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Greg Walton

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61
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2019-08-20
most recent
2019-08-20
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  1. “Yeah, so just as we have beliefs about our relationship with a place, like beliefs about belonging, we have beliefs about relationship partners. And those beliefs can in some cases become maladaptive in ways that undermine the relationship over time. For example, beautiful work by Denise Marigold, who is at the University of Waterloo. And what Denise is interested in is how people with low self-esteem take a compliment from a romantic partner.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, in the case of belonging, it's really a matter of the relationship between yourself and a context. That's how I think about belonging. It's a relationship between me and a place. And it confirms a fear that you might have that maybe people like you don't belong in that environment. And that confirmation in your mind then changes how you act in that setting. So if you start to think that you don't belong, you're less likely to do things in that environment that really engage with it and would help to support your belonging. You know, if you feel like your professor is looking down on you when he criticizes you, you might be less likely to go to office hours and ask him a question. If you feel like the people in your dorm who didn't include you when they went out on a Friday night are telling you that you don't belong, you might be less likely to re-engage with those people or maybe even with other people in your dorm.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Classes and you're meeting your classmates and you're meeting 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 along with a roommate, if you're already wondering whether people like me can belong here, a question that comes from that context, then it can seem like those events confirm that interpretation that maybe you don't belong.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “A 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're a new student, and you're coming to college and you're taking college classes.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “We step back, there are many beliefs that we have about school and about schooling that contribute to our performance, positive or negative. These can include beliefs about whether a person like me can belong in this environment, beliefs about whether intelligence is something that's fixed or something that can grow. And those beliefs can be shifted and they can affect how well people perform and whether people are able to perform to their potential within school environments, even over long periods of time.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, it's interesting. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. It's actually largely the effort not to think about it. Stereotype threat happens most in spaces where people are really identified, where they want to succeed. They care about that space. They care about doing well in that space. They also, though, have called to mind the stereotype and they don't want to be thinking about that stereotype. They want to be able to think about the task before them because it's really hard. Stereotype threat happens most when people are doing things that are really pushing the edges of their abilities. So it's actually the effort to suppress the thoughts about the stereotype that takes up cognitive resources and makes it harder for people to actually devote resources to performing well on the task.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, the idea 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 it makes it true.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Could we level the playing field a bit? Could we see students from lower income backgrounds, students of color be able to achieve at higher rates?”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “The concept of stereotype threat. And it was revolutionary to me. It really opened my eyes. It was work showing that if you just change the way that a test was represented in the laboratory, you brought people in, undergraduates in in the original studies, and you gave them a difficult GRE verbal test. You found that African American students did less well than white students. And yet if you took this very same task and you said, oh, we're a bunch of cognitive psychologists and we're just interested in how people solve puzzles. This is not evaluative of your abilities. Suddenly that inequality went away. African American students did a whole lot better just as well as white students with the same SAT scores, in some cases even slightly better. And I thought that's amazing just changing the way that a test is represented could change how people perform on it. How could we do that in the real world? What would happen if we did that in the real world?”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, it really began in high school. I was part of this group called Students Educating Each other about discrimination. It was called Seed, and we were basically a group of high school students who went into middle school to sixth grade classrooms and led role-playing exercises and discussions around inequality and race, class, gender in American society. And it was part of that group that I became aware of the persistence of really large differences in educational success for students from different social class backgrounds and different racial ethnicities. And I also became aware of how those differences existed despite the fact that as a society, it seemed put forth a lot of effort to try to reduce them, for example, through great society programs from the 60s onward. It was very discouraging. But then I read this early work published in Atlantic Monthly by Claude Steele that introduced the”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Have two kids who are six and four, and when the kids are bicycling and they say that they're tired, we always say to them, it's when you're tired that your muscles are getting stronger. And the idea is to reframe for them what it means to be tired. It's not necessarily a reason to stop, but this is your opportunity to have that growth experience. It's when things are difficult that you are learning.”

    2019-08-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #64 Greg Walton: The Big Impact of Small Interventions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT