Heroic Imagination Project
Six Topic Areas Summary
A New Approach to Psychologically-Based Educational Interventions
A psychological intervention is a focused strategic procedure designed to elicit enduring change
in a person’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and/or behavior in desired directions based
on a particular conceptual view or theory of human nature (Zimbardo, 2012).
In education, a well-constructed intervention utilizes limited time and resources to create lasting
positive change in a psychological process critical to the academic or social success of students.
Although a number of promising areas of intervention in educational settings have been
extensively researched (see “The interventions that inspired us” below), few of these findings
have been systemically integrated by schools into their curricula, or even translated into a form
that teachers can use in the classroom and that students can use and benefit from in the course of
their everyday lives.
Over the last two years, we, at the Heroic Imagination Project, have developed, piloted,
evaluated, and refined six such interventions, both in individually and as a series, to students
across a broad range of ages and diverse educational backgrounds. We have incorporated and
integrated into our intervention design key methodological and conceptual elements from existing
interventions that have been found to have long-term positive outcomes for students. We have
built upon several promising areas of intervention, such as “mindset” and “stereotype threat“, as
well as designed several novel interventions targeting psychological processes critical to
academic and social success that have yet to be extensively researched, such as “situation
blindness” and “the bystander effect.”
We have also recently designed, piloted, and received promising feedback and quantitative results
from our intervention training program, which is designed to allow middle school, high school
and community college teachers with no other specific psychological background to adapt,
implement, and assess the results of our interventions in their unique learning environments.
Our interventions target two major outcomes for our students:
1) Academic success, broadly defined in terms of students’:
a) enjoyment of the classroom environment;
b) motivation to succeed and challenge themselves;
c) rates of attendance;
d) grade-point average (GPA) scores;
e) rates of college acceptance and completion; and most importantly,
f) self-efficacy beliefs in their own potential to improve and achieve explicit goals over
time with effort, social support, and planned approaches (a growth mindset for their
intellectual ability).
2) Social success, as defined by students’:
a) ability to resist negative or unwanted social influence forces (primarily negative
conformity, the bystander effect, and stereotype threat);
b) ability to implement positive change in interpersonal relationships and group interactions,
especially in challenging situations, and
c) beliefs that they can create meaningful and lasting change in the world around them.
The bystander effect.
Popular name: Learning to help others in need.
Core concepts: The more people who are watching someone who needs help, the less likely any
one person is to respond. There are 5 steps to the helping process, and at each there are
psychological barriers to doing so. With practice, we can overcome our tendency to engage in the
bystander effect and respond more safely and wisely to emergencies or other situations where
someone may be in need of help.
Student outcomes: A decreased tendency to engage in the bystander effect. The ability to ask for
help more effectively when they need it. An increased tendency to respond safely and wisely in
unclear or emergency situations and to appropriately help others in need.
Situation blindness and automatic social attributions.
Popular name: Uncovering the hidden power of situations.
Core concepts: Groups and individuals influence each other in powerful yet subtle ways. Our
automatic reactions to certain social situations can be quite different than how we would
mindfully deal with the same circumstances. We often make incorrect assumptions about others
unless we look more deeply at the situation their behavior occurred in.
Student outcomes: An increased awareness of their automatic social nature. Less reliance on
automatic attributional processes in social situations, resulting in a better ability to understand
individual and group behavior and a decreased tendency to create hasty, dispositional attributions
for the behavior of others.
Conformity.
Popular name: Speaking your mind and resisting group pressure.
Core concepts: We all have the tendency to change our behavior to match the real or imagined
expectations of others. This tendency exists because we desire to be liked and accepted, as well as
to have an accurate understanding of the world around us. Normally conformity is adaptive, but
sometimes it can lead us to make poor or even dangerous decisions. Even a single voice of dissent
drastically reduces group conformity when making bad decisions.
Student outcomes: An increased awareness of their automatic tendencies to conform in certain
situations. A decreased tendency to conform to group norms and expectations when the
consequences of doing so would be harmful or unpleasant. An increased tendency to support
others who are the subject of unwanted conformity. The ability to mindfully identify and replace
the specific conforming tendencies which matter most to them using strategies suggested from
psychological research.
Mindset.
Popular name: The growth mindset: the roots of success.
Core concepts: The expectations we have for ourselves and others can act as self-fulfilling
prophecies. Specifically, our beliefs regarding our own potential dramatically increase or
diminish our chances of succeeding. Research has demonstrated that academic ability can be
improved over time with effort and an effective strategy. Our beliefs in the potential of others can
help or hinder their success as well.
Student outcomes: An increased awareness of their mindset regarding both themselves and
others. A lasting gain in their growth mindset regarding their intelligence, resulting in increased
academic motivation and success. The ability to mindfully develop a growth mindset for domains
beyond their intelligence. An increased belief that they can improve, achieve, and thrive, both in
an academic setting and in life. A belief that they can achieve their personal goals and dreams,
and be a force for positive chance in the lives of other individuals, communities, and society as a
whole.
Stereotype threat.
Popular name: Overcoming stereotype threat.
Core concepts: In certain environments, we naturally worry if other people are judging us
because of the groups we appear to belong to. In a testing situation, the anxiety caused by such
worry can decrease our performance and lower our scores. Understanding that this anxiety is a
natural part of the testing process shared by all people can reduce or eliminate the performance
loss it causes. Worries about ability and belonging are normal, and shared to some extent by all
students.
Student outcomes: An increased understanding and awareness of stereotype threat. Increased
resiliency to the performance loss and impaired learning caused by stereotype threat. Adaptive
attributions for test anxiety resulting in increased academic performance and success.
Prejudice, discrimination, and automatic group attributional biases.
Popular name: Becoming less biased and learning to see others more clearly.
Core concepts: We make meaning from the world by making categories for things. This includes
the people around us. This process is unconscious and can be automatically triggered by very
small cues in the environment. We have a natural tendency to treat the people we feel closely
connected to well and to assume good things about them. Unfortunately we also unconsciously
tend to make certain negative assumptions about others whom seem unlike ourselves and can
even treat them with prejudice without ever realizing it. We can become more aware of and
overcome this tendency to at least some extent and learn to be less reliant on categories and
stereotypes in our evaluation and treatment of others.
Student outcomes: An increased awareness of automatic group attributions. A decreased
tendency to rely on stereotypes when evaluating others. An increased ability to break down
automatic social grouping and to interact with others based on their individual traits rather than
their group identity.