It’s Not That You Said It, It’s How You Said It: Exploring the Linguistic Mechanisms Underlying Values Affirmation Interventions at Scale

Over the last decade, psychological interventions, such as the values affirmation intervention, have been shown to alleviate the male-female performance difference when delivered in the classroom, however, attempts to scale the intervention are less successful. This study provides unique evidence on this issue by reporting the observed differences between two randomized controlled implementations of the values affirmation intervention: (a) successful in-class and (b) unsuccessful online implementation at scale. Specifically, we use natural language processing to explore the discourse features that characterize successful female students’ values affirmation essays to gain insight on the underlying mechanisms that contribute to the beneficial effects of the intervention. Our results revealed that linguistic dimensions related to aspects of cohesion, affective, cognitive, temporal, and social orientation, independently distinguished between males and females, as well as more and less effective essays. We discuss implications for the pipeline from theory to practice and for psychological interventions.

A psychological intervention strengthens students’ peer social networks and promotes persistence in STEM

Retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is critical as demand for STEM graduates increases. Whereas many approaches to improve persistence target individuals’ internal beliefs, skills, and traits, the intervention in this experiment strengthened students’ peer social networks to help them persevere. Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students’ network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network. These differing social trajectories predicted STEM persistence: Affirmed students were 11.7 percentage points more likely than controls to take the next course in the bioscience sequence, an effect that was statistically mediated by students’ end-of-semester friendships.