Recognizing the strengths of socioeconomically disadvantaged students could lead to better grades

In a new study, psychologist Christina Bauer from the University of Vienna and her international team show the influence narratives can have on students’ self-image and their performance. The scientists presented reverse narratives to socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and instead of portraying them as weak, they highlighted their strengths.

The team was able to show that this increased the students’ self-confidence and even led to them getting better grades. The study was recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Socioeconomically disadvantaged people often show a lot of strength in dealing with their challenges—such as students from classic working-class backgrounds who have to combine study and work for financial reasons and who 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. Disadvantaged people are instead referred to as “socially weak”—a deliberate narrative, because in fact the social system is weak because it is not able to provide adequate support, but 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.

To investigate the impact of such narratives, Bauer and colleagues from the University of Vienna, Stanford University and Northwestern University turned deficit narratives around in experiments. Instead of portraying disadvantaged people as weak, researchers developed a text that highlights the often forgotten strengths of disadvantaged people, highlighting perseverance, problem-solving skills and strength in dealing with challenges.

This text was then presented to socially disadvantaged U.S. students. These students were encouraged to reflect on their own strengths that they had shown in dealing with challenges they had experienced. Compared to a randomly assigned control group, it was shown that this simple exercise could increase the self-confidence of disadvantaged students.

In a second long-term experiment at a U.S. university, the scientists were able to show that this improved self-confidence also had consequences for the students’ performance. Students who thought about the strengths they had acquired through their socioeconomic background showed better grades in their studies over an entire semester.

In previously unpublished studies with German and Austrian students, Bauer found similar results. The challenges that socially disadvantaged students experience in the U.S. and Europe are partly different, but the stigmatizing narratives that portray students as weak are quite similar, says Bauer.

“Seeing ourselves as strong rather than weak is important for each of us to believe in ourselves and to be able to show our achievements. We need to understand that people who are exposed to disadvantages are not weak and should not be portrayed as such.

“Such narratives can have a stigmatizing effect and thus unintentionally contribute to further disadvantages. They also distract from the real problems with our social systems,” says Bauer. “Instead, we should better recognize the strengths of socially disadvantaged people and at the same time clearly identify the problems with our social systems.”