Buju Dasgupta is the winner of the 2016 Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award. SPSP spoke with Buju about her research findings, how they have been applied, and how she decides which research questions to tackle. She also discussed how social and personality psychology research and application can be used to help change the world, her advice for those who want to use their degrees in an applied way, and much more.

SPSP:  Much of your research focuses on identifying circumstances in which implicit prejudice and stereotypes can be changed. Could you describe some of your research findings, and how they have been or could be applied?

Buju: When work on implicit bias started in the late 1980s to 1990s, the assumption was that implicit attitudes develop early in life and are hard to change subsequently because these implicit preferences and biases are learned without people’s awareness; they are not typically intentional; and can’t easily be managed or controlled.

I felt that answer wasn’t plausible given what we know about human adaptability. So, my early research as a post-doc in the late 1990s was trying to identify and experimentally test specific circumstances under which implicit bias can be reduced; or other circumstances under which it can be increased. We found that people’s implicit attitudes toward racial groups, toward women, and sexual minorities, were remarkably malleable, depending on the local environment they were in.

Let me give you some examples. In our early studies on race, we found that at baseline, most of our participants tended to show strong favoritism towards White Americans and, relatively speaking, bias against African Americans. But when we put them in a lab situation where we first showed them pictures and brief biographies of famous and admired African Americans, and then measured their implicit attitudes towards White and Black people, implicit bias against African Americans was substantially reduced as compared to people in the control condition who saw nothing about race, or people in a different condition who saw famous White Americans and infamous African Americans.

We brought these same students back to the lab 24 hours later and found that the reduction in implicit race bias seen on Day 1 was still there on Day 2 even though we hadn’t shown the earlier images and biographies again. So that was our first evidence that putting people in an environment where they have positive media exposure to people who violate a stereotype, changed something in the short-term that we previously thought was unchangeable. Moreover, the change endured for at least 24 hours.

In later studies, we tried similar interventions using famous and accomplished gays and lesbians, and we found similar results. People who saw and read those biographies of lesbians and gay men who were ‘out’ and who had made major contributions to society, later on showed less anti-gay bias than others who saw pictures and descriptions unrelated to sexual orientation.

We found this kind of implicit bias reduction in relation to beliefs about women in leadership roles. On average, people tended to implicitly stereotype women as ideal for support roles and less ideal for leadership roles compared to men. But again, after we showed them pictures and biographies of women in leadership roles who were Supreme Court justices, well-known political leaders, important scientists and business leaders, implicit gender stereotyping was substantially reduced.

We then expanded into real-world situations. For example, with the sexual orientation studies, in addition to showing people pictures and stories in the lab, we also asked them how many people they knew personally who were gay and lesbian, and how well they knew them. We found a nice correlation: people who knew more individuals who were gay or lesbian—whom they knew well not as acquaintances but as close friends, family members, or coworkers—showed less anti-gay bias on implicit measures than others who knew very few or no gay and lesbian people. So both laboratory research and correlational field research suggested that even though, on average, there may be strong implicit bias against groups at a societal level, either media exposure or real-world contact with individuals from those groups who defy stereotypes can actually reduce implicit bias. And that reduction in bias is not just brief and ephemeral, but can last outside the lab (although the jury is still out on how long it lasts beyond the initial 24 hours after the intervention).

Another research area where a lot of my research focuses now is implicit stereotypes about who is assumed to be successful in specific fields or professions. Research on stereotype threat and social identity threat has shown that stereotypes can impede students’ test performance by increasing worries, anxieties, and reducing their working memory capacity. Moreover, individuals may avoid fields where their own group is negatively stereotyped if they feel like they don’t belong in that world or don’t feel too confident in their ability.

I’ve usually studied this topic in the context of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (or STEM) fields. In our research we sought to inoculate young women against stereotype threat and social identity threat in a way similar to what we did in our earlier studies. We created circumstances where women in STEM environments were exposed to same-sex experts or peers in order to examine whether such exposure would serve as “social vaccines” and inoculate their mind against negative stereotypes.

For example, in one study we compared students in sections of calculus taught by female professors with others in sections taught by male professors. All these were sections of the same calculus class with the same syllabus, lectures, and exams; only the sex of the professor varied. When we compared these classes we found that women students who had female math professors showed less negative implicit attitudes toward math, felt more positively identified with mathematics, and felt more confident about their ability compared to other women taking the same class with male professors. In contrast, male students’ implicit responses were not affected by male vs. female professors. This was our first evidence that interaction with a successful female mathematician inoculates young women’s self-concept against negative stereotypes and allows them to thrive.

Another study testing stereotype inoculation explored the impact of female peer mentors on women’s academic outcomes in engineering across the two years of college. In this study, which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we randomly assigned entering engineering students (only women) to a female or male peer mentor who was a senior in the same major as they, or we didn’t give them any mentor. We found that having a female (but not male) peer mentor preserved young women’s sense of belonging and confidence in engineering, reduced anxiety relative to motivation, and protected their intentions to pursue advanced degrees and careers in engineering at the end of one year. Amazingly, the retention rate for women with female peer mentors was 100% at the end of the first year, compared to 82% for those with male peer mentors and 89% for those with no peers.

So that’s sort of a snapshot of different areas of research where we found implicit bias to be malleable –we’ve sometimes created counterstereotypic environments in the lab while at other times created similar situations in naturalistic settings. Some of our experiments are short-term while others are longitudinal. All of them provide converging evidence about how bias is malleable.

SPSP: How did you get into researching implicit bias in general?

Buju: That’s a good question. I came to graduate school wanting to study prejudice and stereotyping. My assumption was that I would use self-report instruments (that’s all I knew at the time). Yet it was also clear to me that people often didn’t report much bias on survey measures. This didn’t jive with the world around me where there were big group disparities in who had power and who did not; who had wealth and education and who did not; who was societally admired and who was not; who was given the benefit of the doubt and who wasn’t.

It was in graduate school that I learned about implicit social cognition—the idea that people’s attitudes may operate without conscious awareness and may manifest in “gut level” spontaneous reactions that are not well-deliberated. This idea, that attitudes and beliefs may not be entirely conscious, or even if they are, may not always be accurately reported in self-report instruments, was in the zeitgeist in the 1990s. But methods to measure implicit attitudes and beliefs were still new and being worked out.

It was towards the end of my graduate training that multiple measures were becoming available to assess implicit social cognition, which moved my research in that direction. I really became immersed in the world of implicit bias when I started a postdoctoral fellowship with Tony Greenwald at the University of Washington.

SPSP: When you’re studying implicit bias, how do you decide what question to tackle? What’s the process going through your mind – this will be my next project, this is what I want to dive into?

Buju: I’m broadly interested in social inequality and within that, I’m particularly interested in understanding how to reduce inequality and understanding when and why particular interventions work or not. I’m not wedded to studying one type of social group. Over time I’ve studied social inequalities based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, and national origin.

Sometimes my research questions come from a real-world phenomenon I observe or read about. At other times they come from following unexpected findings in our own data. For example, the work on women in STEM came from one of these unexpected findings. Back in 2000 I had a graduate student who worked part-time in a counseling position in a women’s college. She and I thought a women’s college would allow us to test whether students who attended such a college, and saw more women in leadership positions, might show less implicit gender stereotypes than women attending an equivalent coeducational college, who probably saw fewer women in leadership. And we found that to be the case.

But in that study we also found an interesting unexpected effect that I hadn’t really thought of earlier: the more math and science courses students at the coeducational college took, the stronger implicit gender stereotypes they exhibited. At the women’s college, there was no relation between the number of math and science courses students took and their gender stereotypes.

We followed this lead and discovered this was happening because at the coed college, math and science courses were mostly taught by male professors. So the more math and science courses students took, the less they encountered female professors. It was the frequency of exposure to female professors that appears to be the active ingredient that strengthened implicit gender stereotypes. This didn’t happen at the women’s college where math and science faculty were equally likely to be women or men.

That made me wonder: “Huh, if seeing more men teaching math and science affects these students’ gender stereotypes about leadership, I wonder if these stereotypes also affect what women think they themselves can be successful at in their own professional lives.” So that unexpected finding ended up opening the door to the larger question, “Does seeing people like oneself or not seeing such people in achievement domains that are strongly stereotyped, end up determining what a person sees as possible or desirable in his or her own professional future?” That initial question generated a decade of research on stereotype inoculation and “social vaccines” that has kept me busy for a decade.

SPSP: This reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” That always resonated with me – you can’t necessarily see how one thing’s going to interplay with and lead into another, but you look back and say, “Well, that’s how we got here.”

Buju: That’s exactly right! I’m essentially connecting the dots after the fact. The person I was in 1998 when I got my PhD had no idea that this is where I would end up in 2017. I just followed one idea after another with attention to those that seemed especially intriguing to me, and this is where those ideas (or dots) have led me. I’ll be very interested to connect the dots again after another 20 years and see where I end up in the next phase of my career.

SPSP: Is there anything else you’d like to say about your research?

Buju: Yes, when I came to college to the United States from India, I had no idea what psychology was. I had come intending to study biology; I just happened to take a psychology course because my liberal arts college encouraged students to sample courses broadly. But once I took a psychology course I was fascinated, so I took another one, and it happened to be social psychology. And I thought, “This is amazing!”

I think what I liked about it so much was that psychology was a way to study ourselves using scientific methods – not through intuition or self-reflection, but using science. As a kid who was always interested in hard data and science, it was an interesting and unusual proposition to use science to do experiments on yourself and people like you. And that’s what got me hooked.

I was also interested in social inequity and interventions that move us toward social justice. But I was convinced that interventions had to be based on real evidence not intuition to ensure that they actually worked. Social psychology gave me the scientific and theoretical training to pursue this interest.

It has taken me a while to get to the point where I now toggle back and forth between basic research and intervention research. I also enjoy testing theory and hypotheses using both lab and field studies; both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

SPSP: It does seem like the best of both worlds. It seems like so many people want to change the world, but don’t necessarily have the tools to do so, and this provides one set of tools – definitely not the only set of tools, but it’s an interesting way to go about being the change you want to see.

Buju: Yes, exactly. I think that being the change you want to see can be done in multiple ways – someone can be involved in direct action, policy work, or science, but science is quite a bit separate and abstract from the level of direct action on the ground. It’s really a decision that each individual needs to make – whether you want to make change by going abstract and doing the science that informs social policies and practices.

For me, it took a while to be sure that that was the right path for me. I had real questions about whether the path I had chosen, to get a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, was too distant from the change I wanted to see. It took me three years of graduate school to feel confident that I liked this endeavor enough to want a research career in science. In my third or fourth year of graduate school I made peace with the fact that one day (not right now) I would get to the point where I could apply basic research to impact what I wanted to change. And it was not going to happen immediately. That meant trusting that the dots would connect later when I looked back.

SPSP: How would you advise someone who wants to use their degree in an applied way, but maybe is struggling with the best way to go about it, and wondering which path to go down?

Buju: I would say that if you like doing social or personality psychological research, then get a PhD in the field. Later leverage it to any career that makes sense to you. The training to think scientifically and the skills to do science well are vital skills that will allow students to differentiate what’s real and evidence-based and what’s not. Absent evidence, one might have a hypothesis, a hunch, or intuition, but it’s not the same as truth or reality.

Then a student can take those analytical skills and put them in action in various professions. It doesn’t have to be academia. In fact, we need well-trained social and personality psychologists in multiple fields: in business, K-12 education, in tech companies, in policy-making, non-profits, and so on.

And I am glad that as a field, we are becoming less insistent that our PhDs go into academia, because we need to spread the wealth more, and use students’ talent to have a broader impact on society. The best way to do that is by encouraging our graduates who are interested in applying social-personality psychology in many other adjacent professions to do so.

In terms of career advice, I would urge students to look for opportunities in graduate school, probably over the summers, to connect social-personality psychology research to something that is of interest to them in a different professional context. I had a friend in graduate school who became a science writer, and she started doing internships in science writing during the summers in graduate school. She veered off the canonical academic career path. And she is a fantastic science writer today. I admire her strength to march to the beat of her internal drummer.

I also want to acknowledge that this can be difficult for some graduate students if their graduate program has strong norms pushing students toward academia only and pushing them away from other careers. Yet, I think it’s wise for students to have a conversation with their faculty advisors because there’s nothing to be gained by persisting down a path that doesn’t feel fulfilling. Ideally, students should be able to combine social psychological training in a PhD program (assuming they enjoy research) while at the same time consider non-academic career options.

SPSP: Why else do you think applied work is valuable for social-personality psychologists as individuals, and for the field as a whole? I know we’ve kind of touched on that – is there anything you’d like to add?

Buju: I want to add that there is the misperception of a unidirectional move from rigorous basic science in the lab to applications in the field. Quite the contrary, my research has taught me that the relation between basic and applied research is bi-directional.

Sometimes the data I’ve collected in the field has actually changed or modified parts of my theory. For example, armed with theory-driven hypotheses derived from my basic research in the lab I’ve tested them in the field only to find that sometimes the data have nuances that look different from lab findings. Then I’m in a position to compare my lab studies to my field studies and ask, “Okay, what is this difference? Is this difference real, or is it some messiness in the measurement or a difference in the sample, or something else?” Answering those questions ended up modifying my theory.

In some cases, field research has made me realize something about my phenomenon I hadn’t quite articulated explicitly in my mind, but that was really important to theory.  Here’s an example: in my initial conceptualization of the Stereotype Inoculation Model, I hadn’t initially articulated to myself whether or not stereotype inoculation would be differentially impactful during specific developmental periods. However, when our initial field study with first-year and sophomore students yielded robust effects, it led me to realize that developmental transitional periods might be particular sweet spots for stereotype inoculation.

That initial finding from a field study made me articulate a hypothesis that we tested in later studies which seemed to confirm that stereotype inoculation is more likely to be effective if implemented at points of transition in human development. That’s an example of the way in which research in the field can, in a bidirectional way, modify theory.

SPSP: So, in general, you think interventions are more powerful if they happen at transition points?

Buju: Yes, I think that oftentimes when people experience a sense of uncertainty about something, an intervention at that point is more likely to be effective than later on when they’re more settled on their path.

The trick is to figure out when those sweet spots are. There are transition points from middle to high school, high school to college, and college to the job market. These are periods of losing one structure and jumping into another where people are not sure whether they fit in. In my work with stereotype inoculation, I’m arguing that if you look at the national data, these are the transition points where we seem to lose most women and under-represented racial and ethnic minorities in STEM. So if you want to intervene, you should intervene at the period of transition or a little bit before.

SPSP: How do you think application is affecting the careers of current social-personality psychology graduate students? Do you think they’re having these moments of transition as they decide which path to go down?

Buju: I think the field is becoming more open to graduate students and new PhDs going into allied fields, and using their skills derived from social-personality psychology in other areas (policy, business, non-profit, peace and conflict, and so on). Just looking at professional development programming at SPSP conventions I can see how much that has changed from when I was a graduate student. Professional development sessions related to alternative (non-academic) career pathways are far more common today; they didn’t exist when I was a student.

I think that it’s definitely the case that we as a field and a professional society are paying more attention to our students and graduates who are interested in applications of social-personality psychology. Part of it is that we’re responding to pressure from our students; they’re letting us know, and we feel compelled to respond. Another pressure comes from the academic job market—the fact that we don’t have as many academic positions in social-personality psychology to fill as we have new PhDs. Both of these pressures are pushing us to broaden our consideration of multiple career pathways.

SPSP: It’s interesting to think about how a perspective shift like that occurs, and it makes sense that when it happens more organically, that it comes from both directions.

Buju: It is happening organically in the sense that it is in response to job market pressure and student demand.

SPSP: Thank you for sharing your insight. This has been a phenomenal opportunity to hear your story, and I think our members will value it as much as I do.

Buju: Thank you. I like having these conversations because it’s a way for me to reflect on the arc of my career thus far, where I started, how I got here, and how it fits within the field as a whole. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.