Elizabeth Canning, PhD
Assistant Professor
Washington State University

From Lab to Field: Designing Social-Psychological Interventions to Reduce Achievement Gaps

As social beings, we receive messages that communicate certain expectations or norms from many sources. My research investigates how these messages stoke or sap motivation, persistence, and achievement, particularly for stigmatized groups. In this talk, I will focus on subtle messages about ability (e.g., “only some people are innately smart”) and messages about value (e.g., “this will be useful in your future career”) that are communicated by institutions, instructors, and peers. These messages can be communicated verbally—in the form of lectures or one-on-one interactions—and non-verbally—by the materials, policies, and practices put forth by those around us. I will discuss how stigmatized individuals respond to cues from these different sources and how we can design effective interventions that mitigate potentially harmful messages. Studies include controlled laboratory experiments, randomized controlled intervention studies, and longitudinal, field studies that, together, build theory by investigating mechanisms in the laboratory and translate that theory into practice with interventions in the field.

This free lecture is made possible, in part, by a generous endowment from Professor Allen L. Edwards.