Can The Effect Of Prejudice Against Minorities Be Prevented?
In order to solve the integration problems of some students belonging to ethnic minorities from Stanford University, Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen carried out a psychosocial intervention that, in just one hour, was able to improve the academic results, psychosocial well-being and health of a group negatively stereotyped in the educational environment.
In other words, there is evidence that it is possible to prevent the negative effect of stereotypes, and in just one hour. Let’s see how this conclusion was reached.
The study, published in 2011 in the journal Science, demonstrated that socioeconomic differences between African American and European American students were not only maintained due to structural factors, such as salary differences, accessibility to educational training, and social support. Working in the field of social psychology, both researchers wondered how psychological factors could affect the coping techniques of Stanford University students.
They focused on the feeling of social belonging, a basic human social motive defined as the need to form positive relationships with other people. Its importance is such that if it is not satisfied, health problems, social adaptation, well-being and school performance may appear.
According to Walton and Cohen, members of socially stigmatized groups show greater uncertainty than non-stigmatized groups about their social belonging in educational or work institutions. They are more likely to feel insecure about positive social relationships in these settings, and this uncertainty increases during the transition to a new stage, that is, the first year of university.
During the first year of university it is common for some students to experience a feeling of isolation, which affects well-being and performance. Watson and Cohen’s study focused on how to interpret and cope with this feeling as a lack of social belonging or, on the contrary, as a mere transition process.
The objective was avoid catastrophic interpretations and ensure that the perceptual change when codifying social experience was maintained in the long term. To do this, it was necessary to create a “recurrent virtuous circle” in students according to which initial improvements in academic performance favored the feeling of belonging, and this in turn boosted performance.
The usefulness of a one-hour psychosocial intervention
The study was conducted during the first year of university of 92 students, of whom 49 were African American and 43 of European origin. Randomly, some students received intervention and others were assigned to the control condition, in which no intervention was given. The participants completed a questionnaire daily that collected their psychological responses to different problems during the week following the intervention. They also completed a questionnaire 3 years later in the last year of the degree, to evaluate the effects of the study on the feeling of belonging, health and well-being.
During the intervention, the participants were presented with a supposed study carried out with students from other courses, without them knowing that said study was not real. The results of the fake study showed that upperclassmen were concerned about their social belonging during their first year of university but that, as the course progressed, they gave way to greater self-confidence. According to several false testimonies, they gained confidence because they began to interpret the problems of the first year of university as something habitual and temporary during the adaptation and not as personal deficits or due to their ethnic belonging.
In order for the participants to internalize the message, they were asked to write an essay about the similarities between your experience and that of the testimonies, an essay that they later narrated as a speech in front of a video camera. Supposedly, videos of his speeches would help other students during their first year of college.
The procedure with the control group was the same, except that the essays and videos they carried out were on a topic unrelated to social belonging.
The results of the intervention
During the week following the intervention, the African American students’ reaction to everyday problems was more adaptive and their sense of social belonging remained constant. In contrast, in the African American students in the control condition, the feeling of belonging was more unstable and dependent on daily experiences
Three years later, after completing the long-term effects questionnaire, it was found that the intervention increased the academic performance of African-American students compared to the control group, and the differences between African-American and European-American students significantly decreased.
Positive effects were also found on the health and well-being of the participants, with notable improvements in the feeling of happiness and even a lower number of visits to the doctor by the students in the experimental group. The difference between African American and European American students disappeared in the subjective feeling of health and happiness, and in the number of visits to the doctor.
What can we take away from this study?
Walton and Cohen’s research demonstrated that a brief intervention on the feeling of social belonging is capable of significantly improving long-term aspects as important as academic performance, health and well-being. They also show that The differences between stigmatized and non-stigmatized groups do not only arise from structural factors since psychological factors also influence.
It is possible to work on psychological factors such as concern for social belonging through psychosocial interventions of short duration, easy application and low cost, but to do so It is essential that the school environment is not overtly hostile since the study is based on a change of interpretation in ambiguous situations.
It should be noted that this intervention is a clear example of what the biopsychosocial concept means, since it demonstrates the reciprocal connection between physical health, cognitions, emotions, behavior and social factors.
