Feeling Like You Don't Belong In Your Career Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

From the latest issue of my newsletter, The Brilliant Report:

“This week I blogged about a new study that suggests one reason why there are so few women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and maths): they are vulnerable to feeling that they have to put in more effort than others to achieve the same results, and that therefore they must not “belong” in that sphere. There’s a lesson here about the importance of a ‘growth mindset’—researcher Carol Dweck’s term for the belief that success is all about effort, and that ‘even geniuses work hard’—but what I want to focus on today is this notion of belonging, and how crucial it is for effective learning.

Learning is inherently social. The level of comfort we feel in another person’s presence can powerfully influence how intelligent we feel, and in some sense, how intelligent we actually are, at least in that moment. Now multiply that one-on-one interaction by tens or hundreds, and you start to get a sense of how important a sense of belonging to a learning community can be.

Early on in school, some children get the sense that, academically speaking, they don’t belong—that they’re not one of the ‘smart kids.’ The same thing can happen when young people start middle school, or high school, or college: they take a look around and think, ‘I don’t belong here.’ In our work lives, too, we may form an assumption that we’re not quick or sharp enough, not sufficiently creative or innovative, to belong at the top of our fields.

Social psychologists have documented how corrosive this self-doubt can be: sapping our motivation, lowering our expectations, even using up mental resources that we could otherwise apply to absorbing knowledge or solving problems. The feeling of not belonging becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By contrast, a solid sense that we’re among our peers, that we’re where we ought to be, can elevate our aspirations and buoy us in the face of setbacks.

So: how do we bolster a sense of intellectual belonging—in ourselves, our children, our students and employees? Here are three ideas.”

Create your own community. In the late 1970s, Uri Treisman was a researcher at UC-Berkeley interested in why African-American students often struggled in the university’s maths courses, even as Asian-Americans in the same classes flourished. With some probing, he discovered part of the answer: Asian students studied together in groups, while black students tended to work alone. Treisman’s insight became the basis of his Emerging Scholars program, in which students organised into study groups tackle challenging problems together. The lesson: even if you don’t feel a kinship with the school or company you’re a part of, you can find a smaller community within it that will foster the feelings of belonging and identification that allow learning to blossom.
Take care with transitions. When we’re starting at a new school or a new job, our sense of ourselves is especially fragile; we carefully inspect our new environment, looking for cues that this is a place we belong. Some researchers, in fact, have tied the slide in many students’ grades that happens in middle school to the transition from elementary school itself: during this fraught passage, some students decide school isn’t for them. Studies by Stanford professor Gregory Walton and others have shown that interventions delivered at such key moments—like a video shown to college freshmen in which upperclassmen explain that everyone feels unsure of themselves early on, but that these feelings go away—can increase feelings of belonging and improve performance.   

Avoid impossible role models. Although we’re supposed to feel inspired by successful figures, comparing ourselves to these superstars can make us feel that we’ll never belong in their stratosphere. A recent study of middle-school girls exposed to eminent women in STEM fields, for example, found that the experience actually made them less interested in maths, and led them to lower their their judgment of their own ability and their odds of success. The achievements of these role models, investigators concluded, seemed “unattainable.” What’s the alternative? Find flawed role models—people who succeed but also fail. In one study, for example, students who were taught about the failures and setbacks of well-known scientists became more interested in science, remembered the material from their science lesson better, and did better at complex open-ended problem-solving tasks related to the lesson. Reminding ourselves that those we look up to struggle, too, can make us feel that we belong in their company.

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