Presenter: Cameron Hecht, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Recent debates about mindset interventions—brief exercises designed to shift beliefs and encourage positive behaviors—often focus on their small average effects. However, this overlooks how their impact can vary across individuals and contexts. In five lab and field studies (n = 4,910), Professor Hecht tests predictions from the Mindset × Context framework to identify when and for whom growth mindset interventions are most effective in reducing educational inequality. Building on these findings, he evaluates a new strategy that targets teacher support for growth mindset in a large field experiment (n = 897 teachers, 32,172 students), yielding stronger inequality-reducing effects than student-focused approaches.