Girls are good at STEM: Opening minds and providing evidence reduces boys' stereotyping of girls' STEM ability.

Girls and women face persistent negative stereotyping within STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). This field intervention was designed to improve boys' perceptions of girls' STEM ability. Boys (N = 667; mostly White and East Asian) aged 9-15 years in Canadian STEM summer camps (2017-2019) had an intervention or control conversation with trained camp staff. The intervention was a multi-stage persuasive appeal: a values affirmation, an illustration of girls' ability in STEM, a personalized anecdote, and reflection. Control participants discussed general camp experiences. Boys who received the intervention (vs. control) had more positive perceptions of girls' STEM ability, d = 0.23, an effect stronger among younger boys. These findings highlight the importance of engaging elementary-school-aged boys to make STEM climates more inclusive.

Where and with whom does a brief social-belonging intervention promote progress in college?

A promising way to mitigate inequality is by addressing students' worries about belonging. But where and with whom is this social-belonging intervention effective? Here we report a team-science randomized controlled experiment with 26,911 students at 22 diverse institutions. Results showed that the social-belonging intervention, administered online before college (in under 30 minutes), increased the rate at which students completed the first year as full-time students, especially among students in groups that had historically progressed at lower rates. The college context also mattered: The intervention was effective only when students' groups were afforded opportunities to belong. This study develops methods for understanding how student identities and contexts interact with interventions. It also shows that a low-cost, scalable intervention generalizes its effects to 749 4-year institutions in the United States.

Efficiently exploring the causal role of contextual moderators in behavioral science.

Behavioral science interventions have the potential to address longstanding policy problems, but their effects are typically heterogeneous across contexts (e.g., teachers, schools, and geographic regions). This contextual heterogeneity is poorly understood, however, which reduces the field's impact and its understanding of mechanisms. Here, we present an efficient way to interrogate heterogeneity and address these gaps in knowledge. This method a) presents scenarios that vividly represent different moderating contexts, b) measures a short-term behavioral outcome (e.g., an academic choice) that is known to relate to typical intervention outcomes (e.g., academic achievement), and c) assesses the causal effect of the moderating context on the link between the psychological variable typically targeted by interventions and this short-term outcome. We illustrated the utility of this approach across four experiments (total n = 3,235) that directly tested contextual moderators of the links between growth mindset, which is the belief that ability can be developed, and students' academic choices. The present results showed that teachers' growth mindset-supportive messages and the structural opportunities they provide moderated the link between students' mindsets and their choices (studies 1 to 3). This pattern was replicated in a nationally representative sample of adolescents and did not vary across demographic subgroups (study 2), nor was this pattern the result of several possible confounds (studies 3 to 4). Discussion centers on how this method of interrogating contextual heterogeneity can be applied to other behavioral science interventions and broaden their impact in other policy domains.

Counterfeit diversity: How strategically misrepresenting gender diversity dampens organizations' perceived sincerity and elevates women's identity threat concerns.

Women remain underrepresented in technology and computing fields. Aware of this problem, many tech organizations seek diversification strategies. Several academic sources recommend including gender diverse images in recruitment materials as a low-cost way to potentially attract female workers. However, for gender nondiverse organizations, this strategy means misrepresenting the current on-the-ground diversity of their organization. Four experiments investigate how women and men perceive organizations that counterfeit diversity (i.e., exaggerate gender diversity in recruitment advertisements) relative to organizations that (a) authentically portray a high degree of gender diversity (authentic diversity; Experiments 1-3); (b) authentically portray a low degree of gender diversity (authentic nondiversity; Experiments 2 and 3); and (c) acknowledge a lack of diversity in the present, but aspire to increase diversity in the future (aspirational diversity; Experiment 3). Results reveal that women and men perceive counterfeit diversity as insincere. This perceived insincerity, in turn, decreases women's and men's interest in the organization and engenders identity threat concerns among women (Experiments 1-4). Taken together, these findings complicate scholarly discussions of diversity and inclusion strategies by highlighting the role of perceived sincerity. When recruitment strategies are deemed insincere, these strategies can backfire-decreasing interest in the organization, fomenting threat, and perpetuating underrepresentation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).