Faculty Members Reflect on Mentoring

The Ambady Award for Mentoring Excellence is presented to individuals who have demonstrated exemplary commitment to fostering the professional and intellectual development of students and early career researchers through their service, support, and accessibility as a mentor.

This month, we spoke with four faculty members who have been recipients of this prestigious award to glean their insights and wisdom on mentorship.

• Dr. Phoebe C. Ellsworth is the Frank Murphy Distinguished University Professor of Law and Psychology Emerita at the University of Michigan. (Winner 2014)
• Dr. Tom Gilovich is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. (Winner 2016)
• Dr. E. Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Professor of Business at Columbia University and Director of the Motivation Science Center. (Winner 2017)
• Dr. Dacher Keltner is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkley where he is the director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. (Winner 2018)

What is your mentoring philosophy?

Keltner: I would say it focuses on giving students a lot of freedom, requiring them to tackle original problems that matter to them, to make sure they are always collecting data with really original paradigms, and to press them on diving into writing with force.

Higgins: It is critical that the student’s research be about something that the student experiences as a “burning issue.” Doing research takes a lot of effort, and there will be challenging times and frustrating times over many months or even years. To put in the effort needed and persist through the challenges and frustrations, the research needs to be about something that the student believes is important and fascinating. For the collaboration to work, the student’s “burning issue” must also be a “burning issue” for the mentor. The student and mentor need to share that what they are doing together really matters…

Gilovich: My goal is to play to each student’s strengths. We’re all better at some things than others and although it’s certainly important to remedy any weaknesses, it’s even more important to fully develop and accentuate a student’s strengths. Students are strong in some areas for a reason, often because that’s where their greatest passion lies. And everyone will be more successful working in ways and on things they’re passionate about.

Ellsworth: I don’t think I really have a mentoring “philosophy” because every student is different…I’m likely to put the inexperienced students to work on some project I’ve already figured out, letting them suggest modifications or add measures that fit their interests, but basically just giving them a chance to be involved in all stages of actually running a research study… During that time they usually develop ideas of their own... For the ones who know my research and have an idea, we work on making the idea something that we both think is worth doing and turning it into actual research. For the middle group, we try to crystallize their ideas into a researchable question that is interesting to both of us. Helping students to become future leaders in the field is part of our job as professors and simply treating them as research assistants usually isn’t enough to accomplish that.

How did you develop this mentoring philosophy?

Keltner: My mentors—Phoebe Ellsworth, Lee Ross, and Paul Ekman—gave me a great foundation in these principles, to entrust students, to let research be question or phenomenon-driven rather than paradigm or measure-driven, and to insist that students ask questions that are personally significant.

Higgins: For me, it began with teaching my Junior and Senior Advisees at Princeton University. After dozens of research collaborations, I learned that the most gratifying were those where the “burning issue” for the student and me was one that we had co-created. It was “our” issue.

Gilovich: It stems in part from watching different coaches in professional sports. Some insist that things be done “my way” and that their players “need to get with the program.” Others build or adapt their systems and game plans around the strengths of the particular players on their teams. The latter tend to be more effective.

Ellsworth: I suppose this approach developed over many years as I encountered more and more different students. I certainly didn’t consciously plan it. I probably learned the most through trial and error with difficult students.

What do you consider the biggest mentoring challenges? Joys?

Keltner: I think the biggest challenge in mentoring is that students' lives … always matter to you, their trajectories are always on your mind, and the trials and tribulations of the early career in academics that they face weigh on your mind. And that is the greatest joy of mentoring, to watch students evolve, mature, and become their own original voices of what they care about (and to hear faint traces of your contribution).

Higgins: The biggest challenge when mentoring graduate students, especially, is to find research projects that are both a “burning issue” and tractable—a research question where the study needed to answer it is manageable and can yield interpretable findings while still being novel and important. Not all “burning issues” are equally tractable…The biggest joy when mentoring is to conduct research that yields a discovery: not finding support for something you expected to happen, but having results that you did not expect and making you think in new directions. When you and your student discover something, then together you have learned something about the world that was not known before—how exciting is that!

Gilovich: The biggest joy? That one is easy: Whenever a student gets a tenure-track or other type of job that they’re excited about. What a happiness boost that is! The biggest mentoring challenge is helping students with the biggest scientific challenge we all face as social psychologists, which is to see things that aren’t obvious about the social world around us.

Ellsworth: The biggest joy is seeing the transformation of students from kids just out of college into real colleagues with their own research ideas and agendas. As for challenges, there are different kinds. One is the student who disappears, or who shows up for each meeting without having done anything since the last meeting... Sometimes the problem is that they can’t figure out how to accomplish the task and are too embarrassed to ask, sometimes they actually don’t like the idea and are too embarrassed to tell me, sometimes their personal life is falling apart and they think it’s inappropriate to talk about that, sometimes they just don’t like graduate school. Figuring out the problem is always a challenge. I also find some very ambitious students to be a challenge – students who just want to make themselves look good by churning out as many articles as possible or who want me to teach them how to “play the game” rather than how to do good research.

How do you mentor students/faculty from a wide range of backgrounds?

Keltner: I think by adopting a similar style -- one that empowers students, gives them freedom, demands they gather great data, and have fun in the process -- but at the same time one that builds upon the student's unique profile of strengths and concerns, whether those strengths are capturing something unique about a particular culture, or for carrying out really imaginative, provocative studies, or computational in nature...

Gilovich: The goal of playing to each student’s strengths is helpful here because everyone, from any background, has some things they’re good at and the goal is to build from there.  The “playing to strengths” mantra also helps with two other important elements of mentoring—being fair (because everyone’s strengths get emphasized) and letting students know that you take them and their ideas seriously (because there’s less need to be guarded about what a student feels most secure about).

Ellsworth: The main trick to working with students from different backgrounds is to find out what their background is, and to be wary of using superficial traits such as gender or race to infer beliefs, skills, and attitudes. ­

Any other comments on mentoring generally?

Keltner: Learn hard methods (e.g., coding facial muscle movements in faces; learn to work with psychophysiological data); soak up strengths and ideas around us; marvel at data; be lighthearted about our work; have fun. [Mentoring] has been the single most enduring joy of my career.

Higgins: Intellectually, the mentor-student collaboration should be treated as a relationship between equals—co-partners in the development of the ideas, the research, and the joys of discovery.  However, this does not mean that mentors should demand equity in the outcomes—equal benefits (outputs) and costs (inputs) for the mentor and the student. It is the role of the mentor—the responsibility of the mentor—to nurture the student and help the student to grow and advance as much as possible as a scholar and scientist. This can mean in some cases that the student benefits from the relationship more than the mentor. But this is as it should be in any support interaction. When we help out another person who needs help, we take on the costs to ourselves of the support that we give in the hope that the other person will benefit from our support. That’s what it means to help out another person, and this needs to be part of what it means to be a mentor.

Gilovich: When I was being trained as a conflict mediator, the trainers would insist, over and over, that “you have to trust the process.” By that they meant that as the mediation session unfolds it will often seem clear to the mediator what the “right” solution is, and it will be tempting to steer the disputants to that solution.  But it’s important to resist that temptation because the mediator's solution is not necessarily the one that will work best for the disputants. You have to let the mediation process unfold to maximize the chances of a satisfying and durable resolution. The same is true with graduate training. It’s important not to try to steer the student too quickly or too forcefully to a given topic or to become a particular “type” of psychologist. Instead, it’s important to “trust the process” – trust the training procedures that you or your department have set up…over time they work their magic and provide your students with the skills and insights they’ll need to tackle the problems that most interest them.

Ellsworth: Mainly you have to remember that students are people with their own goals and interests, not just replaceable research assistants. If students are not interested in a research question, I really don’t want them to work on it because they won’t do it as well as it should be done. I’m lucky enough to have a variety of topics I’m interested in, so students have several choices, and we can usually find a project that interests us both…