Applied Psychology OPUS

An Interview with Dr. Joshua Aronson

Aditi Iyer

Dr. Joshua Aronson is a social psychologist whose research investigates stereotyping, standardized test performance, and achievement gaps among culturally disadvantaged youth. Some of his most widely cited research examines stereotype threat, or the risk of acting in accordance with the negative stereotypes associated with one’s social group. Dr Aronson received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Princeton University. In conversation with Dr. Aronson, he shared how he became involved in the field of psychology, his greatest inspirations, and his take on conducting and sustaining psychological interventions.

What drew you to the field of psychology?

Nature and nurture. I was surrounded by psychologists as a child. My parents were both psych majors in college, lured into changing majors by their favorite professor, Abraham Maslow. Whatever drew my parents to Maslow drew me to psychology as well. There’s a sense among all my siblings that we were genetically selected and then environmentally shaped to be concerned with social justice—all of us went into careers aimed at helping other people. Still, my first impulse as an adolescent and aspiring college student was to run in the opposite direction of my parents. But everything fell into place for me when I took a graduate course in experimental social psychology. Thinking about and designing social experiments just came so naturally to me. I started finding myself designing experiments in the shower or riding my bike, or lying in bed. Later I volunteered at Stanford University working in the lab of Philip Zimbardo and Lee Ross. I got a little office in the basement that had been used as a prison cell in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. At night I would pull out a futon and sleep in my little Stanford Prison cell. It was creepy but I also felt like I was steeping myself in psychology history. The next year I went off to grad school.

Who was the greatest inspiration for your career?

I have been inspired by so many different people over my career and still am. Of course my dad is number one for me. He gave me a lot of advice and showed me a version of the good life that has been like a beacon to me. Both of us suffered from the same math disorder, a difficulty with numbers, that convinced him in grad school that he would never make it as a scientific psychologist. When I later had the same struggle with statistics , he simply passed on what his advisor, the redoubtable Leon Festinger, told him 30 years earlier in response to my father’s confession of his own inability to master statistics: “Big deal. So you’ll hire a statistician.” That was a great relief and something I like to pass on to my students. You don’t have to be great at everything, just be sure you’re really good at something and really good at collaborating with others.

What do you consider your greatest research contribution?

I don’t know about greatest, but I’m really proud of a couple things that have turned out to be very influential in psychology, law, and education. One was designing, writing up, and publishing the original experiments on “stereotype threat” with my mentor, Claude Steele. These experiments showed that activating stereotypes could make people perform worse on tests. Another was a now classic study demonstrating the generality and universality of stereotype threat—that even brilliant white males can experience stereotype threat. Developing the first “growth mindset” intervention, which showed that teaching students about neuroplasticity and the ability to get smarter can improve their grades, test scores, and enjoyment of academics. Those were pretty important findings and probably the most significant of my career. People still want me to talk about stuff that I did a long time ago and they use growth mindset in most schools now. Yet, I’m even more excited about what I’m currently doing, which is working with children of all ages, helping them become smarter, happier, nicer people with interventions involving meditation and growth mindsets.

What qualities do you believe interventions need to be effective?

That is a big broad question, but I’m coming to the conclusion that interventions that do not involve ongoing relationships with people, in a social network, are likely to not be worth much. I would say in a general sense that you can give people skills, you can give them money, you can give them important experiences, you can try to boost their brain power and grit and growth mindset and so on, but in the end, if what you’ve given them does not enable them to connect with others in a meaningful interdependent way, the intervention is likely to fade over time. No one succeeds on their own. Yet, our interventions are often premised on the inoculation model, where you give a child a vaccine, vitamins, daycare, or grit, thinking that this will be enough. People need other people to succeed. Our interventions need to take this fact seriously.

How has your research informed practice?

It’s hard to find a school that hasn’t tried the growth mindset intervention. That stuff went viral after Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which promoted all the work we did on boosting learning and performance. I would hear all about it from my kids’ teachers in school, which was funny because they had no idea that it was my work, just that it was really important. That has been kind of surreal. Stereotype threat has informed the design and administration of high stakes tests in some places, and it has also informed the admissions decisions at universities and other places people are selected on the basis of test scores. I think there’s lots of human resources work around stereotype threat as well. And it invariably gets talked about whenever affirmative action is under attack.