Mesmin Destin

Identity-Based Motivation: Implications for Intervention

Children want to succeed academically and attend college but their actual attainment often lags behind; some groups (e.g., boys, low-income children) are particularly likely to experience this gap. Social structural factors matter, influencing this gap in part by affecting children’s perceptions of what is possible for them and people like them in the future. Interventions that focus on this macro—micro interface can boost children’s attainment. We articulate the processes underlying these effects using an integrative culturally sensitive framework entitled identity-based motivation (IBM). The IBM model assumes that identities are dynamically constructed in context. People interpret situations and difficulties in ways that are congruent with currently active identities and prefer identity-congruent to identity-incongruent actions. When action feels identity congruent, experienced difficulty highlights that the behavior is important and meaningful. When action feels identity incongruent, the same difficulty suggests that the behavior is pointless and “not for people like me.”

Closing the Social-Class Achievement Gap: A Difference-Education Intervention Improves First-Generation Students’ Academic Performance and All Students’ College Transition

College students who do not have parents with 4-year degrees (first-generation students) earn lower grades and encounter more obstacles to success than do students who have at least one parent with a 4-year degree (continuing-generation students). In the study reported here, we tested a novel intervention designed to reduce this social-class achievement gap with a randomized controlled trial (N = 168). Using senior college students’ real-life stories, we conducted a difference-education intervention with incoming students about how their diverse backgrounds can shape what they experience in college. Compared with a standard intervention that provided similar stories of college adjustment without highlighting students’ different backgrounds, the difference-education intervention eliminated the social-class achievement gap by increasing first-generation students’ tendency to seek out college resources (e.g., meeting with professors) and, in turn, improving their end-of-year grade point averages. The difference-education intervention also improved the college transition for all students on numerous psychosocial outcomes (e.g., mental health and engagement).

From Assets to School Outcomes How Finances Shape Children's Perceived Possibilities and Intentions

People do not always take action to attain their desired possible selves—after all, whether consciously or nonconsciously, taking current action makes sense if there is an open path toward attaining the desired self, but not if paths are closed. Following this logic, children from families with fewer assets may lower their expectations for school success and plan to engage in less effort in school. To test this hypothesis, we examined the impact of experimentally manipulating mind-set about college as either “closed” (expensive) or “open” (can be paid for with need-based financial aid) among low-income early adolescents. Adolescents assigned to an open-path condition expected higher grades than those assigned to a closed-path condition (Study 1, n = 48, predominantly Hispanic and Latino seventh graders) and planned to spend more time on homework than those assigned to a no-prime control condition (Study 2, n = 48, predominantly African American seventh graders).

From Assets to School Outcomes

People do not always take action to attain their desired possible selves—after all, whether consciously or nonconsciously, taking current action makes sense if there is an open path toward attaining the desired self, but not if paths are closed. Following this logic, children from families with fewer assets may lower their expectations for school success and plan to engage in less effort in school. To test this hypothesis, we examined the impact of experimentally manipulating mind-set about college as either “closed” (expensive) or “open” (can be paid for with need-based financial aid) among low-income early adolescents. Adolescents assigned to an open-path condition expected higher grades than those assigned to a closed-path condition (Study 1, n = 48, predominantly Hispanic and Latino seventh graders) and planned to spend more time on homework than those assigned to a no-prime control condition (Study 2, n = 48, predominantly African American seventh graders).

The Context-Sensitive Future Self: Possible Selves Motivate in Context, Not Otherwise

Imagining ones possible future self can motivate action but whether motivational power resides more in positive or more in negative future identities is not clear. We predicted that motivational power resides not in these positive or negative future identities but in the fit between context and future self. We varied fit in four experiments by having students read about college as a success-likely or failure-likely context and then write about their desired or undesired possible future identities. Which aspect of the future self was motivating depended on context. Motivation was higher in success-likely contexts if desired rather than undesired possible futures came to mind and was higher in failure-likely contexts if undesired rather than desired possible futures come to mind.

A Difference-Education Intervention Equips First-Generation College Students to Thrive in the Face of Stressful College Situations

A growing social psychological literature reveals that brief interventions can benefit disadvantaged students. We tested a key component of the theoretical assumption that interventions exert long-term effects because they initiate recursive processes. Focusing on how interventions alter students’ responses to specific situations over time, we conducted a follow-up lab study with students who had participated in a difference-education intervention 2 years earlier. In the intervention, students learned how their social-class backgrounds mattered in college. The follow-up study assessed participants’ behavioral and hormonal responses to stressful college situations. We found that difference-education participants discussed their backgrounds in a speech more frequently than control participants did, an indication that they retained the understanding of how their backgrounds mattered. Moreover, among first-generation students (i.e., students whose parents did not have 4-year degrees), those in the difference-education condition showed greater physiological thriving (i.e., anabolic-balance reactivity) than those in the control condition, which suggests that they experienced their working-class backgrounds as a strength.

Feeling hierarchy: the pathway from subjective social status to achievement.

The current study tested a psychosocial mediation model of the association between subjective social status (SSS) and academic achievement for youth. The sample included 430 high school students from diverse racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Those who perceived themselves to be at higher social status levels had higher GPAs. As predicted by the model, most of the relationship was mediated by emotional distress and study skills and habits. The lower SSS students had more depressive symptoms, which led to less effective studying and lower GPA. The model held across different racial/ethnic groups, was tested against alternative models, and results remained stable controlling for objective socioeconomic status. Implications for identity-based intervention are discussed.

The Effects of a Warm or Chilly Climate Toward Socioeconomic Diversity on Academic Motivation and Self-Concept

Persistent academic achievement gaps exist between university students from high and low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. The current research proposes that the extent to which a university is perceived as actively supporting versus passively neglecting students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds can influence low-SES students’ academic motivation and self-concepts. In Experiments 1 and 2, low-SES students exposed to cues suggestive of an institution’s warmth toward socioeconomic diversity demonstrated greater academic efficacy, expectations, and implicit associations with high academic achievement compared with those exposed to cues indicating institutional chilliness. Exploring the phenomenology underlying these effects, Experiment 3 demonstrated that warmth cues led low-SES students to perceive their socioeconomic background as a better match with the rest of the student body and to perceive the university as more socioeconomically diverse than did chilliness cues. Contributions to our understanding of low-SES students’ psychological experiences in academic settings and practical implications for academic institutions are discussed.

An Open Path to the Future Perceived Financial Resources and School Motivation

One contributing factor to gaps in academic achievement may be that some students perceive long-term educational goals, such as college, as financially out of reach, which can make schoolwork feel meaningless even several years before college. However, information that leads students to perceive that the financial path to college is open for them (i.e., need-based financial aid) can increase school motivation. Two classroom-based field experiments expand this area of theory and research. Early adolescent students who were randomly assigned to receive information about need-based financial aid (open path condition) showed greater school motivation than those who were randomly assigned to a control condition, specifically if they came from low-asset households. In a second exploratory experiment, the open path effect was mediated by an increased likelihood that students envision a future career that includes college (education-dependent identity). Implications for the study of identity and disparities in academic achievement are discussed.

Status-Based Identity: A Conceptual Approach Integrating the Social Psychological Study of Socioeconomic Status and Identity

Psychological research on socioeconomic status (SES) has grown significantly over the past decade. In this article, we build upon and integrate existing approaches to direct greater attention toward investigating the subjective meaning and value that people attach to understanding their own SES as an identity. We use the term status-based identity to organize relevant research and examine how people understand and make meaning of their SES from moment to moment in real time. Drawing from multiple areas of research on identity, we suggest that even temporary shifts in how people construe their status-based identities predict changes in thought, affect, motivation, and behavior. This novel focus is positioned to examine the psychological effects of status transitions (e.g., upward or downward mobility). Further, in initial empirical work, we introduce a new measure to assess uncertainty regarding one’s SES (i.e., status-based identity uncertainty) and offer evidence that greater uncertainty regarding one’s status-based identity is associated with lower individual well-being. In sum, we argue that insight from the literature on identity will both expand and serve to organize the burgeoning literature on the psychology of SES and, in so doing, reveal promising new directions for research.