About

Gregory M. Walton's research focuses on the role of social psychology in shaping individuals' beliefs about belonging, their sense of self, and their ability to achieve their goals. He investigates how these beliefs can be influenced by social interventions and how they impact individuals' well-being and success.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Medical education
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Mathematics education
• Family medicine
• Economic growth
• Psychiatry
• Engineering
• Chemistry
• Nursing
• Gerontology
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• A Prosocial Purpose Intervention Unleashes the Learning Potential of Hungarian First-Generation Learners

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• How culturally wise psychological interventions can help reduce poverty

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-11-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Poverty is characterized by multidimensional economic, social, and psychological constraints that undermine people’s agency to pursue new opportunities and shape their life outcomes. How can interventions best support the agency of low-income individuals and, in so doing, boost poverty-reduction efforts? We theorize and find that agency interventions are effective when designed to be “culturally wise,” i.e., attuned to the model of agency predominant in a cultural context. Focusing on low-income women in rural Niger, Study 1 finds that local mental models of economic success primarily reflect interdependence, grounded in relational factors like advancing social harmony, respectfulness, and collective benefits. As evidenced by data from a United States sample, this contrasts with a more independent model common in the West grounded in personal factors like self-initiative. Study 2 finds empirical support for relational factors (e.g., subjective social standing) in addition to self-oriented personal factors (e.g., self-efficacy) as mechanisms of women’s economic advancement in a highly effective multifaceted poverty reduction program. Study 3 reports a field experiment with program participants (n = 2,628) to compare a Western-derived personal agency intervention and a culturally wise relational agency intervention each to a control. Only relational agency caused significant improvements in economic outcomes over 12 mo, as well as in some personal and relational outcomes. By contrast, personal agency showed limited effects, shifting only personal outcomes. These findings reveal the promise of research at the intersection of social and cultural psychology, behavioral science, and development economics to help address global poverty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Prosocial Purpose Intervention Unleashes the Learning Potential of Hungarian First-Generation Learners

  2025-02-13

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Prior research shows that giving U.S. students an opportunity to reflect on their prosocial purposes for learning can motivate them to persist on challenging but tedious learning tasks and, in turn, improve academic performance. This “prosocial purpose” intervention was designed to be robust for diverse people and communities, including by letting people consider various purposes they might have that could motivate schoolwork. But it has not been tested broadly. Here, we test this intervention among university students in Hungary (N=296). In this Eastern European country, people focus mainly on close relationships, not broader societal goals. The intervention caused significant academic benefits, particularly for first-generation college students: it raised grades among these students in the semester of the intervention relative to the active randomized control condition, and students sustained this level of performance through the next two semesters. The results suggest that the potential of the prosocial purpose intervention can resonate with interdependent values rooted in families and communities beyond U.S. cultural contexts and enhance academic outcomes for underprivileged students.

  PublisherDOI

• A strategic mindset enhances children’s generation of effective strategies and delay of gratification across tasks.

  Developmental Psychology · 2025-01-21 · 2 citations

  article

  = 237), 5- to 6-year-old children who read the strategic mindset storybook with an experimenter (vs. a control storybook) waited significantly longer to receive desirable treats (Experiments 1 and 2) and to watch an appealing YouTube video (Experiment 2). Moreover, they were able to wait longer because they spontaneously generated and applied a greater number of effective waiting strategies. Going beyond classic research that taught children specific strategies to delay gratification, our results suggest that our new "metacognitive" approach can empower children's self-regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• A scalable empathic-mindset intervention reduces group disparities in school suspensions

  UNC Libraries · 2025-10-31

  articleOpen access

  Suspensions remove students from the learning environment at high rates throughout the United States. Policy and theory highlight social groups that face disproportionately high suspension rates-racial-minoritized students, students with a prior suspension, and students with disabilities. We used an active placebo-controlled, longitudinal field experiment (<em>N</em>_teachers = 66, <em>N</em>_students = 5822) to test a scalable "empathic-mindset" intervention, a 45- to 70-min online exercise to refocus middle school teachers on understanding and valuing the perspectives of students and on sustaining positive relationships even when students misbehave. In preregistered analyses, this exercise reduced suspension rates especially for Black and Hispanic students, cutting the racial disparity over the school year from 10.6 to 5.9 percentage points, a 45% reduction. Significant reductions were also observed for other groups of concern. Moreover, reductions persisted through the next year when students interacted with different teachers, suggesting that empathic treatment with even one teacher in a critical period can improve students' trajectories through school.

  PublisherDOI

• Who Gets to Belong in College? An Empirical Review of How Institutions Can Assess and Expand Opportunities for Belonging on Campus

  Educational Psychology Review · 2025-04-09 · 15 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Liberal paternalism: Weak-victim narratives are common, especially among liberals, and facilitate the disempowering treatment of groups that face disadvantage

  2024-06-17 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Groups that face systemic disadvantage, such as refugees or people facing poverty, are sometimes viewed as essentially weak, passive victims. We show that weak-victim narratives are common, especially among liberals: they are well-represented in media, especially liberal media (Study 1), and commonly endorsed, especially by liberals (Studies 2a, 2c, 4, &amp;amp; Supplementary Study 1). What leads people and especially liberals to endorse weak-victim narratives? Weak-victim narratives conflate weakness (“weak”) with a sympathetic recognition of disadvantage (“victim”; Study 2b). This ambiguity facilitates their endorsement among liberals and their contribution to paternalistic behavior (Study 2c). Relatedly, mediation analyses (Studies 2a, 2c, &amp;amp; Supplementary Study 1) and experimental data (Study 2d) show that the perception of disadvantage, which is more pronounced among liberals, contributes to narrative’s endorsement. Experimental data also suggest that people sometimes endorse the weak-victim narrative strategically when seeking approval from liberals (Study 3). What are consequences? Correlational and experimental evidence show that the weak-victim narrative, as compared to a strong-agent narrative, leads liberals to see members of disadvantaged groups as less strong and agentic (Studies 4, 5, &amp;amp; 7) and to treat people in ways that are functionally disempowering: donating more money to disempowering rather than empowering aid organizations known to undermine recipients’ confidence in their abilities through paternalistic representations of aid (Studies 5-6), and encouraging students to quit challenging but valuable learning opportunities (Studies 2c &amp;amp; 7). Eleven studies (Ntotal=1,948) point to a novel mechanism, common among liberals, that facilitates the disempowering treatment of disadvantaged groups.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Culturally Wise Psychological Interventions Help Reduce Poverty

  Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks · 2024-06-28 · 5 citations

  bookOpen accessSenior author

  Poverty is multidimensional, associated not only with a lack of financial resources, but also often social-psychological constraints, such as diminished agency and aspirations. Through a series of field experiments, this paper assesses the causal impacts of culturally wise interventions designed to build women’s agency on poverty reduction efforts in rural Niger. Moreover, the study identifies a model of agency that is “culturally wise” because it is the most motivational and functional in the study cultural context. Study 1 reports descriptive evidence that an interdependent model of agency—that is grounded in social harmony, respect, and collective advancement and that accounts for relational affordances for individual goals—is predominant in rural Niger. This stands in contrast to a more self-oriented, independent model grounded in personal aspirations, self-direction, and self-advancement that is more common in the West. Study 2 explores the psychosocial mechanisms of a highly effective, multifaceted poverty reduction program that included two psychosocial interventions—a community sensitization and a life skills training, which incorporated both models of agency. Although the results support the role of intrapersonal processes (including enhanced self-efficacy and optimistic future expectations) in driving economic impacts, there is equal, if not greater, support for relational processes (including increased subjective social standing, control over earnings, and social support). Study 3 conducts a mechanism experiment to disentangle the causal effects of interventions grounded in independent agency (“personal initiative”) or interdependent agency (“interpersonal initiative”). The results show that the interdependent agency intervention, which is considered to be most “culturally wise,” led to significant effects on economic outcomes as well as both intrapersonal and relational processes. By contrast, the independent agency intervention showed impacts on intrapersonal processes alone. These findings show the promise of an emerging area of research at the intersection of behavioral science, cultural psychology, and development economics for addressing complex global problems like poverty and inequality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The strength in mental illness: A targeted identity-reframing exercise improves goal pursuit among people who have experienced depression

  2024-06-17 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Widespread narratives frame mental illness as a sign of personal weakness. We theorized that these narratives impair individuals’ ability to realize their strengths and pursue their goals. To test this hypothesis, and to attain a practical intervention-tool, we developed a brief (~20-minutes), highly-scalable exercise that inverts weakness-narratives by highlighting the strengths people show contending with depression. Three large randomized-controlled experiments (Ntotal=748) show that this identity-reframing-exercise enhanced the confidence of people who had experienced depression to pursue their goals (Experiments 1a-b); and, over two weeks, the progress they reported making towards a self-selected goal from 43% to 64% (Experiment 2). Lessened stigma mediated the gain in confidence (Experiment 1b): While 71% of control-condition participants thought the strengths needed to pursue their goals did not describe people with depression well, identity-reframing reduced this to 52%. Complementing treatments of depression, efforts to invert weakness-narratives can help people recognize and access their strengths.

  PublisherDOI

• The Strengths of People in Low-SES Positions: An Identity-Reframing Intervention Improves Low-SES Students’ Achievement Over One Semester

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2024-10-20 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  Students from low-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds such as first-generation or low-income students are often portrayed as deficient, lacking in skills and potential to succeed at university. We hypothesized that such representations lead low-SES students to see their SES-identity as a barrier to success and impair achievement. If so, reframing low-SES students’ identity as a source of strength may help them succeed. Testing this hypothesis in a highly scalable form, we developed an online low-SES-identity-reframing exercise. In Experiment 1 ( N = 214), this exercise helped low-SES students to see their SES-identity more as a source of success and boosted their performance on an academic task by 13%. In Experiment 2, a large randomized-controlled intervention field experiment ( N = 786), we implemented the identity-reframing intervention in a university’s online learning program. This improved low-SES students’ grades over the semester. Recognizing the strengths low-SES students bring to university can help students access these strengths and apply them to schooling.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Carol S. Dweck

  29 shared

• David S. Yeager

  The University of Texas at Austin

  20 shared

• Geoffrey L. Cohen

  Stanford University

  19 shared

• Steven J. Spencer

  The Ohio State University

  14 shared

• Veronika Job

  University of Vienna

  10 shared

• Priyanka B. Carr

  Stanford University

  8 shared

• Carissa Romero

  7 shared

• Cintia Hinojosa

  7 shared