It is notoriously hard to persuade people to change their behavior, even to do the things they know they "should" do. This challenge can be even greater in professional contexts where people already have well-established ways of doing their job and may not have spare time to dedicate to changing their approach.
Teachers provide an excellent illustration of this phenomenon. Teachers are among the most overworked professionals, yet they are frequently required to attend professional development workshops that attempt to change their approach to teaching. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these workshops are unsuccessful.
Pragmatic Behavior-Change Appeals
One reason that many appeals for behavior change fail—including with teachers—is that they emphasize pragmatic reasons to adopt a new behavior. Such appeals are ubiquitous: "If you quit smoking, you'll be less likely to get cancer." "If you exercise more, you'll lose weight." "If you save more money now, you'll be more financially secure when you retire." The problem with these behavior-change attempts is that they succumb to "psychological myopia" or "delay discounting," whereby people overvalue immediate rewards and undervalue long-term benefits. When competing with immediate, urgent priorities, promises of a reward at some future date tend to lose out.
Values Alignment Circumvents Myopia
One way to get past the myopia problem is to use "values alignment." Values-aligned behavior-change appeals help people see how a behavior is consistent with a deeply held value or identity. For example, one successful values-aligned message successfully changed adolescents' dietary choices. It did this by showing how choosing healthier food was a way to "stick it to" manipulative, predatory junk food companies, and to thus be the kind of rebellious and independent-minded adolescent their peers would respect. Values-aligned arguments do not fall prey to myopia because they do not depend on some distant reward. Instead, they show how a behavior allows someone to be the kind of person they want to be now, providing a motivationally immediate reason to change their behavior.
Promoting Teachers' Expression of a "Growth Mindset"
In recent research, my colleagues and I tested a values-aligned professional development module that encouraged high-school teachers to consistently communicate a belief in all of their students' ability to learn and improve—that is, to convey a growth mindset. This change in how teachers communicate with students is subtle but powerful. Teachers who communicate a growth mindset in the classroom have been found to have smaller group-based academic disparities among their students, as well as higher student reports of psychological safety. In part, this is because teachers' messages that all students can improve may help to counter group-based stereotypes about who has high enough "fixed" levels of academic ability to be successful.
We started by interviewing high-school teachers in the U.S. and found that they tended to share a common "core" value. They wanted to be the kind of teacher who could get students excited about learning, and they didn't want to resort to threats or coercion to get them engaged in class. A nationally representative sample of 965 math teachers confirmed this takeaway from the interviews: 81% of teachers ranked "inspiring enthusiasm for learning" as the most important indicator of a respectable and admirable teacher, above six other commonly cited characteristics such as maintaining high standardized test scores or being well-liked among students. A whopping 97% ranked "inspiring enthusiasm" as one of their top three values.
In Only 45 Minutes
The values-aligned program we developed—a 45-minute online module—described how communicating support for the growth mindset could inspire students' enthusiasm for learning, helping teachers live up to this core value. The module explained that when students doubt their teachers' belief in their ability to succeed, they reciprocate this perceived disrespect by disengaging or acting out in class. Conversely, the module explained that by consistently expressing a belief in students' ability to learn and improve, students would feel respected and would reciprocate this respect by engaging deeply in the learning process.
At the beginning of the school year, 150+ high-school teachers in our study received our values-aligned module and 150+ teachers received an unrelated professional development module as a comparison. The values-aligned messaging was effective. Teachers who received the values-aligned module reported significantly greater intentions to use teaching practices that communicate a belief in their students' ability to learn and improve. And, critically, this seemed to have positive consequences for students. We saw improved academic performance, with larger effects in classes with a higher proportion of students from working-class backgrounds, reducing socioeconomic inequality in academic outcomes.
Persuading People is Possible
Persuasion is difficult, but possible, even among overworked professionals. In this research, the key was to help teachers see how a relatively small shift in their teaching practice could help them be the kind of teacher who can get struggling students engaged—the kind of teacher they were already deeply motivated to be.
For Further Reading
Bryan, C. J., Yeager, D. S., Hinojosa, C. P., Chabot, A., Bergen, H., Kawamura, M., & Steubing, F. (2016). Harnessing adolescent values to motivate healthier eating. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 10830–10835. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1604586113
Bryan, C. J., Yeager, D. S., & Hinojosa, C. P. (2019). A values-alignment intervention protects adolescents from the effects of food marketing. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(6), 596–603. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0586-6
Hecht, C. A., Dweck, C. S., Murphy, M. C., Kroeper, K. M., & Yeager, D. S. (2023). Efficiently exploring the causal role of contextual moderators in behavioral science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(1), e2216315120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216315120
Cameron Hecht is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Population Research Center and the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Hecht's research seeks to identify psychological processes that contribute to societal problems, develop theory-based interventions that target these processes, and understand when and why these interventions are most effective.
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