people will think
the stereotype is true, that girls can't do math.
And if you value math, if that'ssomething that's important to
you, if you want to be an engineer or a doctor or anything
else, then that's really upsetting.
It's really disruptive and it's cognitively disruptive and it
makes it harder to perform well,especially when you're trying to
(05:43):
do something difficult. So what Todd Steele did was to
bring people in and have them take a like a GRE test.
And in one case, he said, this test is evaluative of your
intellectual reasoning abilities.
It will assess the strengths andweaknesses of your verbal
reasoning ability. And in that condition, black
students, for example, did much worse than white students on the
(06:05):
test. But then in a second condition,
he said, We're cognitive psychologists.
We're interested in how people solve really hard verbal
puzzles. This is not evaluative of
anything, but we want to learn how people solve puzzles.
So please try your best. And black students performance
sword and they actually do a little bit better than white
students in the in that case. And so the way that I understand
(06:25):
that is that that first condition where it's evaluative,
it puts a question on the table.The situation puts a question on
the table. And the question is, will people
think people like me are dumb ifI don't do well?
Will I confirm a stereotype in their eyes?
Will I let down my whole group? And that's really disruptive.
It's upsetting and it produces its consequence.
It produces almost a self fulfilling consequence.
(06:48):
I think what's really challenging about these biases
and these like in Group out group biases is that we aren't
even necessarily aware that they're taking place or what
groups were attached to. And I think people hearing that
they're like, well, I've never walked into a classroom and been
told that this test I'm taking is representative of my grade or
my school or my gender or whatever kind of in Group you're
(07:11):
assigned to. Can you kind of explain to us
how these pressures show up in these day-to-day contexts, even
if we're not explicitly primed to say this is evaluating this
dynamic? I mean, actually, like part of
what's hard about this dynamic is that it's covert, right?
It's not like anybody's walking around saying, I think you're,
you know, dumb because you're anex or something.
(07:32):
Yeah, Yeah, Excuse. It's this suspicion.
It's this fear. It's a question, right.
So they like the analog, like one, one way to think about
threat is like physical threat. Like you're, you're walking
through a forest and you know that there's a bear there, that
bears might live there. You don't know if there's a bear
right there then, right? You don't know if that bear
might have malicious intentions towards you, but it there could
(07:53):
be a bear and that preoccupies you.
You never know when you can put that to rest because you never
know when it's actually present.So you're, you know, walking
into a space and you're aware maybe in the back of your mind,
maybe not explicitly that there might be a negative stereotype
in that space and you're contending with that.
One of the things that's interesting about stereotype
threat is that, like in the original research, Claude talked
(08:17):
a lot about how people are experiencing a threat in the
air. And it seemed like from that
representation that people wouldbe acutely aware of the
stereotype as they're engaging with it.
But actually, if you look closely, this is work by my
colleague Christine Logel at theUniversity of Waterloo, if you
look closely at women in math context, for example, gender
stereotypes are less accessible to them while they're taking a
(08:40):
test under stereotype threat. So words like irrational or
illogical, they're slower to identify those words while
they're taking a math exam understereotype threat.
And then after the exam is over,those words rebound an
awareness, kind of like you're trying to suppress a thought and
then it it it pops back up. But that pattern itself is
(09:02):
actually taking up mental resources.
So the more that people are suppressing those thoughts, that
is the slower they are to detectwords like irrational, the worse
that they're doing on the test, for example.
Because you mentioned gender andtest performance, I'm really
curious your thought on almost like this like pendulum effect
we're seeing with kids now in school where previously we saw
(09:25):
this achievement gap with girls,more resources were directed
there, and now we see that boys are falling behind academically
in this traditional classroom setting.
What are your your thoughts as it applies to this?
Is there now that new stereotypethreat?
Are girls more comfortable in this context?
It's there still that original? What are your thoughts there?
The dynamics with, you know, thestereotype threat is a dynamic
(09:47):
about walking into a situation where there's a negative
stereotyping and girls do you know well in school in general
and better than boys. The the research on the
stereotype throughout was alwaysabout math and science and, and
very kind of elite and selectivekinds of math and science
context where you're really demanding and you're really
being pushed. And there's this stereotype that
like the geniuses are the boys and the men and the girls.
(10:09):
Maybe they work hard, but they're not such they're not
such geniuses. And that's the stereotype that
really advantages girls and women.
You know, I think boys contend with a lot of other issues and a
lot of those are psychological too.
So, for example, we've done a lot of research on classroom
conflict situations, disciplinary encounters, on
interventions that help support trust between teachers and
(10:31):
students, that can address questions like, will I be seen
as a troublemaker, or is this student a troublemaker off the
table? And those can be particularly
beneficial for boys. You you mentioned wise
interventions and this framework.
You creative people aren't familiar with how these
interventions work to address belonging and impact achievement
rates of like punishment in classrooms, as you mentioned.
(10:54):
How did you come across these interventions, develop them, the
outcomes associated, all the things?
So the research on stereotype threat was, was really inspiring
to me, but it was also just in the lab, right?
It was just this dynamic in the laboratory setting.
And I wanted to know, like, whatis this?
What does this mean for the realworld?
When students are going out and they're, you know, introducing
(11:15):
themselves to a new teacher, they're meeting new classmates,
they're trying to take a test, they're trying to study for
something. And as I thought about it, I
thought about how focusing now on on students of color, how,
you know, so much of education has this deep history of
exclusion and race based exclusion.
And you know, there's stereotypes that say that
(11:36):
students of color are less smartthan others, that they're less
able than others, that they don't deserve higher education
opportunities, for example. And so then, for example, if
you're a black student going to predominantly white college then
and you look around, most of thepeople there aren't black, Some
people there seem to believe youdon't deserve to be there.
That creates a a much broader kind of threat than the narrow
(11:58):
threat of stereotype threat. It creates a a worry about
belonging. And in this case, the situation
is posing the question, do people like me belong in this
environment? And if people are asking that
question, like imagine you're going to college and you're
asking that question and then you take a first Test and you
don't do very well on that test.And you try to get in a student
group and the student group doesn't want you.
(12:19):
You come home on a Thursday night and find out that
everybody went out to something and they didn't bother to
include you in that event. Maybe you have all that happen
in one week. Like that might accumulate to
start to make it feel like maybeI don't belong here.
Maybe people like me don't belong in this environment.
And if you start to draw that inference, then it's going to be
(12:40):
harder to re engage with the people in that world to go, you
know, join a different student organization to go talk to your
professor about what went wrong on that first Test, to have a
conversation with a peer. And ultimately, that erodes the
kind of relationships that anybody needs to succeed in a
college environment. So wise interventions are
(13:01):
interventions that are sensitiveto dynamics like this.
They're sensitive to how people are making a sense of themselves
and social situations, and in particular to the kinds of
questions and doubts that come up as we navigate the world.
So in this case, what they do, what an intervention does is it
offers people a different way tounderstand those experiences, a
(13:22):
way of understanding these experiences that says this can
happen, this is normal, it can happen to everybody, and it can
get better with time. So it, the technology is
actually very simple. It's about storytelling and
story sharing. It's about sharing stories from
other students that talk about transitions and, you know,
acknowledge the the pride and the enthusiasm people have, For
(13:45):
example, to go to college, how exciting that is to move away
from home, to go to a new place,to join a new community.
But don't whitewash it. Also talk about how that's a big
transition. And there's going to be times
you feel homesick. You might miss California.
I missed Michigan when I came toCalifornia.
Do you miss? The weather or other things?
I did miss the weather. Yeah, it's not the weather.
(14:06):
I do love California. But when I came to Stanford, my
first year at Stanford, I was coming back.
It was my first quarter. I was coming back from class,
going home to the dorm at lunchtime, and there was this in
and out truck that had pulled up.
And in and out does not exist inMichigan, right?
There's all this whole line of students, like my classmates
(14:27):
lined up to get in and out. And I felt so excluded.
I was like, like, who are these people?
Like I'm not standing in line for a burger.
Like then I go they. Only have three things on the
menu like this is. Like a frigging mystery.
Like what is this? So I go back to the dining hall
and I eat by myself. And, you know, I think that if I
(14:50):
had had the awareness that everybody is coming to a new
place, everybody's kind of far from home, even if you're from,
you know, just down the road, even the people from Southern
California who somehow kind of were the a cute example in my
mind. I could have gotten in line,
right? I could have asked Someone Like
You and said, what's in and out?Like, why do you like in and
out? What is animal style?
(15:10):
I might have made a friend, right?
It would have been a much betterexperience.
And that that kind of illustrates the way that the
belonging intervention works. So like hearing stories,
learning from other people that worries about belonging are
normal, that it can get better with time that everybody's going
through that transition. Not kind of overreacting or or
reacting in a really global way when when something goes wrong.
(15:32):
Helps you stay the course and helps you build relationships
and helps you find the kinds of communities that you need to
succeed in a new environment. We read the study that you did
about this intervention or college freshman in my positive
psychology class, and it's one of those ones that just like
sticks with you because of what a profound impact it has on
outcomes even beyond college. Can you speak to some of those
(15:54):
things that happen when we tell people this will be hard and
other people are experiencing this and you can get through it?
Yeah. So what's really interesting and
important about the belonging intervention in particular is
how it illustrates what I call spirals, both downward spirals,
but also upward spirals. So imagine you don't have the
belonging intervention. Imagine you're a first
(16:17):
generation college student or you're a student of color and
you have something difficult happen early on, like not a big
thing necessarily, but you feel homesick.
You can't find your favorite foods.
You can't find some place that will cut your hair properly.
Maybe you don't, you know, you haven't made a friend yet, or
maybe you've made a lot of friends, but they're all shallow
(16:39):
and, and, and not really real yet.
Then if you're worried about theidea that maybe people like me
can't belong here, then it what that does is it makes it harder
to engage and harder to actuallybuild those relationships.
And you might persist in that space, You might continue in
that space, you might not. You might end up feeling like
you don't belong and leave, or you might persist and kind of
(17:01):
carry through but not ultimatelybuild the kinds of relationships
that you really need in the Belonging intervention.
What happens is you share these stories that it's normal to
worry at first about whether youbelong.
It can get better with time. And students still have the same
kinds of difficulties, like theystill experience exclusions,
they still experience homesickness.
(17:21):
They still sometimes get a bad early grade, but no longer do
those events mean to them I don't belong here in general or
people like me don't belong herein general.
And that helps people stay more engaged, like to study more
literally, to study more hours per night, to go to office hours
more with professors, to meet with peers in study groups, to
(17:42):
ask questions in class. And those behaviors then have a
consequence that goes out of that psychological system.
It's not just that people are feeling better.
It's that people are actually making relationships.
Like people are developing friendships.
They're more likely to develop close mentor relationships.
And in the end, that undergirds higher achievement or even years
(18:02):
into the future and greater success as people transition out
of college into the adult world.So in the original study, which
was done at a selective university in the Northeast, we
found that African American adults who got the belonging
intervention in their first yearof college report about 10 years
later, be more satisfied in their lives, more successful in
(18:22):
their careers. They're more likely to have
taken on leadership positions intheir community.
And the reason why they're able to do that is because they're
reporting, it seems that they'remore likely to develop strong
mentor relationships in college and relationships that persisted
after college that gave them thekind of guidance and structure
that helped them move into the spaces that mattered for them as
(18:44):
young adults. Can you speak a bit to that
mentor value? Because I think it's a something
that is now being promoted more to high schoolers.
And I'm ATA for Grit lab and this week we talked about
mentoring. So I'm guys like here's how I
got my mentors. Here's how it's helpful to
structure that relationship. I promise it's so important.
And when you ask like who are your mentors, a lot of them said
(19:05):
like a parent or maybe an aunt or an uncle.
Truly having these external figures and support systems,
especially in the college context like you mentioned, can
have such a profound impact on outcomes.
Sometimes there's like mentor programs where people are kind
of assigned mentors. I don't that that can be
helpful, but I don't think it works as well as kind of bottom
up authentic relationships that come from the student themselves
(19:26):
that really match who they are and who it is who they want to
become. So in the Belonging
intervention, if you like, one of the stories that a student
told us at one point was that hehad decided that he wanted to
become an engineer, and yet he had failed in an introductory
calculus course. And so he went to his professor
(19:49):
and he said, professor, like, I'd like to become an engineer.
And the professor said, well, you got to get your act together
when it comes to math because engineering requires a lot of
math. And he had the confidence at
that point then to go out and buy like a high school calculus
textbook to review the the foundations that he needed to
(20:10):
review. And he continued to reach out to
that professor. And he told us in one of our
surveys that he actually met with this professor on a weekly
basis. And the professor helped him
secure that foundational knowledge in math and he saw his
marks, his grades go up week by week, you know, problem set by
(20:31):
problem set get a little bit better.
And in the end, that professor who was I think an emeritus
professor by the time he retired, an older person, he
became a, a strong mentor and advocate for him and helped him
as he as he got his first job asan engineer after leaving
college. And so that like kind of dynamic
can happen when a student says, here's the kind of person I'd
(20:54):
like to become. And the professor or whoever it
is says, I can see that I can value that and I can, I can help
you in your growth towards becoming that person.
It's very authentic. It's not networking in that kind
of shallow way. It's, it's very authentic.
It's very real. And it's very much about kind of
envisioning the person that a young person can become, having
(21:15):
the young person envision that, having the older person envision
and that having a shared vision about that and then problem
solving along that path to achieve that vision.
It's no surprise that Gen. Z is struggling in a lot of
ways. There's a lot of really great
strengths that we experience. I think the vulnerability is
absolutely unparalleled. I think there's so much ambition
(21:35):
and so much belief that we can make change, but we're also
struggling a lot with mental health and a lot of concerns and
red flags that are being raised by different people having this
conversation. Anytime I have a researcher on
the podcast and especially 1 that's worked in interventions
targeted in these kinds of areasand demographics, I love to kind
of get your thoughts on what youthink is a big pinpoint or a big
(21:56):
point that we could be directingsupport and resources towards.
And obviously, lots of competingopinions here, whether it's more
phones or mentor relationships, scaffolding, all these kinds of
things. What are your thoughts on this
like crisis that's been labeled?Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of
thoughts. I mean, I think one thing to say
is about it's just to stay with belonging for a second.
Like belonging is in it's sort of most important form within
(22:19):
college. It's about belonging within that
kind of achievement related space.
It's not just about having friendships or being with other
people. It's about really being able to
belong within that community. Like, I think that it's very
healthy for people and very important for people to like
they are parts of communities inwhich they are learning and
(22:42):
growing and becoming towards thekind of person that they want to
be. And I think that's part of why
belonging in college is so important.
Like, people come to college, atleast in part because they see
that space as a space that can help them become the kind of
adult that they want to be, to have the kind of impact that
they want to have on the world, to explore the kinds of
questions that they want to explore and do what they want to
(23:03):
do. And so to belong within the
college environment is to belongto that journey, to that process
of becoming. And that's like really
foundational for mental health and mental well-being like that.
That's you becoming the right kind of person for you.
And it's also why exclusion in the college environment or
loneliness or disrespect, not feeling fully a part of it,
(23:25):
feeling adrift can be so damaging.
There is research sort of directly looking at the
consequences of the belonging intervention itself on both
physical health and on mental health, including reduced rates
of depression. So when people experience the
belonging intervention and they recognize worries about
belonging as normal, as improving with time, then people
report years later being happierin their lives, they're less
(23:49):
likely to meet clinical criteriafor depression and they actually
are going to the doctor blast. So they're they're actually
healthier. There's a couple of other things
that I think are really important.
So a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to be the
faculty member in residence at Stanford's program in Berlin.
And so we were, you know, it wasa, a group of new Stanford
(24:10):
undergraduates having their study abroad experience.
And we were at this welcome dinner, and I sat next to a
woman who I hadn't met before, aStanford student.
And so I'd asked her about her life, and she said that she was
a very competitive gymnast in high school.
And then she blew her knee out. And then COVID happened and she
just said it in like this very direct and honest way that
(24:32):
allowed me to be very direct andhonest back to her.
So I just said the thought that came to my mind.
I said, well, did that make you depressed?
And she said absolutely. I was already seen a therapist,
but for sure. And what was beautiful about
that conversation and what it kind of represented to me, part
of the strength of young people today is the ability to really
(24:53):
surface these circumstances, andI use that word intentionally
and put them on the table as kind of common ground amongst
others. So she was very direct and
honest. And then I could be directing on
us back to her. And then we could see together
like, yeah, like, you're 18, you're 1718 years old.
You love to be a gymnast now. You can't be a gymnast now.
(25:14):
You can't see a friends. Like, would that make a person
depressed? It probably would, right?
Like, that would be that would be the situation.
And when we can talk about it that way, she knows that I'm not
judging her. I know that, you know, I'm not
in fact judging her. But we're both recognizing this,
this challenge that she's confronted with in her life
life, and then it becomes a lot easier to handle the challenge
(25:36):
rather than being defensive about it or pretending that
there's not a problem there. Do you think that surfacing
those challenges and creating space for those conversations on
like a peer-to-peer level can have that similar effectiveness
or it's crucial to have that like mentorship?
I've been through this before, Dynamic.
I think, I think that it's healthy for everybody, like so
(25:56):
definitely with peers. And it's part of, I think a
structural challenge within the mental health business that is
like the mental health business is predicated on a diagnostic
clinical interview that ostensibly diagnosis you as
having something distinctly wrong with you in order to get
treatment right. This is the business model,
(26:18):
right? And it's very different from a
kind of social psychological perspective where you say, like,
what's the situation the person is in?
Like, would that situation create a dynamic like
depression? Like, yeah, like it would.
And from that, if you really have that perspective, it's not
even a vulnerable conversation. Like it's just like this is the
circumstance. This is the reality.
(26:40):
Like 1-1 would be like that. There's nothing to be vulnerable
about about at all. And so I think part of the
challenge with mental health is that we kind of put people
through a process, like a process that involves the
clinical diagnosis, like the diagnostic interview, like the
billing process that is predicated on defining them as
(27:00):
having something wrong with them, even when that's not what
anybody believes that whole system kind of is conveying.
You can't submit it for insurance without a diagnostic
code. Exactly right.
And the diagnostic code says that there's something distinct
about you. And and that's like starting on
the back foot. Like, I think there's a reason
the Barbie movie was such a hit.Like, you know, everybody wants
(27:21):
to feel like they're enough, like they're OK.
But this is a process in which we're starting people off, you
know, in contending with a problem by saying that there's
something distinctly wrong with them.
And how do you like walk that clear line of like that
validation of like this is really challenging and it makes
sense that you're going through this really difficult experience
and this is painful. And also it's not wrong because
(27:44):
we'll experiences these contextsdifferently.
And like you said, we compare. And how do you kind of bounce
those two things at the same time?
Yeah, I, I think sometimes there's a kind of magic like in
in a dialogue, in a conversation.
Like in that conversation, she and I were just kind of like, we
were fully together. We understood it fully together.
And I think understanding like so in the, in my book, Ordinary
(28:08):
Magic, I refer to a lot of picture books because I think
there's a lot of wisdom in picture books.
And one of them is 1 morning in Maine.
And in one morning in Maine, thelittle girl, Sal, it begins with
her saying, Mama, Mama, I lost my tooth.
I'm not gonna be able to have mythe great day I envisioned and
go to Bucks Harbor with Daddy. Yeah.
(28:28):
And her mother says, oh, when you lose a tooth, that's when
you become a big girl. And the whole first half of the
book is, is Sal kind of trying out that idea?
So she says to her mother, did you lose your teeth when you
were little? And the mother says, yes, that's
how I got these nice, big, beautiful teeth now.
And and then Sal goes out and she inquires whether the seal
(28:51):
loses its teeth, whether the bird loses its teeth.
And she, you know, learns yes and no.
And she gets to her father, who's digging clams on the
beach. And she asks him and his, her
father says, yeah, it's when youlose your teeth that you become
a big girl. And so they're they're offering
that whole dynamic is offering this person a new way, a non
pejorative way to understand hercircumstance that losing a tooth
(29:14):
doesn't have to be a catastrophe.
And I think similarly, like we should be like that in mental
health situations. So like, yeah, would a person
feel depressed in a circumstancelike that?
Absolutely. Like does it mean that there's
something wrong with a person? No, they're a normal person,
right? That's the situation they're in.
Like, how do we contend with that?
How do we work with that? That was just such like a
(29:35):
forgotten memory experience where you're describing it.
And I'm like, I remember the images and she, like, falls on a
rock. Like I have not thought about
that, Yeah. She slips, she tries to you're
in to see the seal close and then she slips.
She's like. She's like all distressed.
It's like a whole, like the conflict of the story.
I completely forgot about that. Speaking of your new book, you
had a quote when I was recentingfor the episode, which I thought
(29:56):
was just so interesting and fascinating, where you said
maybe the fact that we're feeling the pain of dealing with
ambiguity right now, that were actually doing the thing we came
here to do and heading in a new and interesting direction and
that like. That's not my quote.
Really. No, no, that's, that's a quote,
that's a quote from. So people have started to share
(30:18):
with me what I think of as thesetales of ordinary magic.
And so that came from a former student who shared that
experience with me. So she she was describing how
she had felt kind of trapped in a previous career, like it was
kind of too structured. So she was looking for something
more open-ended, more, more morebroad.
(30:39):
And then she'd gotten into this and was participating in this
program. And then she felt adrift and
like she didn't have direction. And she was kind of re
understanding that adriftness asmaybe what it was that she
wanted that was actually freeingfor her.
So it's that kind of mental shift that is a a kind of tale
of ordinary magic in in her case, yeah.
Those like mental shifts, these attributions like the reframes,
(31:01):
whether it's like it's not something wrong with you or it's
not a failure, but it's challenging makes sense in this
context or this is going to be hard, but it is possible.
These kind of ways that we look at situations differently.
Are there any other of those like magical ways that we can
reframe things? These really powerful ways of
shifting perspective that are really relevant and common to
(31:23):
what you found within this like college age population, high
schoolers, these challenges thatso many people go through it.
But again, we're not necessarilymaybe surfacing these
conversations and like widely discussing how we can reframe
them. Yeah.
I mean, let's stay with the mental health theme.
So another example of this is the ways that we have identities
often and they can be mental health identities that are often
(31:44):
cast us as kind of weak or deficient or problematic in some
form. And often these.
So something like mental health,like having contended with a
mental health problem, often might be very challenging,
right? It might be very difficult.
But our narratives about mental health challenges are also often
kind of 1 dimensionally negative.
(32:06):
They only talk about the negative.
So one of my collaborators, a woman named Christina Bauer, has
developed a technique called a kind of identity inversion
intervention. So what you do in this technique
is you ask people to think aboutidentities they have that are
often seen as sources of weakness or deficiency.
(32:26):
And you say even though this might often be something that's
difficult to deal with, this identity might also be a source
of strength and agency and goodness.
How have you found strength or agency or goodness in this
identity? In one of the cases, she did
this work with people with experiences with depression.
(32:46):
So she gave people who had experienced depression stories
from other people who talked about the strengths and the
agency and the goodness that they had developed in contending
with depression and how they usethose strengths and agency and
goodness to work toward goals that matter to them.
And then she asked people to tell their own story of that, to
(33:07):
tell, you know, what strengths have you developed from
continuing with depression? What goodness have you developed
from that? And people, when you ask people
questions like this and they stop and they think about it and
they have that space to reflect a little bit, they'll tell you
absolutely beautiful things thatcompletely inverts.
I think of it as an inversion that kind of inverts the meaning
of the identity. And Christina, then, what she
(33:30):
found is that that actually increased people who'd
experienced depression, their confidence that they could
accomplish big goals in their lives and the progress that they
made in working towards personalgoals over several weeks.
So people were more likely to say they made progress on
cutting back on social media useor on exercising regularly or
getting prepared for a job interview or, you know, working
(33:51):
regularly in a school setting orworking on a particularly
important relationship once they'd found strength in that
experience of depression. Yeah.
At the time that we're recordingthis, we're in like a very
interesting period with educations and intervention and
DEI and different initiatives that have been put in place to
support these populations and people that might not feel that
(34:13):
sense of belonging or might be more susceptible to these
challenges when navigating the academic space.
Regardless of like policy or howthings are changing, what do you
hope for in these classrooms in high schools and colleges?
What do you think would best equip students, set them up for
success? If you could wave a magic wand
and have an intervention like large scale.
(34:34):
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the
things that's been really unfortunate is that people have
kind of treated belonging as a kind of 0 sum game and as though
if one group belongs, another group doesn't.
And that does not have to be thecase.
And that's not actually how people work really in the end.
Like in the end, we'll all belong more.
(34:56):
If everybody can belong more, that can be a healthier
environment. So if you think about like a
family environment or a neighborhood environment or a
classroom or school environment,if everybody in that space is
feeling good about their membership in that space, it's
easier to feel that you too are belonging in that environment.
You know, I think that in the like the political dynamic, like
(35:17):
you can understand, you can readthe November election and you
can read a lot of the Trump administration policies as an
expression of feelings of non belonging within, for example,
higher education contexts. And when people feel like they
don't belong, often they do things that can become really
(35:38):
hurtful for other people's belonging, right?
And you get this kind of reverberation, this kind of
action reaction. So my, if I was to be able to
wave a magic wand, I would want to support everybody in those
feelings of belonging. To make college environments
spaces where people from all backgrounds and really all
backgrounds really do feel they belong and are valued and
(36:01):
contribute and can be heard and can be seen and can hear and see
that diversity of people who's in that space.
From the social science perspective, in addition to
this, like one side of the coin being not feeling like you
belong, but the people that are promoting and pushing that lack
of belonging almost. And I think everyone has been in
(36:23):
that context at some point because we have endless in Group
out group biases. Why do you think we like is an
evolutionary thing? Like why are we so 0 sum with
belonging when we know? Like you said in lived
experiences, when everyone belongs it's easier to feel
accepted and understood. Yeah, I mean, you know, it I I
think that we have not had the kinds of communication spaces
(36:46):
that allow people to really talkabout their experiences and
authentic ways. Like the conversation I
described at Berlin was like a very real authentic conversation
where we kind of achieved commonground.
And I think that the way our society has developed with
separate kind of media spheres, with, you know, political
segregation in neighborhoods andin jobs and in educational
(37:09):
spaces has not facilitated thosekinds of conversations in the
way that we would need to to actually kind of get to together
in this place. Then when people feel excluded
and they feel non belonging, sometimes people do terrible,
crazy, hurtful things that are hurtful for themselves and
others that undermines belonging.
(37:29):
Yeah, it's very challenging. You mentioned a couple of
anecdotes from your book, but ifpeople want to get the book,
learn more about the conversations that you had, the
research you've been doing, where can people follow along
with both of those things? Yeah, of course they can.
The books available anywhere youcan buy books.
It's called Ordinary Magic, and if you have a tale of ordinary
(37:50):
magic, I would love to hear it. Amazing.
We'll put a link to the show notes, both for the book and
where people can submit their tales.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I know this is going to help so many people in college.
Hopefully like a little mini intervention, understanding that
it's challenging and possible, and having mentors is so
important and crucial in that process.
I'm just really grateful for youtaking the time.
(38:11):
Great. Thank you very much, Sadie.
If you enjoyed this episode, if she persisted, make sure to
leave a review, subscribe and share with a friend or family
member. Follow along at at She Persist,
a podcast on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and more for bonus
content. Thanks for listening and keep
persisting.
Welcome to Sheep Assisted, the Gen.
Z mental health podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton.
Let's get into it. People come to college at least
in part because they see that space as a space that can help
them become the kind of adult that they want to be, to have
the kind of impact that they want to have on the world, to
explore the kinds of questions that they want to explore and do
what they want to do. And so to belong within the
(00:22):
college environment is to belongto that journey, to that process
of becoming. And that's really foundational
for mental health and mental well-being.
Like that's you becoming the right kind of person for you.
Hello. Hello you guys, and welcome back
to Sheep Persisted. I am so excited you're here
today. We have a really incredible
episode. We have Greg Walton on the show.
(00:43):
He's the Michael Foreman University Fellow and professor
of psychology at Stanford University.
His research looks at psychological processes
contributing to major social problems and how wise
psychological interventions thattarget these processes can
address such problems and help people flourish over long
periods of time. He's also the author of a book
that just came out called Ordinary Magic, The science of
(01:04):
how we can Achieve big change with Small acts.
The link to that will be in the show notes.
This is just such an incredible conversation, an one that I've
been looking forward to for a long time.
You guys have heard me talk about the Tanford study that
targeted belonging and priming for adversity in College in so
many episodes. It's something I heard about in
(01:24):
my positive psychology class andit's just stuck with me.
And this is his research. And so it was just such a full
circle, incredible moment to getto talk to him about his work,
how important it is to have a sense of belonging, how we can
improve mental health in college.
What Gen. Z is struggling with, how
interventions can be applied on a large scale to address these
(01:44):
types of challenges. We talk about biases and
overcoming biases, how the way that we mentally navigate
situations and attribute things has such a huge impact on their
outcome. And so I'm so grateful to Doctor
Walton for joining me on the podcast.
And without further ado, let's dive in.
Thank you so much for joining metoday on Cheaper Assistant.
I'm so incredibly excited to have you on the show.
(02:06):
And I think this conversation isgoing to have so much value for
young adults and also the communities that support them,
teachers and parents. So thank you for joining me.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Of course. So to get started, I'd love to
get into your background, how you came into this area of
psychology, focusing on interventions and this
particular demographic because it's definitely a more unique
(02:27):
area. And so I'd love to get your
background and how you decided to specialize in this area of
research. Yeah, I mean, I was a high
school student and I was part ofa student group that went into
middle school classrooms and LEDrole-playing exercises and games
and things around inequality andidentities and things like race
and class and gender. And it was in the in the context
(02:49):
of that, this was this was in the 1990s that I read some of
the first research about stereotype threat.
And at the time, you know, I waslearning in history class about
the persistence of racial inequality in American education
that there been this thing called the Great Society program
in the 60s. And there's this big federal
investment in increasing supportfor lower income students and
(03:12):
for racial and ethnic minority students and the whole civil
rights movement and desegregation.
And yet you saw that racial inequalities and in math and
science, gender inequalities hadreally maintained and they
hadn't hadn't reduced over time.So it felt like a very dark
time. It felt very discouraging at
that time to think about those problems.
(03:33):
And then along came this work bymy now colleague Claude Steele,
who showed that you could just change how you represented a
test in a laboratory setting. And you could see inequalities
between men and women in a math context or between black and
white students in a in an intellectual reasoning context
appear or disappear. And it was like magic.
I thought, that's incredible. Like, how is that possible?
(03:55):
How does that work? And what can we learn from that?
How could we take that to the real world to make the real
world more like the psychologically safe conditions
and less like the psychologically threatening
conditions that produces inequalities?
It seemed to me like, you know, I grew up as a middle class kid
in a, in a stable household. I'm, you know, I'm a white man.
(04:16):
And it just felt profoundly unfair that the American dream
was not a reality for so many people, that there was this
persistent inequality. It just felt profoundly wrong
and that we needed to find some some way to approach that
problem and solve it. And I'm curious, you talked
about this like magical way thatwe were able to shift outcomes
(04:38):
based on the way that the information was presented and if
people took Indro to psych classes.
Claude Steel's work is so interesting.
You probably got an overview, But for people who haven't read
those studies or aren't aware ofhow those conditions shifted
such meaningful outcomes, can you give us a little overview of
how powerful that messaging is? Yeah.
So Claude and his collaborators at the time was thinking about
(05:00):
the idea that when you walk intoa setting and there's a
stereotype about your group and you're trying to perform in that
environment, you're kind of laboring in the context of that
stereotype. That if you're a woman going in
to take a really difficult math test and there's all these
people, maybe these men looking at you and thinking you're going
to be like the dumb girl, then it creates this extra pressure.
(05:23):
It creates this feeling that if you were to do badly, it would
take the risk of confirming thatmaybe these people will think
the stereotype is true, that girls can't do math.
And if you value math, if that'ssomething that's important to
you, if you want to be an engineer or a doctor or anything
else, then that's really upsetting.
It's really disruptive and it's cognitively disruptive and it
makes it harder to perform well,especially when you're trying to
(05:43):
do something difficult. So what Todd Steele did was to
bring people in and have them take a like a GRE test.
And in one case, he said, this test is evaluative of your
intellectual reasoning abilities.
It will assess the strengths andweaknesses of your verbal
reasoning ability. And in that condition, black
students, for example, did much worse than white students on the
(06:05):
test. But then in a second condition,
he said, We're cognitive psychologists.
We're interested in how people solve really hard verbal
puzzles. This is not evaluative of
anything, but we want to learn how people solve puzzles.
So please try your best. And black students performance
sword and they actually do a little bit better than white
students in the in that case. And so the way that I understand
(06:25):
that is that that first condition where it's evaluative,
it puts a question on the table.The situation puts a question on
the table. And the question is, will people
think people like me are dumb ifI don't do well?
Will I confirm a stereotype in their eyes?
Will I let down my whole group? And that's really disruptive.
It's upsetting and it produces its consequence.
It produces almost a self fulfilling consequence.
(06:48):
I think what's really challenging about these biases
and these like in Group out group biases is that we aren't
even necessarily aware that they're taking place or what
groups were attached to. And I think people hearing that
they're like, well, I've never walked into a classroom and been
told that this test I'm taking is representative of my grade or
my school or my gender or whatever kind of in Group you're
(07:11):
assigned to. Can you kind of explain to us
how these pressures show up in these day-to-day contexts, even
if we're not explicitly primed to say this is evaluating this
dynamic? I mean, actually, like part of
what's hard about this dynamic is that it's covert, right?
It's not like anybody's walking around saying, I think you're,
you know, dumb because you're anex or something.
(07:32):
Yeah, Yeah, Excuse. It's this suspicion.
It's this fear. It's a question, right.
So they like the analog, like one, one way to think about
threat is like physical threat. Like you're, you're walking
through a forest and you know that there's a bear there, that
bears might live there. You don't know if there's a bear
right there then, right? You don't know if that bear
might have malicious intentions towards you, but it there could
(07:53):
be a bear and that preoccupies you.
You never know when you can put that to rest because you never
know when it's actually present.So you're, you know, walking
into a space and you're aware maybe in the back of your mind,
maybe not explicitly that there might be a negative stereotype
in that space and you're contending with that.
One of the things that's interesting about stereotype
threat is that, like in the original research, Claude talked
(08:17):
a lot about how people are experiencing a threat in the
air. And it seemed like from that
representation that people wouldbe acutely aware of the
stereotype as they're engaging with it.
But actually, if you look closely, this is work by my
colleague Christine Logel at theUniversity of Waterloo, if you
look closely at women in math context, for example, gender
stereotypes are less accessible to them while they're taking a
(08:40):
test under stereotype threat. So words like irrational or
illogical, they're slower to identify those words while
they're taking a math exam understereotype threat.
And then after the exam is over,those words rebound an
awareness, kind of like you're trying to suppress a thought and
then it it it pops back up. But that pattern itself is
(09:02):
actually taking up mental resources.
So the more that people are suppressing those thoughts, that
is the slower they are to detectwords like irrational, the worse
that they're doing on the test, for example.
Because you mentioned gender andtest performance, I'm really
curious your thought on almost like this like pendulum effect
we're seeing with kids now in school where previously we saw
(09:25):
this achievement gap with girls,more resources were directed
there, and now we see that boys are falling behind academically
in this traditional classroom setting.
What are your your thoughts as it applies to this?
Is there now that new stereotypethreat?
Are girls more comfortable in this context?
It's there still that original? What are your thoughts there?
The dynamics with, you know, thestereotype threat is a dynamic
(09:47):
about walking into a situation where there's a negative
stereotyping and girls do you know well in school in general
and better than boys. The the research on the
stereotype throughout was alwaysabout math and science and, and
very kind of elite and selectivekinds of math and science
context where you're really demanding and you're really
being pushed. And there's this stereotype that
like the geniuses are the boys and the men and the girls.
(10:09):
Maybe they work hard, but they're not such they're not
such geniuses. And that's the stereotype that
really advantages girls and women.
You know, I think boys contend with a lot of other issues and a
lot of those are psychological too.
So, for example, we've done a lot of research on classroom
conflict situations, disciplinary encounters, on
interventions that help support trust between teachers and
(10:31):
students, that can address questions like, will I be seen
as a troublemaker, or is this student a troublemaker off the
table? And those can be particularly
beneficial for boys. You you mentioned wise
interventions and this framework.
You creative people aren't familiar with how these
interventions work to address belonging and impact achievement
rates of like punishment in classrooms, as you mentioned.
(10:54):
How did you come across these interventions, develop them, the
outcomes associated, all the things?
So the research on stereotype threat was, was really inspiring
to me, but it was also just in the lab, right?
It was just this dynamic in the laboratory setting.
And I wanted to know, like, whatis this?
What does this mean for the realworld?
When students are going out and they're, you know, introducing
(11:15):
themselves to a new teacher, they're meeting new classmates,
they're trying to take a test, they're trying to study for
something. And as I thought about it, I
thought about how focusing now on on students of color, how,
you know, so much of education has this deep history of
exclusion and race based exclusion.
And you know, there's stereotypes that say that
(11:36):
students of color are less smartthan others, that they're less
able than others, that they don't deserve higher education
opportunities, for example. And so then, for example, if
you're a black student going to predominantly white college then
and you look around, most of thepeople there aren't black, Some
people there seem to believe youdon't deserve to be there.
That creates a a much broader kind of threat than the narrow
(11:58):
threat of stereotype threat. It creates a a worry about
belonging. And in this case, the situation
is posing the question, do people like me belong in this
environment? And if people are asking that
question, like imagine you're going to college and you're
asking that question and then you take a first Test and you
don't do very well on that test.And you try to get in a student
group and the student group doesn't want you.
(12:19):
You come home on a Thursday night and find out that
everybody went out to something and they didn't bother to
include you in that event. Maybe you have all that happen
in one week. Like that might accumulate to
start to make it feel like maybeI don't belong here.
Maybe people like me don't belong in this environment.
And if you start to draw that inference, then it's going to be
(12:40):
harder to re engage with the people in that world to go, you
know, join a different student organization to go talk to your
professor about what went wrong on that first Test, to have a
conversation with a peer. And ultimately, that erodes the
kind of relationships that anybody needs to succeed in a
college environment. So wise interventions are
(13:01):
interventions that are sensitiveto dynamics like this.
They're sensitive to how people are making a sense of themselves
and social situations, and in particular to the kinds of
questions and doubts that come up as we navigate the world.
So in this case, what they do, what an intervention does is it
offers people a different way tounderstand those experiences, a
(13:22):
way of understanding these experiences that says this can
happen, this is normal, it can happen to everybody, and it can
get better with time. So it, the technology is
actually very simple. It's about storytelling and
story sharing. It's about sharing stories from
other students that talk about transitions and, you know,
acknowledge the the pride and the enthusiasm people have, For
(13:45):
example, to go to college, how exciting that is to move away
from home, to go to a new place,to join a new community.
But don't whitewash it. Also talk about how that's a big
transition. And there's going to be times
you feel homesick. You might miss California.
I missed Michigan when I came toCalifornia.
Do you miss? The weather or other things?
I did miss the weather. Yeah, it's not the weather.
(14:06):
I do love California. But when I came to Stanford, my
first year at Stanford, I was coming back.
It was my first quarter. I was coming back from class,
going home to the dorm at lunchtime, and there was this in
and out truck that had pulled up.
And in and out does not exist inMichigan, right?
There's all this whole line of students, like my classmates
(14:27):
lined up to get in and out. And I felt so excluded.
I was like, like, who are these people?
Like I'm not standing in line for a burger.
Like then I go they. Only have three things on the
menu like this is. Like a frigging mystery.
Like what is this? So I go back to the dining hall
and I eat by myself. And, you know, I think that if I
(14:50):
had had the awareness that everybody is coming to a new
place, everybody's kind of far from home, even if you're from,
you know, just down the road, even the people from Southern
California who somehow kind of were the a cute example in my
mind. I could have gotten in line,
right? I could have asked Someone Like
You and said, what's in and out?Like, why do you like in and
out? What is animal style?
(15:10):
I might have made a friend, right?
It would have been a much betterexperience.
And that that kind of illustrates the way that the
belonging intervention works. So like hearing stories,
learning from other people that worries about belonging are
normal, that it can get better with time that everybody's going
through that transition. Not kind of overreacting or or
reacting in a really global way when when something goes wrong.
(15:32):
Helps you stay the course and helps you build relationships
and helps you find the kinds of communities that you need to
succeed in a new environment. We read the study that you did
about this intervention or college freshman in my positive
psychology class, and it's one of those ones that just like
sticks with you because of what a profound impact it has on
outcomes even beyond college. Can you speak to some of those
(15:54):
things that happen when we tell people this will be hard and
other people are experiencing this and you can get through it?
Yeah. So what's really interesting and
important about the belonging intervention in particular is
how it illustrates what I call spirals, both downward spirals,
but also upward spirals. So imagine you don't have the
belonging intervention. Imagine you're a first
(16:17):
generation college student or you're a student of color and
you have something difficult happen early on, like not a big
thing necessarily, but you feel homesick.
You can't find your favorite foods.
You can't find some place that will cut your hair properly.
Maybe you don't, you know, you haven't made a friend yet, or
maybe you've made a lot of friends, but they're all shallow
(16:39):
and, and, and not really real yet.
Then if you're worried about theidea that maybe people like me
can't belong here, then it what that does is it makes it harder
to engage and harder to actuallybuild those relationships.
And you might persist in that space, You might continue in
that space, you might not. You might end up feeling like
you don't belong and leave, or you might persist and kind of
(17:01):
carry through but not ultimatelybuild the kinds of relationships
that you really need in the Belonging intervention.
What happens is you share these stories that it's normal to
worry at first about whether youbelong.
It can get better with time. And students still have the same
kinds of difficulties, like theystill experience exclusions,
they still experience homesickness.
(17:21):
They still sometimes get a bad early grade, but no longer do
those events mean to them I don't belong here in general or
people like me don't belong herein general.
And that helps people stay more engaged, like to study more
literally, to study more hours per night, to go to office hours
more with professors, to meet with peers in study groups, to
(17:42):
ask questions in class. And those behaviors then have a
consequence that goes out of that psychological system.
It's not just that people are feeling better.
It's that people are actually making relationships.
Like people are developing friendships.
They're more likely to develop close mentor relationships.
And in the end, that undergirds higher achievement or even years
(18:02):
into the future and greater success as people transition out
of college into the adult world.So in the original study, which
was done at a selective university in the Northeast, we
found that African American adults who got the belonging
intervention in their first yearof college report about 10 years
later, be more satisfied in their lives, more successful in
(18:22):
their careers. They're more likely to have
taken on leadership positions intheir community.
And the reason why they're able to do that is because they're
reporting, it seems that they'remore likely to develop strong
mentor relationships in college and relationships that persisted
after college that gave them thekind of guidance and structure
that helped them move into the spaces that mattered for them as
(18:44):
young adults. Can you speak a bit to that
mentor value? Because I think it's a something
that is now being promoted more to high schoolers.
And I'm ATA for Grit lab and this week we talked about
mentoring. So I'm guys like here's how I
got my mentors. Here's how it's helpful to
structure that relationship. I promise it's so important.
And when you ask like who are your mentors, a lot of them said
(19:05):
like a parent or maybe an aunt or an uncle.
Truly having these external figures and support systems,
especially in the college context like you mentioned, can
have such a profound impact on outcomes.
Sometimes there's like mentor programs where people are kind
of assigned mentors. I don't that that can be
helpful, but I don't think it works as well as kind of bottom
up authentic relationships that come from the student themselves
(19:26):
that really match who they are and who it is who they want to
become. So in the Belonging
intervention, if you like, one of the stories that a student
told us at one point was that hehad decided that he wanted to
become an engineer, and yet he had failed in an introductory
calculus course. And so he went to his professor
(19:49):
and he said, professor, like, I'd like to become an engineer.
And the professor said, well, you got to get your act together
when it comes to math because engineering requires a lot of
math. And he had the confidence at
that point then to go out and buy like a high school calculus
textbook to review the the foundations that he needed to
(20:10):
review. And he continued to reach out to
that professor. And he told us in one of our
surveys that he actually met with this professor on a weekly
basis. And the professor helped him
secure that foundational knowledge in math and he saw his
marks, his grades go up week by week, you know, problem set by
(20:31):
problem set get a little bit better.
And in the end, that professor who was I think an emeritus
professor by the time he retired, an older person, he
became a, a strong mentor and advocate for him and helped him
as he as he got his first job asan engineer after leaving
college. And so that like kind of dynamic
can happen when a student says, here's the kind of person I'd
(20:54):
like to become. And the professor or whoever it
is says, I can see that I can value that and I can, I can help
you in your growth towards becoming that person.
It's very authentic. It's not networking in that kind
of shallow way. It's, it's very authentic.
It's very real. And it's very much about kind of
envisioning the person that a young person can become, having
(21:15):
the young person envision that, having the older person envision
and that having a shared vision about that and then problem
solving along that path to achieve that vision.
It's no surprise that Gen. Z is struggling in a lot of
ways. There's a lot of really great
strengths that we experience. I think the vulnerability is
absolutely unparalleled. I think there's so much ambition
(21:35):
and so much belief that we can make change, but we're also
struggling a lot with mental health and a lot of concerns and
red flags that are being raised by different people having this
conversation. Anytime I have a researcher on
the podcast and especially 1 that's worked in interventions
targeted in these kinds of areasand demographics, I love to kind
of get your thoughts on what youthink is a big pinpoint or a big
(21:56):
point that we could be directingsupport and resources towards.
And obviously, lots of competingopinions here, whether it's more
phones or mentor relationships, scaffolding, all these kinds of
things. What are your thoughts on this
like crisis that's been labeled?Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of
thoughts. I mean, I think one thing to say
is about it's just to stay with belonging for a second.
Like belonging is in it's sort of most important form within
(22:19):
college. It's about belonging within that
kind of achievement related space.
It's not just about having friendships or being with other
people. It's about really being able to
belong within that community. Like, I think that it's very
healthy for people and very important for people to like
they are parts of communities inwhich they are learning and
(22:42):
growing and becoming towards thekind of person that they want to
be. And I think that's part of why
belonging in college is so important.
Like, people come to college, atleast in part because they see
that space as a space that can help them become the kind of
adult that they want to be, to have the kind of impact that
they want to have on the world, to explore the kinds of
questions that they want to explore and do what they want to
(23:03):
do. And so to belong within the
college environment is to belongto that journey, to that process
of becoming. And that's like really
foundational for mental health and mental well-being like that.
That's you becoming the right kind of person for you.
And it's also why exclusion in the college environment or
loneliness or disrespect, not feeling fully a part of it,
(23:25):
feeling adrift can be so damaging.
There is research sort of directly looking at the
consequences of the belonging intervention itself on both
physical health and on mental health, including reduced rates
of depression. So when people experience the
belonging intervention and they recognize worries about
belonging as normal, as improving with time, then people
report years later being happierin their lives, they're less
(23:49):
likely to meet clinical criteriafor depression and they actually
are going to the doctor blast. So they're they're actually
healthier. There's a couple of other things
that I think are really important.
So a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to be the
faculty member in residence at Stanford's program in Berlin.
And so we were, you know, it wasa, a group of new Stanford
(24:10):
undergraduates having their study abroad experience.
And we were at this welcome dinner, and I sat next to a
woman who I hadn't met before, aStanford student.
And so I'd asked her about her life, and she said that she was
a very competitive gymnast in high school.
And then she blew her knee out. And then COVID happened and she
just said it in like this very direct and honest way that
(24:32):
allowed me to be very direct andhonest back to her.
So I just said the thought that came to my mind.
I said, well, did that make you depressed?
And she said absolutely. I was already seen a therapist,
but for sure. And what was beautiful about
that conversation and what it kind of represented to me, part
of the strength of young people today is the ability to really
(24:53):
surface these circumstances, andI use that word intentionally
and put them on the table as kind of common ground amongst
others. So she was very direct and
honest. And then I could be directing on
us back to her. And then we could see together
like, yeah, like, you're 18, you're 1718 years old.
You love to be a gymnast now. You can't be a gymnast now.
(25:14):
You can't see a friends. Like, would that make a person
depressed? It probably would, right?
Like, that would be that would be the situation.
And when we can talk about it that way, she knows that I'm not
judging her. I know that, you know, I'm not
in fact judging her. But we're both recognizing this,
this challenge that she's confronted with in her life
life, and then it becomes a lot easier to handle the challenge
(25:36):
rather than being defensive about it or pretending that
there's not a problem there. Do you think that surfacing
those challenges and creating space for those conversations on
like a peer-to-peer level can have that similar effectiveness
or it's crucial to have that like mentorship?
I've been through this before, Dynamic.
I think, I think that it's healthy for everybody, like so
(25:56):
definitely with peers. And it's part of, I think a
structural challenge within the mental health business that is
like the mental health business is predicated on a diagnostic
clinical interview that ostensibly diagnosis you as
having something distinctly wrong with you in order to get
treatment right. This is the business model,
(26:18):
right? And it's very different from a
kind of social psychological perspective where you say, like,
what's the situation the person is in?
Like, would that situation create a dynamic like
depression? Like, yeah, like it would.
And from that, if you really have that perspective, it's not
even a vulnerable conversation. Like it's just like this is the
circumstance. This is the reality.
(26:40):
Like 1-1 would be like that. There's nothing to be vulnerable
about about at all. And so I think part of the
challenge with mental health is that we kind of put people
through a process, like a process that involves the
clinical diagnosis, like the diagnostic interview, like the
billing process that is predicated on defining them as
(27:00):
having something wrong with them, even when that's not what
anybody believes that whole system kind of is conveying.
You can't submit it for insurance without a diagnostic
code. Exactly right.
And the diagnostic code says that there's something distinct
about you. And and that's like starting on
the back foot. Like, I think there's a reason
the Barbie movie was such a hit.Like, you know, everybody wants
(27:21):
to feel like they're enough, like they're OK.
But this is a process in which we're starting people off, you
know, in contending with a problem by saying that there's
something distinctly wrong with them.
And how do you like walk that clear line of like that
validation of like this is really challenging and it makes
sense that you're going through this really difficult experience
and this is painful. And also it's not wrong because
(27:44):
we'll experiences these contextsdifferently.
And like you said, we compare. And how do you kind of bounce
those two things at the same time?
Yeah, I, I think sometimes there's a kind of magic like in
in a dialogue, in a conversation.
Like in that conversation, she and I were just kind of like, we
were fully together. We understood it fully together.
And I think understanding like so in the, in my book, Ordinary
(28:08):
Magic, I refer to a lot of picture books because I think
there's a lot of wisdom in picture books.
And one of them is 1 morning in Maine.
And in one morning in Maine, thelittle girl, Sal, it begins with
her saying, Mama, Mama, I lost my tooth.
I'm not gonna be able to have mythe great day I envisioned and
go to Bucks Harbor with Daddy. Yeah.
(28:28):
And her mother says, oh, when you lose a tooth, that's when
you become a big girl. And the whole first half of the
book is, is Sal kind of trying out that idea?
So she says to her mother, did you lose your teeth when you
were little? And the mother says, yes, that's
how I got these nice, big, beautiful teeth now.
And and then Sal goes out and she inquires whether the seal
(28:51):
loses its teeth, whether the bird loses its teeth.
And she, you know, learns yes and no.
And she gets to her father, who's digging clams on the
beach. And she asks him and his, her
father says, yeah, it's when youlose your teeth that you become
a big girl. And so they're they're offering
that whole dynamic is offering this person a new way, a non
pejorative way to understand hercircumstance that losing a tooth
(29:14):
doesn't have to be a catastrophe.
And I think similarly, like we should be like that in mental
health situations. So like, yeah, would a person
feel depressed in a circumstancelike that?
Absolutely. Like does it mean that there's
something wrong with a person? No, they're a normal person,
right? That's the situation they're in.
Like, how do we contend with that?
How do we work with that? That was just such like a
(29:35):
forgotten memory experience where you're describing it.
And I'm like, I remember the images and she, like, falls on a
rock. Like I have not thought about
that, Yeah. She slips, she tries to you're
in to see the seal close and then she slips.
She's like. She's like all distressed.
It's like a whole, like the conflict of the story.
I completely forgot about that. Speaking of your new book, you
had a quote when I was recentingfor the episode, which I thought
(29:56):
was just so interesting and fascinating, where you said
maybe the fact that we're feeling the pain of dealing with
ambiguity right now, that were actually doing the thing we came
here to do and heading in a new and interesting direction and
that like. That's not my quote.
Really. No, no, that's, that's a quote,
that's a quote from. So people have started to share
(30:18):
with me what I think of as thesetales of ordinary magic.
And so that came from a former student who shared that
experience with me. So she she was describing how
she had felt kind of trapped in a previous career, like it was
kind of too structured. So she was looking for something
more open-ended, more, more morebroad.
(30:39):
And then she'd gotten into this and was participating in this
program. And then she felt adrift and
like she didn't have direction. And she was kind of re
understanding that adriftness asmaybe what it was that she
wanted that was actually freeingfor her.
So it's that kind of mental shift that is a a kind of tale
of ordinary magic in in her case, yeah.
Those like mental shifts, these attributions like the reframes,
(31:01):
whether it's like it's not something wrong with you or it's
not a failure, but it's challenging makes sense in this
context or this is going to be hard, but it is possible.
These kind of ways that we look at situations differently.
Are there any other of those like magical ways that we can
reframe things? These really powerful ways of
shifting perspective that are really relevant and common to
(31:23):
what you found within this like college age population, high
schoolers, these challenges thatso many people go through it.
But again, we're not necessarilymaybe surfacing these
conversations and like widely discussing how we can reframe
them. Yeah.
I mean, let's stay with the mental health theme.
So another example of this is the ways that we have identities
often and they can be mental health identities that are often
(31:44):
cast us as kind of weak or deficient or problematic in some
form. And often these.
So something like mental health,like having contended with a
mental health problem, often might be very challenging,
right? It might be very difficult.
But our narratives about mental health challenges are also often
kind of 1 dimensionally negative.
(32:06):
They only talk about the negative.
So one of my collaborators, a woman named Christina Bauer, has
developed a technique called a kind of identity inversion
intervention. So what you do in this technique
is you ask people to think aboutidentities they have that are
often seen as sources of weakness or deficiency.
(32:26):
And you say even though this might often be something that's
difficult to deal with, this identity might also be a source
of strength and agency and goodness.
How have you found strength or agency or goodness in this
identity? In one of the cases, she did
this work with people with experiences with depression.
(32:46):
So she gave people who had experienced depression stories
from other people who talked about the strengths and the
agency and the goodness that they had developed in contending
with depression and how they usethose strengths and agency and
goodness to work toward goals that matter to them.
And then she asked people to tell their own story of that, to
(33:07):
tell, you know, what strengths have you developed from
continuing with depression? What goodness have you developed
from that? And people, when you ask people
questions like this and they stop and they think about it and
they have that space to reflect a little bit, they'll tell you
absolutely beautiful things thatcompletely inverts.
I think of it as an inversion that kind of inverts the meaning
of the identity. And Christina, then, what she
(33:30):
found is that that actually increased people who'd
experienced depression, their confidence that they could
accomplish big goals in their lives and the progress that they
made in working towards personalgoals over several weeks.
So people were more likely to say they made progress on
cutting back on social media useor on exercising regularly or
getting prepared for a job interview or, you know, working
(33:51):
regularly in a school setting orworking on a particularly
important relationship once they'd found strength in that
experience of depression. Yeah.
At the time that we're recordingthis, we're in like a very
interesting period with educations and intervention and
DEI and different initiatives that have been put in place to
support these populations and people that might not feel that
(34:13):
sense of belonging or might be more susceptible to these
challenges when navigating the academic space.
Regardless of like policy or howthings are changing, what do you
hope for in these classrooms in high schools and colleges?
What do you think would best equip students, set them up for
success? If you could wave a magic wand
and have an intervention like large scale.
(34:34):
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the
things that's been really unfortunate is that people have
kind of treated belonging as a kind of 0 sum game and as though
if one group belongs, another group doesn't.
And that does not have to be thecase.
And that's not actually how people work really in the end.
Like in the end, we'll all belong more.
(34:56):
If everybody can belong more, that can be a healthier
environment. So if you think about like a
family environment or a neighborhood environment or a
classroom or school environment,if everybody in that space is
feeling good about their membership in that space, it's
easier to feel that you too are belonging in that environment.
You know, I think that in the like the political dynamic, like
(35:17):
you can understand, you can readthe November election and you
can read a lot of the Trump administration policies as an
expression of feelings of non belonging within, for example,
higher education contexts. And when people feel like they
don't belong, often they do things that can become really
(35:38):
hurtful for other people's belonging, right?
And you get this kind of reverberation, this kind of
action reaction. So my, if I was to be able to
wave a magic wand, I would want to support everybody in those
feelings of belonging. To make college environments
spaces where people from all backgrounds and really all
backgrounds really do feel they belong and are valued and
(36:01):
contribute and can be heard and can be seen and can hear and see
that diversity of people who's in that space.
From the social science perspective, in addition to
this, like one side of the coin being not feeling like you
belong, but the people that are promoting and pushing that lack
of belonging almost. And I think everyone has been in
(36:23):
that context at some point because we have endless in Group
out group biases. Why do you think we like is an
evolutionary thing? Like why are we so 0 sum with
belonging when we know? Like you said in lived
experiences, when everyone belongs it's easier to feel
accepted and understood. Yeah, I mean, you know, it I I
think that we have not had the kinds of communication spaces
(36:46):
that allow people to really talkabout their experiences and
authentic ways. Like the conversation I
described at Berlin was like a very real authentic conversation
where we kind of achieved commonground.
And I think that the way our society has developed with
separate kind of media spheres, with, you know, political
segregation in neighborhoods andin jobs and in educational
(37:09):
spaces has not facilitated thosekinds of conversations in the
way that we would need to to actually kind of get to together
in this place. Then when people feel excluded
and they feel non belonging, sometimes people do terrible,
crazy, hurtful things that are hurtful for themselves and
others that undermines belonging.
(37:29):
Yeah, it's very challenging. You mentioned a couple of
anecdotes from your book, but ifpeople want to get the book,
learn more about the conversations that you had, the
research you've been doing, where can people follow along
with both of those things? Yeah, of course they can.
The books available anywhere youcan buy books.
It's called Ordinary Magic, and if you have a tale of ordinary
(37:50):
magic, I would love to hear it. Amazing.
We'll put a link to the show notes, both for the book and
where people can submit their tales.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I know this is going to help so many people in college.
Hopefully like a little mini intervention, understanding that
it's challenging and possible, and having mentors is so
important and crucial in that process.
I'm just really grateful for youtaking the time.
(38:11):
Great. Thank you very much, Sadie.
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