Biased outcomes stem from people and places. Understanding how and why prejudice attaches to places suggests novel strategies to reduce bias.

A promising way to mitigate inequality is by addressing students’ worries about belonging. But where and with whom is this social-belonging intervention effective? Here we report a team-science randomized controlled experiment with 26,911 students at 22 diverse institutions. Results showed that the social-belonging intervention, administered online before college (in under 30 minutes), increased the rate at which students completed the first year as full-time students, especially among students in groups that had historically progressed at lower rates. The college context also mattered: The intervention was effective only when students’ groups were afforded opportunities to belong. This study develops methods for understanding how student identities and contexts interact with interventions. It also shows that a low-cost, scalable intervention generalizes its effects to 749 4-year institutions in the United States.

Most research on the cognitive effects of subtle racial discrimination among racial and ethnic minorities focuses on direct experiences of it wherein stigmatized individuals are the targets of discriminatory treatment. However, it is not necessary for people to be the direct target of discriminatory behavior to experience the negative consequences associated with it. Although exposure to discriminatory behavior is increasingly common given the accessibility of smartphones and social media, we know relatively little about how this exposure affects people's executive functioning. Here, we provide a systematic, comparative review of the extant literature on the effects of (a) personally experiencing versus (b) observing instances of subtle racial discrimination toward others on three core executive functions: inhibition, shifting, and updating. We highlight where more work is needed to understand the cognitive consequences of observing discrimination and we provide initial evidence that observing subtle discrimination impairs updating—a previously unexplored relationship. Finally, we discuss the implications of executive function impairment due to observing and experiencing subtle discrimination for long‐term outcomes, such as academic achievement, employment, and mental health.

Two studies investigate how science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professors’ fixed mindsets—the belief that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable—may induce stereotype threat and undermine women’s performance. In an experiment ( N = 217), we manipulated professors’ mindset beliefs (fixed vs. growth) within a course syllabus. While both men and women perceived the fixed mindset professor to endorse more gender stereotypes and anticipated feeling less belonging in the course, women reported these effects more than men. However, only for women did this threat undermine performance. In a 2-year longitudinal field study (884 students enrolled in 46 STEM courses), students who perceived their professor to endorse a fixed (vs. growth) mindset thought the professor would endorse more gender stereotypes and experienced less belonging in those courses. However, only women’s grades in those courses suffered as a result. Together, these studies demonstrate that professors’ fixed mindset beliefs may trigger stereotype threat among women in STEM courses.