The social psychologist Joshua Aronson and I did one of the early experiments testing this. We invited white and Black Stanford University students into our laboratory one at a time and gave them a very difficult thirty-minute section of the verbal Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

Also as in the Cohen research, they were followed all the way through high school. The results were presented in three reports— the first published in 2016 and the last in 2021. This research, too, found that the self-affirmation intervention, in its first year, significantly improved the academic performance of Black and Hispanic students in schools where they were lower in number and in level of achievement— precisely the conditions in which their identity threat would be greatest. And again, this effect lasted. From the seventh grade through the last year of high school, the racial achievement gap for affirmed students grew 50 percent less each year than the gap for non-affirmed students. The achievement gap between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students had decreased by 42 percent by the end of high school. And the intervention increased the percentage of minority students eventually graduation from high school on time by 10 percentage points. All of this from a twenty-minute affirmation exercise in the seventh grade! It launched a process of ever-increasing engagement with school that lifted these students’ trajectories of achievement.

But Black students have lived with their racial identity. They know it can matter. They didn’t know that it would matter in this instance. But they knew it could. Thus their predicament. To be safe, not to be misled, they were less trusting. They stayed in churn.

Such caution has its costs. There could be value in that feedback. It might help them with their essay and their writing generally. Trusting less means they’d miss out on that benefit. And this would happen over and over in a diverse school.

They were left with that nagging ambiguity: Was it my essay or a bias of the feedback-giver that shaped the feedback? In these two conditions, Black students wanted to trust the feedback, be motivated by it. But there was that ambiguity. They remained in churn, protectively less engaged. Take this ambiguity away— as did the wise feedback-giver— and Black students showed strong trust and motivation. Their capacity to trust and be motivated was there all along. The spark they needed was evidence that the feedback-giver’s expectation of them was not limited by the stereotype about their group’s abilities.

For students facing Tyler-type identity threat, they improve performance less by directly affecting their learning than by reducing the identity threat that can otherwise interfere with their learning. That’s their route of action, their shared active ingredient. They do it in different ways. But they all change the socio-psychological experience of school for these students. And throughout the now extensive literature testing these effects, it is for these students that these interventions have their largest, most reliable effects.