How to prevent the effect of prejudice against minorities?

In order to solve the integration problems of some ethnic minority students from Stanford University, Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen performed a psychosocial intervention that, in just one hour, was able to to improve the academic results, psychosocial well-being and health of a negatively stereotyped group in the educational environment.

In other words, there is evidence that the negative effect of stereotypes can be prevented, and in just one hour. Let's see how this conclusion was reached.

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The feeling of social belonging and prejudices

The study, published in 2011 in the journal Science, showed that the 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 support Social. Working in the field of social psychology, both researchers wondered how they could affect to the psychological factors to the coping techniques of the students of the University of Stanford.

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 that groups not stigmatized about their social membership in educational or work institutions. They are more likely to feel insecure about positive social relationships in these scenarios, and this uncertainty increases during the transition to a new stage, that is, the first year of college.

During the first year of college, it is common for some students to experience a sense of isolation, which affects well-being and performance. Watson and Cohen's study focused on how to interpret and deal with this feeling as a lack of social belonging or, on the contrary, as a mere process of transition.

The goal was avoid catastrophic interpretations and make perceptual change at the time of coding the social experience it was maintained in the long term. For this, it was necessary to create a "recurring virtuous circle" in students according to which improvements initial academic performance favored the feeling of belonging, and this in turn promoted the performance.

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The usefulness of a one-hour psychosocial intervention

The study was conducted during the first year of college on 92 students, of whom 49 were African-American and 43 of European descent. At random, some students received intervention and others were assigned to the control condition, in which no intervention was performed. The participants completed a daily questionnaire 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 an alleged study carried out with students from other courses, without them knowing that this study was not real. The results of the bogus study showed that the students in higher grades were concerned about their social belonging during the first year of university but that, as the course progressed, they gave way to greater self-confidence themselves. According to various false testimonies, they gained security because they began to interpret the problems of the first year of university as something habitual and fleeting during the adaptation and not as personal deficits or due to their belonging ethics.

In order for the participants to internalize the message, they were asked to write an essay on the similarities between your experience and that of the testimonials, an essay that they later narrated as a speech in front of a video camera. The videos of his speeches were supposed to 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 made were on a topic not related to social belonging.

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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 African-American students in the control condition, the feeling of belonging was more unstable and dependent on daily experiences.

Three years later, after carrying out the questionnaire on the long-term effects, it was found that the intervention increased the academic performance of African American students versus the control group, and the differences between African American students and European-Americans.

Positive effects were also found on the health and well-being of the participants, with notable improvements in the feeling of happiness and even with fewer visits to the doctor by the students in the group experimental. 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 get out of this study?

Walton and Cohen's research showed that a brief intervention on the feeling of social belonging is capable of to improve significantly and in the long term aspects as important as academic performance, health and wellness. They also show that the differences between stigmatized and non-stigmatized groups are not only born of 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 for this 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 demonstrating the reciprocal connection between physical health, cognitions, emotions, behavior, and factors social.