The (Lack of) Efficacy of Social Belonging and Growth Mindset Interventions Among College Students

We are indebted to the first-year economics instructors at the University of Toronto and at York University for their willingness to incorporate our experiments into their courses many times over the years. We are also indebted to Aaron DeMello and James Lahey for their tireless commitment to designing the project’s well-run website and online exercises, as well as for their help with organizing and extracting the experimental data. We are very grateful to Christine Logel, Greg Walton, and David Yeager who generously provided intervention materials from prior studies and helped design the new, context-specific interventions we test in this paper. We thank participants at the Advances with Field Experiments (2025) conference at the University of Chicago for their helpful feedback and comments, and we thank the Social Science Research Council of Canada (Insight Grant # 435–2018–0268 and Insight Development Grant # 430–2017–00779), the Jamal Poverty Action Lab, and the University of Toronto’s Learning and Education Advancement Fund for financial support. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry