How “Wallpaper” Creates Inequality: An Approach to Change It with Buju Dasgupta

Using her new book as an anchor, Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta’s talk, 'How “Wallpaper” Creates Inequality: A Science-Driven Approach to Change It,' offers a science-driven approach to culture change in service of greater equality and justice.

Dasgupta's new book 'Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities' uses a classic social psychological concept—the power of situations—to show how situational forces nudge our cognition, motivation, and behavior in small ways that compound over time in one of two directions. Some forces increase unfamiliarity, exclusion, and inequality while other forces increase familiarity, inclusion, and equality. These situational forces operating in the background barely get our attention; they function like wallpaper in a room, hidden in plain sight. Yet, we are all affected by it. The talk shows people how to notice the “wallpaper,” counteract its negative effects, and harness the positive ones by developing science-backed interventions and taking action in schools, college, at work, and in our communities. The book takes a deeper dive and synthesizes research across multiple disciplines in the social sciences, health sciences, cultural geography, architecture and urban planning, weaving them with stories of ordinary individuals, to show what works and what doesn’t in the effort to create positive culture change that is actionable where we live and work.

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta is a Provost Professor of Psychology and founding Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned her PhD in social psychology from Yale University and a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and neuroscience from Smith College. A leading scholar of implicit bias and diversity science, Dr. Dasgupta integrates laboratory research with real-world settings to address complex social problems. With collaborators, she develops and tests interventions that reduce the impact of implicit bias and structural barriers in higher education using lab and field experiments. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and American Psychological Foundation, and featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, PBS News Hour, ABC News, Wired, Boston Globe, Scientific American Mind, and many others. Dr. Dasgupta’s contributions have been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award, the Hidden Bias Research Prize, SPSP’s Award for Application of Personality and Social Psychology, the Christine A. Stanley Award for Diversity and Inclusion Research, and the Chancellor's Medal for Outstanding Research at UMass Amherst. She is also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Mind and Life Institute.