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.