For another set of students, the researchers worded the praise slightly differently. Rather than praising the person, or telling them how smart they were, the researchers praised the process, or how hard they were working (“You must have worked hard at these problems”).

For half of the participants, this letter was based on the letter normally sent to incoming students. It stressed four student goals:

• learning by exploring personal interests,

• expressing ideas and opinions,

• creating your own intellectual journey, and

• participating in independent research.

For the other participants, this letter listed goals more compatible with the culture of working-class students:

• learning by being part of a community,

• Connecting with fellow students and faculty,

• Working together with and learning from others, and

• Participating in collaborative research

Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen tested the effect of a similar intervention at the college level. They exposed freshmen to a persuasive message that presented the social stresses of college life as transient and as something everyone experiences. This message improved Black students’ grades over their next three years in college when compared to Black students who didn’t get this message. How did it do this? Further analysis showed that it helped Black students see college stress as something not peculiar to their identity. It reduced their identity threat. They could trust their environment more— churn less— and their grades reflected it.

Yet shown in the Stephens research described in chapter 6, welcomes can go wrong: they can alienate people, even if inadvertently, as well as welcome them. Recall the finding: When a welcome letter ostensibly written by a college president emphasized independence, finding one’s own passion, and working independently, working-class students were affected enough that they performed worse than non-working-class students on a subsequent verbal reasoning test. And at orientation, when independence was emphasized but no mention was made of communication values, working-class students got lower grades than other students on a subsequent test. These were students whose admission credentials and high school grades were on par with those of everyone else participating in the experiment. There’s a lesson in these findings: When bringing a diversity of people into a setting, it’s especially important that welcoming be inclusive. When it’s not— again, even inadvertently so— it can have serious consequences.