Professor Greg Walton

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. I think we really need to get to a place where we're valuing growth and development, and we're not looking around for the smartest guys in the room, like the people who took Enron down.

On this episode of the Puck, we have a unique conversation with associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, Greg Walton. Professor Walton discusses his powerful work in identifying psychological processes that contribute to a variety of social problems in the education of young people today. He shares his work with us on the development of wise interventions into these psychological processes that help us transform deeper issues, opening a path for this new generation to thrive and flourish in our world communities. A quick note on this audio, you may notice some background noise during the discussion, but stick with us. This is one you will not want to miss.

Greg Walton, welcome to the puck. We're excited to have you. Before we jump right in, can you tell us a little bit about your background and and also how you got to Stanford? Sure. My name is Greg Walton.

I'm a social psychologist at Stanford. I have had three trips to Stanford. I was a preschool student in the early eighties. It wasn't very successful. I actually got kicked out of preschool from a local neighborhood preschool, which is a story to tell.

I came back as an undergraduate. I was brought up in Michigan, and then I came back as an undergraduate in 1996, and then I returned as a faculty member in 2008. Wow. When I recently had sir Paul Collier on the show, we had a very interesting discussion about his concerns about the future going forward. In having the discussion, we talked about his life trajectory, kind of how his life changed by some of the help that he got along the way.

And he was really reminiscing and talking about that he really didn't believe in today's world that he would be able to have the opportunities that he's had because of kinda where the world is today. And in that discussion, it led to him telling me, you need to look at the work that Greg Walton's doing at Stanford because that's the kinda work that's being done today to make the world a better place. And so can you tell us a little about the social psychological interventions you're doing and the work you're doing at Stanford in that regard? Yeah. The first thing that I would say is that we often have a myth about ourselves or about the heroes of society in which we hold them up as individuals as though they each achieved what they achieved or built what they built kind of all by themselves.

But the reality is that 99.999% of the time, it's really communities of people and collections of people who are helping each other, developing each other, help pushing each other, helping each other learn or grow, explore new spaces that changes the world. What that means is that it's really important as we're developing and as we're thinking about young people developing, whether in school or into the workplace, to think about the communities that they're part of and to think about whether they are genuinely and deeply feeling like they belong and are part of those communities and able to contribute to the goals that those communities are organized around. So the student, for example, in school feels not so sure whether they belong in their school setting, not so sure whether other people really want them there, whether they're valued there, whether their teachers are gonna give them the help that they need, whether they'll have their back, whether they'll let them make a mistake and support them. That can be very detrimental for students' growth. So in the work you're doing, are are you working with college students?

Are you working to teach people how to be better teachers so they go back in the local communities and work at the elementary school level? How are you getting your work out to the general community? Yeah. So we're doing work at all sorts of levels. We're doing work with students in secondary school.

We're doing work with teachers in secondary school. We're doing work at the college level with both students and teachers. We're doing work with managers and corporate leaders. Maybe a place that I'll start where thinking about the growth and belonging is around our work on what we call the social belonging intervention. And the basic place that this begins with is that for many people in many different circumstances, as you walk into a new school setting or as you walk into a new corporate setting, it's a reasonable question to ask whether someone like me can belong here.

People can walk into these spaces and you can look around and see that a lot of people there maybe don't look like you. I was once at a, Downtown San Francisco headquarters for a large organization, and they had their kind of wall of fame. They had leaders of their organization, black and white photographs that covered the entire conference room wall. And you walk down it, and literally every single person for the first 80% of the wall was a middle aged white man. So it's a reasonable question then if you don't fit that mold and you walk into that setting, is this a place where someone like me can belong?

If that question is on your mind, even if it's an implicit question, then when negative things happen, if you get criticized, for example, or if you fail at something that's hard, or if you aren't included maybe at a happy hour event, it's easy to wonder whether that event is confirmation for the fear that you have, the kind of implicit question that's troubling you. And so what the social belonging intervention does is it helps people to an authentic and legitimate way to answer that question that maintains their motivation and success within a setting. And so again, at a place like Stanford, is the research you're doing to determine the best way to have these programs applied in general society and in schools? Or is it actually work you're doing at Stanford to help the students at Stanford? We've done both.

So we've done a lot of work at Stanford. And Stanford does some things really well and much better than it did when I was an undergraduate, and I can tell you about that. It also continues to have space to improve, and I can also talk about that. I wrote a piece in Ed Week last year called Stop Telling Students You Belong, which was written out of frustration with some things my freshman students were telling me that they were hearing from Stanford. Then we've also worked with thousands and thousands of students and teachers around The United States and around the world on issues related to belonging and and creating climates in which everybody can grow and develop.

What's intriguing I mean, there's a lot of things you're saying that are very intriguing to me, but if you look at some of the work that's been done recently in terms of even gun violence, one of the things that authors such as David French have written about is this notion of community and whether or not people belong. And the role that, for instance, the church used to play in that, and now with sometimes the breakdown of the family, the different ways in which we as society start to come together and so the people don't feel alone and disenfranchised. It sounds like the work you're doing is very complimentary and is is dealing with those issues. Yeah. I think there's lots of ways you can look around modern society, and you can see how it's not serving people very well.

That is we have a very basic need to connect to other people, to be seen, to be recognized, to belong to communities of care and communities of work, communities of productive work and valued work, to be able to contribute to the lives of each other, to help each other. There are many spaces where those systems are not functioning the way that they ought to. For example, a statewide survey in California, California school kids found that about a third of California school children reported not having a relationship with a caring adult in their school. You know, learning is based on relationships and membership in a community like a school is based on relationships. That's a real problem.

So do you see the schools in a sense starting to fill in this gap for these kids that don't have an adult in their lives outside of school? I think school can do that, and it certainly does do that in many circumstances. But I think it also fails to do that for many other kids. I think that we have a lot of work to do within schools, but also within society more broadly to create the communities that would really serve us well. But the work you're doing is focused on within the schools themselves.

Yes. A lot of it is. Yeah. Okay. And what specifically, like, in terms of how you approach this or reach out to these other schools, and are you directly teaching, for instance, public school teachers in small towns and some of these schools how to better engage with the students?

Yeah. So there's lots of things you can do. So the belonging intervention work that I described before, it began with a sort of simple aspect of the problem, which is how does the student, him or herself, make sense of their belonging? And the basic idea was that you could be walking into a school and you're part of a a group that's underrepresented in that setting. Maybe your group faces negative stereotypes that say that you're less able or less deserving than other people.

And then you can wonder whether people like you can belong. That's a process that is a reasonable question that comes from the reality of school and the history of schooling, but it's a process that begins really inside of that person's head. It's a psychological process. The problem is that if you're in that state of mind, what we call belonging uncertainty, then you look out at the world, you have something bad happen to you, even a routine negative event that happens at some time or other to everybody, like an instance of exclusion. And it's easy to think that maybe that means people like me don't belong here in general.

And if you draw that inference, you hold back, you withdraw, or maybe you act out, maybe you aggress against somebody in the setting. And all of that is detrimental for your development of relationships within that space, your ability to pursue your goals in that space, your ability to learn and grow as a person. What the belonging intervention does is it conveys the truth that everybody worries at first about whether they belong in one way or another as they make the transition to a new school. That's a normal thing to have happen. It doesn't mean that you don't belong.

It just means that belonging is a process, and how are you gonna develop your belonging? What are the communities within the school, the relationships with teachers or other instructors, the kinds of clubs or activities that you could join, the kinds of peer groups that you could become parts of That might be important for you to have a good experience to grow and develop the way that you see fit. That intervention can be bottled into a kind of online module, and that online module can be made available to kids as they're making academic transitions. We've done this work with students transitioning into middle school. Others have used adapted versions for students transitioning in high school.

We've done more than a dozen studies with students transitioning into college. Colleges and universities can make those available as part of their transition programs as, you you know, like a welcome to Stanford or welcome to whatever university it is. Students often have to complete online forums, like health insurance forms or information for an advisor. They can review these materials then. It can be communicated by a university, for example, and how it welcomes students in the kinds of residential programming that it does.

All of these have been subject to scholarly research, including rigorous randomized controlled trials. And when that's done and when that's done well, we can see improvements in students' outcomes. We can see things like students earning higher grades, students being more likely to persist through college, and in some cases, students being more likely to earn a degree in college. Because when you have that mindset, when you know that those belonging warriors are normal, it lets you stay engaged, though. It's just like to build the relationships that you need in that space in order to succeed.

But at the same time, to be effective, that kind of approach where you're focusing just on the mindset of a student, that has to be legitimate and authentic and real in the lived experience of a student. They have to be able to take that idea and use it within that setting. And that means that the school environment actually has to be a place where people like them can belong. And if the school isn't providing that for whatever reason, maybe it's too disorganized, too chaotic, maybe there's a bunch of other stuff going on. Maybe there's aspects of racism or sexism or other kinds of biases that are getting into the way.

Maybe there's just a kind of misguided approach or leadership that's not creating a community that people need. Then if you just work with somebody's mindset, it's not gonna be effective. So lots of other work has developed from the belonging intervention to try to really empower educators to create spaces of opportunities of belonging for students. And I would just flag one example, which is PERTs, the project for education research that scales. One project that they're doing is they've created very face valid, very brief surveys of students that teachers can give to their students at the end of the week.

And those questions ask students basic important things about their learning experience in the classroom. For example, this week, I felt cared for, or this week, I got feedback on my work to help me learn. And then that is automatically put together into a report that goes to a teacher. The data is anonymous to the teachers. The teacher just finds out what percentage of students endorsed those themes.

And sometimes that's broken down by race, for example, or or gender, for example. So you can see something like, maybe only a third of my black female students thought this week that they felt cared for. And that then presents a challenge. How can you up that in your learning environments? You might not know what the worries are that your subordinates or your students have because you're just not in that position.

So how did you actually get into this particular area of research? Yeah. So I was very much inspired by the nineteen nineties era work by Claude Steele and colleagues at Stanford on stereotype threat. What Claude and his colleagues did was he took black and white Stanford undergraduates who brought them into a room, and he gave them a very difficult GRE test. But he did something clever, which is he manipulated how we represented that test.

So in one case, he said, this test is evaluative of your abilities, your strengths and weaknesses, and verbal reasoning ability. And in that circumstance, the white students did much better than the black students even when they had the same incoming SAT scores. And that reproduces common kinds of racial achievement gaps that we can see in the education literature. But the second condition, you gave people the exact same test, but he said, we're cognitive psychologists. We're interested in puzzle solving.

These are gonna be very difficult puzzles, but they're not evaluative of anything. Please try our hardest so that you can help us in our understanding of how people solve puzzles. Their black students did much better. In fact, they slightly outperform white students on the very same problems. And as a high school student in the nineties, I read about that, and I thought, holy shit.

Like, you just change the way that you represent a test and you can see these long standing inequalities in test performance actually go away. Like, what is that? What is that power? What's going on there? As I thought more about stereotype threat, I thought of it very much as a fear about how you could be viewed.

So if you're an African American student in that situation and you're gonna go take that test, if you were to do badly, people could think that it's true that that stereotype that African American people aren't as smart as other people. People could think that that was true. They could take your own test performance as evidence for that, and that's very upsetting. It's very distracting. And what we know now as social psychologists with decades of research on this is that that situation is one in which people work very hard to try to push those thoughts away.

They try to suppress those thoughts of the stereotype, but that itself takes effort. And so I wanted to know, well, how could we do something like that in the real world? So in other words, these subtle or not so subtle cues that we put out there really have an effect on our performance. And we're often interacting with people all the time and saying things and we're having this effect on them with having no awareness of how we're affecting people. Yeah.

So one of the values of the research, I think, is to see clearly these dynamics, to surface them, and then to put them into public spaces. Like, they'll put them in between people so everybody can look at them and kind of contend with them directly. So something like belonging uncertainty. Like, if you step back and think about it, education is really important. Right?

It's like the space that we create as a society. We create public schools to give everybody upward mobility opportunities. Right? We wanna create vehicles for success. We want people to become contributing members of their society and their communities and to be able to support their families.

We invest in public education for that. People themselves, individuals themselves, see that and value that and know that. And yet also education has a deep history of exclusion. We have decades of fights most visibly around the desegregation of public schooling, where we were literally denying people entrance into public school spaces because of the color of their skin. And we've had decades of fight about affirmative action and the deservingness of people of color in higher education spaces, for example.

And we still have stereotypes that tell people that some people aren't as smart as other people. People come into the school spaces that are valuable, that society has said are valuable, that they themselves think are valuable, and they're worried about whether someone like them is gonna be really received well and respected and valued and supported in their growth and supported through their mistakes. That's the dynamic that we face. When we put it in those terms, it's very reasonable that people would experience that uncertainty about belonging as they come into the spaces. And then as a society and as creators of those spaces, it's our obligation to respond to that.

It makes sense. I've done some reading and I've listened to some podcast where they talk about the emotional disadvantage or challenges that some people have that, for instance, were the beneficiaries of affirmative action. And the question of, do they feel that they are worthy or that they would have gotten in? And to your point also, are people judging them? Do they deserve to be there?

And there's gotta be psychological follow-up because of that, I would think. Yeah. It's complicated. Right? Because affirmative action is very important to open up spaces.

Some research that I've done suggests that there's a rationale for affirmative action even in narrowest meritocratic terms. That is standard measures of merit. Standardized test scores underestimate the potential of the women in math because people of color and women in math face stereotypes as they take those tests. Right. When you talk to students, for instance, what about your work are they most excited about?

I think one of the exciting directions for research now that many people are enthusiastic about is how do we actually create school settings that are more supportive of people? How do we change not the kids who are trying to navigate the school, but the school itself or the adults in school or the managers in a company so that they will create the settings that will support belonging and support growth for everybody. And then when people leave school and they go out there, is there a situation where you connect companies that quote could change the world with the quote money out there? What's the relation between the work you're doing and and working with businesses? You know, companies wanna create positive internal climate, so they invest a lot in DEI kinds of initiatives.

And there's a question of what really will work and what really is effective for people and how do you go from a company that, you know, maybe historically hasn't been very diverse and hasn't had upward opportunities for diverse people to create a world where your company does have that and you can access that talent, and that talent has upward mobility within the company. So I think companies are very interested in that and there's a number of direct lessons that come from research in education spaces to what happens in companies. So as you're doing your research, are there things that our audience would find interesting, for instance, that would not be something that you would just be intuitively aware of? Like, what are some of the findings that you could share? One way to think about that is to really understand the kind of reasonable implicit worries that people have within a setting.

So if you think about a company, for example, and the company is hiring new employees, what are the reasonable worries that those employees might have in that setting? And that might be something like, am I gonna be able to catch up? This feels like a moving train. It's moving very quickly. Am I gonna get the the skills that I need or the access to the learning opportunities I need to catch up and and be able to contribute?

Are people gonna listen to my suggestions and help me build on the initial ideas I have or or might they take my ideas and, you know, call them their own? When we've talked with employees at at tech companies, those are often questions that come up. Another question, I once had an interaction at a start up where we kept hearing this language where people said super smart, such and such as super smart. And we said, what's valued more here? Super smart or somebody who works really hard?

And the first person said, somebody who works really hard. And then the second person said, no. Super smart. And you could tell that they both knew that the right answer, the answer that they wanted to give, was that the person who was valued was the person who worked really hard. But they kind of also knew that the truth in their corporate environment was that there was this construct of super smart, and that was what was valued.

And I think we really need to get to a place where we're valuing growth and development, and we're not looking around for the smartest guys in the room, like the people who took Enron down, for example. That's the healthy world. It's not an inclusive world. It's not a world where everybody can grow together and develop together and contribute to the shared mission of the company. We live in a world where a lot of people focus on meritocracy.

Right? And so that if you are smart or as you said, you work hard, you get ahead. But then there are certain barriers to entry and there are certain people that have gotten help and so forth. Are you saying that these labels like super smart or superstar, they label people in a way that prevents them from otherwise excelling where, you know, hard work can be just as important, if not more important, that there is this bias that comes out of that? Yeah.

I mean, I'm all for meritocracy. Right? And if we really had a meritocracy, we wouldn't have a world where we have, like, two Fortune 500 corporate leaders who are women or people of color. That's not a meritocracy. We do not live in a meritocracy.

And when we use phrases like super smart and we implicitly equate that with being white and being male, we are excluding people, and we're telling them that we don't value them and that we don't anticipate that they're gonna be able to grow and develop. That's not a productive world. That's not a world in which we're really maximizing the contributions of of everybody who'd like to contribute to the mission of the company. If a company starts talking about who's super smart, like, who do you think's gonna be excluded from that category? If you're a woman, you probably think that you're not included.

I mean, if you look at, Google search data, for example, is my son or is my daughter brilliant, you'll see far more, I think, sevenfold more searches for the son being brilliant than the daughter being brilliant. If you look at it by race, like, you're definitely gonna see that stereotype by race. We don't think of African Americans as brilliant in the way that we think of white people sometimes as brilliant. And so if you're a person who doesn't fit that canonical category of brilliance, the white man, then if people are talking about super smart, that's implicitly excluding you. Who do they think is gonna be the person who's super smart?

Probably not me. There's work by Elizabeth Canning at Washington State University. This is a study of, I think, all the science and engineering departments at Indiana University. And they found that professors varied in how much they endorsed the idea that intelligence is fixed versus the idea that intelligence can grow. And then they looked at the outcomes within those classrooms.

And in the classrooms where the professors endorsed the view that intelligence can grow, that people can get smarter. Everybody got higher grades, and the achievement gaps, like the racial achievement gap, for example, had been halved. It was half as large within those classrooms. Because the professors conveying, wherever you are, our job is to grow you. Our job is to help you learn and develop.

You didn't take chemistry in high school? Great. Like, let's start with where you are. We're gonna grow you up. Instead, if the professor is saying, oh, some people are chemists and some people aren't.

Some people think like a physicist. Some people don't. Look to your right. Look to your left. You know, two of you are gonna be out of the class by the end of the term, but people check out because that's not an inclusive environment for them.

It's not a place where they can grow and develop. So how do you practically get this information out? I mean, are you actually running programs to teach the teachers, you know, how to teach more effectively? I mean, what's the actual practical application of your work in terms of getting it out to people? There's many different examples.

I mentioned Perts earlier. There's also an organization that my colleagues and I, David Yeager, Mary Murphy, and Christine Mogul created called the College Transition Collaborative. One of the CTC's projects is called the Student Experience Project, which is done in collaboration with a number of organizational partners, post secondary partners, and and other nonprofit groups. And that has created, for example, a series of tools and tool kits for instructors, including things like, how am I introducing the class on the syllabus? How am I introducing the class on the first day?

How do I think about assignments? How do I give assignments? How do I give feedback on assignments? How do I get feedback to help support growth? That's being used, and so far, it seems to be being very effective in helping educators do their work better.

In a perfect world, is there a plan to expand the work you're doing across the country? Yeah. I mean, that work is being done across the country. There are institutional partners and university partners across the country. CTC has partnered with dozens and dozens of colleges and universities in every region of The United States.

That said, there's far more work to be done, and it's an ongoing process. It's like a relationship in a sense. Like, if you are in a relationship, then it's gonna take work, and it's not like you're ever done. You continue to show your values in that relationship and you continue to show how you value the other person. You continue to spend quality time together.

It's ongoing work to signal what you value and what that organization values, to make sure that your practices are aligning with your values, to make sure that when you're communicating things that what is heard is in fact what is intended and that there aren't miscommunications. It's very easy to have miscommunications. And so that involves feedback processes. How do you empower the people who have the least power in the system to tell you how it feels? How something you're saying is sitting with them?

Right. There's also a movement I think because of social media where aren't some professors also intimidated about certain teaching techniques and certain things that they're doing because if they do something wrong, they're getting also lambasted by the students, and there's a certain kind of cancel culture thing too. I mean, does that figure in your work at all? I mean, is there a challenge there? I think it's a really interesting time in the culture and I wonder sometimes whether the aggressive proponents of cancel culture are happening because people don't feel heard otherwise.

And there aren't the kind of regular spaces for people to, speak up and modulate and speak up to power and modulate that power without having to just, you know, cancel them. I mean, I also certainly think that social media has an effect here and social media has a exacerbation effect on these debates when they occur. You know, ideally, if you have, like, a math teacher, for example, who says something that was somewhat offensive or insensitive, ideally, you know, in an ideal world, there's a way to speak to that gently, right, in a way that that math instructor who you presume has good intentions can hear and that that math instructor can then correct for that mistake. So Greg, when you look at some of the work that I've been doing, one of the things that I've been encouraging people to do is in polarization, cross the island, talk to people that don't necessarily see the world in the same way they do. What you're interestingly doing is you're taking people, right, professors and students and business leaders and workers, and you're trying to sensitize them so that they can have more productive conversations and take some of this bias out, so to speak.

How does also letting awareness of their natural anxiety when they go into these situations, is there a way to bolster people so that they can become less sensitive in a sense? Because we all get triggered whenever we talk to somebody that doesn't see the world the same way we do. So we kind of go back in our echo chambers and then break off. You're approaching it from the perspective of making it easier, like saying things in a more acceptable way that doesn't trigger people. Isn't also part of that encouraging dialogue so that when somebody is triggered, they can go back to that professor or that employer and have a conversation?

Yeah. I have a couple of things to share about that. So one is my graduate student Kiara Sanchez, who is a incoming faculty member at Dartmouth this summer. She did a series of fascinating studies on how black and white friends, like people who are black and white and, like, expand friends with each other, how they think about and talk about race with each other. What she found was that it's a kind of loaded topic for both groups.

Like, everybody's kind of worried about that. Like, these are real friendships and people care about their friendship, but they don't want something to come between them. They don't wanna disrupt the friendship, but they also know that race is kind of the big bugaboo. And, like, the white person kinda wants to know, like, what the black person's experiences have been like and wants to understand that side of them. And the black person kinda wants to be authentic about that too and and be able to be their whole self with the white person, but they're both kind of nervous about it.

So Kiara calls this a threatening opportunity. She did a lot of work on this. And then after having done that work, she did a next stage of work where she actually, during COVID, brought black and white friends together and had them have Zoom conversations with each other. And in some cases, they talked about race, the black person's race related experiences. One of the things she did in that is she for one group of people, she explicitly surfaced the ways that these can be anxiety provoking conversations.

She said it's normal for people to be anxious about this, to feel a little uncomfortable with this. And the reason why you feel that is often because you care. Like, you care about each other, you care about the relationship. And so people can feel that. And she gave them stories from black friends and white friends who both talked about that from their different perspectives.

And she asked people, why do you think this would be normal? Why do you think this might actually be helpful or or not harmful? Then she put them into the conversations, and the conversations are incredible. They're incredibly moving. People connect in a way, I think, that they haven't connected before.

One of the amazing findings is that she then resurveys people several months later, like three months later. And one of the findings is that black friends, particularly when they were in that reframing condition, they feel they're more authentic in their friendship, that they can be more of their whole self and their friendship with that white friend three months down the road, that this space has been opened up and they're now able to be more of themselves there. I think it's really important how we think about discomfort and how we can not automatically treat it as a reason to go away or shy away or that danger might happen. It's not danger, Will Robinson danger. It might just mean you care, and this is important.

And it might mean that that's the time to lean in and listen carefully and be present and go through that process with someone who you're with and who you who's important for you. So that means that people shouldn't shy away from the conversations. They should lean into them. But, like, if you are a white person talking to an African American person and you wanna understand their perspective or a way in which to have these conversations, did her research reveal any ways in which those conversations should be approached? Yeah.

I think this is one of the big ones, is that when both people went through this process of thinking about how it is normal to have those worries, then those can happen. It doesn't mean that it's gonna go badly. It doesn't mean that you're not a good friend or that you're racist or something. It just means really that you care and that when you care, you lean into that. You you go with that.

Then those conversations go better than people expect. People feel really, really good in them, and it can open up space within the relationship. So not treating the discomfort itself as an immediate reason to go away. It might just mean that you care. And that's true for lots of things in life.

That's not just true for that context. So it's also true in school. It's true when we think about stress. Like, sometimes we think of stress as something that is just inherently bad. But my colleague, Ali Crum, has worked on how the mindset that stress is enhancing can improve performance and can improve health.

We've done intervention with people taking the California bar exam, where three months before they begin the bar exam, we give them materials, and part of those materials talk about how it's normal to feel a fair bit of stress as you're preparing for the bar exam. That increased passage rates on the bar exam months later. So we can be weak in a sense where a little bit of discomfort and we run away from it. But it's helpful, I think, when we're experiencing that discomfort to ask ourselves, is this normal? Why might this be normal?

How might this be useful? Can I use this for myself? Do you also find that when you're talking to these professors or when you're coaching people in terms of kinda how to have these dialogues, that there's something that happens with conversation when it's one on one that's different than in a group. And what I mean by that is, I find often, I'll say something on a one on one basis, and the person will say, that's not what I said or that's not what I mean or and I say, no, no, that's not what I meant either because words are finite and we're using them with our own subjective reality, and and we're trying to make a point. But oftentimes, what we're trying to say is not what the person heard, but because they give us immediate feedback, we're able in the context of that dialogue to say, hey, that's not really what I meant, and we can kind of correct in the moment.

As a professor or as a business leader, when you're talking to a group of people, I would think it's harder to know how those words are coming across. And how do you deal with that when there is so much room for misinterpretation? Yeah. I think that's right. So Kiara's work, for example, is focused on that close one on one context.

And part of me thinks we just need kind of more of that in our lives. A student and a teacher, friends, you know, romantic partners, and we are in that close space with each other. I think that with large groups, then it's a different kind of communication. And I think what you're communicating there is often more about the values that you have in that space and maybe the norms that will be followed in that space in order to help you all achieve the goals that you have given the values that you have. That can take, you know, many different forms, but that's a different kind of conversation.

Yeah. So for those of us who are running our own businesses, or for those of us who are interacting with people and we wanna be effective communicators, but also we wanna bring the best out in other people. What can we what can our audience do to take some of the research that you've done and the techniques you are teaching and apply them in our own lives? I think one thing is to be humble about your awareness of your assumptions about other people, especially people who are in positions of lower power than you. And to create spaces where people in different perspectives can say what they're thinking or what they're feeling.

For example, I talked with you earlier about the work on wise feedback. I think it's a good example of this. So one of the best resources for learning and for growth and for performance is specific, critical, constructive feedback on something you've done. Like, you know, here's this thing you did. Here's this code you wrote.

Here's this memo that you wrote. Here's this presentation you gave. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here's some different options you could consider.

And that can be very, very productive for learning. The challenge is that people can get defensive about that. People can get threatened by that. It can feel like you're being judged. It can feel like, why is this person doing this?

Do they think that I'm dumb? And if that feedback is coming across group lines, do they think that people like me can't do this? If that's coming from a white teacher to a black student, the student can wonder, is the teacher biased? And the teacher may be aware of that, and that may make them hold back and giving them feedback in the first place, which is itself a form of bias because now you're denying the student this resource for learning, and it becomes a whole mess. The thing to understand there is that the person who's receiving that feedback has reasonable concerns that are in their head about why it is they're receiving the feedback.

And if you can anticipate those concerns and then give the feedback with an awareness of those concerns, you can change trajectory. So in research, for example, one line of studies interrupted an assignment that seventh graders had written that the teachers their seventh grade teachers had marked up. So these are seventh grade kids, suburban Connecticut. They've written an essay about their hero. The teachers have have marked this up, then the researchers intercepted that, and they appended a paper clip note onto the essay itself.

In the critical condition, that note said, I'm giving you this feedback because I have high standards, and I think that you can meet them. So that's not changing the substance of the feedback. It's conveying why you as the instructor are providing the student the feedback. It's saying it's not because I'm biased. It's not because I think that you're limited or something like that.

It's because I actually have high standards, and I think with more work, you can reach that high standard. And students, especially African American students, but all students were more likely to revise their work for a higher grade. They showed stronger trust in their teachers over the school year. Then the next year, they were less likely to get involved in discipline events. They received fewer disciplinary citations.

They continued to show stronger trust of their teachers, and they were even more likely to go to college on time, before your college on time after high school. There, critical communication helped redefine for a seventh grader who's a little bit worried about what their relationship with their teachers might be like, that that's a relationship that can be one that's supportive of growth and learning. I mean, I love what you're saying in the way you're approaching it. As you're talking, I'm thinking about the different things I've seen. I mean, good coaches, I think instinctively do a lot of this.

There's that book, How to Win Friends and Influence People that Dale Carnegie wrote. There's the work that people have done about don't criticize the person, criticize the behavior, not to shame people, but bring them forward with the right hand, and then maybe, you know, criticize them with the left. But it's finding that balance so that we're not hurting people's self esteem. It's also Stand and Deliver, the classic movie of AP Calculus performance in Right. Central Los Angeles.

Jaime Escalante, the real world teacher that inspired that. He had high standards and he believed that his students, his Latino, black American, eleventh, twelfth grade students could reach those high standards. And he told them that in all sorts of ways, implicitly and explicitly. In fact, the wise feedback work was inspired by many real world examples of expert teachers and tutors and and leaders who convey in their words and their deeds that they have high standards and they think that the student can meet them. Yeah.

So true. And I love that movie and and he was such an inspiration. It is amazing how people will rise to the occasion if you believe in them. You know, there's a lot of work that they've done with early childhood experiences in terms of just having a good enough parent and having somebody that's a cheerleader that believes in you and that actually sees your potential. And and so the work you're doing by getting this out there with the teachers and the business community is fantastic, Greg.

Earlier, you were talking about communications and and power. And I just wanna end by telling you about this work that we've done across a real power divide. This is with kids coming back to school in Oakland after having spent time in the justice system. So these are predominantly African American kids. Almost all of them come from low income, low education households.

They've all been convicted of a crime. Right? They've all spent time in juvenile detention. And so if you're a teacher, like, you're teaching eighth grade English or eleventh grade math or something, and you are told that, you know, this kid's gonna be coming back into your classroom, and you know it's because this kid was in juvie, the thousand stereotypes can cross your mind. It's very easy.

Like, that intersection in our culture of race and class and incarceration status. It's very easy to just imagine the trouble that this child is gonna cause you. This is gonna be a problem child. We did a long series of work with these kids in this community, listening to them, working through student organizations, hearing about their goals and values. And we ultimately, we created an exercise that basically creates a platform for these kids to introduce themselves in their own words, and their goals and their values and the challenges that they faced in school to a teacher who they cared about.

And I I wanna just emphasize this point of giving people who don't have voice voice and helping the people who are empowered in situations hear those people. So we had this exercise we created. At the core part of that exercise, at the end of it, the students did a couple days after coming back into school. We asked them, who's a teacher in school who isn't yet but could be an important source of support for you? What would you like that teacher to know?

And then the kids list a person by name. Like, they'll say, like, mister Smith, my counselor, or miss Johnson, my English teacher. And then we ask them, what would you like that person to know about? Who you are as a person, your goals and values, but what's hard for you in school that they might be able to help it. And kids write these incredibly basic and overwhelmingly powerful things.

Like, they'll say something like, I want miss Johnson to know I'm a good kid, and all I wanna do is have good relationships with people. And what's hard for me is that I really stink at math, and I really stink at reading, and I take more time than other kids, and I and I need some one on one help. And it's like, oh my god. Like, that's who this child is. Right?

That's who they are. We then put that into a letter that we give to that teacher, and we say this child is chosen to participate in this program to improve their transition coming back to school. As you know, every kid needs support from adults to succeed. This child has chosen you as an adult that they'd like to be that support for. Here's what Jamal, for example, would like you to know about him, and we pipe in what that kid has said.

And then we say to that teacher, thank you very much for your work. You're on the front lines for all of our children. Go at it, essentially. We find in our initial trial that that actually reduced recidivism to juvenile detention from sixty nine percent to 29%, a 40 percentage point reduction. And for teachers, the experiences, it's like transformative.

Teachers say things like, my first thought would be, what problems is he gonna cause to my class? Is he gonna be violent or disruptive? But then as I read the letter, I see that he's just a kid. He's faced challenges. He's asking for my support.

If I can be that support for him, I wanna be that. I would sit down with him. I would talk with him about what he needs. I would look forward to working with him. Like, our teachers can stand up and be incredible, like, incredible, great, transformative people for the young people.

But to get there, we have to get a transformative people for the young people. But to get there, we have to get a platform where these people who don't have voice, who aren't heard, have that voice and can be heard. So I think it's just really important that we create systems and structures where the people who aren't heard, whose experiences aren't seen, who can be seen in a stereotype, where we can give them their opportunity to say who they are and what they need to the people who can make a difference, then help empower those people who can make a difference to help them do that. That's a beautiful way to wrap up. It's interesting because we all have a hard time being vulnerable.

And the reality is that in any situation, you have to be able to see the other person. We all have our own subjective insecurities and biases, and what you're doing is you're creating a safe space where each person can see the other and start to build that relationship of trust. We all could use training and reminders of that. So this this has been very inspiring, Greg. Keep doing the work.

We'll get the message out there to other people, but thank you so so much for your time and joining us on the Puck today. Great. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. The Puck Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMEG Advisors.

If you enjoyed the conversation and haven't subscribed yet to the show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Check us out on Instagram and Facebook and let us know what you think about the podcast. On this episode of the Puck, we have a unique conversation with associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, Greg Walton. Professor Walton discusses his powerful work in identifying psychological processes that contribute to a variety of social problems in the education of young people today. He shares his work on the development of wise interventions in the these in the these into these.

Should be into these. Right? Into these. On this episode of the Puck, we have a unique conversation with associate on this episode of the Puck, we have a unique conversation with associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, Greg Walton. Professor Walton discusses his powerful work in identifying psychological processes that contribute to a variety of social problems in the education of young people today.

He shares his work on the development of wise interventions into these psychological processes that help us transform deeper issues, opening a path for this new generation to thrive and flourish in our world communities. A quick note in this audio, you will notice some background noise during the discussion, but stick with us. This is one you will not wanna miss.