Strong agents, not weak victims

Diverse groups of individuals (e.g., refugees, ethnic minorities, or people with mental illnesses) suffer from stigmatizing societal narratives that portray these groups of individuals as weak and deficient. Such stigmatizing narratives can compromise individuals chances for attaining a successful and happy life: They can, for example, impair individuals ability to perform and their wellbeing. Aiming to address this problem, colleagues and I have developed a brief online intervention exercise that, for the first time, reframes stigmatized individuals identity in an empowering way. That is, the intervention re-defines what it means to be, for example, a refugee, in a way that highlights individuals strengths rather their weaknesses. Countering stigmatizing narratives portraying individuals as weak and deficient, the intervention highlights that i) through their experiences, stigmatized individuals have shown many important strengths and skills like the ability to deal with adversities and ii) these strengths can help them attain their goals. Applied to refugees in academic contexts, this identity-reframing-intervention has been shown to boost individuals engagement over one year. Goals: Building on the first study with refugees, this project investigates how and under what conditions identity-reframing yields beneficial effects for different populations and outcomes. Specifically, I investigate to what extent effects may extend to - other stigmatized groups in educational contexts: ethnic minority students - the attitudes and behaviors of important non-stigmatized others: teachers expectations and teaching behaviors - and non-educational outcomes of stigmatized individuals: depressed individuals goal pursuit and wellbeing To investigate how and under what condition the intervention works, I will examine potential processes that could carry the intervention effect as well as potentially crucial intervention components. Approach: The intervention will first be adapted to respective populations based on exploratory interviews and then tested in a series of short- and long-term experiments in the laboratory as well as in the field. Innovation: This project is the first to investigate how the creation of empowering rather stigmatizing narratives about disadvantaged groups may carry beneficial effects for diverse individuals. Since these experiments are the first to experimentally change stigmatizing narratives, results will not only shed light on effects and mechanisms of the identity-reframing approach, but also the way stigmatizing narratives cause disadvantage in the first place.

Diverse groups of individuals (e.g., refugees, people with low socioeconomic status background, or people with mental illnesses) suffer from stigmatizing societal narratives that portray these groups of individuals as weak and deficient. Such stigmatizing narratives can undermine individuals' confidence in their abilities, and their successful goal pursuit. To address and also to better understand this problem, the project "strong agents, not weak victims" develops interventions - brief, and highly scalable online exercises - that support individuals in their goal pursuit. Countering stigmatizing narratives portraying individuals as weak and deficient, the intervention highlights that i) through their experiences, stigmatized individuals have shown many important strengths and skills like the ability to deal with adversities and ii) these strengths can help them attain their goals. Applied to students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds and individuals facing depression in randomized-controlled field trials, we have shown that this intervention is effective in reversing the effects of stigma: Students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds who participated in the intervention gained better grades over one semester than students in an active control condition. Further, among people who have experienced depression, the intervention improved goal progress on a self-selected goal: over two weeks, individuals who participated in the intervention reported to make more progress towards a self-selected goal than control participants. Lastly, we also showed that the intervention can be effective for people who work with stigmatized groups (e.g., teachers): When people who participated in the intervention, they treated refugees in more empowering ways - e.g., encouraging them more to take on challenges. Overall, results highlight the importance of how we represent individuals facing adversity - and solutions for how to effectively do so. The interventions created are publicly accessible and can thus be reused by practitioners and researchers.