The Exchanges

Q And so can you sort of, like, walk me through all of those techniques?

A Yeah, sure, of course, yeah. So direct labeling is just telling people, you know, what something is, or what a situation is. This is particularly useful when people are newbies, when they're young, or when they're just trying to make sense of things for the first time. They don't have necessarily a pre-existing experience. View. So in a classic study, kids were assigned to different conditions and encouraged to not litter in the classroom. And in one condition, they were given a persuasive appeal. They were told it's really important that you don't litter. That seemed to increase or throwing away of trash and not littering in the short term, but not in the long term. Another condition, kids were told that they were not litterers, that they were the clean class, the school principal, the teacher, the The janitor all told kids that they were the clean class and that they didn't litter. So here you have young kids being labeled, their, their group identity is being labeled, and then kids behaved in accordance with that label. They littered less even weeks later. Now that's not how, um, you know, most interventions, especially with older populations or with people who are more sophisticated, don't just give people a label. They instead give people information Upon which they can draw a new inference. They give people the new basis for interpreting something in the world. For exampl…

AI assessment note: “So direct labeling is just telling people, you know, what something is”

Q That's fascinating. What's going on behind the scenes there that sort of, is it the framing? Is it like our beliefs about ourselves?

A Yeah, it's the idea in the, in the original work on stereotype threat was that when we say something is evaluative of people's abilities, all of us associate Those abilities with different kinds of social groups, and if you are, for example, an African-American student, and this test is said to be evaluative of your intellectual abilities, or if you're a woman in math and science, and the test is said to be evaluative of your math and science abilities, a space in which, in many contexts, women and girls are negatively stereotyped, we automatically call to mind those stereotypes, and then We can fear that if we were to do poorly, other people could see us through the light of that stereotype. They could think that maybe our poor performance was confirming of that negative stereotype. That's, it makes it true.

AI assessment note: “we automatically call to mind those stereotypes, and then We can fear that”

Q Is it because that's how we make sense of ourselves, which is how we also act, or?

A Um, the first thing to say that's important is that the beliefs that we have are often implicit in the sense that we don't directly interrogate them, but they come about from the social context that we're in as Reasonable responses to the context that we're in. So if you are going into a setting Where your group is underrepresented, where your group has historically been excluded or marginalized, where your group faces negative stereotypes, then it's a reasonable thing to wonder whether perhaps somebody like you, a person with your group identity, might belong in that environment. That question gives you a lens for interpreting everyday events that happen to you. So you go into a complicated social environment, You, you're a new student, and you're coming to college, and you're taking college classes, and you're meeting your classmates, and you're meeting professors, and you're trying to make sense of this whole new world, and you're asking, what is this place? How do I fit into it? How might my experience here develop over time? And if you have in the back of your mind this question about whether maybe people like you can belong, it gives you a kind of narrative structure within which to interpret everyday events. So when bad things happen, when your professor criticizes you, when you get a bad grade on a first midterm, when you feel lonely or homesick, when you don't get alon…

AI assessment note: “That question gives you a lens for interpreting everyday events that happen to you.”

Q So what's an example of your favorite sort of intervention?

A Let me give you an example of one that I think is particularly helpful for illustrating a number of important points. So this was work that Daphna Bugenthal, who was a psychologist at Santa Barbara, did. She's retired now, and she was interested in the problem of child abuse. And how could we prevent child abuse? And what she did was she worked with a group of low-income, um, mostly single moms, Latina, many of whom themselves had been, had experienced abuse themselves, and so were sort of demographically at risk for abusing their new children. And, uh, she assigned these, um, mothers to three conditions. There was a control condition where nothing in particular happened, The second condition was a state program that was visiting these mothers and giving them tips about parenting, budgeting, kinds of nuts and bolts things. Then the third condition, she just appended to that second condition. So again, they got these state visits, but the social workers who were doing the visits were trained. And what they did was to ask these mothers about the most difficult challenges that they had with their babies. So, uh, these are newborn babies, uh, or in the first year of life. Um, so they're infants and the, the social workers were to ask mothers, what's the most difficult problem you have with your baby? And the mothers would say something like, oh, I can't get my baby to stop crying. …

AI assessment note: “Let me give you an example of one that I think is particularly helpful”

Q So if your son or daughter comes home and they've made a mistake knowing this, how do you respond?

A Yeah, so, I mean, Kyla has some beautiful stories from parents who Uh, she asks just this question to imagine your child comes home with say a poor grade on a math test. What would you say? How would you respond? And I remember one parent said something like, oh, I would say, I'm so sorry you had this experience, but let's sit down together and see, see what you got wrong and how we can learn from it. Um, maybe we can have an ice cream as we do it to engage the child in the learning process through the mistake rather than to, um, To say things like, for example, I would worry that my child might not be good at math.

AI assessment note: “let's sit down together and see, see what you got wrong and how we can learn”

Q I'm going to have to look that up. I want to come back to, uh, failing or struggling relationships. What are the sort of interventions that people who feel disconnected from their partner feel like things aren't working? Even if you're in a good relationship, what would be an intervention you can use to strengthen meaning and connection?

A There's a lot of things that you could say about that in general terms. Of course, uh, you know, there's kind of the wise wisdom of, uh, spending time together, and trying new things together, and growing together, communicating, but I wanna, I wanna talk about something very specific, which is a line of research led by Eli Finkel at Northwestern University, which There's a study of married couples in the Chicagoland area, and these were not couples who were in any kind of marriage, marital distress. They were just normal, kind of middle-aged married couples, and they were involved in a several-year longitudinal study in which every few months they reported on their feelings in their marriage, their passion and intimacy and closeness that they felt in the marriage, and they also described the kinds of conflicts that they experienced in the marriage and how they thought about those. And they did this for a year. And then at the end of that year, um, before the next stage of the, of the study began, There was a randomized intervention that was introduced, and what this was, was that after having described their most significant conflict that existed within their marriage, each member of the couple was asked a series of questions. They were asked, um, how would a neutral third party who wants the best for all view this conflict? Then they were asked, what barriers would prevent yo…

AI assessment note: “a line of research led by Eli Finkel at Northwestern University”