Understanding where inequality comes from and what can be done about it is a difficult task. We therefore employ a wide range of rigorous research designs—including tightly controlled experiments, fine-grained longitudinal data collections, and partnership studies with schools throughout the US—to provide converging insights into the lab’s central topics below.  

Education & Identity 

Schools are one of, if not, the most powerful drivers of societal opportunity. On the one hand, our research documents how this positions schools to reinforce disparity as common stereotypes lead teachers, principals, peers, and other key figures to favor students who hold privileged identities over those who hold marginalized ones. On the other, we provide wide-ranging evidence for the value of leading these figures to adopt alternative strength-based approaches that recognize the valuable skills, knowledge, and resources that students often gain from their otherwise marginalized backgrounds. We demonstrate that leading educators and peers to create classrooms grounded in these approaches reinforces marginalized students’ persistence and well-being in the classroom, as well as their course grades and even their likelihood of earning a college degree.

Example papers: The effects of strength-based approaches on educators and marginalized students, Inequalities in motivational payoff for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students

The Garden Drexel

Opportunity Hoarding & Parenting 

One of the major barriers to reducing inequality is public action. While people readily say that they would prefer to live in societies where everyone has equal opportunities to get ahead, they also frequently oppose policies that would help achieve this goal. We are interested in understanding why this disconnect occurs. In one line of work, we study a phenomenon we call opportunity hoarding in which higher income people cross the political spectrum prioritize maintaining their elevated position in society, even when doing so comes at the overt cost of lower income people’s access to important resources. Our studies show that this can be particularly consequential in parenting contexts. Telling higher income parents that society is doing well and creating ample chances for children to succeed paradoxically leads them to engage in opportunity hoarding as they oppose policies that might benefit lower income families (e.g., reallocating tax dollars from schools in high-income districts to schools in low-income ones). We’re currently investigating the scope of opportunity hoarding and its consequences, as well as how all parents can be directed to participate in more meritocratic behaviors. 

Example paper: Economic mobility and opportunity hoarding among affluent parents 

Kara Walker Untitled

Economic Mobility 

The dream of creating a better and more financially stable life for yourself and your family is practically universal. Around the world, people cite the goal of achieving upward mobility as a primary motivator behind the professions they pursue, the people they vote for, and the decisions they make on a daily basis. We thus study economic mobility as both an objective circumstance and a powerful psychological experience. For example, we show that local policies aimed at jumpstarting people’s likelihood of climbing the economic ladder not only increase their annual incomes but also lead people from lower income backgrounds to feel healthier, sleep better, and view their lives as more meaningful. More broadly, we document the role that different societal contexts, including the workplace, play in facilitating people’s journeys toward achieving upward mobility.  

Example paper: Strength-based workplace cultures support professional advancement for people from lower income families

Garden de Kooning

Strength-Based Approaches & Meta-Science 

Each of our lines of work is rooted in a commitment to improving the field’s understandings of core topics, including identity, person-context interactions, and intergroup dynamics. Toward this end, we have outlined the potential of strength-based approaches to inform more accurate measures of marginalized people’s abilities and the systemic challenges they face. Relatedly, much of our work centers on building stronger models of the individual- and contextual-level level factors that shape our complex social realities. Our recent studies have emphasized the importance of working toward these models through merging insights from psychology with research in economics, public health, and related disciplines that take multi-level approaches to understanding nuanced real-world phenomena. 

Example papers: Defining strength-based approaches and their value for psychology

Candy Sticks Thiebaud

All of the artwork featured is from the Yale University Art Gallery. From top to bottom: Christof Drexel, The Garden, ca 1922; Kara Walker, Untitled, ca 1994; Elaine de Kooning, Garden with Trees and Stairs, ca 1965; Wayne Thiebaud, Candy Sticks, 1964.