BEAR x BI-Org Webinar: Neil Lewis Jr.

Behavioral Insights for Building More Equitable Societies
When societies separate people into different groups and provide those groups with differential access to resources and opportunities, members those groups inevitably have different experiences in life. Due to situated cognition processes, differences in contexts that arise from such social stratification influence how people make meaning of the world around them. Moreover, those differences in meaning-making have cascading effects on the decisions people make. In this talk, I will share recent findings from my program of research that has been examining these processes in the context of the United States. We have been examining how US segregation (i.e., by race and socioeconomic status) influences how Americans make meaning of their experiences, and the implications of that meaning for their motivation to pursue different goals and success in goal pursuit efforts. I will discuss the implications of this research for behavioral interventions that aim to foster equity in society.
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Neil Lewis, Jr., Assistant Professor, Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medicine (Department of communication, division of general internal medicine, and graduate field of psychology)
His research examines how people's social contexts and identities influence: (1) how they interpret and make meaning of the world around them, (2) their motivation to pursue their goals and success in goal pursuit efforts, and (3) the implications of these processes for the effectiveness of interventions and policies to improve equity in social outcomes.