The Effect of Pro-Diversity Social Norms Messaging on Social Inclusion and the Achievement Gap
Post by Stephanie Williams
What's the science?
Despite the urgency of creating an inclusive social climate at universities, few effective methods have been developed and implemented. Recent meta-analyses of currently implemented methods — such as diversity workshops and implicit bias training — have shown that many of these methods are ineffective, have little impact on discriminatory behaviors, and may lead to backlash effects. One underexplored approach, coined social norms messaging, involves broadcasting a message about what is socially normative and acceptable. The underlying idea is that observing socially acceptable behaviours will encourage individuals to align their own attitudes and behaviour with these standards. Although there is substantial evidence that social norms can influence behaviours, it is unclear if it would be effective in changing social behaviours in college and university settings. This week in Nature Human Behavior, Murrar, Campbell and Brauer tested whether broadcasting salient pro-diversity norms within a college can change an institution’s climate, or alter academic performance differences between privileged and marginalized social groups.
How did they do it?
The authors performed six, randomized controlled experiments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. They developed two social norms interventions with the intention of promoting positive attitudes towards social outgroups. The first intervention was a social norms poster displaying pictures of students from different ethnic backgrounds, a statement about valuing diversity, and statistics that reflected how many students agreed with the content on the poster. The poster, based on previous studies, said that 93% of students agreed with the message on the poster, and 84% of students agreed to have their picture on the poster. In the first experiment, participants were exposed to either a neutral poster about getting a flu vaccine or the social norms poster, while they sat in a waiting room for 5-7 minutes. Afterward, participants completed a filler memory task and then filled out surveys that had questions related to the social climate and to intergroup attitudes. In the second experiment, the authors put up four to six social norms posters in some classrooms during the first 5 weeks of the university semester. For each classroom, posters were put up 10-30 minutes before class started, and taken down 5 minutes after everyone had left the room. At the end of the semester (weeks 10-12), the authors asked students to complete surveys that assessed their appreciation of diversity, how positive they felt about social outgroups, how welcoming the classroom climate was, the extent to which they felt belonging, and warmth ratings of feelings towards Black, Hispanic, Arab, and gay individuals.
The second intervention was a 5-minute video that conveyed the general message that the university community welcomed people from all backgrounds. The videos consisted of scenes of 1) interviews with students who expressed appreciation for diversity on campus and 2) scientists and diversity specialists who reported evidence that most students on campus behaved in an inclusive and non-prejudiced manner. In experiment 3, the authors randomized students to either watch or not watch the social norms videos on the first day of the semester. The authors repeated this study with an additional video on bias and microaggressions (experiment 5), to ensure that any effects were driven by the content of the video and not the video itself. In a fourth experiment, the authors tested the same social norms video online to examine if the same effects could be seen in the virtual setting. Participants filled out an additional survey that assessed the participant’s perceptions of their peers’ norms, their perceptions of their university’s commitment to diversity, and their interest in several campus programs (e.g. social justice). In a final experiment, the authors were interested in understanding how the short videos could influence academic achievement, which they measured with student grade information collected at the end of the semester. The authors recruited science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professors to show the social norms video to half of their sections on the first day of class. The other half did not watch the social norms video but instead saw a short diversity statement on the class syllabus.
What did they find?
The authors found that their social norms interventions had positive effects on pro-inclusive attitudes across all six experiments. In experiment 1, the authors found an effect of the poster on participant’s inclusive climate scores (which consisted of an average of standardized scores from questions about positive traits, modern racism, internal motivation to respond without prejudice, rejection of racism, and attitudes toward minorities). When the authors compared this effect across privileged (defined in this experiment as Caucasian participants who were Christian or had no religion) and marginalized groups, they found that the effect was not moderated by privilege, and that both groups were equally affected by the posters.
Participants who were exposed to the social norms poster showed higher inclusive climate scores than participants who saw the neutral posters. Although significant, the observed effect was small. The authors note that participants in the experimental condition may not have noticed the poster, and that the outcomes were collected 5 to 7 weeks after the students were last exposed to the posters. In experiment 3, the authors found that participants who saw the social norms video on the first day of class had higher inclusive climate scores than participants in the control condition. In experiment 4, the authors observed that there was a difference between those who had seen the video and those who did not. Participants who saw the video showed more positive attitudes toward outgroups, appreciated “diversity” more, and reported an increased sense of belonging. The authors also found that there was a stronger effect on the inclusive climate score for privileged students than for marginalized students. Analyses revealed that a shift in attitude was driven by the participant’s perceptions of their peers’ inclusiveness, and not by their university’s commitment to diversity.
In experiment 5, the authors found that the social norms video had a strong positive effect on inclusive climate scores for individuals from marginalized backgrounds - they reported that their peers behaved more inclusively. Finally, in experiment 6, the authors found that marginalized students showed lower grades (mean 83.69, s.d. 10.78) than students categorized as privileged (mean 86.77, s.d. 8.35) within the control group. In the social norms video group, however, there was no significant grade gap between the two groups, suggesting that the social norms intervention mitigated the achievement gap in STEM classes.
What's the impact?
This study provides evidence from randomized controlled trials that shows emphasizing peers’ pro-diversity values and behaviors can have a positive impact on the social climate and reduce the achievement gap at a large midwestern university. These findings demonstrate the importance of directing attention towards peers’ pro-diversity values as a strategy for generating positive change that could be applied and tested in a variety of social environments. Further, the interventions used in this study are easily scalable, and can be implemented using a variety of channels to communicate the same message.
Murrar, S., Campbell, M., and Brauer, M. Exposure to peer’s pro diversity attitudes increases inclusion and reduces the achievement gap. Nature Human Behavior. (2020). Access the original scientific publication here.