The Power of “Small” Interventions to Cause Big Change
Greg Walton on social psychology’s potential to address big challenges using “wise interventions”
Policy wonks have long believed that if you build the right system - a school, a hospital, a job program - good outcomes will follow. The goal has been to expand access to resources, markets, and institutions. The mind, for the most part, was left out of the model.
Behavioural economics tried to correct this, and over the past two decades, it has crept into the policy mainstream. But the version that took hold was narrow: an ever-growing catalogue of cognitive biases and the nudges designed to correct them. The result is a behavioural policy agenda that often treats people less as agents than as problems to be managed- subtly, silently, from above.
There is another tradition. For over twenty years, Greg Walton, a psychologist at Stanford, has explored how people interpret the world and their place in it. His work focuses not on error but on meaning- the beliefs people hold about themselves, their belonging, and their ability to grow. These shape whether a student studies, a worker speaks up, or a parent seeks help.
Walton’s field experiments have shown that short, well-crafted interventions can lead to long-term gains in achievement, well-being, and life outcomes. These “wise interventions” are now being used across education, health, and development- offering a more humane and more potent vision for applied psychology.
We spoke with him about his new book, Ordinary Magic, which was released on March 25th.
What drew you to psychology as a tool for addressing social challenges?
In high school US history classes, I remember feeling discouraged by the persistence of racial, ethnic, and social class inequalities. It seemed built into the system, a violation of the American Dream. But then I learned about Claude Steele’s research on “stereotype threat,” which showed that you could reduce inequalities in academic performance, at least in the lab, just by changing how an exam was framed.
For example, telling people you’re giving them “a test of your intellectual abilities” can result in large disparities by social identity – because that framing provokes questions that get in the way of performing: “If I do badly, will people take it as proof of negative stereotypes about my group?” But describing the exact same task as “a puzzle-solving exercise” reduced group disparities. Then those worries never come to mind. Then people are free to perform well.
I found that research both fascinating and tantalizing. Could we make the real world more like the “puzzle-solving” condition? Would that free people to succeed?
What are examples of psychological processes reinforcing inequality, and how do wise interventions address these challenges?
Broadly, wise interventions are about “construal” – or how we make sense of ourselves and others in social situations. In daily life we often encounter situations that raise icky questions. It’s not just an evaluative test. It’s also walking into a school where your group hasn’t historically belonged – maybe you’re a first-generation college student – and wondering, “Do I belong here? Will I be respected and supported?”
These questions are most pointed when students face negative stereotypes or underrepresentation: they’re reasonable questions, given the situation you’re in. But the problem is, they easily become self-confirming. When you’re asking a question like, “Can people like me belong here?” it can seem like every challenge – every feeling of homesickness, every rude professor, every disappointing grade – might mean that maybe you don’t belong. That makes people hold back, to study less, to withdraw socially, to avoid professors. And then, if you do that, with time, you really don’t belong.
These questions are often invisible to more advantaged people. It’s a form of privilege not to ask yourself these questions.
Wise interventions are wise to these implicit, pejorative, and potentially self-confirming questions. By offering more useful answers, the exercises create the right space so people can see questions like this clearly, develop good answers to them so they can set them aside, and then move forward.
Much of this work stems from your 2007 paper on belonging. Can you explain that study?
The original intervention involved an hour-long, one-on-one exercise with first-year African-American students at a selective, predominantly white institution. They read stories from older students of all racial backgrounds, describing their initial worries about belonging during the transition to college and how this got better with time. Then the participating students wrote about their own experiences, why they thought worries about belonging were normal when students go to college, and how this can get better with time. They also recorded a speech giving advice about belonging to future students. This approach offers students an adaptive way to think about belonging – that it’s normal to worry at first, and that it can get better. Then students can try that idea on for themselves, to think about their experiences in that light, to see if it’s right for them, and to advocate for this way of thinking to others.
Tracking students over the next week, we found Black students in the control group (who did a similar activity but not one about belonging) were more likely to respond to having a bad day with feeling like they didn't belong. Those who got the belonging message were more likely to say, “It might just be a bad day.” If they got a bad grade or were socially excluded, they were able to maintain that sense of belonging. And they started engaging more academically – studying more, contacting professors more, attending more study group sessions, and participating in class more.
Over the next three years, through college graduation, the treatment group earned higher grades, reducing the racial achievement gap by about 80%. Since belonging is such an important part of the college experience, we also saw improvements in happiness and health. We even surveyed students at about age 27. Those in the belonging group reported being more satisfied in their lives, more successful in their careers, and taking on more leadership roles in their communities.
What drove these results, and how have they been replicated and extended?
It wasn’t because students remembered that experience way back in their first year of college, or attached any special significance to it. They didn’t.
The intervention was quiet, not loud. First, by helping students weather bad days, the belonging exercise helped them deepen their engagement and relationships in college.
And then, in the long term, the gains arose because students were able to build deeper mentor relationships in college. Black students in the belonging group were far more likely to develop a faculty mentor relationship during college and have that relationship continue beyond graduation. And that was strongly linked to those gains in life satisfaction and career success.
These effects show us two things at once. First, they show that everyday worries about belonging – worries that arise directly from a history of exclusion in post-secondary education – cause persistent inequality in adult life. And second, they show what we can do about it. When we see questions about belonging clearly, we can create experiences that, gracefully and deftly, help students set these questions aside. And that can free students to succeed.
There have been more than a dozen similar trials of the social belonging intervention in academic transitions, primarily at US and Canadian post-secondary institutions, but also in the transitions to middle and high school in North America and abroad.
We've also developed ways to scale the exercises by embedding them in online experiences that students complete when coming to college. That’s allowed us to reach tens of thousands of students, including in RCTs. My recent paper in Science, for example, described an organization I helped create – the College Transition Collaborative – that partnered with 22 colleges and universities across North America to implement the belonging intervention with more than 25,000 students. One of the things we’ve learned through this scaling work is where and with whom belonging exercises are most likely to be effective.
In particular, we find they are most likely to work for students in groups that are underperforming in a school context but have opportunities to belong there. The belonging intervention gives students a hopeful narrative about developing their belonging in a context – but that opportunity has to be real if you are to act on it.
What makes wise interventions methodologically distinct?
Wise interventions contend with some of the deepest and most significant questions we face in our lives. Can I belong in the spaces that matter most to me? Can I trust my teacher? Does my partner love me?
These are the questions that determine the trajectory of our lives: Whether you will be able to do what you want to do, to become who you want to be.
Often our go-to response when icky questions about these things come up is to try to suppress them. But that’s just gaslighting yourself. Instead, wise interventions create the right space to recognize these questions – to see that they come from the situation you’re in, and that there’s nothing wrong with you. And then they help create the right space to consider, on your own or with others, how you really want to think about those questions. As I write in Ordinary Magic, “Thinking is for becoming.”
To do that, many wise interventions share stories with people, particularly stories of other people contending with a complex or challenging question, like developing your belonging in a new school. The people reading the stories are treated as experts in this question, and are asked to model their expertise in giving advice to others. So if we’re working on a problem of belonging, we don’t start by saying, “We think you feel like you don’t belong.” That would be exactly the wrong approach. Instead, we say, “We think many students worry at first about their belonging when they first come to school. Why do you think this is? Can you share aspects of your own experience to help future students when they enter our school?” That’s putting people in the role of intervention creators, not recipients. It's strength-based, not deficit-based.
Growth mindset interventions use similar approaches. You're offering people opportunities to see their experience through the lens of change, development, and growth – then to advocate for that way of thinking to other people in similar situations.
What differentiates wise interventions from other behavioral approaches?
On one end of the spectrum are nudges, which also aim to influence behavior in everyday situations. For instance, it might help to rearrange a cafeteria to make it easier to get healthy options. But nudges struggle to address the things people care about most, like people’s deeper concerns about belonging or respect. At the other end of the spectrum, clinical psychological approaches typically have that psychological depth. But they can too easily come across as pathologizing people by implying that there is something “wrong” with them. Clinical approaches even begin with a “diagnostic” intervention to figure out what is distinctly wrong with you. But often that feeling is itself the problem!
Wise interventions have that psychological depth, but they recognize that our worries and doubts are normal things that anyone might have in our circumstances. There's nothing wrong with a first-generation student wondering if she will belong in college – her family has never attended college! These questions come from history and context. Wise interventions normalize these questions and create the right space for people to answer them well.
Are there challenges that wise interventions struggle to address?
These questions we ask ourselves pose real constraints – but there are also real differences in people’s opportunity structures. As I mentioned earlier, for example, in our research on belonging, we don’t find benefits for students in groups that lack adequate opportunities to belong in their college context. It's like planting a seed – it won’t grow if the soil's not fertile.
Similarly, growth mindset interventions are generally helpful, but if your teacher keeps saying “some kids are smart and others aren't,” the idea of growth might feel like a fairytale – it’s not an idea you can hold onto, at least not in that class. When that’s the case, when opportunities for belonging are lacking or a teacher doesn’t value growth, then that’s the problem to be solved. That’s why my colleagues Katie Kroeper, Maithreyi Gopalan, Kathy Emerson, and I just published a paper with the title, “Who gets to belong in college? An empirical review of how institutions can assess and expand opportunities for belonging on campus.”
Can wise interventions help address problematic contexts?
Yes! We can use some of the same techniques to mitigate bias and negative stereotypes.
A great example is Jason Okonofua’s empathic discipline intervention, an approach that offers teachers an ideal way to think about and respond to students when they misbehave. Teachers get stories from other teachers who describe learning to pull students aside after a misbehavior: to listen and understand where they are coming from, even when the student is being irrational; to strengthen the relationship, rather than push the student away; and to help the student grow from within the context of this relationship. Teachers read these stories and then describe how they have learned or are learning to use this approach with their own students in the form of giving advice for new teachers. It’s a way to invite teachers to bring their best selves to their students, sidelining bias.
We have tested this intervention in two large randomized controlled trials. The first, in five middle schools in San Jose, California, with predominantly Latinx student populations, cut student suspension rates from 9.6% to 4.8%. A subsequent study in a very large and more racially diverse district in the southeast US produced a similar percentage-point reduction for students of color, with similar benefits for students with disabilities and those with prior suspensions. A third trial, run by an independent team, came out just this January. It extended these benefits to the United Kingdom, particularly for boys.
What are some other contexts where wise interventions have been effective?
Wise interventions have a ton of potential to improve close relationships. For example, persistent conflicts with your spouse might raise questions like, "Are we in trouble? Does my spouse value me?" In one case, a team led by Denise Marigold developed a single question to help people reflect on their partner’s value of them. That made conflict conversations more positive and productive. In another case, a five-minute exercise prompting partners to reflect on their highest values before a conflict conversation not only improved the conversation but set off an upward spiral. A year later, couples were closer, more intimate, and more committed. That’s five minutes for a better relationship a year later!
Another powerful example is with new mothers demographically at risk of committing child abuse. Daphne Bugental realized that new mothers sometimes wondered, implicitly or explicitly, “Maybe I’m a bad mother?” and “Maybe I have a bad baby?” So she took a structured approach to help moms work through the everyday challenges of parenting a newborn: if the baby wasn’t taking a bottle, for example, a social worker would ask “Why do you think you’re having that problem?” If the mother gave a reason that blamed themselves or the baby, the social workers would just ask, “Could it be something else?” until the mother came up with a non-pejorative reason. Then they’d say “Great, why don’t you work on that?” A couple weeks later, when they came back they’d ask how that went. It’s a way to build mom’s self-efficacy and problem solving. The approach reduced child abuse, and after three years, kids whose moms got that intervention had better cognitive development, were less aggressive, and had lower rates of stress hormones. And both kids and moms were healthier.
All relationships are recursive cycles – spirals. How I see and respond to you reverberates back to how you see and respond to me. So when we can see toxic questions that come up and threaten to kick off a bad spiral – questions like, Do you really love me? Do you respect me? Am I a bad mother? – we can facilitate lasting, wonderful change.
How have wise interventions been adapted to global contexts?
The specific agency-depriving questions people ask vary widely across different social, institutional, material, and cultural contexts. So when working globally, part of the goal is to try to understand this variability across geography, culture, social class, and institutional settings.
Catherine Thomas’s work, for example, is sensitive to the questions asked by people who benefit from development projects. In rural Niger, for instance, she finds that female entrepreneurs face a thicket of questions – like, Does receiving help make me helpless? Or, Is expanding my business consistent with being a good woman, mother, and wife?” To address these questions, Catherine created a video to facilitate village-level conversations about traditions of adaptation and interdependence, including how female entrepreneurship can use aid to support the collective good. A multifaceted intervention including this approach produced the most cost-effective reduction in poverty ever observed in the social sciences.
What is the outlook for scaling these approaches?
Practical tools like pre-matriculation social-belonging interventions are freely available online to all four-year institutions in North America and have been used by hundreds of thousands of students across many institutions. Likewise, many schools have embraced concepts like growth mindset and belonging. Sometimes this is shallow, but incredible things are also happening. For instance, EL Education’s concept of “crew” creates strong classroom communities. And PERTS’ Elevate program is a structured way for teachers to learn about the classroom environment they are creating for their students, learning where they are doing well and where they can do better.
Wise interventions often involve more complexity than is visible at first. A great deal goes into the development of simple, graceful tools to surface big questions and help people set them aside. But once we have developed the tools, they can be broadly helpful. And as we learn how these interventions work, we can get wiser. We can develop an “ear” for psychological questions and habits of understanding that these questions are normal, that there’s nothing wrong with you when you have a worrisome thought.
There are many reasons society is unequal; it’s not just material inequality. It’s also these psychological processes, questions like “Can I do it?” and “Do I belong?” and “Am I respected?” It's the job of psychologists to understand these questions, to learn how they work in the context of other factors, and to develop tools to get them off the table – so we can all live in a better, freer, and more equitable world.
Introduction by James Walsh. Interview and editing by Greg Larson.
This blog is part of a series on Leveraging Personal Agency for International Development, a convening co-organized by The Agency Fund and the SEE Change Initiative at Johns Hopkins University.
This was an incredible interview!