This phenomenon creates an exceptional opportunity for college and university faculty. Not only can they teach content, but they can help students cultivate character virtues needed for adult life and potentially see them spread throughout many areas of society.

Without too much heavy lifting, faculty can create classroom conditions that cultivate virtues like open-mindedness, awareness, empathy, and democratic citizenship. These virtues can help increase students’ capacity for ethical decision making, leadership, and professional growth, which are crucial for responsible participation in society.

As young people tackle heightened ideological polarization and partisan hostility in the U.S., they need the right tools to navigate tough conversations and connect with others whose lives look different from their own. Universities can offer a safe and structured, yet intellectually challenging, environment for their students to practice character virtues that are essential to a healthy society.

What university experiences support character development?

Our project team wanted to understand how students’ experiences at our university affect their capacity to cultivate character virtues. To do this, we conducted 12 focus groups with 51 undergraduate students, asking them to reflect on the aspects of their course experiences that either supported or hindered them in developing character virtues. Below are some key takeaways.

1. Activities that promote perspective taking and productive disagreement can support students in practicing virtues such as open-mindedness, awareness, and empathy. Examples of these activities varied in scope. Several students spoke about the importance of building meaningful relationships with peers, both inside and outside the classroom. They often mentioned how these opportunities were crucial in nurturing virtues related to open-mindedness and empathy.

Within classes, students highlighted that their most meaningful peer relationships were facilitated through working with members of their program cohort, participating in project-based group work, or discussing topics with partners. For example, students talked about how working in small-group settings encouraged them to build trust with one another, ultimately fostering a classroom environment that encouraged authentic dialogue and productive disagreement:

The [program] cohort that I’m in [is] still small enough where I could probably name everybody, and a fun fact about them, and like that’s super cool, because then I can also disagree with everybody because I feel comfortable, knowing who they are and I know their values, and I know how to contradict them in a way that’s productive versus just like arguing at someone for hours, [that] doesn’t get you very far.

One student, for example, recounted her experience completing an assignment that required her to interview someone who held a different political viewpoint from her. She shared:

I think [my Political Dialogue class is] where I started working on my open-mindedness . . . because [I realized] everyone has a deeper root for what they believe in. There was one guy I had to meet with and talk with, and the reason he was more [politically] conservative was because he grew up in the [Great] Depression era, and his [conservatism] came from the economic side. [This assignment] was really wonderful, because you also learn these skills of talking to people and presenting empathy and open-mindedness [to others].

One student shed light on how her course experiences have helped her grow in her ability to be more curious and less judgmental about people with different views than her own:

[My classes] allow me to have a wider perspective of people’s backgrounds, views, and ideas, and why they have them, even if it’s someone that I don’t agree with. I still appreciate being exposed to that. I think the way my classes are structured really help me learn from a different perspective . . . my professor will take time out of the beginning of class to literally put all [our] desks in a circle so that we look at each other when we speak. It’s little things like that that help with my moral development . . . when I leave [university], I’ll know how to properly listen to a person, ask follow-up questions, and ask clarifying questions . . . little things like that [can] help me learn about someone holistically rather than just [think] “they said a statement” and then I judge it based off of the statement.

2. Personal connections with instructors who show empathy help cultivate environments where students feel comfortable asking questions and sharing opinions. It is not surprising that students emphasized the critical role their instructors play. Specifically, they shared the importance of instructors demonstrating effort in building authentic and meaningful relationships with their students, and being accessible (such as lingering at the end of class, showing up where students spend time, making clear that faculty have time for and are interested in helping students, and providing office hours but also expressing to students how to use these office hours [e.g., “Come and chat”]).

Students also mentioned how the classroom culture set by their instructor influenced how comfortable they felt to express their opinions generally, but also how likely they were to engage in authentic dialogue with their peers:

I’m an [education] major, so a lot of our classes [involve] discussions. I feel [like this] relates a lot to being open-minded. I feel like a lot of the discussions in classes . . . the space is a lot more welcoming, for disagreement and challenging different ideas. And I feel like the professors are very supportive of that, too. I’ve also found that a lot of professors in that school [the School of Education and Human Development] are more willing to foster relationships with their students.

Not all students had positive experiences. Some students spoke about times when instructors created hostile classroom environments that discouraged authentic participation. One Black student shared about a time her professor used a racial slur and how this impacted her psychological safety:

I think that censorship is a big theme in classrooms and . . . I think that students don’t feel like they can truly express themselves because professors are not cultivating an environment where respectful debate is welcome. . . . I know one professor in particular—I love him, but he said something crazy . . . the N-word. And he’s white and tenured. That power dynamic gives you the ability to say something like that and not receive repercussions. . . . But students can’t. . . and that challenges your ability to truly like authentically, be yourself in the classroom. So, I appreciate when professors are who they are, but they are cognizant of the demographics that they are teaching. And even if those demographics are not in the room, they’re constantly including those demographics in their discussions, because to me, that’s true allyship and advocacy.

This example illustrates how important it is for instructors to be aware of their own personal attributes and past experiences, the power differences between them and their students, and the intersection of the two—especially in classrooms that include students with marginalized identities.

3. Understanding the relevance of course content within the real world impacts students’ virtue development. Students crave opportunities to apply their new classroom knowledge to real-world situations linked to current events in society. One student, for example, described how seeing real-life applications deepened their understanding of how they can exercise their civic-related virtues to make the world a better place:

I think using a real-life application project as a way to facilitate diversity [is meaningful]. I remember going to a conference two months ago and seeing a . . . competition where entrepreneurs pitched ideas about how they can use AI or machine learning or any type of technology to improve, for example, maternal health for Black mothers, since we are more likely to die in childbirth. . . . It’s really cool to see how innovative these projects can be and how it can help a lot of people who come from underrepresented backgrounds, or anyone who just wants the problem solved. So more of those real-life examples [in the classroom].

Though students want their learning to connect to real-world situations, it is not always feasible for instructors to implement experiential learning opportunities. Courses are already packed with specialized content and sometimes serve as a prerequisite for other courses. Saying yes to one type of content might mean saying no to another.

Yet we see that college student engagement has dropped in recent years—students, on average, spent 1.7 fewer hours attending classes, discussion sections, and labs in 2022–23 than in 2018–19. Is it possible that incorporating real-world situations would enhance engagement? What if every semester included at least one course built around real-world, experiential learning? This might include asking students to follow a current news topic related to the course content for the full semester, creating assignments that require students to engage with community members, or learning about a local problem related to course content (e.g., local water testing in chemistry, or analyzing data from the city on problems like transportation or affordable housing in a data analysis class).

If it is too difficult to rework curriculum to create real-world opportunities, faculty can turn to other means to engage students in real-world experiences. At least 65% of students enrolled in college engage in research with faculty, extracurricular activities with student organizations, or civic participation. That raises the question—are there ways that instructors can create connections between students’ classes and their daily lives and activities outside of class?

What university experiences hinder character development?

Students were also candid in sharing aspects of their lives that can sometimes limit or challenge their capacity to engage in virtue development:

1. Being the “bigger person” in every situation is difficult to sustain. It is difficult for students to engage in perspective taking and practice open-mindedness with beliefs that oppose their own. One student, for example, reflected on how she grapples with expressing empathy with others, especially to those who hold perspectives that oppose her personal values:

I think sometimes it’s really hard to be compassionate and empathetic when I just don’t understand why [someone is] doing that. And then there’s also the idea of being fundamentally different from somebody, and somebody’s fundamental views on life and morals, are just different from my own and so it’s sometimes hard to give people any benefit of the doubt when I’m like, You’re representing something that I fundamentally disagree with.

2. Students expressed feeling uncertain about their future. This can make it difficult for them to prioritize practicing certain civic virtues, such as social action, because they are focused on how to navigate their own uncertainties ahead.

Students expressed concerns regarding navigating an unstable job market, finding a job related to their degree, and ultimately establishing a career that is aligned with their values and how they want to contribute to society:

I’m currently about to graduate and I’ve accepted one job over another job. . . . I did have two [job] offers that I felt like both of them would have been making a positive change in the world, and would kind of get me closer to where I wanted to be in 5 to 10 years, but I picked one over the other largely because I feel really uncertain about where the economy is headed, where, like education in particular is headed. So, I chose a job over Teach for America, because I’m not super sure where the AmeriCorps is going to go. So yeah, I think financial stability matters to me. But I think at this point, making positive change also still really matters to me.

She also went on to share her concerns regarding the longevity of her career path, given current political realities:

As someone that’s studying public health intertwined in education, those are two things that I feel like are really being defunded or not invested in currently by the administration. Also, I got one of my offers rescinded initially, and that really sucked. I think that a huge challenge for me is trying to figure out and navigate this landscape of what do I do? [Do I choose] what I know will be good for my career in five years, post this [presidential] administration, or do I do what I need to do to be comfortable right now with where I’m at?

Young people will inevitably encounter circumstances that bump up against their character virtues. It is our responsibility, as educators, to provide our students with the tools they need to navigate these difficult moments, so they engage in ethical decision making. The best place to start, we’ve found, is by elevating the voices of your students and genuinely seeking to understand how you can best support their character development. So, start there: Listen first and create opportunities for students to stretch, practice, and apply virtues to real-life, day-to-day situations.

I think about that gap often. The distance between the announcement of freedom and the experience of it. The way something can be technically true and still take years, generations, to land in the body—if ever.

And I think about what freedom, maliciously delayed, would have even meant to the newly self-possessed. Were they reaching for relief from the daily indignities, the particular violence of a system designed to extract everything and return nothing? Or did they believe it would mean something structural—the dismantling of the system itself? Slavery was technically over, but the system was not dismantled. Which means what was on offer in 1865 was not liberation. It was, at best, a temporary and conditional relief expected to be received as grace.

This pattern repeated itself in the generations that followed. The right to order one’s own steps, to live where you chose, to build in a neighborhood that would hold what you built—blocked at every turn. The freedom to move, which had always been a precondition for everything else, was managed, restricted, and re-administered through new instruments every time the old ones were formally prohibited.

In his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote of leaving Mississippi years earlier: “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Isabel Wilkerson built her landmark book, The Warmth of Other Suns, around that line, as she documented the 6 million Black Americans who left the South between 1915 and 1970 in search of dignity.

When I left the United States for Spain in 2017, this, too, was an exercise in freedom of movement. I called it a break. I was burned out in the particular way that Black women in the U.S. get burned out—from the sustained physiological cost of living in a country that registers your presence as a problem to be constantly surveilled and managed. A bone-deep fatigue that rest did not ease, that did not belong entirely to me. It had been passed down.

There’s a name for this condition: “weathering.” Coined by public health researcher Arline T. Geronimus, who has spent four decades documenting its effects in Black Americans, weathering describes the way chronic exposure to racial stress accelerates biological aging, wearing down the body itself. By midlife, more than half of Black women show signs of advanced biological aging that cannot be explained by socioeconomic status alone. The problem, Geronimus argues, is not how well we take care of ourselves. It is how well society takes care of us. There is no current evidence that weathering stops, let alone reverses, on departure. What I felt abroad was real. It just did not happen on the tarmac.

But weathering is not the whole story. Corey Keyes, a psychologist at Emory University, identified a striking paradox: Black Americans report higher rates of flourishing than white Americans by clinical measures, even while carrying greater exposure to discrimination, stress, and physical illness. When Keyes controlled for perceived discrimination, the Black advantage in flourishing increased across nearly every measure, meaning Black Americans would be even healthier were it not for discrimination.

What the data registers as resilience is simultaneously evidence of what is being endured. To read it as proof that Black people can take more, that what has been suffered is not that bad, is to misread the data in a way that has consequences. It converts structural injury into individual strength and lets the structure off the hook. There is no current clinical evidence that weathering reverses on departure.

Three years after I had landed in Spain, still trying to understand what I had moved toward, what I had moved away from, and whether those were the same question, I launched my podcast and archive, Flourish in the Foreign. This happened on May 11, 2020, two weeks before the world watched George Floyd die on a Minneapolis street. My project became an award-winning, internationally acclaimed life-history archive documenting Black women living abroad, building narratives that mainstream media preferred to flatten.

Merriam-Webster defines flourishing as growing luxuriantly, achieving success, and being in a state of active production. That is the flourishing I named this archive after. Not a diagnostic threshold, but a felt life; the gap between those two definitions is where this essay lives. What the guests on my podcast describe—the body stopping its bracing, the jaw unclenching—gestures toward something the research has not yet followed them far enough to name. Flourish in the Foreign exists because I understood, from my own body, that the research could document the toll but could not capture the texture of what women were actually navigating—the calculations, the grief, the unexpected discoveries, the slow interior work that no wellness program had prepared them for.

Over six years, I have conducted more than 150 life-history interviews with Black women living across 30 countries. Through my recent “Aging Abroad” podcast series, I have begun revisiting many of these women years later, creating a rare longitudinal record that documents not only why Black women leave but how their understanding of wellness, belonging, and freedom evolves over time. The question Richard Wright asked—can the transplanted person grow differently, can they bloom?—is the same question running beneath every interview in my archive.

What this project has taught me, consistently and without exception, is this: Relief is real. And relief is not the same thing as freedom. Confusing the two has costs.

What does liberation require?

Niana was my first podcast guest. I had known her since we were both language assistants in northern Spain. She’s from Chicago, a city that received hundreds of thousands of Black Americans during the Great Migration, and whose children will likely never know the city the way she does because they are being raised in the Netherlands.

That, too, is what movement does across generations, disrupts identities and connections to place. I recorded our conversation in February 2020, 18 months after she had left Spain to follow her Dutch husband to the Netherlands, and months before the podcast publicly existed. She was still Spain-shaped, still grieving it from the flatness of the Netherlands.

Six years later, when she returned for the “Aging Abroad” episode at 42, she named what Spain had actually given her: “When I went to Spain, I felt free. I felt like someone had lifted something off my chest. But what came with that—it was just myself and my internal voice . . . it was super clear. It was super loud. It couldn’t be hidden by interactions with other people or distractions.” Spain is not devoid of anti-Blackness. But what it offered her was the specific removal of enough noise that the voice waiting underneath got loud enough to hear.

She also named what she had had to reckon with in that quiet—the guilt of the American differential, the specific social transaction of announcing her nationality and watching rooms shift in her favor in ways she knew were not available to the Black Spanish and Afro-European women around her.

“I felt a lot of guilt there because I knew that I had to say I was American,” she said. “I would immediately be treated differently and I would have access to things that this person who’s born here who deserves it will never have access to.” That observation, made 18 months out of Spain, was not yet theory. It was a pattern she had watched play out for five years and had not yet found clean language for. The essay you are reading is still looking for that language.

What began as a personal experiment became a sustained interrogation of what wellness actually means in the context of voluntary migration and whether what Black American women are calling freedom is what they are actually reaching for, let alone experiencing. The question moves through a historical thread: from Juneteenth, where freedom was declared but had not yet arrived in the body, to the Great Migration, where Black Americans moved North and West toward dignity and found a different version of the same constraint, to the present idea of Blaxit (Black Exit), a growing social and political movement of Black Americans away from the United States—and beyond.

The movement is global, but the question underneath is the same: What does liberation actually require, and is that what is being sought, or simply the next iteration of conditional relief? To name that distinction is the beginning of honest accounting.

Migration as liberation

Courtney grew up in a sundown town in Michigan. Her family integrated the neighborhood in 1988; her father, a police officer in a neighboring city, was stopped and harassed by local police every night driving home through the neighborhood where he owned property, because they did not believe a Black man belonged there, regardless of the badge he carried. Her mother had moved north from Mississippi following siblings who had already gone in earlier surges of the Great Migration.

“I consider myself a product of it,” Courtney told me on the podcast. She carried that lineage before she ever boarded a plane.

She built a life in Atlanta. In the first six months after she and her husband moved into a townhome there—one of the only Black families in the neighborhood—they had police called on them twice: once because a moving truck briefly blocked a cul-de-sac, once because a neighbor heard music and called rather than knock. The year before she left the United States, her closest friend died by suicide. Same age. In her wedding. Had just earned her Ph.D.

“Looking at my friend in a casket, somebody that just like looks like me and like is in the same life stage as me, really did something. It broke me open, quite honestly.” She flew to Mexico on May 1, 2021. She cried before the plane doors opened, tears streaming into her mask before they had even disembarked. Mexico is not devoid of anti-Blackness. What it offered her was the specific removal of the specific instruments that had been administering harm to her entire life.

“Migration as liberation,” she told me, “is a newer, modern way for us to reclaim our freedom.” She named the lineage she was placing herself inside: Josephine Baker in France, James Baldwin in Paris, Assata Shakur in Cuba—people who left not always because the world was offering them better, but because survival required departure. She named her mother’s Mississippi-to-Michigan journey as the movement she descended from. The wager she was making in Mexico was the same wager, updated for a different century and a global map.

I believe this. I also believe that liberation requires something that relief does not.

Relief is a change in conditions—the body stopping its bracing, the jaw unclenching, something long-held beginning to release. It is real and substantive.

Liberation is a change in structure—internal, relational, and political. It requires self-awareness about the construct you are leaving. A commitment not to rebuild it somewhere else. The willingness to be in genuine relationship with the place and people you have arrived among. To bring your gifts rather than your hunger.

Becoming, and the long work

Sienna came to Spain for the first time as a study abroad student from Vassar for five months, extended by a month on her own money, long enough that she wrote her senior thesis on the misrepresentation of Afro-Latina and Caribbean women there.

She went back to Brooklyn after graduation, worked a good job, and was unhappy in a way she couldn’t fully name. The freedom she had found in Spain had no equivalent in her daily life. She applied to the government language assistant program, got placed in Murcia, and moved permanently. That was 12 years ago. She had been building toward Spain deliberately, which makes what happened next the more instructive.

She still had her hair fall out at 24. As she said on my podcast, “That was almost like a culmination of all of the years of not living in alignment that had kind of manifested itself through my body.”

She had come home from the beach one afternoon and begun taking out her braids. Clumps in the shower. A month of doctors offering no answers. The geography had changed, and she had chosen it with intention and intellectual preparation. The survival mode had not. What Spain offered was the specific removal of enough noise that the interior work became impossible to avoid.

“Where you are does not matter if you do not do the work to heal, to become who you truly want to be.”

Twelve years later: VP of growth at a talent and recruiting platform, a successful brand, Las Morenas de España, built and left on her own terms. A village of 700 people in Valencia. A partner. Chickens. A garden. Not the relief of arrival. The consequence of work.

Khephra came to Spain in 2013, before this was a movement, before it had a name, before anyone was using the word Blaxit. A New Orleans woman who had grown up bold and uninhibited arrived in Madrid and had to learn, for the first time, to have some inhibitions. She came because she wanted to, a desire that required no political rationale.

“I just left because I wanted to. I’ve always wanted the chance to leave.” She went natural, organized, started the first protest after Michael Brown’s murder with seven friends and a permit for 1,200 people—4,000 came. She does not fully belong in Spain. When she goes home to New Orleans or Atlanta, she does not fully belong there either. She has made peace with a diasporic home rather than a national one, a self assembled from chosen belonging rather than inherited geography.

“I’ve grown so much and, yes, I’ve been through so much, but I’ve also learned, don’t die. That’s the best we can do. That is liberating.”

That sentence is not ironic. It is this essay’s argument at its most earned and unsentimental—not the liberation of the golden hour, not the liberation of the terrace in Lisbon, but the liberation of a woman in her mid-40s who has been at this for over a decade and has found the courage to be disliked, to occupy her own full complexity, to stop managing other people’s comfort. She suspects her picture lines the finest bird cages and litter boxes in Spain. She is fine with that, as long as they got her good side.

Freedom is something to live

Ayoka B., a writer and poet from Washington, D.C., was a featured guest on the podcast in March of this year. She discussed leaving America for Costa Rica, and also was guest essayist on my Substack, Letters From Elsewhere, in May 2026. She wrote about the evolution of her motherhood abroad in the weeks before her son—raised in Costa Rica from 13, fluent in Spanish, thriving in ways she could not have engineered for him at home—flew back to D.C. against her wishes.

She described her departure from the U.S.: “I felt like I was fleeing for my life because I was.”

Her son rode his bike to school, an 11-minute ride he navigated alone, something he could never have done in D.C. He earned As and Bs. He played basketball on weekends and hung out at the beach. He moved through a community that evaluated him on what he contributed rather than managed him for what he might threaten. “My son could move around alone and with his friends, unbothered,” she said.

And then someone suggested he return to the States after graduation. He agreed. He had grown up in the freedom she made and did not know what made it necessary. He did not grow up in the D.C. that she survived.

“Now, he wants to return to the United States, against my wishes, at the worst possible time.” She named what he would be returning to: ICE raids, ballooning unemployment, police violence. She named what he did not understand: that there is a difference between visiting D.C. and living there, that he doesn’t know how to move in it, that his disposition—open and trusting, easygoing, earned on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica—could make him a mark. “My son, who has always had his own room, will be sharing a house with four people and sleeping on the couch.”

He flew to D.C. on May 28. She is currently filing paperwork for Costa Rican citizenship, hoping more options will lure him back. “I am terrified. I’m not as emotional as before, but I’m not OK.”

Crossing the gap

That is this essay’s most difficult truth: Relief can be built, inhabited, handed to a child, and returned. The freedom Ayoka made is real. Her son’s choice to leave it is also real. He never had to experience what made it necessary. He does not know what she survived. He doesn’t yet know what she knows.

On Juneteenth, we celebrate the day the news arrived. But what Juneteenth also documents is that freedom can be declared and not yet lived. There is always a gap—sometimes measured in years, sometimes in the distance between a mother in Costa Rica filing citizenship paperwork and a son on a plane to D.C.—between the moment liberation is made possible and the moment it is actually inhabited.

I am nine years into crossing that gap. The women in this archive are years and decades into it.

Niana, at 42 in a Dutch village, craving Lake Shore Drive, told me: “I can also say what might heal me may not be where I’m from, but I’m proud of that.” She holds both truths without resolving them. She has been holding them for 13 years.

We are not running away. We are running toward something that was never available where we started. The thing we are running toward is not a specific country. It is an experience of self-determination. It is an opportunity to cultivate a life well-lived, on our own terms.

Richard Wright asked whether the transplanted person could grow differently. Whether they could respond to the warmth of other suns. Whether they could, perhaps, bloom.

The women in this archive are the answer. Not because they have arrived. But because they are still growing.

• A Short History of Black Happiness: What can African American history tell us about the cultivation of well-being?
• How Well Do Happiness Practices Serve Black Communities?: We interviewed Black people about where happiness comes from and whether 15 typical happiness practices work for them.
• On Juneteenth, Black Women Reflect on Seeking Freedom Outside the U.S.: Black Americans can find relief when they leave the United States to live abroad—but do they find liberation?
• Why Telling Our Own Story Is So Powerful for Black Americans: Andrea Collier reflects on the role of storytelling in black American history—and in her own life.
• Why Storytelling Skills Matter for African-American Kids: For black students, storytelling skills directly predict their early reading skills.
• Can Loving Yourself and Others Protect Your Health?: Research suggests that seeing our spiritual connections to others could protect us from disease and promote public health.

Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, Virginia, 1905. Source: Wikipedia

• How to Change the Story about Students of Color: Dena Simmons explores how educators can inadvertently harm students of color—and what we can do to bring out their best.
• Why Marginalized Students Need Hope to Succeed: Researcher Dante Dixson is developing programs to help disadvantaged students envision a brighter future for themselves.
• Can We Teach Racial Justice by Talking About Virtues?: It’s harder to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools these days, but there might be other ways to frame the conversation.
• How Talking About Race Can Bring Black Families Together: A new program is helping Black children and their caregivers talk about race—and they’re learning important lessons about racial socialization.
• For Black Children, Play Can Be Transformative: Play is a radical and liberatory activity for Black children. As adults, we have a responsibility to promote and participate in it, too.
• Does Preventing Depression Look Different for Black and White Kids?: New research suggests that ways of supporting mental health in white youth may not work for underrepresented groups, such as Black youth.
• Nine Picture Books That Illuminate Black Joy: These books celebrate Black children’s everyday lives—being bold, curious, creative, loving, and playful.
• How Adults Can Support the Mental Health of Black Children: Psychologist Riana Elyse Anderson explains how families can communicate about race and cope with racial stress and trauma.
• How Can I Stay Positive for My Kids When I’m So Overwhelmed?: Even for a psychologist who studies how kids understand racism and violence, talking to her own children about it is difficult.
• How the “Strong Black Woman” Identity Both Helps and Hurts: Being a “superwoman” could help African American women cope with racial discrimination—but it may have some drawbacks.
• Seven Complicated Lessons From Jamaica About Happiness: What does the island reveal about the science of happiness?
• From Othering to Belonging: In a Science of Happiness podcast, we explore racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of connection and concern.
• When Diversity Is Stressful, Focus on Building Trust: We talk with Claude M. Steele about his new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It.
• Thoughts on Awkward Relationships and Bridging Divides: In a Science of Happiness podcast, comedian W. Kamau Bell discusses the challenges of finding common ground, even with people in your own family.
• Why George Floyd Still Matters: Five years ago, the police killing of George Floyd provoked a wave of change. As those gains come under attack, Stephanie Griffith finds hope in human moments.
• Can We Build a World Where We All Belong?: john a. powell explains why we distance ourselves from groups of people and how we can all find the connection that we crave.

We also have resource pages devoted to anti-racist tools and to the scientific case for diversity.

Can you teach someone to provide care that isn’t simply accepting of differences, but actually tends to all the ways those differences are impacting a patient’s health? 

The faculty at Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy can. In fact, they must. They’re required to do so by the accreditation body that sets the standards for the education of pharmacists.

In addition to teaching students information like the physicochemical properties of drugs or the mathematical calculations involved in dosing, pharmacy programs are required to help their students develop complex interpersonal skills such as cultural and structural humility, advocacy, and interprofessional collaboration. The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education requires that all pharmacy programs prepare students to provide “whole-person care.”

Whole-person care, according to the World Health Organization, requires that providers learn to see that a patient’s health is not just the result of biomedical factors. Psychosocial, cultural, and environmental forces also shape our well-being. Providing whole-person care means crafting treatment plans that address all of those forces. It’s impossible to provide this kind of integrated care without strong interpersonal skills. Graduates of accredited pharmacy schools—like other institutions that train health care professionals—must know how to “actively engage, listen, and communicate” and “to mitigate health disparities by considering, recognizing, and navigating cultural and structural factors.”

How, exactly, does an institution help students engage with each patient as a person with their own needs, beliefs, and cultural norms and as a person whose health might be impacted by structural forces like environmental racism or anti-fat bias? The McWhorter School of Pharmacy offers a helpful model in teaching people to care in complex, comprehensive ways for people who are different from them.

The “other culture” assignment

Jonathan Thigpen has come up with creative, impactful strategies for teaching these skills during his tenure as assistant dean of Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy.

Thigpen and his colleagues have crafted a curriculum in whole-person care that runs throughout a doctoral student’s time at Samford. One of the assignments he gives first-year students—the “other culture” assignment—is emblematic of this work. Thigpen created the assignment in response to an unsettling observation. Across many years of teaching, he noticed in his students a growing reluctance to get out of their comfort zones. He says he saw an “increasing unwillingness to try something new, to take a risk, to put yourself out there.” It was disconcerting because, as Thigpen says, “you have to be able to do that as a health care provider.”

The assignment involves:

• Visiting a site or event that is part of an “other” culture. It can be any culture about which the student is curious; it just has to be different from the student’s own background. The student should ask permission to attend if necessary.
• Staying immersed and present for at least one hour. The student must go have an individual experience. They can’t bring a friend or go with a group of people from class. The student must stay off of their phone and avoid taking photos, pictures, and notes or do anything else that might take them out of the experience or make them seem like a “tourist” in the place.
• Writing a two- to three-page reflection essay. The reflection should connect the student’s experience to topics they have discussed in class, covered in readings, or analyzed in other assignments. The results were remarkable. Samford is a private Christian university outside Birmingham, Alabama, and many of Thigpen’s students use this assignment as an opportunity to experience a new faith community. Protestant students have attended Catholic services. Catholics have attended Protestant services. Other students have chosen to experience events or spaces associated with classes, races, and genders other than their own. One young woman went to a car auction, an event that’s typically more popular with men. Another student who has a white-collar career ate lunch at a blue-collar cafeteria.

Sometimes the “other” culture a student chooses to experience is one that they’ve been taught to fear or avoid. One student grew up with a family member who had a gambling problem, and they had been warned of the dangers of gambling for as long as they could remember. They had never stepped foot inside a casino but harbored plenty of curiosity. This assignment afforded them the opportunity to better understand a place that held such charge for their family. 

Overwhelmingly, students report having positive experiences and share significant insights about the power of connecting with different people and cultures. An international student who chose to visit a cattle stockyard in Texas noticed there’s a big difference between consuming media about a place and interacting with it themselves. In their paper, they observed, “Even though I have heard and seen a lot about Texas, it felt so different when I experienced it in real life. I think to know a culture, it is not enough to just watch their movies or read about them in magazines. What we feel and experience when interacting with them or join[ing] some of their traditional events is so much more valuable.” 

When a white student visited a Black church, they realized that encountering other cultures can be easier than expected. They noted, “This experience taught me that all my anxiety about being in a different cultural setting was my own issue. I was surrounded by people different from me, yet everyone treated me like family. No one cared about the color of my skin, and I realized that my initial fears had been unnecessary. I had worried that my presence might be disrespectful, but, instead, I was welcomed with kindness.”

After administering the “other culture” assignment for many years, Thigpen made an unexpected observation. Students don’t need to encounter a dramatically different culture or bridge an emotionally charged divide in order for the cross-cultural experience to have a deep impact. Sometimes crossing a small bridge can create big change.

Take Briana Watson’s story. Watson decided to visit a European antique store that happened to be owned by a member of the Samford faculty—a white woman of European descent. Watson is Black and hails from a small town a few hours outside of Birmingham.

Watson recalled feeling a bit guarded as she first entered the store. Her body remembered childhood excursions to stores full of delicate items, being told to hold still and don’t touch anything. But when she stepped through the doors, her professor warmly welcomed her and the tension melted away. Watson and the professor struck up a conversation and discovered they share more in common than they expected.

“There was so much to unpack beyond the antiques,” Watson said. “She comes from a military family as do I,” she remembered, “so really connecting over the understanding of service and the love of service and the work ethic that comes behind that started to bridge the gap.”

Watson started the day thinking I’m going to see my professor, but, by the end of the visit, she had a level of connection and trust that became the foundation for a deep, long-lasting relationship. Watson ended up returning to the store many times. This professor became one of her most trusted mentors, and they even went to Spain together on a study abroad trip.

The experience helped Watson develop an awareness of the ways in which the roles of professor and student or pharmacist and patient can create a structure or hierarchy that isn’t always useful when you need to build trust or ask for support. She explained, “I think when we’re always in these structured learning environments, we tend to look at our relationships as that structured dynamic, too. After breaking away from that and . . . getting to know more about her culture, we’re more inclined now to ask her questions if we need help. We’re more inclined to just sit in her office and talk now.”

The experience also gave Watson a chance to reflect on how someone creates an interpersonal encounter that actually feels welcoming and fosters connection. She wants to carry those lessons into her work as a pharmacist. “What stuck with me the most,” she said, “is how I have to be intentional about creating that space with anyone, whether it be a friend or a patient. . . . It’s more about leaning in and asking the follow-ups and being intentional and also having the humility to accept viewpoints that are different than your own. It’s like, OK, this is the person that I want to be in the world and I’m going to make strides towards that.”

Noticing who we want to be in the world and taking repeated action to become that version of ourselves are important components of character development. It’s clear that Watson engaged with the “other culture” assignment as a character-building experience. That’s no accident.

Designing for character development

Character scientist Elise Dykhuis notes several features built into Thigpen’s assignment that make it more likely that students have a character-building experience instead of a simply memorable one, whether you’re looking to strengthen your own capacity to care across differences or you’re responsible for helping develop the character of others.

Establish trust and relevance. If you’re designing an experience for someone else and especially if you’re making it mandatory, like Thigpen does, take the time to build a foundation of trust. All Samford pharmacy first-year students take the “Foundations of Health and Pharmacy” series, and this assignment comes toward the end of the semester, after students have been through lectures and readings about bias and cultural humility. Thigpen has had time to build trust with his class, demonstrating the curiosity, intellectual humility, patience, and empathy that he wants his students to exercise.

He has also introduced why this experience is relevant to their professional development. He establishes it as an opportunity to do something that researchers call “self-expansion.” Research finds that there are many benefits to understanding difference not only as something to tolerate or to manage, but as an opportunity to learn, to broaden one’s perspective, and to expand the self. When people have strong motives to self-expand and they anticipate growth from an interaction, they report greater interest in engaging with people from different groups and they show patterns consistent with more high-quality contact in their interactions with people from different groups.

Leverage curiosity and autonomy. This assignment is driven by curiosity. Thigpen asks his students to consider their own curiosities. Are there cultures or groups of people that have stoked their curiosity? Curiosity gives students the leverage to get over the barrier of discomfort and take the first step. Students are also afforded the autonomy to choose the experience they want to have. Dykhuis explains that, according to self-determination theory, autonomy is one of the key factors “when we’re thinking about what we can use to promote intrinsic motivation in the long run, which is what we really need as adults in order to change something about ourselves or develop ourselves.”

Reflect. Thigpen’s reflection paper is key to the assignment’s efficacy. Dykhuis notes that multiple literatures about self-development stress the importance of reflecting on an experience right after it happens, but we often struggle to provide ourselves with the opportunity to do it. If we pause, reflect, and make meaning after an encounter, we’re more likely to let ourselves be changed by it. 

Prioritize encouragement and enjoyment. Thigpen’s assignment is a one-time experience, but there are things we can add to the experience to help encourage longer-term development. As Dykhuis and her colleagues explain, the personality and character change research says if we want people to change or develop on their own long-term, encouragement and enjoyment are key. Encouragement comes from being integrated into a community and forming relationships. When we’re part of a community of other practitioners and practitioners-in-training (like the pharmacy students are), we’re reminded to stick with it. When we build connections to people whom we care about, they help keep us accountable. Plus, we’re surrounded by people modeling the attitudes and skills we want to develop.

Don’t forget the fun. Many students report that once they muster up the courage to try their first formal bridging encounter, they realize that it’s not as hard as they thought it would be. It’s actually quite enjoyable to connect with people who are different from them and to have new experiences.

No one is going to learn how to provide whole-person care over the course of one semester. It could take an entire career of deep dedication to live up to the standard of care that professional organizations like the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the American Pharmacists Association set for their fields. The systemic factors that shape social determinants of health are complex and dynamic. The contexts in which health care providers meet and tend to patients are ever-changing. However, when we focus on developing the character strengths we need to connect across differences, we can keep building our capacity to meet and care for people where they are, in their full complexity. And, as a bonus, we get to bring the courage, curiosity, intellectual humility, patience, and empathy that we’ve cultivated into other areas of our lives, as well. How fun is that?!

This dynamic becomes especially visible during periods of heightened immigration enforcement. Parents weigh whether it is safe to take their child to the doctor. Teenagers in a mixed-status family reconsider applying for college. Families avoid public spaces. Over time, these decisions accumulate, reshaping how families care for one another and imagine their futures.

For many immigrant families, separation—whether by force or by choice—is not a single moment. It becomes a psychological rupture that reshapes how they experience safety, belonging and identity.

For many, separation starts with the act of immigration itself, often forced by desperate circumstances. Diana Ortiz Giron, director of programming and education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is the youngest of three siblings raised by a single mother who had to make a difficult choice: In 1996, she left her children with their aunt and grandmother and moved across the border, from Tijuana to Azusa, a city in Southern California, in search of economic opportunities.

“I remember very little from my time in Mexico, but what I do remember is people telling me that I would hold onto my mom’s leg when she would leave back to the States,” she says.

If families are reunited in the United States, even legal immigrants today face intensified fears of family separation, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains more and more lawful residents with no criminal records.

Researchers note the phenomenon is not new. For decades, U.S. immigration policy has created conditions in which physical, emotional, or anticipatory separation is a recurring part of life for many Latino families—and increasingly, all immigrants today. The current enforcement landscape builds on that history, amplifying pressures that continue to shape health, decision-making, and family relationships.

Studies show that experiences with immigration enforcement, from racial profiling to knowing someone who has been deported, are linked to delays in healthcare—such as postponing doctor visits, avoiding hospitals, or forgoing preventive care—and increased psychological distress. Each additional encounter increases the likelihood that individuals will postpone care or report worse health outcomes.

Gustavo Carlo, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies Latino youth and family relationships, says the effects of enforcement-related separation can be especially damaging for children and adolescents.

“This form of forced separation is powerful and potentially destructive to health and well-being,” Carlo said. “It’s not only involuntary, but it often violates basic human rights. When it happens at a large scale, it intensifies fear, anxiety, and stress in ways that can disrupt the lives of children, families, and entire communities.”

Together, these findings suggest that today’s enforcement tactics do more than create isolated fear; they shape how people navigate everyday decisions about their health and well-being. According to advocates, today’s immigration policies reflect broader choices about who is protected in American society—consequences that reach far beyond migrant communities. But those communities are not helpless in the face of these forces. Families, advocates, and local organizations are working to buffer their impact and reimagine systems of support.

A long history of separation

Family separation in the United States dates back to the 18th century.

From the forced separation of enslaved families to exclusionary immigration laws that limited entry and family reunification, these practices have disrupted family networks across generations. Early federal policies, including the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricted migration and, in many cases, prevented families from remaining together or reuniting. 

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, immigration enforcement became more formalized through expanded detention systems and increased coordination between federal and local authorities. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 reorganized immigration enforcement under a national security framework. Programs such as Secure Communities and 287(g) agreements enabled local law enforcement to work more closely with federal immigration agencies.

These changes broadened the scope of enforcement into routine settings. Encounters such as traffic stops or other local law enforcement interactions could lead to detention or deportation, increasing the risk of family separation beyond border crossings.

The Trump administration marked a significant increase in the scale and visibility of these practices. The 2018 Zero Tolerance Policy mandated criminal prosecution for unauthorized border crossings, resulting in the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border. At the same time, expanded interior enforcement, workplace raids, and efforts to rescind programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) contributed to increased uncertainty for mixed-status families.

In recent years, tens of thousands of spouses and children have been separated due to immigration enforcement actions. Many more families live with the possibility of separation, and some make difficult decisions about whether to remain together or apart in response to enforcement risks. Family separation continues to be a recurring outcome of immigration policy in the United States.

Anxiety and anticipatory grief

Today, Ortiz Giron is a newly naturalized U.S. citizen who was once undocumented and later became a DACA recipient. She says she constantly worries about what might happen if her husband, a brown Latino man, were to encounter ICE.

These fears shape even ordinary moments. “We have conversations about what would happen if we were detained,” she says. “The baby’s in the car seat, I’m in the back, he’s driving—and if they ask him to get out, we’ve already said: don’t intervene. Let them take you. I’ll find a lawyer. I’ll find resources to get you out.”

Psychologists and family researchers increasingly ask: What happens when family separation is to be expected?

To investigate, researchers distinguish between three interconnected experiences. Forced separation occurs when a parent is detained or deported. Separation by constrained choice happens when families preemptively separate in response to danger or instability. Fear of separation, often overlooked, describes the chronic anxiety of living under the constant threat that family unity could be shattered at any time.

These experiences do not occur in isolation; they accumulate and are increasingly shaping the psychological lives and cultural experiences of Latinos in the United States.

Ortiz Giron’s childhood experience reflects separation by constrained choice—one shaped by survival and economic necessity. While difficult, she says separations caused by deportation feel more like an unexpected death.

“You don’t expect it. You’re not prepared for it,” she says. “There’s grief and a loss of that connection to that family member, and there is deep pain throughout the whole process. I cannot imagine the fear that parents carry, knowing this could happen and that they could be separated from their children.”

Living with constant uncertainty

Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young is an immigrant health scholar who studies how immigration policy shapes family well-being. Her research shows that uncertainty itself can become a powerful force, influencing how people assess risk and make decisions about care.

“One of the big challenges that communities are facing at this time is having the ability to plan and make plans for their own future,” she explains. That uncertainty reaches into daily life, influencing whether parents seek medical care for their children or whether young people pursue higher education.

Young emphasizes that this instability does not begin with high-profile enforcement actions. It’s built into the policy landscape.

“The baseline in this country…is one of exclusion,” she says. Federal and state policies often limit access to basic services such as healthcare, particularly for undocumented immigrants. Even before recent increases in enforcement, many families were already navigating a system where access to care, education, and work opportunities was uncertain.

That broader context matters. It means families are not just reacting to isolated events, but adapting to an environment where risk is constant.

Researchers have begun to describe this as more than a “chilling effect.” Rather than simply avoiding institutions out of fear, many immigrants experience repeated, direct contact with enforcement systems, from workplace raids to traffic stops or the detention of a family member. In some cases, a single deportation reverberates across an entire social network, affecting how neighbors, relatives, and friends assess risk.

Those encounters accumulate over time, shaping how people move through the world and how they make decisions about safety and health.

The psychological toll of separation on children

One longitudinal study followed more than 300 recently immigrated Latino adolescents in Los Angeles and Miami over the course of a year, surveying them at multiple points about their experiences of discrimination, depressive symptoms, and social behavior.

The researchers found that experiences of discrimination and chronic stress were linked to increases in depressive symptoms over the course of the year, which in turn were associated with lower engagement in helping and cooperative behaviors. Indeed, decades of research show that family separation is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and trauma, with effects that can persist into adulthood and shape educational attainment, social relationships, and long-term well-being.

In some communities, enforcement actions extend into spaces meant to provide stability, like schools and the courts. This disrupts school attendance, undermines feelings of safety, and disfigures the broader social fabric of schools and neighborhoods.

One reason family separation is so damaging is that it often creates what psychologists call ambiguous loss, a concept developed by family therapist Pauline Boss. She describes it as a uniquely stressful form of loss because it lacks clarity and closure, making it difficult for families to grieve or adapt.

Research on immigrant families has applied this framework to experiences of deportation and prolonged separation. Studies by Luis H. Zayas find that children in mixed-status households often experience persistent fear, anxiety, and disruptions to family roles when a parent is detained or deported.

As he explains in one paper, “The constant dread of the possible arrest, detention, and deportation of their parents sets the context that places citizen-children at risk for negative psychological effects and disruption of their developmental trajectories… [and] the actual arrest, detention, and deportation of parents serve only to complete the trauma.” This situation is shaped as much by uncertainty as by separation itself. In this context, a parent who has been deported may still be in contact, yet their absence remains unresolved and ongoing.

Ambiguous loss prevents closure. Families remain suspended between hope and grief, unsure whether reunification will ever occur. Over time, this unresolved stress can fracture family dynamics and isolate households from broader community support.

Exclusionary environments can intensify this isolation. Fear of immigration enforcement leads families to withdraw from social networks built through institutions such as schools and religious places of worship resulting in deepening loneliness and reinforcing vulnerability.

Familismo and the weight of separation

These effects extend beyond individual well-being. Gustavo Carlo points to the concept of familismo, which reflects the central role of family in many Latino children’s lives.

“Family is the training ground for children’s development,” he said. “It provides not just support, but shapes their sense of self and their sense of obligation to one another.”

These values can foster resilience, encouraging individuals to support one another even in the face of adversity. At the same time, they can heighten the emotional toll of separation, as disruptions to family unity strain entire support systems. This tension between resilience and strain defines many families’ experiences.

Carlo also emphasizes that these challenges do not define outcomes for all families.

“In spite of trauma and tremendous barriers, some individuals are able to overcome these risks,” he said. “There’s always the possibility not only to cope, but to contribute in positive ways, to support family members, strengthen communities, and advocate for future generations.”

In many immigrant communities facing the constant threat of deportation, separation is not an abstract possibility. It is a shared reality, an ongoing condition that shapes how families think about safety, belonging, and the future.

Supporting families and imagining humane enforcement

Despite the challenges of separation, Latino families and community organizations are finding ways to reduce harm and build resilience.

Legal aid, know‑your‑rights workshops, and case management help families stay together and access healthcare, education, and housing, while peer groups, faith communities, and culturally grounded mental health services provide emotional support and reduce isolation.

Inside the home, families are also developing strategies to navigate the possibility of separation. A recent study by Mahsa Rafieifar and Hui Huang examines how undocumented parents talk with their children about legal status and the risk of family separation. The researchers found that these conversations are often carefully planned and emotionally complex, with parents weighing how much to disclose and how to protect their children from fear.

Some parents frame these discussions through stories of migration, explaining why they came to the United States and emphasizing hope and opportunity. Others make deliberate efforts to avoid being perceived as “lawbreakers” by reassuring their children that their actions are rooted in care for the family’s future. In many cases, conversations about legal status are intertwined with discussions about long-term goals, helping children make sense of uncertainty within a broader narrative of sacrifice and aspiration.

Some of the most difficult conversations center on contingency planning, particularly the possibility that a child may need to live with another caregiver. The study finds that while some parents identify trusted guardians and prepare their children for that possibility, others avoid the topic altogether, reflecting the emotional weight and uncertainty surrounding these decisions.

These strategies highlight the quiet, often invisible work families do to maintain stability under conditions of chronic risk. They also underscore the limits of what families can manage on their own.

At the community level, organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS advocate for policies that prioritize family unity, reduce deportations, and invest in community services rather than detention. Advocates and service providers increasingly emphasize that reducing harm requires not only individual coping strategies, but systemic change.

How communities can buffer the effects

What would it take to ease the toll of family separation for families and the communities where it has become part of everyday life?

Researchers and practitioners point to a growing body of evidence showing that community-based support and policy changes can meaningfully buffer the effects of immigration enforcement on children and families.

Studies in public health and social work have found that access to stable legal representation, community health services, and school-based support systems can reduce psychological distress and improve long-term outcomes for children in mixed-status families. Programs that provide universal legal representation, for example, are associated with higher case success rates and greater family stability, allowing parents to remain with their children and maintain access to work, housing, and care.

Mental health researchers also emphasize the importance of culturally responsive, family-centered care. Interventions that include peer support, trauma-informed therapy, and community-based counseling have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression among children experiencing immigration-related stress. These approaches work in part because they rebuild trust and social connection, two factors that are often eroded in enforcement-heavy environments.

At the policy level, scholars argue that shifting away from detention-based systems is key. Community-based alternatives to detention, such as case-management programs, have been found to support high rates of compliance with immigration proceedings while allowing families to remain together. Limiting prolonged confinement and reducing the use of enforcement in sensitive spaces like schools and hospitals can also help restore a sense of safety in the institutions families rely on most.

Advocates, including organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS, argue that humane enforcement must center family unity and child well-being. That includes investments not only in legal systems but also in education, healthcare, and economic opportunity, factors that shape whether families can remain stable in the face of uncertainty.

Research suggests that the harms of separation are not inevitable. They are shaped and can be reduced by the systems surrounding families. With the right support in place, communities can buffer the effects of enforcement, protect children’s development, and create conditions in which families are able not only to endure but to thrive.

These policies could help make life better for all Americans. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young emphasizes that immigration policy does not just affect immigrants.

“Even before 2025, in multiple studies I found that in states with many anti-immigrant policies, the health of U.S.-born citizens—regardless of whether they are white, Black, Latino, or Asian—is worse,” she says. “We need to understand that immigration policy is not just about immigrants; it reflects choices about how we treat people in society. Choosing to be anti-immigrant has implications for the well-being of everyone.”

Now, bring to mind an educator you felt close to. Someone who saw you for who you were and even who you could be. What did it feel like to be around them?

Next, shift your attention to an educator you were not close to. Someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t see you. How did it feel to be near them?

Most of us still carry these experiences with us, decades later. We know firsthand that these relationships shape us long after we leave the school building. The good news is that we know a lot about what makes the positive ones so powerful and how to build them.

Research consistently finds that positive student-teacher relationships have a significant impact on students’ engagement, social-emotional development, and academic success—as well as physical and mental health in adulthood. And the benefits go both ways: For educators, positive student-teacher relationships predict greater teaching efficacy and higher levels of well-being.

Of course, building these relationships isn’t always easy or straightforward. One of the biggest barriers is implicit bias, which refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that unconsciously affect a person’s perceptions, actions, and decisions. For example, educators might consciously hold egalitarian personal beliefs while unconsciously associating Asian students with being quiet, compliant, and self-sufficient or Black and Brown students with being loud, disruptive, and aggressive.

Implicit bias can make it harder for us to see our students for who they truly are and could be. But the more we understand about how these biases work, the better equipped we are to move past them and toward the kinds of relationships that change lives.

Implicit bias in education

So, where does implicit bias come from—and how does it show up in schools?

Implicit bias is the result of our brain’s natural wiring for quick, automatic processing and living in a society permeated by the smog of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of prejudice.

Due to our frequent exposure to bias, our brains encode these prejudiced ideas for when we need to make split-second decisions. Because none of us are immune from breathing in the smog, no one is immune from implicit bias—not even well-intentioned, caring educators.

There are certain conditions called “vulnerable decision points” in which people rely more heavily on quick, unconscious processing. These conditions include time constraints, exhaustion, frustration, stress, and even hunger. In her article “Understanding Implicit Bias: What Educators Should Know,” Staats writes: “Given that teachers encounter many, if not all, of these conditions through the course of a school day, it is unsurprising that implicit biases may be contributing to teachers’ actions and decisions.”

In K–12 education, implicit bias contributes to disparities in academic achievement as well as discipline. When looking at relationships, students of color are less likely to have close connections with their teachers, and implicit bias is suspected to be a major contributing factor. In other words, implicit bias can determine whether a student experiences us as the adult who saw them or the one who didn’t.

A plethora of trainings and interventions focus on identifying, reflecting on, and excising implicit bias. Unfortunately, implicit bias is resistant to removal.

Luckily, researchers have found a more effective intervention that focuses on disrupting the implicit bias before it becomes behavior. Even better news? Focusing on changing behavior can weaken implicit bias over time, making it possible to build the positive relationships we hope for with all of our students.

How educators can counter implicit bias

According to neuroscience, there are three ways to disrupt implicit bias before it becomes behavior:

• Identify the disconnect between implicit bias and your values. Implicit bias often operates in direct conflict with what we consciously believe. The first step in disrupting it is recognizing when our automatic reactions don’t match the values we hold.
• Prevent reactive behavior stemming from implicit bias. Once we notice the disconnect, we need the ability to pause before acting on it. Regulation strategies like pausing and breathing give us the chance to stop our automatic reaction.
• Choose a values-aligned response. With that pause, we can deliberately choose a response that reflects how we actually want to show up for our students: one rooted in the beliefs and commitments that brought us to this work in the first place.

Just as we plan for our students’ needs, we as educators can plan for our own needs, too. We’re going to suggest a three-step reflective process for educators that turns these neuroscience insights into a self-awareness that can help replace behavior influenced by implicit bias.

This process can be used at any time during the school year and with any student. To get started, consider a student who is on your mind right now. Maybe it’s someone you’re struggling to connect with at the start of the year, one whose behaviors you find challenging midway through, or one who continues to mystify you as the year winds down. The best time to get started? Right now.

Step 1: Get curious and name what you want to change. The first step is to get curious. There are a series of activities and reflection prompts below that will guide you through looking closely at yourself, your student, and your relationship.

Ground yourself in your values. Before looking outward, look inward and start with what matters most to you. Your values are the foundation for the kind of educator you want to be and the relationships you want to build.

• Identify your top three to five values as an educator by completing this values-based exercise.
• Take a minute to visualize the settings in which you work with students (e.g., class, hallways, after-school club, etc.). What do these values look like in practice? What do you want your relationships with students to look like? How do you want your students to feel?

Choose a student and reflect on your relationship. Now that you have a clearer picture of your values and your vision, it’s time to identify a student you’d like to build a stronger connection with.

Select a student. How would you describe your relationship with them right now? How do you feel about them?

Look at your patterns. When things get difficult with this student, how do you tend to respond? What do you do or say? To what extent are you practicing your values in these moments?

Consider the role of implicit bias. Next, look beneath the patterns you’ve identified. Implicit bias often operates outside of our awareness, so this step asks you to consider what might be fueling those behaviors.

• Think about your and your student’s social identity markers. Which ones feel salient to this situation? What unconscious beliefs might you have absorbed about these identities?
• Reflect on when you’re most vulnerable to snap judgments. Consider the time of day, location, and your state of mind. When are you most tired? Hungry? Stressed? These are your vulnerable decision points.

Name what you want to change. At this point, you’ve grounded yourself in your values, looked honestly at a relationship, and considered how implicit bias might be showing up. Now get specific: What is one behavior you want to stop, and what values-aligned behavior do you want to replace it with?

When I reflect on my values, connection and inclusion rise to the top, and yet (for example) when I think about my student Justin, I can see I’m not living those values. We’ve butted heads since his first week in my class, and somewhere along the way, I stopped asking about him or his interests and shifted into conflict-avoidance mode instead. Thinking about the role implicit bias might be playing, I notice that Justin is a tall Latino male who looks older than his 15 years, and I wonder if I’ve unconsciously held him to a standard of maturity he doesn’t have yet.

As a first step, I want to focus on transitions, which have been the source of most of our tension lately. When I ask the class to shift tasks, Justin resists, and I get frustrated. My new approach is to give him a quiet heads-up before any transition so he has time to prepare, and if he still needs a moment, I’ll check in with him one-on-one rather than calling him out in front of everyone. The goal is to replace my reactive pattern (frustration, public correction) with something values-driven: a genuine invitation to join the class in what comes next.

Step 2: Tune in and try out the response you want. The first step happened in a reflective space. This step happens in real time, in the moments that matter most. When you notice that reactive behavior coming up with your student, that’s your cue to pause and practice. The following process is adapted from Zarretta Hammond’s SODA Strategy, which is described in her 2015 book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.

Tune in. Your body often registers implicit bias before your conscious mind does. Learning to notice those signals gives you the chance to choose your response rather than react on autopilot.

• Tune in to your internal landscape. What thoughts are you having? What emotions are you feeling? What is your body telling you? A flash of heat, a rolling stomach, a clenched jaw? These are all data.
• Take a moment to ground and care for yourself. Grounding practices could include taking a few deep breaths, thinking about a soothing place, washing your hands, or stepping outside. Even a small pause can help you shift from reactive to intentional.

Try it out. Once you feel a little more grounded, try the replacement behavior you identified in step 1. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal isn’t to get it exactly right the first time; the goal is to practice responding with your values instead of bias. Pay attention to what happens; these observations will be important for step 3.

Here’s how this might look in practice with Justin: I give him a heads-up that we’ll be transitioning in a few minutes. He nods, but when the time comes, he still isn’t ready. I feel that familiar frustration tightening my jaw, but instead of calling him out, I walk over and quietly check in. He grumbles a little, but starts packing up.

No matter the outcome, you’ve gathered valuable information about yourself, your student, and the relationship. Move to step 3 to continue the learning.

Step 3: Reflect in community. This step invites you to bring all the work you’ve done so far to people you trust. Other perspectives can help us see what we can’t see on our own, especially when it comes to implicit bias. Find a trusted colleague or group to process with. This could look like a regular check-in with a teaching partner, a group chat with colleagues you trust, or dedicated time in your professional learning community meetings. Whatever it looks like, these are your thought partners.

The process below—adapted from Barbara Dray and Debora Basler Wisneski’s mindful reflection protocol—uses description, interpretation, and evaluation to help you and your thought partners separate what actually happened from the stories you might be telling yourself about it.

Describe your experience. Walk your thought partners through the interaction you had with your student, focusing only on the objective facts of what happened. For example: “I gave Justin a heads-up about the transition, and when he did not transition with his peers, I gave him a private, follow-up reminder, and he then transitioned.” Your thought partners’ job is to listen, ask clarifying questions, and gently flag if you’ve slipped out of description into interpretation or evaluation.

Surface your interpretations. Next, name the meaning you’ve assigned to your student’s behavior. For example, I might say: “Justin didn’t transition with his peers even with the extra reminders. It feels like he doesn’t respect my time or his classmates’ time.” This is where thought partners can be especially useful. By listening and offering alternative interpretations, they can surface possibilities you might not have considered on your own. A thought partner might share, for instance, that they themselves struggle with quick transitions, finding it jarring when lessons shift repeatedly over the course of an hour. Another might wonder whether students sometimes struggle with transitions because they are still deep in learning and not ready to switch gears yet. Could either of those be part of what’s happening with Justin?

Examine your evaluations. Finally, look at the judgments you attached to the interaction. Did you attach positive or negative significance to what happened? My evaluation of Justin’s behavior as disrespectful is a negative one. Your thought partners can help you examine whether your evaluation is grounded in what actually happened, or built on interpretations that may be shaped by bias. Is there a more generous way to read the last interaction with Justin?

Plan your next move together. Come back to the values you identified in step 1. With those values and your thought partners’ fresh perspectives in mind, work together to consider what comes next.

• How do you want to respond the next time you’re in a similar moment with this student? Do you want to try the same thing again? Is there another approach to take?
• What support do you need to make that possible? Can your thought partners offer advice, tools, or positive encouragement?
• Commit to trying again and bringing what you learn back to your thought partners.

After processing my interaction with Justin, my thought partners could help me see that his willingness to transition, even with some grumbling, was actually progress, and that quick transitions may genuinely be hard for him. Next time, I want to try acknowledging his effort in the moment, something as simple as a quiet thank-you. I also might think about how I can design my lessons with fewer transitions to support learners who need more processing time. It might not seem like much, but every time I choose to respond in a values-aligned way, I am getting closer to being an educator who sees Justin.

Author and activist adrienne maree brown reminds us that “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.” Every time we choose our values over our bias, we’re not just changing one relationship—we’re shaping the kind of classroom, school, and community our students carry with them. We won’t always get it right, but this work helps us see our students for who they are and who they could be. And in the process, it helps us become the educators we want to be.

In that book, Steele introduced the concept of stereotype threat—the idea that people can underperform when they fear confirming a negative stereotype about their group. The research helped explain disparities in academic testing, workplace performance, and many other settings.

Steele is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University (and a former executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Berkeley). Over the past three decades, his work has influenced fields ranging from education to organizational leadership.

His new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It, serves as a kind of sequel to Whistling Vivaldi. While stereotype threat focuses on how stereotypes affect individual performance, Churn explores the broader tension that can arise when people from different backgrounds interact in situations that matter.

When the Commonwealth Club World Affairs, in San Francisco, invited me to interview Steele about the book, I jumped at the opportunity. Our conversation explored how identity, anxiety, and trust shape interactions in classrooms, workplaces, and everyday life. What follows is an edited version of that on-stage discussion.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Before we talk about your new book, I want to start with Whistling Vivaldi, which came out back in 2010.

Claude Steele: That book described the research journey that led me and my colleagues—Steve Spencer, Josh Aronson, and others—to the concept of stereotype threat.

That’s when someone faces a negative stereotype about one of their identities—such as race, age, or religion—in a situation that matters to them, like a job interview or a test. In those moments, the possibility of being judged through the lens of that stereotype can be distracting and upsetting. It interferes with your ability to perform in the moment. And if you expect to encounter that pressure repeatedly in a particular environment—say, a profession or a field of study—you might decide not to participate at all.

The research became widely known because it showed that stereotype threat could affect something as important as standardized test performance. For example, a highly motivated African American student taking a difficult exam might experience normal frustration and start wondering, Am I confirming that stereotype about my group? Will others see my performance that way? That extra pressure can undermine performance.

Over the years, researchers have seen this dynamic in many contexts—athletic performance, negotiations, academic settings, and more.

Eventually, I began to think people were missing the broader significance of the idea. The same kind of tension often appears in interactions between people of different identities. In diverse settings, people may worry about being seen through negative stereotypes. That concern can make them hyper-aware of how they’re behaving, what they’re saying, and how they’re being interpreted.

JAS: You’ve compared that experience to multitasking. A person under stereotype threat is juggling extra mental tasks while everyone else can focus on the main activity.

CS: Exactly. If I’m in a group composed entirely of people like me—say, a group of older men—I don’t feel much anxiety about ageist stereotypes. But if younger people join the group, I might start wondering: Do they think I have outdated ideas? Do they assume I’m not technologically savvy? I know what the stereotypes of older men are…and that I could be judged in terms of them.

Diversity brings us together with people of different identities. When that happens, we lose the security that we won’t be judged by outgroup stereotypes. That worry is experienced as tension. 

JAS: Your new book introduces the concept of “churn.” What does that mean?

CS: “Churn” is my term for exactly the tension I just described. To illustrate, let’s begin by imagining a seventh-grade parent-teacher conference. The parents and student are African American; the teacher is white.

The parents know the stereotypes about African Americans, about their intellectual abilities, about their aggressiveness, etc. So on the way to the meeting, they may worry: Will the teacher see our child’s real potential? Will ordinary mistakes be interpreted as signs of aggression or lack of ability?

As they walk into the meeting then, they’re in a state of churn—a kind of vigilant anxiety about how their and their son’s identity will shape their experience in the meeting and their son’s experience in the school.

Meanwhile, the teacher has her own form of stereotype threat. She knows the stereotypes about her racial identity. She may be deeply committed to fairness but nonetheless worried that anything she says—even constructive criticism—could be interpreted as racism.

Both parties enter this conversation in that state of tension I am calling churn—an agitated concern about how their identities will affect how they are judged and treated (and for the African American parents, how their son’s identity will affect his experience in the school). Both parties wonder: Will I be judged and treated fairly in this meeting? Is there some way I should behave, or not behave, to ensure this? Will I be given the benefit of the doubt? Etc.

Most approaches to diversity stress the need to reduce intergroup prejudices—something I heartedly endorse. But churn is different. It affects the prejudiced and non-prejudiced alike—arising as it does not from prejudice per se, but from the identity threat that all parties in a diverse setting can feel.

Churn is a form of social anxiety tied to identity.

JAS: And you argue that churn shows up especially in important situations.

CS: Yes. In low-stakes settings—riding the subway, sitting in a crowd—it usually isn’t a factor.

But when the stakes are high, the threat of being negatively stereotyped increases. That’s when churn becomes more powerful.

Churn isn’t inherently bad. It is simply the effort to cope with identity threat in a situation. It reflects the existence of that threat—and that the person can’t yet trust the situation enough to feel safe from it.

JAS: Another way of putting it might be that churn prevents people from entering a state of flow, where they’re fully immersed in the task.

CS: Exactly. Let me describe an experiment that illustrates this.

My colleagues and I asked white and Black Stanford students to write an essay about their favorite teacher. We told them that strong essays might be published in a campus magazine. Two days later, they returned to receive feedback from a white evaluator.

When feedback was delivered in a straightforward way—or preceded by generic praise—white students trusted it. But Black students trusted it much less.

Why? Because they couldn’t be sure whether the criticism reflected the essay itself or stereotypes about their group’s abilities.

But when the evaluator said, “I’m applying high standards to these essays, and I believe you can meet those standards,” Black students’ trust changed dramatically. They trusted that feedback more than anyone else and were far more likely to revise their essays using it.

Why did that work? Because it signaled clearly: I’m not judging you through those stereotypes of your group. I believe in your ability.

That kind of communication builds trust—and trust is the antidote to churn.

JAS: So how do individuals build that trust?

CS: At the individual level, it often comes down to conveying that you see someone’s full humanity.

There’s a term in the research literature—“wise.” It originally came from an ethnography of gay communities in the 1950s. A “wise” person was someone outside the group who understood their humanity and didn’t reduce them to stereotypes.

When people feel that recognition, they begin to trust you. Often the simplest way to show that is through genuine curiosity—listening, asking questions, taking an interest in someone’s experience.

JAS: So curiosity helps create trust.

CS: Yes. When you feel churn, it can be a signal to adopt a learning mindset. Instead of defending oneself, or retreating, ask questions. Be polite. But be curious. People can sense genuine interest, and that can transform the interaction.

JAS: Some people might say that sounds like a lot of work.

CS: Remember, I’m talking about important settings in our lives—classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, athletic teams, and so on. In those places, showing respect and interest in others can be far less work than dealing with the consequences of not doing these things.

Moreover, in these settings, I think many people really want to have ways of reducing churn and feeling more comfortable with and connected to others across identity divides. The chief mission of this book is to give people concrete ways of doing that, of feeling more comfortable in diverse settings, and better able to enjoy their great benefits.

JAS: Let’s talk about how power differences might affect churn and trust.

CS: Sure. I think it’s a lot to expect the groups that have historically been the most disempowered to be the first to trust. That’s a big ask.

And in the current divisive era—when we have leaders who don’t even bother with dog whistles in preference for openly racist messaging—it becomes even harder. For African Americans, for example, but for other groups, too, this kind of behavior and rhetoric makes it difficult to trust that their full humanity is appreciated or even recognized.

I don’t want to diminish that troubling reality in any way. But I don’t want to lose hope either. I still have to get up every day and go to work, and so does everyone else. So the question becomes: What do we do in our everyday lives?

That’s really what this book is about. It’s not about somehow directly fixing the political climate, for example. It’s about what we can do within the diverse settings and relationships in which we actually live our lives, to feel more comfortable and able to engage the riches that our differences can offer us. That’s what motivated me to write the book.

JAS: Do you experience churn? When?

CS: Of course. I’m older, and I work in a world full of young people. Sometimes the question is, “Does he even know how to use a computer?” There are moments like that.

JAS: One of the things I appreciated about the book is that it really made me reflect on my own experiences with churn. As I read it, I found myself developing a sort of taxonomy of churn in my own life. Some of it was trivial, some of it more significant—but I realized I hadn’t thought about it very consciously before. It feels like you’ve put your finger on something we all live with.

CS: I’m glad to hear that. In many ways, this is the American experiment. We’re trying to build a democracy that integrates people from many different backgrounds. That’s inherently challenging.

JAS: There’s something a little neurotic about it. From the outside, people sometimes look at the United States and think, “You people are obsessed with diversity”—and they have a point. Many Americans want a very diverse society, but at the same time we’re afraid of what that diversity means, and we must fight against feeling threatened by people who are different from us. Those two impulses are constantly in tension within the American mind. And the truth is, as a people, we seem to want two contradictory things at once. We want the comfort of sameness and we want the vitality offered by living with many different kinds of people. I think that’s part of what’s going on right now in the United States.

CS: Exactly. And that’s why I keep emphasizing the importance of focusing on the worlds we actually inhabit—the classrooms we teach in, the workplaces we’re part of, the systems of hiring and promotion we help shape.

When you talk only about the larger society, the conversation can start to feel abstract or utopian. But when you focus on concrete settings, that’s where real progress can happen. That’s where the strategies I talk about—practical forms of wisdom about trust—can actually make a difference.

The United States made a legal commitment to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy in the 1960s when we dismantled the laws that upheld segregation. When I was a child, the system was so rigid it could fairly be called apartheid. Legally, we changed that—one of our society’s greatest achievements. Now the challenge is making equality of opportunity real in everyday life.

And that happens in relationships—through the small things people do that make it easier to trust each other and work together. Some of the examples I describe in the book involve university programs that created conditions where students could genuinely trust their institutions. In those environments, diversity became a treasured feature of their experience, not a problem.

One reason I’m hopeful is that building trust may actually be more manageable than trying to directly eliminate prejudice. Changing someone’s beliefs is incredibly hard. As a social psychologist, I know how difficult that is.

But trust is different. Many of us have done that in our lives. We have fairly good intuitions about how to do it and what’s required. And then, as the trust between us builds, our attitudes and beliefs begin to change naturally. Prejudices start to loosen their grip when there’s a genuine human connection.

JAS: It also seems like there’s an ask here—especially for white people—to try to be trustworthy.

CS: Right. And to understand that the issue isn’t all personal—it’s largely historical. The question is: Can I trust you? Do I carry the memory of the past into this interaction, or can I begin to set it aside with you?

When trust starts to form, the door opens to a very different kind of relationship.

JAS: Whistling Vivaldi spurred years of research about stereotype threat. What would you like to see researchers study about churn?

CS: I’d love to see research testing whether a focus on building trust is an effective way of reducing prejudice. I’ve suspected this for a long time now. It could be the focus of a whole research program.

My intuition is that trust-building has been an under-appreciated factor in bridging identity differences. I heard colleagues say, “I explained everything clearly to my students—why don’t they listen?” But if the students are wary about trusting you, information alone won’t help. If we really talk to them and listen, we may see, as in the experiment I mentioned above, that they are in a situation that makes trust difficult. Before they can fully absorb the information we’re trying to pass on, they need some evidence or signal that their full humanity is appreciated—that they’re not being reduced to those stereotypes that they know exist, and that they know you know.

Once a foundation of trust is there, the road to learning becomes easier. My hope is that this book encourages researchers, and the rest of us as well, to explore that road more seriously in the settings where we live our lives.

In this challenging environment, a new book by Berkeley law professor David B. Oppenheimer is a compelling exploration of an idea that has galvanized some of the most grinding political and cultural conflicts of our time. The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea follows the history across a surprising 200-year span. Along the way, it profiles the famous scholars who gave birth to the idea and shaped its evolution, and details the essential role of universities and the law in its advance.

At such a fraught time, the book could have been a partisan argument, but Oppenheimer’s approach is scholarly and accessible. The study is deeply documented, and the tone is measured. While he does not hide his embrace of diversity and his opposition to those who want to cancel it, his focus is on the philosophy and practical application of an idea that is too often oversimplified beyond recognition.

Oppenheimer describes diversity as the foundation for the “marketplace of ideas”—the clash of assumptions, hypotheses, values, and knowledge that demands intellectual rigor and creates a real-life laboratory for understanding the world and solving its problems.

“The diversity principle holds that when you bring together people with different backgrounds and experiences, including people of different ages, of different religions, of different races and ethnicities and genders, when you include people with disabilities, when you include people who are perennially outsiders and make them all part of a group, they will be better problem-solvers,” he explained in an interview.

“In a classroom, they’ll generate more ideas. In a science lab, they will come up with more significant discoveries. In government, they will develop more original public policy initiatives. In a business, they’ll make more money.”

And, Oppenheimer says, there’s extensive scientific research to prove the point. What remains to be seen is how much evidence will be needed to persuade a powerful corps of diversity opponents.

Oppenheimer is a clinical professor of law and codirector of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, and he has written extensively on issues of discrimination and how to address it through the law. His latest book was released on February 24 by Yale University Press.

Legal issues of race and fairness have been a flashpoint throughout U.S. history, and certainly in the political and cultural wars since the zenith of the Civil Rights era more than 50 years ago. Despite steadily advancing support for the principles of diversity, the idea has faced a growing backlash from critics who suggest it’s a ruse for advancing people of color and women unfairly, at the expense of white people or men.

Initially, Oppenheimer was skeptical. If diversity was just a device for enrolling or hiring a few people from marginalized groups, he worried the approach would lead to tokenism. But some years ago, a colleague urged him to look more deeply. That challenge led to a sustained, deep dive—and to the discovery of a remarkable history that has propelled the idea through two centuries.

Tracing the history: Prussia, Washington, Berkeley

Wilhelm von Humboldt was a visionary educator in early 19th century Prussia. He defined the early principle of diversity, and after founding the University of Berlin in 1810, he applied it there in faculty hiring and student admissions.

In Oppenheimer’s telling, the story begins with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian polymath, diplomat, and educator. He founded the University of Berlin in 1810 with a revolutionary plan: fewer lectures, less memorization. More debate, more experimentation. Such a culture required more diverse voices, so enrollment was opened to Jewish and Catholic students and faculty.

John Stuart Mill and his wife, fellow philosopher Harriet Taylor Mill, embraced those ideas. Nearly 50 years later, in their seminal work, “On Liberty,” Humboldt’s words are featured in the epigraph: “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

The Mills were enormously influential in American life in the mid-1800s, and especially in the anti-slavery movement. A central conclusion of their work, Oppenheimer said, is that the quest for truth requires people to test their own ideas and beliefs with people who have different ideas and beliefs.

“The only way to see the world through the eyes of others,” he explained, “was to create what we now call a ‘marketplace of ideas’ by including a diverse group of people—not just Anglicans, but Unitarians and Catholics and Jews, and people from other countries.”

The Mills’s idea had revolutionary implications: Creating a free marketplace of ideas meant giving women the right to vote and allowing Jews to run for Parliament. It required freedom for Black people in the Caribbean and freeing Ireland from strict British rule.

In subsequent decades, the idea continued to unfurl. Charles Eliot was named president of Harvard in 1869 and is credited with transforming it from a sleepy college to a great center of learning. He opened Harvard to Catholics and Jews, Black people, immigrants, and low-income students.

The famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes was educated at Harvard. He mentored two young attorneys, Felix Frankfurter and Harold Lasky, and together they read “On Liberty.” The book shaped Holmes’s landmark Supreme Court rulings on freedom of speech, and, later, when Frankfurter was a Supreme Court justice, it shaped his writing on academic freedom.

Oppenheimer credits Berkeley-educated attorney Pauli Murray with a profound impact as a scholar and activist focused on racial and gender diversity. She was Black and queer, and today, many scholars believe, she may have identified as a transgender man. She faced a gauntlet of discrimination as she made her way through university and law school, but the experience forged a committed legal scholar. While earning a master of law degree at Berkeley in 1944 and ’45, she wrote the first law review article on sex discrimination in employment.

Through that paper and others, Oppenheimer writes, Murray’s work had an influence on legal titans such as Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Murray’s “hard-earned insights,” he writes, “made their way into some of the most important Supreme Court cases of the 20th century.”

Archibald Cox, famed for his role in holding President Richard Nixon accountable for the crimes of the Watergate scandal, was a student of Frankfurter’s. Returning to Harvard after Watergate, he wrote a legal rationale for affirmative action that was influential in the 1978 landmark case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions.

That precedent held for 45 years, until 2023, when today’s conservative Supreme Court majority reversed it in two cases that effectively barred colleges from using racial considerations in student admissions.

A fundamental confusion

The core of the diversity principle is that diverse minds and diverse experiences, when applied to a problem, will lead to better understanding and better solutions for challenges across day-to-day life.

In the marketplace of ideas, competition sharpens insight and drives success. It’s an essential benefit, Oppenheimer says, that this opens the door for marginalized groups to have a stronger voice in the affairs of the nation.

Not so long ago, influential conservatives and Republicans embraced the idea. Supreme Court justices Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy each were appointed by Republican presidents, he writes, and each had written opinions upholding the right of colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity in assembling a diverse student body.

Today, however, the terms of our debate—literally, the words we use—can reflect a fundamental confusion. Many contemporary critics of diversity use the word interchangeably with “affirmative action” or “quota,” though there are significant differences between them. In the Supreme Court’s 2023 case prohibiting affirmative action, the conservative majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, insisted that the law must be “colorblind.”

“But ‘color-blindness’ in a society with pervasive systematic racism is not a form of opposition to racism,” Oppenheimer writes. “It is simply racism-blindness.”

Oppenheimer drives home the point: In law and politics, diversity opponents are advancing the view that acknowledging race as a critical issue is itself racist, and that idea now inflames our politics. What does he see as the core of that paradox?

For some opponents of diversity in higher education, he writes, “it appears that the ultimate goal is to enroll fewer minority and more white students.”

The value of diversity, proven by research

While opponents often believe that diversity values unfairly put white people or men at a disadvantage, Oppenheimer argues that everyone stands to lose if the principle is undermined.

A significant section of his new book explores the growing body of research that shows how diversity creates advantages across a range of sectors: business, the military, health care, education, civic engagement, and others. He details how leaders in those fields have embraced the principle in their own operations.

He identifies another UC Berkeley connection to the evolution of diversity values: Victoria Plaut, a social and cultural psychologist at the law school and vice provost for the faculty, has pioneered the field “diversity science.” Her work has explored the idea that for diversity to produce its best results, marginalized groups must have equity and inclusion.

“For the first 180 or 190 years, diversity was a philosophical theory,” Oppenheimer said. “It had not been empirically tested. But then starting about 30 to 40 years ago, people started testing the idea. We found that it really does work.”

His book details research that shows the diversity principle in action. For example, diverse groups do better in creative tasks than homogenous groups. The most successful scientific research labs are more likely to be diverse. Students in a diverse environment come up with more ideas—and they’re more comfortable in diverse environments.

“The science,” he concludes, “just gets stronger every year.”

Can our diversity inspire us to listen?

After his work on The Diversity Principle, and after years of research into discrimination law and policy, Oppenheimer knows that progress toward racial equality in the United States moves predictably from advance to backlash, in recurring cycles. Slavery, then an anti-slavery movement. Freedom for people who’d been enslaved, then the rise of Jim Crow. The passage of historic civil rights laws in the 1950s and 1960s, then campaigns to tap racial resentment among white voters. Barack Obama, then Donald Trump.

And so, while the landscape is challenging today, he is optimistic that, in time, diversity will return to favor.

“Unless we’re re-experiencing the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages,” he said, “I have to think that we’ll come to our senses as a society and recognize the importance of this powerful idea.

“Does a country that has become the richest country in the history of the world—in significant part because of the strength of our diversity—decide to give that up and become a poor country? Does the country with the greatest universities in the world decide to disassemble those universities so that other parts of the world can be the home of the greatest universities?

“Diversity contributes so much to our success,” he said. “I hope it will help to put us on a path in which we do a better job of listening to each other.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

A new survey from the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM)–which represents over 300,000 people working in the human resources field worldwide–finds that incivility in the workplace continues to be a major challenge, particularly as generational and political differences come to the forefront for employees.

The top contributor to workplace incivility in the SHRM index? The answer might surprise you: political differences. In fact, 41 percent of workers said they experienced or witnessed incivility related to politics.

“The workplace is kind of a hub for what’s happening out in civil society,” says Sara Rahim, who serves as a social impact strategist and program manager at SHRM. “So if we’re seeing greater polarization just in the state of America right now, naturally that’s going to translate into the workplace. She also cites generational differences as a point of tension.

Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University, who has spent years working on how organizations can improve employee culture, argues that promoting civility is often overlooked as an organizational goal.

“We pay a lot of attention to productivity,” she says, “but we often overlook accountability for creating a workplace where people can thrive.”

Could America’s colleges and universities train the next generation of workers to be a little more civil with each other? With such a large number of Americans now pursuing higher education, these institutions can play a major role in preparing students to navigate differences in the workplace.

Indeed, that’s the goal of the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, released last year by the Greater Good Science Center. The playbook features science-backed strategies that administrators, academics, and students can use to build their skills for bridging differences.

One way to navigate personal differences is to explain how you came to a belief or worldview and explore how others did the same–rather than simply debating them. By questioning your assumptions about other people, you can help create a less threatening environment. Here’s an overview of key practices that can be cultivated in school and imported to the workplace.

Focus on personal stories

Mark Urista is a communications professor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon. The campus sits between two politically polarized counties. The famously liberal Portland, Oregon, is around 70 miles away. Benton County has voted for the Democratic candidate for president every year going back to 1988. On the other side is Linn County, which Urista describes as “very blue collar, very conservative,” adding that the last time it voted for a Democrat for president was in 1976.

“So if you think about some of the major tensions right now in this country I kind of feel privileged to be at a college that serves as a laboratory for how to bridge them,” Urista says.

He teaches speech communications classes at the college, largely focused on public speaking and argumentation. In order to help students broach thorny topics, he encourages them from the beginning of the course to humanize themselves.

“The very first day, I get students to start engaging in self-disclosure so they can reveal a little bit about themselves, make themselves vulnerable, understand who their classmates are,” he explains.

The students are then assigned to give a speech advocating for the class to take action on an issue they care personally about. The rest of the class is expected to offer constructive feedback and let the speaker know whether they were persuaded or not.

As one example of how this program worked in action, Urista says that in the spring a female student decided to deliver a speech about how men are struggling in society.

“I love my friends. Back in high school, I had a close group I laughed with, vented to, made the kind of memories that last forever,” she said in that speech. “But when we all moved to college, something shifted. The girls in the group stayed in touch, but the guys, slowly, just… disappeared. Not out of malice or drama. They just stopped reaching out, stopped responding, and stopped showing up.”

She went on to call attention to the epidemic of loneliness among men. She asked her classmates to “be vulnerable,” to “check in on their friends, plan a hangout, start an awkward conversation,” do any small thing they can to help reduce the loneliness among American men.

“I’m sure you can imagine, this created quite the controversy,” Urista says. “You get a lot of students saying, ‘Well, males, they’re part of the historically privileged group, you know? Why should we be making an effort to support them when we see all these other groups that are struggling, right?’”

As the class civilly debated the issue, eventually some men in the class spoke up and said they appreciated the student for giving her speech.

“Sharing that comment openly in the classroom helped shape a climate that allowed us to have a more productive discourse,” Urista says.

Urista’s work is backed by social psychology research around the world that has found benefits to opening up to one another.

For instance, in Europe, the Roma people have long been marginalized, with many Europeans holding contemptuous attitudes toward them. But using an exercise called 36 Questions–where you ask a conversation partner a series of questions to get to know more about them as individuals–Hungarian students who held negative attitudes towards Roma people became more positive towards them after just an hour of conversation with a Roma student.

Similar exercises elsewhere have produced similar outcomes.

One 2015 study found that when college students were assigned to strike up friendships with gay and lesbian people, they grew closer to those people, showing greater closeness and improved attitudes towards gay and lesbian people more broadly.

A separate study from 2008 found that cross-group friendships helped reduce cortisol levels–that’s the hormone tied to stress–between whites and Latinos.

Understand values

Another way to promote civility in the workplace is to encourage employees and employers alike to understand the values of others. After all, cultural and social differences mean that we don’t all even necessarily agree on what constitutes incivility–one person’s habit may be another’s faux pax.

When we discuss our differences, we often focus on positions or beliefs without thinking about the underlying values we ourselves and other people hold. This makes it more difficult to understand where other people are coming from and relating to their experiences and beliefs.

This is a practice that Justin Turpan honed as a student at Tulane University. Working with the bridging-differences organization BridgeUSA, he helped organize events where students discussed contentious social and political topics. Focusing on understanding the other person’s values helped make these conversations more meaningful and less combative.

During one discussion on gun control, for instance, a supporter of gun rights and a backer of gun control were able to both acknowledge that they valued the same thing: safe and secure communities. Acknowledging these values helped them have more constructive conversations.

To make this practice work, it’s important to avoid our conversations devolving simply into debates.

“Debate was not designed to create a group that works well together,” explains Heidi Brooks. “It was designed to help us be more rigorous with thought and to be able to have the issues on the table.”

She imagines her classrooms as miniature societies.

“They’re micro-socities designed for learning,” she says. “And so these micro societies need some practices…listening and curiosity. And that’s not the same thing as judgement, and as critique and analysis.”

But understanding someone else’s values can also help you be more persuasive when you are making an argument. One study published in 2015 found that when arguments were framed in ways that appealed to someone else’s values, they were more convincing. For instance, framing an argument for gay marriage in terms of values that conservatives hold dear–like loyalty or patriotism–was more persuasive than making those arguments rooted in liberal-leaning values like fairness.

Find shared identities

We often find ourselves at loggerheads with our colleagues on campus or in the workplace because we view ourselves as coming from distinct groups. We think to ourselves, that other person is nothing like me.

But when we look closer, we can often find that we share more in common than we think.

GGSC Senior Fellow Allison Briscoe-Smith put this skill into practice by starting a series of interfaith events at the Wright Institute, where students and other civic leaders across the spectrum of faith and spiritual beliefs convened to discuss their distinct practices and where their traditions overlapped.

The series of events helped people across campus connect across religious differences when they saw themselves not just as followers of different religions but collectively as people of faith.

One 2001 study found that building a common identity can go a long way in healing even racial differences.

Researchers had interviewers post up outside of a college football game to ask participants to answer questions about their food preferences. They found that Black interviewers netted interviews more often when they wore paraphernalia associated with the same university as the interviewee. This helps demonstrate how the shared identity of supporting the same university helped bridge the racial divide.

What we can all do

The SHRM Index isn’t all bad news. In a section where employees were asked about how their managers are addressing workplace incivility, 51% said that their manager “actively helps to guide employees through acts of incivility” and 54% said that their manager “actively encourages employees to address incivility through talking and having conversations,” just as Urista does with his class.

The survey finds that employees who described their work team as civil were much more likely to report positive team cohesion. For instance, 86% of workers who said that they belonged to a civil team said their “team members celebrate one another’s successes,” as opposed to just 47% of those who belong to uncivil teams.

But challenges remain, especially as Generation Z–whose school life and work life was intimately shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning–enters the workplace and encounters the norms that older workers have.

Rahim says that it’s important for people to ask themselves how they can contribute to building a culture of civility: “How am I showing up in the workplace? How am I building psychological safety for my team? How am I creating a space in which feedback is welcome?”

Brooks agrees.

“We all have a responsibility to bring some positive energy… into work spaces,” she says. “It’s part of what it means to be a citizen.”

Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emeritus of Spelman College and author of the enormously influential book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. In her new book, Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, she offers real-life examples of education leaders who successfully faced these challenges and in the process transformed their institutions.

Drawing from her years as a college psychology professor, trustee, and president, Dr. Tatum brings a breadth of experience to her analysis of the current state of higher education—covering everything from defending free speech campus protests during the War on Gaza to reallocating Spelman’s resources in 2012 to create a broad wellness initiative that swapped varsity sports for campus-wide fitness.

We talked about her new book and how leaders can help chart a path through today’s turmoil. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: In 1997, you published Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together at the Cafeteria. More than a quarter decade later, where are we with the public conversations around race?

Beverly Tatum: Since 1997, our population has gotten a lot more diverse—a lot of immigrants from places like India and China—and the Hispanic population is growing fast. Today, the population in the United States is maybe 50% white, a little bit less, and children of color are the majority in the school-age population.

In 2001, we had the 9/11 attack. There were the wars that came after that and in 2008 the economy tanked. All of the anxieties associated with a challenged economy and a nation in conflict with other nations made it a hard time to have a conversation about race.

Fast-forward to the election of Barack Obama. Many people saw that as really a culmination of the civil rights movement. But the pushback against the Obama election was quite dramatic— the Tea Party movement and the racialization of him and his wife and the family, all of that. And of course he was followed by Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric, from his announcement of his candidacy, evoked racialized images. The conversation has gotten a lot harder. And it has been symbolic of the nation’s polarization.

HR: Amid these changes in leadership and wars, we faced the murder of George Floyd, too.

BT: Yes–on the one hand, after Donald Trump’s first election, there was a rapid decline in talk about race. Even in his first term, Donald Trump was saying at the federal level, “You can’t talk about race; shouldn’t talk about privilege.” There was a list of words that weren’t supposed to be used in Trump’s first term. But when the George Floyd murder happened, it was so horrible and dramatic—on everybody’s phones, right, in their social media—and there was a great awakening of racial awareness, racial consciousness.

HR: Trump has attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on campus. What are the effects we can see?

BT: In his first early days in office, Trump issued an anti-DEI executive order. One of the really unfortunate things has been the overreaction of colleges and universities to comply. Nobody wants to be a target. And so people have been scraping their websites and changing the names of their programs—or eliminating programs. Maybe there was an office for diversity, equity and inclusion, and that office has just been eliminated. In some cases it’s been renamed or reorganized. But there are lots of places where they just said, “You know what, we’re just gonna eliminate this.”

That’s really unfortunate. Even if you are a staff person working in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and you’ve now been reassigned to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies Office, and you’re still trying to work with students who are experiencing marginalization on your campus, they may not know how to find you. Programs like the Black Student Union that might have been supported by the division of student affairs, maybe they have a small budget for programming. And now those funds have been completely cut off and the students have to do them on their own—which is an added burden for those students, yet important to their sense of belonging.

So there’s a way in which the structural changes and the fear of being targeted—forced to pay a big fine, or even threatened with loss of accreditation—those things have, particularly at public institutions, really put a damper on the student experience.

HR: What about at the classroom level?

BT: One major thing that has changed is the fear for faculty members. Now you’re not supposed to talk about certain things—free speech and academic freedom are under attack. If you’re working in, say, Georgia, there’s a law that says you’re not supposed to talk about “divisive” concepts. What is a divisive concept? If I’m talking about American history, I am challenging conceptions of the Confederacy and what it meant. Is that a divisive concept? Can a student report me as having broken the law? There are cases like that where faculty members are being removed from classrooms because a student was upset about something they said and felt it was “against the law.” This is a really crazy time for classrooms. I don’t know if I would be able to teach today my “psychology of race” class in some states.

HR: Why is there so much resistance to D.E.I, and what can colleges do to promote these values?

BT: There’s a need for courageous leadership. We need to reframe the conversation. On the face of it, some people are unhappy with those letters, D.E.I. With “diversity,” some people feel left out. If you’re white and male and heterosexual, where do you fit in when someone’s talking about diversity? But of course, diversity includes everyone. I fault the users, us, for how the language has evolved. Some people use “diversity” as a substitute for more racialized terms, like when someone says, “There was a diverse job candidate”—what do they really mean? There was a Black candidate, maybe. Well, just say so.

Inclusion is so important. When you see a photo, you look for yourself. But what happens when you can’t find yourself in it? You say, “What’s wrong with me?” This is the experience of marginalized people on campus.

We need to ask: Who’s missing from our picture? Institutional leaders can foster inclusive communities by their own example (what they talk about, the language and examples they use), through their hiring decisions, and through the use of budgetary resources within their control.

For example, if increasing STEM participation among students of color is a goal, investing in professional development for faculty to learn from experts in inclusive pedagogy could be worthwhile. Launching a speaker series and inviting prominent STEM scholars of diverse backgrounds to campus is another tangible action. Lending support to faculty who are successful mentors of underrepresented students through campus recognition and the allocation of resources signal that those activities are valued. Strengthening connections between alumni and current students through campus programming can also give visibility to underrepresented groups.

HR: How should colleges handle the extreme polarization, which may take form in campus protests against the war on Gaza, for instance?

BT: Dialogue helps. We must create a community, a climate where the expectation of respectful dialogue is our way of being. With the Gaza protests, some campuses were more successful at this—I’m thinking about an example of two students, on Jewish and one Palestinian American, who formed Atidna [a reference to “our future” in Hebrew]. They really wanted to create a space where Palestinian-supporting students and Jewish-identified students could come together and have conversations. They did so without much help from the university, but it’s a model that universities can use.

Presidents can offer support. They can sponsor all kinds of things; they can show up to the talks. Cultivating leadership is not just about the exercise of your own leadership but helping people on your senior team, students, and faculty. To show faculty that it’s possible to disagree with the president. To model it, to give other people space. Students have a right to express their concerns, and we’re not just going to panic when that happens.

HR: In 2012, you reallocated Spelman College’s NCAA budget into a wellness initiative to campus. How did that go, and what lessons did you come away with?

BT: Intercollegiate athletics was not a big part of the Spelman experience, which was one reason it seemed like, “Why are we spending money on this?” Students weren’t coming to game; there weren’t many students playing. But it was not without controversy. Student athletes were not happy with me. Many people didn’t understand that there are no NCAA scholarships.

The main thing was framing it; that led to the success. We talked about not what was going away, but what would come instead. With the same resources, we could create a program to benefit all students. It was a population that really needed to move more, to be more active, to counteract the health trends that were plaguing Black women. We also offered yoga and meditation and sound healing. The big lesson was how to communicate.

HR: Artificial intelligence has entered college campuses. What do you think about this?

BT: It’s amazing how fast this has unfolded. In the spring of ‘23, the conversation the faculty were having was focused around cheating behavior. Fast forward to today, it’s about how we teach students to use AI responsibly. It’s important for us to all get up to speed. We must invest in faculty development so they can do the work with AI that is helpful to students.

A bigger question is what does artificial intelligence mean for work? How do we, as a society, accommodate people whose work has been taken over by machines? It speaks to the importance of colleges as the place where that question is explored, and the exploration of what it means to be human in an AI-dominated world. What are the things that humans most need to know? What are the enduring conversations, critical thinking, problem solving? Where are the empathy and compassion?

The skill of dialog is so important because you develop empathy, you develop mutual understanding. And it seems to me those are the capacities that at least to date AI doesn’t have. I can’t think of a better place to be than a college or university at such a difficult and potentially challenging time.

In fact, a recent Rand Corporation survey found that even in states without formal curricular bans, two-thirds of K-12 teachers have chosen to limit classroom instruction on social issues. In essence, the presence of state-specific restrictions has silenced even teachers who are not subject to them, limiting students’ access to learning about race, gender, historical events, and social movements nationwide.

In our own work, we have spoken with many educators who are feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or discouraged in this moment. Yet, as James Baldwin argued in 1963—a year marked by both profound struggle and collective resilience—moments of social crisis are precisely when educational justice work becomes most essential. In a speech to teachers in New York City, Baldwin challenged educators to remember that the obligation of anyone who considers themselves responsible is to examine society and to work to advance justice.

If we take Baldwin seriously and understand the present moment as one in which examining society and advancing justice are especially urgent, the question becomes how educators and students can engage in this work amid intensifying social, political, and legal constraints.

We have spent years researching and writing about how educators across grade levels, from elementary school through college, can nurture students’ capacities to examine society and work toward its transformation. Through this sustained study, we have learned that even in moments when schools and educators are prohibited from explicitly drawing on justice-oriented curricula, pathways still exist to cultivate students’ motivation and foundational skills to recognize, analyze, and challenge injustice and to create spaces that value all human beings.

As teachers, we retain meaningful agency and power in our classrooms. Beyond teaching content, educators are responsible for shaping interactions, relationships, and critical skills—domains through which we can continue to prepare young people to analyze and engage the world around them with clarity and purpose. Here are suggestions for cultivating critical thinking in a challenging time.

1. Use your classroom to model community and practice connected living.

In dozens of ways, through the news, social media, their own communities, and perhaps even in their own lives, young people right now are witnessing people treat other humans with callousness and cruelty.

The ability to truly see one another as human beings and recognize each other’s humanity is the foundation of a just world. Equally important is the ability—and the will—to treat one another as human beings. We likely wish this came as second nature to everyone, yet the world around us, both historically and today, shows us that it does not. Or if it does, we submerge that nature in favor of other things.

Educators have the power and space every day to offer young people relational tools and help them practice the basic skills of communal human living. Even as specific content in curriculum is being sidelined, we can insist that students learn and speak each other’s names, create space for students to meaningfully hear pieces of each other’s histories and stories, and set expectations/norms for how students listen to each other, disagree, and engage with each other.

These small practices strengthen students’ ability to build just relationships and communities outside of school—and each models what connected human engagement can look and feel like. We should not underestimate the power of this skill and desire; relationships are the foundation of a transformed future.

2. Teach analysis skills and frameworks that students can apply to exploring and understanding justice issues.

Most teachers are guided by state standards that call on them to support students’ development of strong analytical skills, whether they are examining literary texts, historical events, scientific hypotheses, or mathematical approaches.

Within these expectations, teachers often have flexibility in choosing the analytic tools and lenses they introduce to students. Educators can make use of that flexibility to introduce students to analytic tools relevant to academic tasks that students can also apply to making sense of the wider world and the social and political forces shaping our lives and communities.

For example, political scientist Iris Marion Young offers a framework in her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, with several key questions (see streamlined version below) that can be applied to any number of ideas, histories, or academic concepts:

• Who benefits?
• Who is excluded?
• Who has less power?
• Whose experiences are being discounted or attacked, or who is harmed?

History teachers might introduce this framework to their students to support their rigorous analyses of historical events not currently omitted from the curriculum, ranging from the Industrial Revolution to westward expansion to women’s suffrage.

Science teachers might draw on Young’s framework to ask students to analyze environmental issues (e.g., air or water pollution) by examining who benefits from industrial practices, which communities bear the most significant health risks, whose voices are excluded from decision-making, and whose lives are the most harmed.
Educators can also remind students that these frameworks can be used to analyze any event, including events happening in the present day. As educators, we need to remember that critical questions about power, voice, fairness, and justice are not bound to particular content; they are intellectual habits that can be practiced across texts, disciplines, and genres.

3. Leverage schools themselves as sites for practicing critical social analysis skills.

Our own classrooms and schools can also serve as sites for this kind of analysis, offering students meaningful opportunities to explore fundamental concepts and levers in creating and sustaining injustice, such as power.

For example, teachers can invite students to explore who sets classroom rules, who enforces them, and whose voices shaped the rules in the first place. Students can be invited to analyze a school dress code, asking whose forms of expression are policed or excluded. This practice of noticing and observing power in the everyday spaces they inhabit helps students see power at work in tangible ways and supports their understanding of a fundamental principle of justice. 

Some teachers may have the opportunity to engage students in applying these same questions to events shaping their local or neighborhood communities, but even teachers who cannot have access to ecosystems within schools themselves that provide ample opportunities for critical questioning and reflection. These opportunities build students’ muscles to do this critical questioning in other domains.

4. Teach something you can teach and make it matter.

Almost anything we are charged with teaching can be grounded in concepts related to civic engagement, social change, or justice, even without using commonly associated justice language. No text, theory, or equation exists outside of time, place, and power. Literary canons, scientific paradigms, and mathematical methods reflect decisions about whose knowledge is preserved, valued, and taught.

In conversations about chemistry, we can discuss quantification and precision as epistemic power, or explore how foundational concepts such as yield, waste minimization, and optimization may harbor hidden values. We can teach a Shakespeare play or a Robert Frost poem and invite students to consider: whose interior life is being explored, and whose is not? In history, humanities, or anything that involves text, we can employ resistant reading strategies, documented practices that develop students’ critical thinking. Resistant reading consists of asking students to interpret a text from a different perspective or to scrutinize a text for pre-existing beliefs. This can be done in any text across a wide range of content and perspectives.

Any canon or content can be taught in a way that offers students an entry to deep criticality and consideration of the fundamental questions of civic and just life. This may require some creativity on our end or collaboration with other educators to think outside the box, but we can use anything we teach to build students’ habit of asking questions as they encounter information in the world around them.

5. Leverage schools and classrooms as sites for practicing social action.

To truly advance justice, students also need chances to use the relationship-building and critical thinking skills they are developing, not just talk about them. Shifting from thinking to doing helps students see that their voices matter and that they have infinitely more power when collaborating.

For some of us, the opportunity for students to practice doing already exists in the curriculum. For example, in Massachusetts, all eighth graders complete a student-led civics project focused on real-world topics. The goal is simple: students learn how change happens by actually trying to create it. And for many other educators, current restrictions limit or prohibit this kind of student-led civic work.

Yet, we don’t actually need state-sanctioned curricular projects to provide opportunities for students to practice acting on something they care about or to give students places and spaces to exercise their power.

Fortunately, we have learned from our two decades of research in schools that civic action within the school community or even in the classroom can be as real and meaningful to students as civic action out in the “real world” (because school communities are students’ real worlds). Importantly, civic action within the school or classroom can help students develop the real-life skills they need to engage in social action more broadly.

In a high school in Rhode Island, for example, a history teacher provided her students the opportunity to go through the school handbook to identify a policy they believed was unjust or unfair, and then come up with a plan to change that policy. The students collectively decided to try to change their school’s technology policy governing when they were allowed to use phones, iPads, and laptops, and then set about researching the topic, developing a presentation proposing a new policy, and lobbying their school’s administration to consider these changes. When the school leadership team ultimately agreed to enact the students’ proposed technology policy on a trial basis for the remainder of the school year, the students described surges in their confidence in their ability to effect change.

They also learned essential skills for social change: how to use research to make a compelling argument, how to make a pitch to various stakeholders, and how to write a policy that meets the needs of a wide range of community members. Importantly, they will bring these skills into other communities they are part of, now and in the future.

In times of consistent constraints and change, it can be easy to focus on the power we feel we are losing and to lose sight of the power we continue to have. Alongside the real reasons for concern that educators have, there are also enduring reasons for hope.

As classroom teachers and school leaders, it may be that some of the familiar ways we have supported students in critically analyzing society or preparing for civic and social engagement are no longer available to us.

But educators have always been masters of creativity and adaptation. History reminds us, again and again, that when the outside world closes in and places deep constraints on our work, educators remember the creative power that they have; they innovate, reimagine, and persist. In remembering and reclaiming our power, we help our students recognize the power they inherently hold and can harness to shape the world around them.

At a time when the country feels more fractured than ever, this camaraderie among Americans is rare. It’s worth paying attention to the parts of American life where people still come together—where, at least for a few hours, they set aside the divisions that so often define our politics, because politics couldn’t be further from their minds. Sports fandom is one such phenomenon, one that’s baked into the habits of millions of Americans.

What’s striking is that this sense of connection extends well beyond the game itself. The biggest sports fans tend to be deeply engaged in their communities and civic life, and most open to connecting with people across political divides. Fans don’t just set aside political divisions for a few hours every Sunday, they tend not to let these divisions define them at all.

Research conducted by More in Common and FOX Sports in June 2025 found that the most dedicated fans—those who follow sports most closely and participate most actively—are also more likely to be registered to vote, to vote in local elections, and to follow politics regularly. They are also more likely to give to charity, attend political meetings, donate blood, and contribute to their communities.

What’s especially notable is that this engagement doesn’t come at the cost of openness. In much of American life, the people who are most politically engaged are also the most likely to misunderstand and distrust members of the opposing political party. Typically, the higher the political engagement, the deeper the partisan divide.

Sports fans are an exception. Despite their high levels of political participation, the biggest fans are more open to engaging across political differences, not less. And the more invested the fan, the more open they are to connect. Among the most passionate fans, nearly 7 in 10 say they’d be interested in a conversation with someone who holds opposing views, compared to just 46% of non-fans. And more than 8 in 10 say they’d be willing to work with someone from across the aisle to improve their community (compared to 65% of non-fans).

Crucially, these patterns appear across the political spectrum. Republican and Democratic fans alike have warmer feelings towards members of the opposing political party and are more open to collaboration than their non-fan counterparts.

This willingness to connect across divides is unusual in today’s political climate. And it points to a broader truth: sports are more than entertainment. In an era of polarization, it stands out as one of the few large-scale cultural arenas where people of different backgrounds regularly share space, build trust, and find connection. As one respondent said, “I live in a community where following our sports team brings us together and my parents were just huge on watching it.”

That spirit of connection matters even more when we consider who shows up most in these spaces. The most dedicated fans are disproportionately men, and in an era of rising male isolation, sports fandom offers a place where connection, conversation, and community are already happening.

According to Gallup, 25% of American men aged 15 to 34 reported feeling lonely “a lot” in their day‑to‑day lives, compared to 18% of women in the same age group and just 15% in peer democratic countries. Men are also less likely than women to turn to friends or family for emotional support and report having fewer close friendships.

In this landscape, sports fandom offers a rare pathway for connection. Sports remain one of the most culturally acceptable spaces for emotional expression among men, with three in four avid fans, male and female alike, agreeing that sports are a healthy way for men to express themselves.

Most men don’t proactively spend their time “thinking about healthy ways to connect.” They’re more likely to just sit next to a couple of buddies enjoying a game. Sports create the conditions for connection—offering structure, shared interest, and a sense of ease that makes openness feel more natural. And our data suggest sports fans may experience less loneliness. Specifically, fans are more likely to disagree with the statement, “There is no community where I feel a strong sense of belonging,” and fans are more likely than non-fans to see sports as a healthy outlet for male expression.

While sports fandom may not solve polarization or loneliness on its own, it shows us that there are still spaces where people of different backgrounds show up, engage, and build trust—even if they’re just cheering for the same team.

If we want to strengthen civic life, we should take seriously the places where Americans are already finding common ground. Sports fandom isn’t just entertainment—it’s one of our largest, most diverse, and most consistent shared rituals. And that makes it worth noticing, understanding, and cherishing as more than just a game.

This Sunday’s Super Bowl won’t fix all that’s broken in America. But for a few hours, it may remind more than 100 million Americans that coming together is still possible.

Dorriene’s partner, Diane, passed away in 2020. They’d been together for 40 years, and Dorriene was devastated. She couldn’t bear to stay in the house where Diane had died. She called her sister and asked, “Can you come get me?” The two retirees now live in Jo’s house with Jo’s granddaughter Breelyn and great granddaughter Soulann (a.k.a. baby Soso).

These days, Dorriene spends most of her time alone in her bedroom. When she emerges to interact with Jo and the rest of the family, the house fills with bickering and what Breelyn describes as “bad energy.” While Jo and Dorriene are physically closer than ever, they’re struggling to bridge the emotional distance. They recognize the impact they’re having on the household, but they don’t know what to do.

That’s where Queer Eye’s Fab Five come in. They’ve arrived in Washington D.C., ready to help Jo and Dorriene find their way back to each other or, at the very least, to create a more peaceful environment for baby Soso. Certainly, over the course of ten seasons, the show hasn’t always gotten it right on set or on screen. But in this episode, as the Queer Eye team works to help Jo and Dorriene reconnect, they demonstrate how transformative (and fun!) bridging practices can be when they’re implemented skillfully. Here are four research-backed best practices for bridging differences, all beautifully modeled in this episode.



1. Focus on common goals and keep trying

Jo and Dorriene disagree on a stunning array of topics–what to watch on TV, how to clean, and what kind of childhood they had growing up in a family with 18 kids. Queer Eye’s resident food and wine expert Antoni Porowski notices one thing the sisters can agree on: their mom’s pineapple upside down cake was delicious.

This rare moment of consensus sparks a fruitful idea (pun intended). Antoni surprises Jo and Dorriene with an outing to a restaurant where, in the kitchen, he has assembled all of the supplies one needs to bake a pineapple upside down cake. The sisters jump to it, explaining how much brown sugar to use (more than you think!) and whether to use milk or pineapple juice in the recipe (juice!).

The sisters work together seamlessly. There’s laughter. The jokes are gentler than the sharp barbs they exchanged in earlier scenes. Antoni notices the growing warmth between them and he casually floats a more meaningful question: When did you used to eat this cake growing up? Stories emerge. The conversation gets deeper.

In this scene, Antoni, Jo, and Dorriene show us the power of a common goal. Dorriene and Jo both wanted to make a pineapple upside down cake, and that common goal was enough to get them working together. As we explain in the Bridging Differences Playbook, a shared objective can help move us away from disagreements and toward collective action. We don’t need to agree on everything in order to make something happen. And actively engaging in making something happen can help warm us up to one another. It can also result in a delicious cake!

One of the other key aspects of the experience that Antoni facilitated is its repeatability. As social psychologists Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone note in Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups, research shows it takes time and repeated interaction for members of different groups to build trust.

Antoni directly acknowledges that reality. With the sisters out of earshot, he tells the camera that he’s not trying to change a decades-old dynamic in one afternoon. If Jo and Dorriene keep cooking and baking together on a regular basis, their relationship will continue to shift. Before Antony’s time with Jo and Dorriene ends, the sisters decide what they’ll bake next–a quiche.

2. Give your perspective

Dorriene and Jo were born and raised in D.C. and they have a lot of family around. Jo is close with the family. Dorriene is not and hasn’t been for many years. Dorriene’s not up for something as simple as watching TV in the living room with Jo, Breelyn, and Soso, and she’s certainly not interested in attending larger family functions. Jo can see that Dorriene is lonely, and doesn’t understand why she won’t just leave the past in the past and come be part of the family again.

The Fab Five get it, though. They know it’s possible to grow up in the same house with someone and feel like your hearts are a million miles apart. For many of us queer folks, the feeling is all too familiar. We can share geography, skin color, faith, even the same parents and still not share a sense of belonging.

In an effort to build more understanding between the two sisters, Karamo Brown, the show’s culture expert, facilitates an experience that we at the GGSC call perspective-giving.

Karamo brings Dorriene and Jo to the D.C. History Center where they’re greeted by Ashley Bamfo, treasurer of the Rainbow History Project. As part of their mission to collect, preserve, and promote D.C.’s LGBTQ+ history, the Rainbow History Project maintains an archive of oral histories. Karamo reveals that he has brought Dorriene here to have her oral history recorded. He has brought Jo here to witness. He explains:

Dorriene, your story touched me because–to hear you say that you were in a relationship for 40 years–as younger queer people, the only reason I knew that I could find love and I could have somebody is because I see models like you. I want to make sure you have a chance to tell your story. I want us to document it because it’s important. As long as this country is around, they know Dorriene’s story.

While this episode’s primary focus is helping Jo and Dorriene build a stronger connection with one another, Karamo is also making it clear that he wants Dorriene to feel a sense of belonging to the queer community. Dorriene and her partner Diane belong to D.C. queer history. They are part of this long, storied tradition of love and resistance, and it’s important that this truth is preserved in the archives.

With all of this context set, Dorriene starts talking. We only see portions of what was surely a much longer experience, but even in excerpts, her stories do big work.

Dorriene tearfully opens up about “the things you had to do just to be loved.” How it felt to sneak around and keep secrets. How it felt to be treated poorly by their parents when she saw how much love and care her siblings got. She says: 


I remember my mom looking at me with such hatred. Like I did something wrong, you know. That she was ashamed of me. That I wasn’t part of the family. That I wasn’t her daughter. That hurt. [...] That’s why when I left home at 14, I never looked back. And I moved in with a drag queen!

She recounts the day she met Diane in their apartment building’s laundry room and the day, less than three weeks later, when she moved in with her! (They lived in the same building. No U-Haul required.) She even talks about the time she married David, one of her gay male friends, to protect him from getting kicked out of the military.

Dorriene shares her perspective, and Jo listens. Boy, does she listen.…

3. Listen with empathy

Throughout the oral history interview, Karamo and Ashley model a bridging practice that we call listening with empathy. Karamo and Ashley ask thoughtful, open-ended questions, but never interrupt. They affirm Dorriene’s experiences and feelings. They let themselves be moved, expressing empathy.

In this artfully edited scene, we get to watch Jo learning from Karamo and Ashley’s example. Instead of lecturing or offering solutions, as we’ve watched her do in the past, Jo stays curious. She listens. She opens herself up to Dorriene’s pain. When she does eventually speak, she expresses empathy. She says, wiping tears from her cheeks, “It hurts. I’m not saying it to take from you. I’m hurting for you.”

Dorriene has a strong response to receiving empathetic listening. She softens towards Jo and she’s willing to engage in deeper perspective-giving. She even shares information about her childhood that she had never revealed to Jo before. Dorriene’s reaction to being listened to is a response that’s reflected in the research. Studies show that when we listen to someone with empathy, it increases trust between us and helps them feel less guarded. They’re more likely to want to take the risk of connecting with us across our differences when they feel that we’ve listened to them and understand them. 

Everyone responds to different expressions of empathetic listening, but some combination of the following actions often helps people feel listened to:

• Be curious: Are you asking questions to encourage the other person to elaborate on his thoughts or feelings? Curiosity shows that you’re interested in what the person has to say and that you care.
• Be present: Are you actively engaged in the conversation, refraining from passing judgment, preventing interruptions, staying mentally focused, and avoiding the urge to give advice? 
• Affirm feelings/intentions: How are you affirming the feelings or opinions of the speaker? Do your best to try to find what you are able to affirm, so it doesn’t come across as insincere. 
• Express empathy: Why does the speaker feel or think the way they do? Think less about how you would feel or think in their situation, and more about them. 
• Use engaged body language: Are you using your body language and gestures to convey active listening?

It’s the pairing of perspective-giving and empathetic listening that prepares Dorriene to make a big leap at the end of the episode. 

4. Shift power imbalances

As even the most casual Queer Eye viewer knows, each episode ends with a big community celebration. Everyone gets to ooh and ahh over the makeover and the home renovations, but the real purpose is for the episode’s hero to be loved on and appreciated by their people. This episode’s final celebration certainly doesn’t disappoint. Karamo works with Jo’s granddaughter Breelyn to throw a family reunion at a gay bar, complete with a drag show.

When Karamo and Breelyn tell Jo and Dorriene what they’ve arranged, the sisters are delighted. Karamo is sure to clarify that they’ve only invited family members who affirm Dorriene’s humanity. He says, “The family members that love you and support you are there waiting for you.” We don’t see any of the pushback we might have expected from Dorriene. She’s surprised, but excited. At the bar, she and Jo seem to have a fantastic time with their given and chosen family.

In selecting this location and this form of entertainment, the show does something that researchers Linda Tropp and Trisha Dehrone characterize as a best practice for facilitating effective contact between groups. They shifted a power imbalance. In Tropp and Dehrone’s discussion of how organizations can design opportunities for contact between members of different groups, they write:

[W]e want to make sure that we envision and structure contact programs in ways that allow people from all groups to contribute as equal partners. [...] We can reinforce the equalizing nature of contact programs further by acknowledging and addressing ways in which broader societal inequalities might shape people’s participation in contact programs. [...] Rather than ignoring these differences, try to envision how you can address them directly as you consider what it will take for people from different groups to participate in your program.

It’s long been Jo’s dream to reunite Dorriene with their extended family, to bring her into the community that Jo treasures. It appears as though, with all of the progress they make over the course of the week, Dorriene might be ready to connect with more people. But it’s likely still a stretch for her. With an awareness of that reality, the Queer Eye team chooses a physical location and an activity that feel like home to Dorriene. She gets to regain some social power by being in that setting. By hosting the reunion at a gay bar and featuring drag performers, the crew addressed the impact that a broader social inequity had on Dorriene.

The Queer Eye team recognized the need to address this power imbalance because they understand that while the rift between Jo and Dorriene is personal, it’s also situated within a larger cultural context that includes systems of power.

One of the most noteworthy elements of the episode is the way the show invites the viewer to grow this understanding, as well. The episode is edited in such a way that interpersonal scenes are always connected to one another with references to the structural forces at play. Archival footage cut throughout the episode, paired with short, direct-to-camera interstitial commentary from the hosts, situate Jo and Dorriene’s personal stories within the contexts of D.C.’s civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, and feminism.

By the time we get to the final party, the viewer has had an opportunity to repeatedly see and hear how Jo and Dorriene’s stories (and the differences that divided them) have both interpersonal and structural elements.

Healing can also happen in our connections to individuals and to movements. Being connected to histories and movements can help us feel less alone. It can connect us to resources that foster bridging, as well. As Don Martin notes in his book, Where Did Everybody Go?: Why We’re Lonely but Not Alone, the sites that nurtured movements of collective liberation–like gay bars and Black barber shops–can be powerful, effective locations for cultivating belonging more broadly. That’s not to say that every queer or Black space should be compelled to become a site for bridging work. Bridging is not everyone’s responsibility or calling. But for communities who are interested in connecting across differences, it’s nice to remember that these sites have a lot to offer, not least of which is FUN.

Practicing bridging differences can certainly make us more patient, curious, and courageous people. It can help us create a more loving and just world. The Diggs sisters and the Fab Five remind us that it can also bring more joy into our lives. As Dorriene says before going to the family reunion, “We had so much fun this week.”

As this fraught year comes to a close, the Greater Good education team invites educators to take a break from the news and, through these books, remember the good that you are rendering in the world—every single day with each of your students and colleagues in little moments of love and care. It’s those moments that sustain us, and that will ultimately transform us all. — Vicki Zakrzewski

Happy Schools: Placing Happiness at the Heart of Schools, by Romesh Kumar

In Happy Schools, Romesh Kumar explains that cultivating happiness in classrooms is not an extravagance, but an imperative. He points to the devastating statistics around depression and suicide rates among India’s youth connected to the pressure they feel in schools to succeed at all costs. And the significant costs—lack of social connections, feelings of self-doubt and recrimination, and general despair—are too often the norm for India’s students on any sort of “track” that involves post-secondary education and career pathways.

Kumar argues that there is a solution, one that will not result in lowering academic standards. He shares studies, anecdotes, and successful models of “happy schools” in India and globally to help us rethink how students can be invited into learning spaces. Instead of a near-singular focus on academic achievement, especially through grades and ranking systems, Kumar advocates for a humanizing approach to education whereby students—and the adults who support them—are seen, valued, and held in a culture of curiosity and care.

Throughout the book, Kumar weaves in compelling research that connects student and educator well-being to academic success and happiness, or flourishing, within the larger community. Specific chapters of the book dive more deeply into aspects of education systems that may not always appear in discussions about student well-being and happiness, such as inclusion for students with special needs, the ways that Indigenous knowledge and traditional cultural practices can guide well-being initiatives, and how teacher agency and happiness are necessary for happy schools to exist.

While the book is focused specifically on Indian education systems, any educator will recognize the daily tension that comes with prioritizing academic content, grades, and test scores over self-awareness, well-being, and social connections. In Happy Schools, Kumar offers us a path forward that isn’t an either-or, but rather a both-and solution. If we can center students’ happiness—and our own—schools can become places where our minds and hearts can flourish. — Sarah Bracken

Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency, by Shane Safir, Marlo Bagsik, Sawsan Jaber, and Crystal M. Watson

Pedagogies of Voice is a call to action. Through a seamless weaving of stories, reflective questions, and practical strategies, the authors challenge educators to center students in the margins as they develop curricula and policies.

Each chapter is filled with the voices of real teachers and students working to shift the way we do school. The authors advocate for teachers to rethink their role as the gatekeeper of knowledge, to challenge traditional systems of top-down curriculum and discipline practices, and to listen deeply to students’ stories. Rather than deciding what students need, the goal for teachers is to uncover students’ rich and diverse cultural capital in order to build classrooms with and for them, with particular attention to traditionally marginalized students whose stories and funds of knowledge are often ignored or silenced. The book ends with a chapter on “Awakening Teacher Voice and Agency,” calling on teachers to use their power for the greater good, and on education leaders to invest in and trust teachers to build equitable and meaningful education spaces where all students can learn and thrive.

This book may challenge you, but the gentleness and grace with which the authors push us to examine existing power structures and inequitable paradigms help to ease the discomfort as we gaze inward with a critical eye and advocate outward with conviction. — Sarah Bracken

The Words That Shape Us: The Science-Based Power of Teacher Language, by Lily Howard Scott

The words educators speak in classrooms can have an impact that reverberates for years to come. They shape the way that children interact with learning and relationships—often in ways that we never imagined, argues Lily Howard Scott in her new book. Through thoughtful personal anecdotes and practices you can implement in your classroom today, The Words That Shape Us is a powerful resource and insightful read.

From reframing how we speak to and about children with a more nuanced approach, to introducing language that helps students feel more comfortable discussing their strengths and weaknesses, Howard Scott approaches the topic of language with a comprehensible depth that is actionable and backed by research.

“Words are powerful tools for regulating minds and bodies, and the small moments between teachers and students matter,” writes Howard Scott. “Change is rooted in the hundreds of tiny decisions we make each day and in the language we use throughout fleeting-yet-connected moments.”

While it is directly aimed at grade-school teachers, Howard Scott emphasizes how the tools in this book can be integrated at any level of education, both inside and outside of the classroom. Her work is a compelling reminder that when we speak with intention, we help shape not just better learners, but kinder, more connected humans. — Emily Brower

Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education, by Isabelle C. Hau

In Love to Learn, Isabelle C. Hau explains why our youngest learners deserve far more attention than they’re getting.

“We are all born billionaires: an infant is born with a treasure chest of a hundred billion neurons,” she says. Wired for relational connection, we thrive on attention, attunement, and language-rich “serve and return” exchanges. With public funding for early education fading, she argues for a focus on “a future where learning is relational and love is literacy.”

As the executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning Initiative, Hau partners with researchers, schools, and community leaders to study and leverage the latest applications of technology, brain research, and learning sciences. She’s familiar with a range of cutting-edge educational programs and policies, which makes her a well-informed, research-driven storyteller.

Hau shares examples of schools and community centers that serve as “relational hubs,” connecting students, teachers, and (intergenerational) families. Further, she offers rich, research-based examples of meaningful social play and neighborhood “learning landscapes,” including interactive “MathTrails,” “Storybook Paths,” and “Musical Playgrounds.”

Although the author’s emphasis on AI and education technology may make some readers nervous, in my view she does strike a balance. She features tools that support children struggling with social skills and language development, for example, while cautioning against overreliance on AI robots as nannies or friends who lack the capacity for genuine emotion and care. Further, she reviews a range of relational tech tools like Eldera, Caribu, and Khan Academy Kids that can enhance learning and social connections rather than further alienating us from each other.

Ultimately, Hau argues that love is the “heartbeat of life and learning,” and her vision of early education expands to encompass us all with relational intelligence as the lifeblood of schools, workplaces, and our communities. — Amy L. Eva

Neurodiversity-Affirming Schools: Transforming Practices So All Students Feel Accepted and Supported, by Emily Kircher-Morris and Amanda Morin

“True belonging isn’t about being included in spaces you’d otherwise be excluded from. It’s about feeling welcome from the start. And neurodiversity-affirming schools start from the place of assuming all students belong,” write Emily Kircher-Morris and Amanda Morin. But what exactly is a neurodiversity-affirming school, and how can educators create these types of spaces?

In their book, Neurodiversity-Affirming Schools: Transforming Practices So All Students Feel Accepted and Supported, Kircher-Morris and Morin provide a holistic approach to creating schools where all students can be their authentic selves and feel safe and secure to learn.

After establishing a shared understanding of the concept of neurodiversity—that there is variety and variability in all brains; that we all think and process differently—and what that means for learning, the authors offer a number of entry points to the work of creating schools that affirm all types of thinking, learning, and being.

They propose new pedagogical approaches, encourage mindset shifts, and share practical strategies across a number of topics relevant to teaching neurodivergent learners. The beauty of this book is that educators can follow the path that feels most relevant to them.

This may sound overwhelming if you are new to this work—and that’s OK. The authors emphasize that the goal of creating neurodiversity-affirming schools and classrooms is lofty, and that it cannot be achieved alone. They remind us that change happens gradually. Each conversation, each strategy, each shift in thinking creates more spaces where students feel like they belong. — Mariah Flynn

Nature and Spirituality During the Early Years, by Ruth Wilson

Overwhelmed and exhausted raising a fussy newborn, I stumbled upon a magical balm for my soul—time spent in nature. By stepping out into the sounds, smells, and subtle texture of the natural world, my baby would quickly settle into a sort of wide-eyed wonder.

I’ve often wondered why this simple action had such a profound impact on my daughter. Ruth Wilson’s newest book, Nature and Spirituality During the Early Years, provides a theoretical framework for understanding this innate connection between very young children and the natural world. 

Wilson draws on a considerable body of research in the fields of biology, ecopsychology, and social ecology to describe this connection as “biophilia: an innate tendency to affiliate with life and lifelike processes.” The many long-term benefits of maintaining this connection between children and the natural world are well-documented.

While these benefits apply to all areas of child development, it is the transcendent experiences of awe and wonder that Wilson is most keenly interested in studying. Her work recognizes and values children’s perspectives and ways of interacting with nature, providing both implications for educators’ practice and an understanding of how children’s appreciative interactions with nature support their spiritual development: seeking meaning, constructing a sense of identity, and recognizing their interdependence with the world around them. — Margaret Golden

Just Shine! How to Be a Better You by Sonia Sotomayor, illustrated by Jacqueline Alcantara

Written by The Honorable Sonia Sotomayor as a tribute to her mother, Celina, Just Shine is ultimately a story about the transformational power of love.

Beginning in Puerto Rico, we are introduced to Celina as a young child courageously caring for her sick mother. Throughout the book, we discover how Celina loved without discrimination. Each chapter of Celina’s life offers an example of how loving others makes the world shine—being courageous, keeping others company, helping those in need, offering forgiveness, and accepting kindness and spreading it to others.

The last chapter shows an elder Celina, having given of herself so generously without expecting anything in return, now being cared for in the same ways that she showed love throughout her life. It is a wonderful book for teachers to share in the elementary grades when developing a caring classroom community. It gives clear, concrete examples of how prosocial behaviors help us make the world a kinder and happier place.

This heartfelt and beautifully illustrated book ends with a question: What will you do to make your world shine? It is a perfect book to share during this season of light and love. — Margaret Golden

Reinvigorating Classroom Climate: Everyday Strategies to Inspire Teachers and Students, by Maurice J. Elias

The field of K–12 education is quickly becoming about more than just academics. Indeed, educators all over the world are transforming how we “do” education by attending to students’ (and their own) social, emotional, and ethical development, while also addressing test scores. But sometimes knowing how to foster these forms of development can be overwhelming—programs are a dime a dozen, and research is increasing our understanding of human development at the speed of light, compelling educators to constantly adjust their approach. Help!

Enter Reinvigorating Classroom Climate. Pulling from his decades of research and practical experience, Maurice Elias provides educators with eight approaches, such as creating positive classroom and school climates, promoting inspiration and human dignity, fostering students’ intrinsic motivation, and restoring the soul of educators. Each “approach” is clearly described, supported with practical examples and, best of all, super easy methods for implementing immediately.

What I appreciate most, however, about Elias’s book is his ability to empathize with educators. Not only has he done the hard work of organizing an enormous body of research into succinct methods for classroom implementation, he also speaks to educators’ hearts. He understands that most of us who chose education as a career did so to make a difference in the lives of students and the world—and this book helps us do just that.

As he writes: “It’s seeing our students flourish—despite challenges and hassles—that fosters restoration of the soul of educators and your pride and joy in your work.” — Vicki Zakrzewski

Our favorite parenting books of 2025 provide scientific insights to support the resilience and flourishing of children, teens, and parents. They cover a variety of topics, including coping with racial and cultural stress for teens and young adults of color, having conversations with tween and teen boys, and effecting change for families of children experiencing medical complexity or disability. Our book selections also cover important topics like helping parents to navigate their own emotions, and the power of awe and play for children. Most of these books weave together cutting-edge research and powerful personal stories that can help readers make positive changes in their day-to-day lives.

Empower Yourself Against Racial and Cultural Stress: Using Skills from the REACH Program to Cope, Heal, and Thrive, by Ryan C.T. DeLapp

Empower Yourself Against Racial and Cultural Stress is a workbook intended for teens and young adults of color based on the Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Healing (REACH) program developed by psychologist and author Ryan C.T. DeLapp. “If you identify as a person of color, this book can help you learn to cope with moments of feeling judged unfairly, mistreated, or denied opportunities based on your racial and cultural background,” writes DeLapp. The workbook helps readers learn to practice empowered coping, which has three steps:

1. Clarify the impacts of cultural stress. Notice uncomfortable emotions, like a lack of control over a situation, and navigate critical thoughts about your race or culture.
2. Think of what you can do. Identify what is still under your control that can help you cope when you’re faced with cultural stress.
3. Make empowered coping decisions. Discover what is best for you in a particular moment and in the future.

The workbook begins with activities to explore your identities, reflect on your experiences with cultural stress, and recognize its impact. It then helps you identify and navigate emotional aspects of cultural stress with strategies like mindfulness and self-compassion. DeLapp provides guidance to boost your sense of agency and control by making change efforts and making resilience efforts. Finally, he addresses identity stress, which involves experiencing negative cultural feedback. He provides activities for identity exploration, identity expression, and identity protection to nurture self-love, self-confidence, and cultural pride. 

Throughout the workbook, DeLapp weaves in the experiences of three fictional characters for readers to learn lessons from. These “empowered navigators” are an 18-year-old Latino man who lives with his family, a 16-year-old Muslim teen who recently immigrated with her family, and a 23-year-old Black man raised in the American South in a very religious family. DeLapp also encourages readers to identify people in their own community who can be their own empowered navigators. This practical and interactive workbook can be an empowering gift for parents to share with their teens and young adults of color to nurture their resilience and flourishing.

Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men, by Joanna Schroeder and Christopher Pepper

Boys are increasingly struggling and feeling disconnected. “They are underperforming in school and opting out of college, overdosing on drugs, falling under the spell of extremism, and engaging in lethal violence and self-harm—including mass shootings and suicide,” write coauthors Joanna Schroeder and Christopher Pepper. They wrote Talk to Your Boys as a guide for parents, caregivers, educators, and mentors to catalyze a change, because the way we’re supporting tween and teen boys isn’t working well for them or society at large.

Talk to Your Boys puts a spotlight on the power of deep conversations to help boys feel greater connection and practice empathy, compassion, and introspection. Schroeder and Pepper advise parents to embrace the awkwardness and accept imperfection when talking to boys. They provide conversation strategies and practical tips for parents to begin having conversations about 16 essential topics, including masculinity, emotions, dating, sex, pornography, substance use, screen time, bullying, violence, and racism. They recommend parents start with having conversations with boys about communication because it is the foundation for all conversations.

Here are their six key tips for conversations:

1. Don’t interrupt, inquire. Invite boys respectfully to have a conversation.
2. Set the tone. Help boys know in advance what the conversation will be about so they can better handle what’s coming.
3. Take them seriously. Show them that you are actively listening for understanding and eager to have a two-way conversation.
4. Get curious, not furious. Investigate what is getting in the way and seek collaborative solutions rather than getting stuck in disappointment or frustration.
5. Try reflective listening. Pause before responding and paraphrase what you’ve heard to check in about whether your understanding is correct.
6. Talk shoulder to shoulder, not eye to eye. Consider having a conversation while moving together, like playing ping-pong rather than just staring at each other.

 
With a mix of practical guidance from experts on each topic and authentic and insightful voices from a panel of 85 boys, Talk to Your Boys will resonate with parents who are looking for ways to nurture the well-being of boys who will be guided by standing up for what’s right and creating a better world for all of us.

Be Unapologetically Impatient: The Mindset Required to Change the Way We Do Things, by Christina Cipriano

Be Unapologetically Impatient integrates psychologist and author Christina Cipriano’s insights as a scholar as well as her journey as a mother of four children with a vantage point on medical complexity and neurodivergence. She calls for putting joy in the foreground while working to promote justice in the face of discrimination or inequity based on disability, language, income, culture, education, and more. While being mindful of toxic positivity, she challenges reflexive deficit-framing that focuses on what is lacking or wrong rather than valuing different experiences and ways of being to catalyze changes that can improve inadequate systems and people’s lives. 

Cipriano spotlights the frustrating obstacles to accessing support for families of children with disabilities, like the refrain of “That’s just the way we do things here,” policies that normalize waiting for children to fail before providing interventions, and the expectation for families to remain patient while waiting for services. She shares personal stories of how she has taken action when encountering challenges around accessibility, such as by asking questions and communicating with organizational leaders, that can serve as models for addressing flaws in the systems readers are encountering.

The book provides concrete suggestions to work to change injustices using “call-ins” rather than “callouts,” the latter of which are often counterproductive in the long term. Cipriano offers five helpful call-in strategies:

1. Strive to ask questions with the intention of hearing the answers. Acknowledge and navigate the intense emotions you’re experiencing about the injustice before you while focusing your questions on the present circumstances, like a barrier or a policy, rather than on a person.
2. Avoid asking why, how, or how could you… do, say, behave, inhibit…. Ask questions about the system, like “Why does the policy discriminate?” or “Why does the device take eight months to be manufactured?”
3. Remind yourself to stay in a curious, nonjudgmental, nonargumentative tone. Be mindful of your emotional experiences and expressions, and when your volume is loud. Focus on the issue and share facts and suggestions for actively addressing the situation.
4. Avoid shoulding people. Be aware that people are not receptive to hearing others’ unsolicited suggestions for what they should have done in a past situation.
5. Avoid asking people if they can do something. Understand that “Can you…” often leads to a defensive response and less openness to a conversation.

Parents will appreciate the empowering message and practical guidance of Be Unapologetically Impatient. “I am not waiting for justice at the expense of my children,” writes Cipriano. “And you don’t need to, either. It’s time to be unapologetically impatient. Let me show you how.”

Raising Awe Seekers: How the Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive, by Deborah Farmer Kris

“When we seek out awe with our children, and give them a name for the feeling, we help bend their worlds towards wonder.” In Raising Awe Seekers, child development expert Deborah Farmer Kris unpacks a trove of research on awe, explaining the benefits of awe for families and providing parents with practical and accessible ideas for raising children who turn toward wonder. The book positions awe as an antidote to the busyness, scariness, and messiness of modern parenting and a powerful tool for helping both parents and children to slow down and connect. 

Each chapter unpacks the research on a different source of awe, from nature to music to big questions to human kindness. Drawing on interviews with experts in the field, Kris makes the case for why awe-seeking is such a powerful tool—highlighting its ability to reduce cortisol, foster generosity, and strengthen resilience. She then applies the research on the benefits of awe to parenting, providing concrete tips to bring each source of awe into your child’s life, complete with recommendations for awe-inspiring picture books. In the chapter on the wonder of nature, we learn from research that time outdoors experiencing awe can serve as a protective measure and can recharge our attention battery, and Kris suggests an “oh look!” walk or moon-watching with your child.

Kris highlights throughout the book that the first step to bringing more awe into our children’s lives is to become awe-seekers ourselves. Cultivating this way of being for parents supports our own well-being and deepens our relationship with our children. What’s more, awe-seeking parents can help slow down their kids’ childhood, making space for wonder and helping them gain lifelong skills in connection, curiosity, and humility. 

The Way of Play: Using Little Moments of Big Connection to Raise Calm and Confident Kids, by Tina Payne Bryson and Georgie Wisen-Vincent 

For many parents, playing with their children just isn’t intuitive. We might assume that we remember how to play like children do, but our brains don’t work that way anymore. Often there is relearning that needs to be done in order to join our kids in the power of play. In their book, The Way of Play, pediatric therapists and play experts Tina Payne Bryson and Georgie Wisen-Vincent share seven strategies for parents to use play as a tool to support their children’s emotional development and resilience and build a stronger connection with their children. 

For example, one play strategy is to watch for ways to mirror your child’s actions—with your body, your face, or your voice. When children experience this strategy, they receive the message from their parents, “Someone tunes into me, I can tune into others.” Using mirroring in play can help your child build deeper skills to understand their own emotions, supporting their connections with and empathy for others. But how does this happen? The Way of Play breaks down what happens in your child’s brain when you mirror them and also teaches parents how to mirror.

The book is full of stories from Wisen-Vincent’s practice at the Play Strong Institute that show these strategies in action. It also includes copious cartoon-style graphics illustrating and providing scripts to help parents practice each play strategy with their child. 

Bryson and Wisen-Vincent leave us with the reminder that “Play is kids’ primary language, and it’s key to helping them build emotional, cognitive, and relational skills. And most importantly, it’s a way you can build a stronger relationship with them that will reward you both for years to come.” 

Parents Have Feelings, Too: A Guide to Navigating Your Emotions So You And Your Family Can Thrive, by Hilary Jacobs Hendel and Juli Fraga

Parents Have Feelings, Too acknowledges that just as our children have intense emotions, so do parents, but many of us were never taught in school or at home how to navigate these big feelings. “This book teaches you how to identify, name, validate, and work through your emotions,” write coauthors and psychotherapists Hilary Jacobs Hendel and Juli Fraga. “It’s a skill set that nourishes lifelong well-being and robust mental health for you and your children.

The book is divided into three parts. It begins with describing the central role of emotions for a sense of connection and well-being. Hendel and Fraga explain how our emotions are related to our attachment style—secure, avoidant, anxious, or fearful—and its role in the ways we approach parenting our children. They clarify what emotions are and dispel myths like “pushing down emotions makes them go away and has no consequences.” They introduce the Change Triangle, which is a tool to help you skillfully and confidently navigate your emotions toward calm, connection, curiosity, and compassion, which are keys to achieving a state of open-heartedness and authenticity.

The three corners of the Change Triangle tool are:

1. Defense. The various things we do to avoid emotional distress or pain.
2. Inhibitory emotions. Feelings like anxiety, guilt, and shame, which help us follow the rules of society and culture.
3. Core emotions. Feelings like anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy, and excitement that are key to survival and help us to express our needs, wants, likes, and dislikes.

The fourth component of the Change Triangle is the open-hearted state of the authentic self—when our nervous system is regulated and can help us to take actions that are constructive and promote our well-being.

Parents Have Feelings, Too walks readers through how to use the Change Triangle tool and offers plenty of examples of its application across a variety of both inhibitory and core emotions. Importantly, Hendel and Fraga provide a balanced view of emotions as information and sources of insight that can serve a purpose in our lives. For example, they describe how guilt can prevent us from being dishonest or breaking the law but, when it’s experienced disproportionately, can lead us to harsh self-judgment.

Readers will appreciate the dozens of practical exercises woven throughout the book, like “Dropping Into the Body,” “Tending to Your Sadness,” and “Working With Disgust Caused by Your Child.” “These tools have been game-changing for us as parents and psychotherapists, and we are excited to share them with you,” write Hendel and Fraga.

NOTABLE MENTION: We also want to share our own workbook that came out this year, Family Well-Being for the Greater Good: A science-based workbook for people supporting parents. It offers parenting practitioners practical lessons and activities to help you prioritize cultivating your social and emotional well-being while additionally supporting you in sharing these insights and practices with the parents and families you serve. Download it for free.

But even when things seem inescapable or hard, it can be helpful to remember that we have personal agency in how we respond. Whether it’s managing our emotions better, improving our relationships, stretching ourselves in new directions, or envisioning a better future for all, we fare better when we don’t give into despair and take constructive, positive action. The science suggests taking care of ourselves can allow us to better face our collective challenges.

We hope this year’s selection of books will inspire you as they have us to become the change you want to see in the world.

Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want, by Marc Brackett

What is your relationship with your emotions on a daily basis?

Some of us might deny that we’re influenced by our feelings at all. Others might try to leave our emotions behind when we move into certain environments, like work or school. We may believe that particular emotions are “bad” or “negative”—and so aim to avoid them as much as possible.

But emotions are around whether we like them to be or not, explains Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in his new book, Dealing with Feeling. Our skill in dealing with them will influence how much success and well-being we can attain.

His book explains how we can work with our emotions so they don’t get in the way of us achieving our goals or living the life we want. This involves working with our beliefs about emotions, the emotions themselves, how they show up in our bodies, and the thoughts that come with them—and reaching out to others for support. 

Emotion regulation is a skill that we should start learning in childhood, Brackett argues, but many of us must revisit it as adults because no one really showed or taught us how to practice it. 

How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty by Elizabeth Weingarten

At the start of her new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions, behavioral psychologist Elizabeth Weingarten rejects the now-conventional wisdom that everyone should “embrace uncertainty.” While that approach might help some people in many circumstances, Weingarten suggests that humans “are programmed to try to dispel doubt and uncertainty”—and so telling people to do the opposite can actually lead to more anxiety, rumination, and paralysis.

Her alternative? To embrace not the uncertainty but rather the questions we confront throughout our lives. Her inspiration is the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in his 1929 book Letters to a Young Poet urges his interlocutor Franz Kappus “to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language.”

Some questions can be answered easily, but some take a longer time—and some must be continually asked. The key is to construct the right questions and understand their place in your life.

For example, Weingarten describes starting out by wrestling with the question of whether she should stay in her relationship. And at a certain point, she realized that “Should I get a divorce?” was simply too binary. A good question needs to break out of binaries, and so she pivots to “What would have to change in order for us to stay together?” This question allowed her to have the right conversations with her husband, and so they were able to answer it together.

Weingarten calls this way of life “a method of truth-seeking” that is “characterized by patience and openness to new ideas.” Through a combination of scientific research and journalistic profiles of people who exemplify these qualities, Weingarten walks her readers through the many ways we can construct good questions and then carry them as we navigate ourselves and the world around us.

Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life, by Shigehiro Oishi

Many of us think happiness or meaning are the keys to a good life. But, in Shigehiro Oishi’s book Life in Three Dimensions, we learn about a third path: “psychological richness”—something that comes with seeking novel, complex, challenging experiences that alter your perspective.

“Psychological richness is really capturing change rather than stability, newness rather than familiarity,” says Oishi. “In that sense . . . it’s quite distinct from happiness and meaning.”

His research finds that people seeking psychologically rich experiences are more curious, knowledgeable, and wise. They’re also more apt to connect across differences, willing to move out of their comfort zone to explore and innovate.

His book tells stories of people like Oliver Sacks and Steve Jobs who famously lived psychologically rich lives. He also features everyday people who’ve pursued novelty and personal challenge, showing how they benefitted from stretching themselves in new ways.

Anyone can seek psychological richness, says Oishi, whether that’s trying out a new cuisine, deepening conversations, or learning a new language. Even those with happy, meaningful lives could experiment with adding more richness to help fill whatever may be missing from their lives.

Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, by Olga Khazan

Our personalities may seem fixed and unchanging. But, as Olga Khazan writes in Me but Better, research and personal experience suggest otherwise. Your personality can change and often does, through aging, experience, or deliberate effort (like therapy). That means you can become a different version of yourself.

Why change one’s personality? For Khazan, it was about being happier and healthier, while taking on new challenges in life. A self-proclaimed introvert and neurotic, she was sobered by research suggesting introversion makes you less happy, while neuroticism (a tendency toward worrying and emotional instability) puts you at greater risk for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and dementia. Her desire to change led her to experiment with a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach, leaning into experiences aimed at increasing extraversion and decreasing neuroticism.

While we may not share Khazan’s goals, her book still offers a provocative, entertaining primer on the research behind personality change, as well as a wealth of tools for nudging yourself in different ways. Following her lead might not bring you a whole new personality, but even small changes could make a difference.

“A new and slightly improved personality, I learned, can make you happier, more successful, and more fulfilled,” writes Khazan. “It can help you enjoy your life, rather than just endure it.”

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, by Kurt Gray

Many of us are outraged today. We dig in our heels on abortion, vaccines, immigration, or gender—convinced we are morally right and the other side is dangerously wrong. We talk past each other, certain we’re protecting what matters most. And the other side feels exactly the same.

In Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, psychologist Kurt Gray argues that our outrage doesn’t stem from fundamentally opposing values, but from a shared moral instinct: the drive to prevent harm.

Drawing on two decades of research and his work leading the Deepest Beliefs Lab at UNC Chapel Hill, Gray [now a professor at Ohio State University] shows that beneath every heated debate lies the same question: Who is being harmed? We aren’t divided because we disagree about morality’s essence; we’re divided because we disagree about who the victim is.

Gray challenges the idea that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. Instead, he argues that our “harm-based” moral minds—shaped over millennia of threat detection—interpret modern dangers differently. These competing perceptions fuel today’s polarized outrage.

Still, Outraged is ultimately hopeful. Gray offers tools like sharing personal harm stories and his C-I-V method (connect, invite, validate) to bridge divides.

Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, by Beverly Daniel Tatum

American colleges are in crisis. Campus protests, financial worries, and White House demands are pressuring higher education leaders like never before. 

Peril and Promise speaks to these pressures. A psychologist by training, Beverly Daniel Tatum has worn many hats in higher education, from professor to trustee to interim president of Mount Holyoke College and president emeritus at Spelman College—a broad perspective that makes her uniquely poised to tackle the issues colleges are facing.

In 2012, for example, Spelman faced a dilemma—its NCAA program was draining resources, and the facilities were floundering. In response, Tatum launched a wellness initiative, replacing costly NCAA athletics with a campus-wide health and fitness program, boosting fitness class participation from 278 to over 1,300 students.  

It’s this out-of-the-box thinking that reveals Tatum’s original thinking and care for the students under her wing. Her vision for higher education—prioritizing holistic health, equity, and belonging—is what our leaders need, moving forward.

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, by Nicholas Carr

Many psychologists have sounded the alarm over social media and its damaging effects on our relationships and mental health. As Nicholas Carr chronicles in Superbloom, this is not some new phenomenon, but part of a historic trend. Many past improvements in communications technologies, like social media, have not lived up to their hype of creating a more connected world.

That’s because increased ease of communication is not necessarily better, he writes. For example, the personal information dumps we get from social media posts tend to make us like people less, not more. People tend to be less filtered when chatting online than in person, too, so that conversations can quickly become toxic and divisive.

Why do we engage anyway? We’re wired to seek out new information and confirm our place in the social hierarchy, says Carr, and these instincts are easily exploited by media companies.

“The algorithms read what triggers our attention, what grabs our attention, and, by proxy, seems to be what we desire, and then give us a lot of it,” says Carr.

By explaining how we’re being duped to tune in, Carr hopes to inspire people to use social media more wisely, prioritize in-person interactions, and exert more agency over how technology is regulated.

Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, by Alison Wood Brooks

As humans, we’re talking to each other constantly. With all that practice, we must be pretty good at it—right? 

Not exactly. As a professor at Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks teaches people how to have better conversations. In Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, she debunks many of the widespread myths and assumptions that cause us to have less-than-stellar interactions. It turns out that many of our intuitions about how to talk to each other are off the mark, creating awkwardness, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities for connection. 

For example, it helps to prepare conversation topics in advance, even if we resist doing so, and people are more open to talking about deep or “negative” topics than we think. Switching topics frequently tends to make conversations better, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever ask too many questions. Almost no conversation will end when you or the other person wants it to—and that’s OK. 

As Brooks explains, conversation is a skill, and research findings can help us become better at it so our conversations are more enjoyable, more productive, and better at bringing us closer together. 

The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life, by Arthur C. Brooks

In his popular Atlantic magazine column, “How to Build a Life,” Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks has explored the habits that help us cultivate greater meaning, contentment, and well-being.

His new book gathers 33 of those short essays, each one with a simple message. In one on  “treating your life like a startup,” for example, Brooks shares how the great entrepreneurs develop clarity, create intentional design, and have the courage to pivot, all of which are important skills to apply to your own life.  

In another, Brooks encourages us to consider starting with “no” as the default, reflecting on how saying “yes” might affect your own happiness (and your need for rest, focus, and meaning), and then making a conscious decision about the request. 

A major theme in the book is that we think happiness will come from status or achievements when, in reality, more lasting happiness comes from paying attention to relational matters like love, friendships, and community. The important thing is to take small steps.

As Brooks relates, “Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination but rather from making tangible progress toward it…no matter what we call it, the key skill is to understand that the returns on life come from the strength of your intimate ties.”

What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, by Diane Button

Most of us probably don’t want to think about the inevitability of dying. But there are important lessons to learn from facing our mortality, argues end-of-life doula Diane Button in What Matters Most.

The book is full of moving stories in which Button helps people manage the practical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of dying. By shepherding them through the process, she’s witnessed firsthand what people facing death care about most and what brings them peace and joy.

“When people are facing the end of life, everything that is superficial just gets stripped away,” she says. “You’re really focusing on love, relationship, healing, and, oftentimes, spirituality.”

She’s also seen many people needing to attend to unfinished business, like reconnecting with estranged loved ones, forgiving others, or preparing a legacy to leave behind. By revealing what people need when facing death, Button provides life lessons for us all.

“Talking about death is talking about life,” she says. “If you start to understand what, for you, is most important and what might be most meaningful for you at the end of life, then you can live differently now.”

Who Pays for Diversity: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do About It, by Oneya Fennell Okuwobi 

To prepare for the writing of Who Pays for Diversity?, University of Cincinnati sociologist Oneya Fennell Okuwobi interviewed employees of color in churches, universities, and corporations. 

She found something troubling. These employees were bearing hidden psychological and professional costs from becoming tokens and commodities in organizations that were pursuing diversity, as many organizations do, for image, legitimacy, or financial gain. Time and again, she found, these employees are asked to serve on extra committees, run diversity programs, and represent the organization in other ways. One Black wealth manager was pulled into so many client meetings that were unrelated to his job, just so the company could “look diverse.” As a result, his performance metrics suffered greatly.

Today, there is no dearth of critiques on the subject of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and that’s probably a good thing. It turns out that it’s really hard to undo centuries of oppression, especially when Americans don’t see eye to eye on these issues. Okuwobi argues for replacing performative diversity with structural change and shared responsibility for equity—and helps all of us consider what a better workplace could look like.

Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection, by Ben Rein

Having warm, close relationships is key to our physical and mental health. Why?

According to Ben Rein’s Why Brains Need Friends, our brains releases neurochemicals like oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine whenever we’re with people we love. The release of oxytocin alone has been tied to reducing stress, anxiety, and inflammation, and healing from wounds, making the health connections clear. But all three chemicals work in tandem to make sure we feel rewarded for and seek out warm relationships.

Other biological systems come into play, too. For example, we unconsciously mimic the expressions of other people we’re with, helping us to understand their feelings and have empathy. This doesn’t happen as easily online, which explains why it’s easier to make a close connection in person.

Our brains can also hinder our desire to reach out to strangers by underestimating how enjoyable it might be or overestimating the possibility of rejection. By understanding our strengths and limitations, we can learn to nurture the warm relationships we all need.

“The human brain has been shaped through evolution to reward us for connection and punish us for isolation,” he writes. “As such, we have so much to gain from socializing, and arguably even more to lose without it.”

Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “It’s called work for a reason,” right? It suggests work is supposed to be hard and torturous, so don’t expect more.

In Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, economists Jan-Emmanuel de Neve and George Ward show why that view is so wrongheaded. By using rigorous research findings to make their case, they argue that investing in policies that support workforce well-being also creates competitive advantages for companies, such as talent acquisition, employee engagement, retention, innovation, and business cost savings and profitability—that is, key performance indicators or KPIs.

For their research, de Neve and Ward partnered with companies to systematically increase well-being among some employees and not others, and then examine the impact on KPIs. Consistently and across multiple studies, more well-being led to better outcomes. The authors even computed a stock market index that included the top 100 well-being scorers and documented their superior long-term performance over well-known S&P 500 and Nasdaq composites. 

Employee well-being improves the bottom line, write the authors, because it heightens productivity, strengthens relationships, fosters creativity, supports health, makes recruitment easier, and improves retention. By sharing methods and strategies for increasing well-being at work, their book provides both justification for and actionable approaches to companies seeking healthier, more profitable workplaces.

BONUS: Though we didn’t include it on our favorite books list, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own book that came out this year, The Science of Happiness Workbook: 10 Practices for a Meaningful Life, which offers evidence-based practices for improving your personal and relational well-being. Read an excerpt.

I often heard this refrain growing up as an unlikely Hindu in a Black body in Cleveland, Ohio. While this idea may sound foreign to many in the Western world, it is foundational in several Eastern philosophies, which teach that attachment to the physical body as the self is a root cause of suffering.

Now, as a social theorist and epidemiologist studying population health, I often reflect on that early lesson. I see more clearly than ever that the supposed divide between science and spirituality is a false one. Our conceptions of self—fundamentally spiritual ideas about who and what we are—are not merely abstract philosophies. They are measurable, powerful determinants of health and well-being. And in this age of preventable crises—climate change, hunger, economic inequality, disease—they may be one of our most untapped resources for survival and flourishing.

I can’t say this realization surprised me. All my life, I watched my mother embody a belief in herself first as a soul connected to all other souls. This conviction guided her through a life defined by compassion, gratitude, advocacy, sacrifice, and countless other generosities of spirit—qualities consistently linked to better mental and physical health. And indeed, my mother was a model of both. While many of her family and community members developed chronic illnesses as they aged—diabetes, heart disease, premature cognitive decline, bipolar disorder—my mother, whom many called Mata, the Sanskrit word for “mother,” remained remarkably vital throughout her life.

Mata’s health thrived despite the immense challenges she faced: gendered abuse, poverty, racism, and other forms of trauma—stressors that weigh hardest upon marginalized populations in inequitable societies. Drawn to understanding health from a young age, I often pondered the nature of her resilience. What made her so strong? Was it her disidentification with the physical body that was so protective? And could others cultivate that same resilience?

For much of my youth, I wanted to be a physician. I entered college intent on majoring in biology and becoming a cardiologist. The heart somehow seemed at the center of every illness I saw in the Black and Brown communities where I grew up. But during my second year at Princeton, a medical anthropology course shifted my understanding of health entirely. I began to see that the diseases of the heart in my community weren’t simply biological—they were social, born from inequality, racism, and chronic exposure to toxic stress. I changed my major to Anthropology and African American Studies but stayed on the pre-med track, determined to bridge biology and society in my understanding of health.

Still, something kept tugging at me: Mata’s quiet, steady strength. Even as I came to understand how social structures shape health outcomes, I couldn’t stop thinking about the inner posture that had sustained her. What role did her spiritual sense of identity play in her resilience?

As an epidemiologist, I became fascinated by how self-identification might buffer people from the health impacts of chronic stress. While many health disparities scholars focus on structural determinants, I saw an opportunity to integrate insights from Eastern philosophy, social psychology, and population health to bring to light understudied sources of resilience. In the first year of my doctoral program, I began to formalize this integration into what I now call the Identity Vitality–PathologyTM (IVP) model.

The model was inspired directly by Mata’s example. I identified three key dimensions of her belief in the self as distinct from the physical body that I believed were central to its health-protective power: a sense of self that includes all living beings, a belief in the intrinsic and immutable worth of all life, and a natural compassion that flows from this recognition of shared value. Together, these qualities form what I call identity vitality—a loving state of being rooted in connection and compassion that is directed toward self and others.

By contrast, when a person defines selfhood narrowly—through physical characteristics, social status, or the exclusion of “others”—they fall into what I call identity pathology. This state, I argue, is inherently harmful, both to self and society, because it constrains compassion and ultimately reinforces inequity. We all exist somewhere along this spectrum. Those who orient toward identity vitality, I hypothesize, are more resilient to the health effects of chronic stress, while those oriented toward identity pathology are more vulnerable.

How does identity vitality protect health?

Stress, after all, is a curious companion to health. In brief doses, it helps us adapt and grow. But chronic, unrelenting stress—like the social burdens imposed upon marginalized people—erodes health across every system of the body. Over time, it accelerates aging and contributes to conditions from diabetes and heart disease to Alzheimer’s and cancer. Yet not everyone is equally affected. Some people, like Mata, seem buffered from many of its worst effects. Genetics play a role, yes—but perhaps so does how we see ourselves and the world. I theorize that identity vitality is a key factor that shapes whether stress becomes toxic or transformative.

To test this theory, I developed a questionnaire to measure identity vitality and pathology. In my lab—the Healthy Aging with Resilient Identities (HARI) Lab—our research explores whether cultivating a vitalized identity can promote healthier aging.

The empirical evidence, though early, is promising. In studies including more than 2,700 Black and white adults aged 18 to 81, we found that greater identity vitality was consistently linked with lower risk of depression, even after accounting for many other relevant factors. The relationship showed a striking “dose-response” effect: As identity vitality increased, the risk of depression declined by as much as 90%. In another study, Black women with higher identity vitality had a 50% lower risk of hypertension associated with neighborhood disadvantage. Among men experiencing severe financial strain, those with higher identity vitality also reported better overall health. These findings suggest that the way we understand who we are may literally shape how our bodies bear stress.

Can identity vitality really improve population health outcomes?

I use the terms vitalized and pathologized deliberately to emphasize that identity states are constructed—and, thus, potentially modifiable. We are all taught, implicitly or explicitly, what to believe about who we are and what gives us worth. But those lessons can be unlearned and relearned at any point in life. If identity vitality can be cultivated, then perhaps resilience itself is teachable.

My confidence in that idea was shaken when my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive uterine cancer at 65 during my final year of doctoral training. Less than two years later, she had physically departed. Her passing forced me to confront painful questions. How could someone so mindful of her health, whose deep and practical spiritual beliefs guided every aspect of her life—including her health behaviors—succumb to such an aggressive, merciless illness?

In grief, I found a new kind of clarity. In a certain way, my mother’s life and death mirrored an ongoing debate in public health: Can individual-level interventions—those targeting mindset, belief, or behavior—truly move the needle on population-level outcomes when the structures at the root of health disparities remain? My mother’s identity vitality had clearly buffered her from many stress-related diseases. Yet even her profound resilience couldn’t entirely protect her from the deeper structural inequities that shape who gets sick with what illness.

Non-Hispanic Black women are nearly twice as likely as women of other racial and ethnic groups to die from uterine cancers. Stressors stemming from structural inequities—rooted in racism, sexism, and economic inequality—accumulate in the body in ways that even the most resilient spirit may not overcome. Because my mother had largely avoided the chronic conditions so often tied to lifestyle and behavior, I began to wonder if I had been somewhat blinded to the constraints imposed by structural inequity.

Over time, however, I came to see that this harsh reality didn’t negate the promise of identity vitality—it offered a path for greater healing. I now see identity vitality as both a conduit for individual resilience and a catalyst for collective transformation. The same beliefs that protect us from stress on the personal level—seeing all beings as valuable, releasing attachment to hierarchy or status—may also dismantle the systems that create inequity and, with them, the need for resilience itself.

These systems persist because so many of us are taught to derive our worth from perceiving ourselves as superior to others. If more of us underwent what I call a vitalizing transformation—a shift from self-worth based on comparison to self-worth rooted in universal connection, intrinsic value, and compassion for ourselves and others—then the decision points that sustain inequity might begin to shift, as well.

Were we able to create an identity inoculant, perhaps we could begin to heal the social diseases of dominance the way we once eradicated polio and smallpox—through collective courage, compassion, and persistence. The turning points that sustain or undo systems of power are not abstract; they live within human choices. Each decision to reinforce hierarchy or to dismantle it is shaped by the identity state of the decision maker. The more people who see themselves as connected rather than separate—as part of a family of all living beings rather than a social ladder—the more our collective choices will tilt toward justice and care, for ourselves, for each other, and for the earth.

As those levers of power slowly shift, individuals, too, would feel the change ripple inward. Our values might evolve; our ideas about leadership might expand. We might begin to choose and elevate those whose sense of worth is grounded in the recognition that all living beings are inherently valuable, in inclusion rather than exclusion. And even as systems transform at their own pace, every person retains an immediate source of power—the ability to vitalize their own identity, to nurture health and compassion within themselves, and to model a way of being that quietly reshapes the world around them.

The next steps

This next phase of my work—understanding how identity states are transmitted and how they might be transformed at scale—is still in its early stages. But I find comfort and inspiration in knowing that the lesson my mother lived by was more than spiritual poetry. It was an early glimpse into a phenomenon that natural science is only beginning to quantify.

I’m not sure whether we are not our bodies—and perhaps the journey toward that answer extends beyond what any physical science can tell. My work does give me confidence, however, that what we believe about who we are matters profoundly for our capacity to sustain our health, even in the face of tremendous stress. More important, our decision to see all living beings as part of ourselves—to engage in this loving practice of extending our ego boundaries to include others, to accept the intrinsic worth of every being, and to offer compassion generously—may be among the most powerful public health interventions we could ever implement.

Mel Owens, the new Golden Bachelor, casually announced on a podcast that he’s only open to dating women 45 to 60 years old. Owens is 66.

This did not go over well on social media, with many women calling him sexist and ageist, among other choice words. And it’s no surprise that many of the 23 women aged 58 to 77 vying for his affection on the show called him out in the first episode, which aired on September 24. And he was dutifully roasted by the women who hadn’t been eliminated in the third episode.

Owens, a former NFL player-turned-lawyer and the divorced father of two young men, said he was sorry. “I sincerely apologize. It was insensitive, unfair,” he said. “It’s truly a privilege for me to be The Golden Bachelor, and I hope you forgive me and let me earn it back. Age is really just a number, and spirit has no age.”

Still, his initial comment and “my bad” response when called out raises questions. Many of us question or dismiss age-gap relationships. Is age just one romantic preference among many, or something else entirely? Is it also wrong to refuse to date a smoker, gambler, or addict, or reject someone taller or shorter, or a single parent or someone who’s never been married? Was Owens being ageist or are there practical reasons for desiring a younger romantic partner as we age (or at any time)? And is age truly just a number—or is it a meaningful indicator of other factors, like health and maturity?

Social scientists have explored and attempted to answer those questions. Their work could help us to understand ourselves just a little better—and the research helps unearth a bias we all have, even if we aren’t aware of it: internalized ageism.

Age and marital satisfaction

We know that our search for love becomes a lot more nuanced and intentional as we age. Both men and women tend to be more satisfied with having a younger spouse over an older one, according to a 2018 study. As the researchers write, “Even though women with older husbands start out at lower levels of satisfaction, they also, just like their husbands, experience the steepest decreases in marital satisfaction with marital duration. As a result, women with much older husbands who have been married at least five years are particularly dissatisfied.”

Owens’ former wife of some 17 years is 20 years his junior, so it’s hardly surprising that he would prefer to skew younger as he looks for love again. Research indicates that many formerly married men seek a much-younger partner the second time around. About 20% of men who marry again have a wife who is at least 10 years their junior, while another 18% chose a woman who is six to nine years younger, according to the Pew Research Center.

Although many women gravitate toward a male romantic partner of their own age, a new study finds that women who are more than 10 years older than their male partner tend to be “the most satisfied with and committed to their relationships compared with both women who were younger than their partners, as well as women whose partners were close in age.”

Part of that may be driven by the fact that older divorced or widowed women are not interested in becoming what’s known as a “nurse with a purse”—count 69-year-old TV host Gayle King among them. “I [would] like it that they have all of their teeth,” she says. “That would be nice.” A study of dating later in life led by Cassandra Cotton, a family demographer and sociologist at Arizona State University, found that many women were rightly concerned about a potential new partner’s health and the possibility of becoming responsible for caregiving again after raising children or tending to ailing husbands or parents.

This is why many women in their 60s and older prefer a “live apart together” (LAT) relationship over cohabiting with a male romantic partner, according to an article in Canada’s Globe and Mail. “I don’t want to take care of anybody. I want to take care of me,” says a woman in her late 70s who has been divorced twice. “You want to be friends and get together, when I say it’s OK to get together? Fine. But to be in a relationship where I have to answer to somebody else? Been there, done that, don’t want to do it again.”

Cotton’s results were similar to what social scientist Lauren E. Harris found in her study of singles aged 60 to 83.

“Older single women were quite aware of the ways men may require their time, attention, and care. Though they were looking for romantic relationships and companions, women prioritized performing less carework over a relationship that required carework like raising a man’s children or nursing him through decline,” Harris wrote.

Being with a younger partner or one around their age might help them avoid that, although there are no guarantees that they won’t become ill, disabled, or meet an early demise.

Are age preferences discriminatory?

Are older women “wrong” for wanting to avoid that kind of caregiving? Are they being ageist? Should we apply a different standard for men?

It’s all too easy for an older woman to slip into the role of “purse.” A study of nearly 4,000 baby-boomer widows, most of whom were widowed in their 50s, found that many were inexperienced around money issues after the death of their husband, making them easy prey when repartnering. The widows who were financially savvy were less likely to be taken advantage of.

There’s another thing working against women when it comes to finding love later in life—family caregiving responsibilities. According to Harris’ study, men often considered single women in their age group less desirable if they are deeply involved in caring for their adult children, their grandchildren, or both. Some didn’t want to be with a woman who wouldn’t make him her top priority and thus looked for a romantic partner who “would put them first and stop mothering their grown children.”

The women, however, considered men in their age group who were close with their families to be more desirable because it made them seem stable, committed, and family-oriented.

Practical matters aside, there might be something else going on that is often overlooked when we make romantic decisions—internalized ageism, a type of implicit ageism that not only is harmful to envisioning our future aging self (if we are lucky enough to age, that is), but also often prevents us from engaging with people who are the same age as we are or older, mostly driven by the fear of aging and looking like we’re aging. Internalized ageism offers a “safe haven and buffer zone for older persons to stretch their middle-aged identity and at the same time distance themselves from being labelled as members of the ‘old age’ cohort,” according to one study.

Age discrimination is real

This is not something we actively choose to do, however. As Yale professor and expert on the psychology of aging Becca Levy suggests, we don’t necessarily realize that we are internalizing the negative stereotypes about older people that we absorb throughout our lives, starting in early childhood, through all sorts of societal messaging, whether from movies, TV shows, advertising, or social media.

For example, one longitudinal study of Belgian fictional movies found that although older women were featured more often than older men, they were often portrayed as “shrews” or “cranky.” In addition, the older actors were overwhelmingly white, middle-class, able-bodied, and heterosexual (if sexuality was even addressed). They were also what are considered “young-old”—those under age 75. As Levy writes in her 2022 book, Breaking the Age Code:

Most of us like to consider ourselves as capable of thinking fairly accurately about other people. But the truth is, we are social beings who carry around unconscious social beliefs that are so deeply rooted in our minds that we don’t usually realize they’ve got their hooks in us. For better or for worse, those mental images that are the product of our cultural diets, whether it’s the shows we watch, the things we read, or the jokes we laugh at, become scripts we end up acting out.

One 2019 study found that, distressingly, we start to develop more stereotypes and prejudices about aging as we age, even while becoming less anxious about our own aging. In fact, older people tend to be more prejudiced about people in their own age group than younger people are, as they try to differentiate themselves from those older than they are.

This doesn’t just play out in romantic relationships, but also in health care situations. Physicians aged 70 and older who were still in practice had much more negative attitudes toward older people than other age groups, especially if they had been in practice for many years. Perhaps that’s because they’ve had many years of treating older people with various health issues and project what may be ahead for them. 

It isn’t just heterosexual people who walk around with internalized ageism. Gay men are acutely aware of how their gay peers view aging and so tend to be more ageist, are more fearful of being seen negatively as they age, and focus more on their own physical attractiveness then lesbians do, according to one study. As Sonya Arreola, research director for UCSF’s Openly Gray: Older Gay Men’s Health Study, notes, “the emphasis on physical attraction and sexual appeal in gay men communities tends to heighten ageism.” Internalized gay ageism leads many middle-aged and older gay men to feel invisible and devalued.

Still, more same-sex spouses—5%—have an age difference of 20 years or more compared with a mere 1% of heterosexual married couples, according to the U.S. Census.

And perhaps not surprising given how much emphasis society puts on women’s beauty and youthfulness, older women tend to be more fearful of their own aging, no matter how positively or negatively they perceive societal stereotypes about aging—what’s known as gendered ageism.

No one is getting any younger

The late gerontologist Bernice Neugarten was the first to notice the rise of what she called the “young-old,” people between the ages of 55 and 75, whom she believed offered “enormous potential as agents of social change in creating an age-irrelevant society and in thus improving the relations between age groups.” In his 1989 book, A Fresh Map of Life, the late historian Peter Laslett expanded on her work by introducing the idea of a “third age,” the years after breadwinning and child-rearing and typically associated with retirement, and a “fourth age,” the final years before death, often considered as involving dependency, decline, and disability.

Ageism is still considered a major societal issue with huge effects on our physical and mental health as well as general well-being—even decreasing longevity, according to the World Health Organization, so we are hardly anywhere near an “age-irrelevant society.” That said, the world is getting older—by 2050, there will be 2.1 billion people across the globe aged 60 years and older. The number of persons aged 80 years or older is expected to reach 426 million by 2050.

In other words, there will be a lot of older adults. Will that make society more or less ageist?

Rather than wait to find out, each of us can try to fight our own internalized ageism. Levy suggests following what she calls the ABC method:

• Awareness of our own attitudes and societal messaging about aging;
• Blaming ageism and not aging per se; and
• Challenging inaccurate and negative age attitudes instead of ignoring them.

Who wouldn’t want to live in a world with what Levy calls “an age-thriving mindset”? Still, that may not change what many of us seek in a romantic partner later in life, especially women who say they are done with providing intensive caregiving.

There’s no way to know if Owens’ initial desire for a younger romantic partner is driven by internalized ageism or something else. As The Golden Bachelor went on, he eliminated the youngest and the oldest of the women vying for his affection. The ones who are still in the running (as of this writing) are indeed all younger than he is—and who knows what kind of internalized ageism they carry around?

But any bachelorette of any age who becomes his romantic partner should be aware that Owens sustained numerous injuries, including to his head, in his nine-season football career as a linebacker for the Los Angeles Rams, which led him to become a lawyer representing athletes with sports injuries. It might also result in him developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a type of brain injury, as he ages. That may be a risk some women don’t want to take.

Which is why it could be that whomever he picks may decide that he’s just too old for her.

In a paper published in Psychological Science, Yale psychologist Wendy Berry Mendes observed how more and less affluent people interact. The results reveal a complicated picture of how our minds and bodies manage difference.

Based on the participants’ financial history, the research team assigned each person to the more affluent or less affluent group, then put them into 130 conversational pairs. Some pairs included participants from the same group, and some paired a more affluent person with a less affluent person (although participants weren’t told this). Mendes and her colleagues observed the participants’ nonverbal behavior and monitored their heart rates as they talked.

The researchers first evaluated whether more affluent people showed discomfort—by fidgeting or mumbling—or attempted to dominate conversations when interacting with less affluent people.

They didn’t. Participants from upper- and lower-class groups appeared comfortable interacting across class lines, although people from both groups were more at ease talking to less affluent partners. Paradoxically, at the end of the exercise, both higher-class and lower-class participants were likelier to say they liked their conversation partner if that person was of the same class. For Mendes, this shows the strength of our instinct to prefer people who are more like us.

But while we might control our fidgeting and believe we feel comfortable in certain interactions, our bodies could tell a different story. “One thing you see as a psychophysiologist is that what people say and how their physiology responds are not always aligned,” Mendes said.

To peer “under the skin,” Mendes and her colleagues monitored the pre-ejection period (PEP) of participants’ heartbeats, which operates entirely outside of our control. If a participant’s PEP changed along with their conversation partner’s, that indicated emotional attunement.

Based on that data, less affluent participants were more attuned to their conversational partners, whatever their class standing. That finding lines up with other research suggesting that lower-status individuals are more alert to their surroundings, likely as a survival mechanism. Mendes’s research on race and attunement has similarly found that people of marginalized races are more attuned to others.

Despite being polite and comfortable, affluent participants showed no attunement with their lower-class conversational partners. They didn’t warm up to their class peers, either.

Can humans move beyond the hardwired preference we have for people like us, in order to get along better in diverse modern societies? While we may not have fully overcome our tribal instincts, Mendes sees hope for us to consciously learn to interact better with people across difference.

“Knowing that your natural inclination is to be more comfortable with people like you can cue you to try harder,” she said.