Recognizing the strengths of socio-economically disadvantaged students leads to better grades

In their new study, psychologist Christina Bauer from the University of Vienna and her international team show the influence societal narratives can have on students' self-image and their performance. The researchers presented reverse narratives to socio-economically disadvantaged students: instead of portraying them as weak, they emphasized their strengths. They were able to show that this increased the self-confidence of these students and that they even achieved better grades. The study was recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Socio-economically disadvantaged people often show a lot of strength in dealing with their challenges - for example, students from traditional working-class backgrounds who have to combine studying and working for financial reasons and have to find their way through university without an academic background in the family. These strengths are often forgotten when talking about socially disadvantaged people. Instead, disadvantaged people are commonly described as weak or deficient, lacking in competencies or potential – a deliberate narrative, because it is actually the social system that is unable to provide adequate support and is therefore weak, not the people. "We already know from previous studies that disadvantaged people often have less confidence in their own abilities than others. Now we have specifically looked at the effects of different narratives about 'social weakness'," says Bauer.

In order to investigate the effect of such narratives, Bauer and colleagues from the University of Vienna, Stanford University and Northwestern University have reversed deficit narratives in experiments: instead of portraying disadvantaged people as weak, researchers have developed a text that emphasizes the often forgotten strengths of disadvantaged people: In it, for example, perseverance, problem-solving skills, and strength in dealing with challenges are emphasized. This text was then presented to socially disadvantaged US students. Those students were encouraged to reflect on their own strengths in dealing with challenges they had experienced. Compared to a randomly assigned control group, this simple exercise was shown to increase the self-confidence of disadvantaged students.

In a second long-term experiment at a US university, the scientists were able to show that this improved self-confidence also had consequences for the students' performance: students who reflected on the strengths they had acquired through their socio-economic background showed a higher level of self-confidence over an entire semester.