Interiors That Welcome Everyone

How can we fight for justice as ordinary people? Can individuals have any impact on structural inequality? What works, what doesn’t, and how do we know? My new book, Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities answers these questions.

Synthesizing 25 years of original research with other scholars’ work across 10 disciplines, the book zeroes in on local culture—showing how the culture of neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and teams signal what’s good and valued and what’s not. Wallpaper is the metaphor I use to talk about situational forces, hidden in plain sight, that shape inequality or equality.

These situational forces nudge our thoughts and actions in small cumulative ways in one of two directions. They can pull us apart based on initial differences, increasing unfamiliarity, distrust, and polarization. Or they can push us together, increasing familiarity, trust, and integration. Once we understand how these forces work, I show how we can counteract the negative effects using evidence-based solutions.

Four types of situational forces or wallpaper are prominent in the book. First is material culture—the physical design of buildings and neighborhoods and technological platforms that either encourage social mixing across group lines or discourage it. Representation comes next, captured by the types of people we see in high places that signal who is valued and respected and who is not, simply by their absence. Third is symbolic culture, which takes the form of stories, conveying values and providing interpretations of social reality, saying, for example, that social mobility is in our control through hard work and personal responsibility and inequality is deserved. Finally, unspoken norms and expectations, knowledge of which is essential to navigate institutions and move up. People who know these rules of the game race ahead while others who don’t miss opportunities.

By combining science and stories, this excerpt from Chapter Five of the book shows the power of material culture and representation to steer the local culture toward justice and opportunity or away from it.—Nilanjana Dasgupta

* * *

I became aware of how the design of restaurants can include or exclude people when I started spending time with a colleague who was in a wheelchair. Like many workplaces, ours has a culture of gathering in local pubs for happy hour and occasional dinners. Before our colleague joined our university, my coworkers and I would choose pubs and restaurants close to work with fairly good, moderately priced food and drink. Physical accessibility was not on our radar. When our group expanded, we started noticing the physical constraints of restaurants. Where are we going this Friday after work? Could we go to the pub on Main Street, our frequent haunt? No, that wouldn’t work because it’s on the second floor and there’s no elevator. What about the little bistro? Nope, the tables are too close. There’s no way to navigate a wheelchair around those tables. What about the local brewery? Oops, only high tops and booths that are unfriendly to wheelchairs. Most of our usual go-to places didn’t work, except one. Johnny’s Tavern was built with inclusive design in mind. We wheel into the restaurant easily through the wide entrance. The lack of steps means that our colleague doesn’t encounter obstacles from the get-go. As the host walks us to our table, our friend wheels his chair in between widely spaced tables without having to worry about bumping into other guests’ chairs and disrupting their meal. We are seated at a table of normal height. I know from being around my colleague that going to public places always requires advance planning. Nothing is simple. Extra phone calls to ask about wheelchair accessibility, types of seating, and stairs. Even one step can be an insurmountable obstacle. He doesn’t like situations where public attention is focused on him, where he feels different. The best restaurants for him are ones where the physical layout accommodates his needs without requiring extra work or a flurry of attention. Where he is like any other guest. Where he feels comfortable and welcome.

Restaurants are not the only places where spatial design tells us who’s welcome. Imagine walking into a workspace where you see vibrant nature posters on the wall, puzzles, a bookshelf with a variety of books, and stacks of water bottles in the corner. Would you want to work in that room? What if the workspace had Star Wars posters on the wall, science fiction books on the bookshelf, videogames, and a stack of soda cans in the corner? Sapna Cheryan, a social psychologist at the University of Washington, and her colleagues wondered whether the décor of a workspace would affect women’s interest in computer science education and tech careers. They discovered that the esthetics of workspaces conveyed clues about its culture, values, and norms. A room at a university with science fiction paraphernalia and videogames signaled a masculine geeky culture, whereas a room with nature posters and puzzles signaled that all genders are welcome. Women were more interested in computer science classes and majors if they were in a room with nature posters than one with

Star Wars posters. They felt they belonged. These women were totally unaware that the room’s ambiance guided their inferences about the local culture and its people and nudged their choices.

Employees at real workplaces are similarly affected by the spatial design of their office and the ambiance it creates. Drift is a startup that prides itself in promoting real-time, personalized conversations between buyers and sellers so that they can build trust and accelerate business. The company has won many awards for the best leadership team, best company culture, best company for diversity, the list goes on. When a new person joins Drift, they notice that the boss doesn’t have a fancy private office. As one employee puts it, “There are no offices for execs at Drift. So, David Cancel, known as DC, sits with the team at a desk just like anyone else. He’s super approachable, incredibly transparent, and is always interested in what you are working on.” The intentional layout of an office with company leaders working side by side with employees creates an ambiance of equality and opportunity to form authentic relationships.

The physical design and esthetics of a place make up its wallpaper. When it signals inclusivity, it attracts more diverse people because they feel welcome. If this is a workplace, its employees feel more satisfied and want to stay, reducing turnover. If this is a college or university, it’s able to attract, support, and ensure all students succeed, even in fields where they are usually underrepresented. As the wallpaper pulls more diverse people into the organization, it changes the perspective of coworkers and organizational leaders and transforms the local culture. What are the esthetics and physical design of your organization? What’s the ambiance like and who does it welcome or leave out?

When people who are strangers interact across racial and ethnic lines, they may initially enter these cross-race interactions with concerns about prejudice. In contemporary American society, many white people are concerned about appearing prejudiced, whereas

many racial minorities are concerned about being targets of prejudice. These competing concerns bring mismatched motivations: white people want to be liked by their interaction partners, whereas people of color want to be respected. The clash of motivations increases anxiety and disrupts the quality of interaction between them. What if these interracial interactions were not short, one-shot interactions between strangers, but instead more frequent and longer? What if people worked together in a community organization, or were on a sports team together for a while, or were assigned to be college roommates? A growing number of field experiments in real-world settings show that when local situations are intentionally designed to create opportunities for frequent, longer interactions between strangers, it increases trust and empathy, reduces bias, and results in the formation of real relationships that benefit all involved. Moreover, longer interactions have beneficial impacts even when they take place in the shadows of violent inter group conflict.

Neighborhoods That Spark Cross-Group Mingling

Let’s rewind to the 1950s. It’s a time of racial segregation in the United States. Imagine you stumble on old photographs of two housing projects. One looks like a checkerboard. Black and white families live in separate buildings intermixed within the same housing complex. Another looks like a racial island. White families live in houses closely clustered together and physically separated from other houses in which Black families live. Residents at both places were asked their opinion on public housing—should they remain segregated or be integrated? When social psychologists Marie Jahoda and Patricia Salter West asked residents this question in 1951, they learned that white residents in the checkerboard complex who saw their Black neighbors regularly were less supportive of continuing segregation. Living side by side normalized everyday interracial interaction and made it possible for them to imagine integrated housing. But white residents in the racial island who rarely saw their Black neighbors couldn’t imagine anything other than segregated housing. When spatial design promotes proximity, it normalizes interracial mingling and makes residents more supportive of public policies for racial justice.

“The houses are too close!” I said to my husband as we walked through a neighborhood in search of a new house. We were moving from one state to another so that I could be closer to work. When we came upon this neighborhood, a new housing development, we noticed it was different. The houses were close together with very few fences separating them. The front stoop of each house was close to the sidewalk. Single-family homes were woven in with condos, affordable housing, and an assisted living home—all within the same neighborhood. Despite my initial reservation, buying a home in this community ended up being the best decision. As my husband and I sit on our porch with our morning coffee, our proximity to the sidewalk sparks hellos to passersby, quick conversations about the weather, and exclamations over a cute passing dog. When I take my regular morning walk around the neighborhood, I wave at an elderly woman making the rounds on her walker and another resting on a bench with a crossword puzzle. Because our sidewalk life encourages casual conversations, I’ve come to know residents in the affordable housing near us. Lowering physical boundaries lowers psychological walls that separate us. The intentional spatial design of our neighborhood creates openings for conversation with neighbors across age, race, class, and other social divides. The sum of many such small moments has created camaraderie and trust. Some of these chance sidewalk conversations have sparked deeper unexpected friendships.

Political scientists Eric Oliver and Janelle Wong also noticed that urban design affects human relationships. They looked at the racial composition of neighborhoods in three major American cities— Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles—and its relation to everyday inter-racial interactions. In racially diverse neighborhoods compared to homogeneous ones, Black, Latino, and white residents felt their relationships with other racial groups were less antagonistic. They felt less concerned about immigration and harbored fewer negative stereotypes about groups different from their own than their counter-parts in racially homogeneous neighborhoods. You might wonder, is this because people who were less biased to begin with opted to live in integrated communities? That question had occurred to Oliver and Wong. So, they measured how comfortable people felt (or not) living in a residentially integrated neighborhood by giving them five pictures each showing a neighborhood with houses whose residents varied in race. These pictures ranged from neighborhoods where all households had residents who were racially similar to research participants to other pictures with a few or no households whose residents were of the same race as participants. They were asked to prioritize these neighborhoods from the most to the least desirable. From their choices, Oliver and Wong captured the racial composition of respondents’ ideal neighborhood. They found no matter which type of neighborhood racial composition respondents preferred in their ideal world, if they happened to currently live in a racially diverse neighborhood, they harbored fewer stereotypes and felt less threatened by racial and ethnic groups different from theirs. Chances are this is because living on the same street or close by sparks frequent interactions among neighbors of different backgrounds. They are also likely to meet through local civic activities— volunteering in schools and food banks and participating in local clubs. All these interactions accumulate over time to weaken social divides and increase interracial familiarity and comfort.

An important observation from Oliver and Wong’s work is that the most important type of residential diversity is at the neighborhood level because this is where people experience everyday meaningful interactions with others that accumulate over time into something substantial. A diverse neighborhood wallpaper increases acceptance and the feeling that we’re all in it together. In contrast, living in a racially diverse city or county doesn’t necessarily mean that people interact with others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds because residential segregation in cities and counties keeps people separated in different parts of town.

Neighborhood social spots, if designed well, are particularly good at encouraging casual conversation with strangers from different walks of life. For barbecue lovers, Brad’s Bar-B-Que in Oxford, Alabama, is heaven. Eighty-year-old Eleanor Baker felt that her visit here in April 2019 was especially divine. She is a widow and lives alone. Her family lives out of town. Eleanor was by herself at Brad’s Bar-B-Que. Three young men were at the next table. Jamario Howard looked over and saw Eleanor. He hates seeing people eating alone. So,he walked over and said, “I saw you sitting here alone. Do you mind having some company?” “Go right ahead,” she said. They started talking. Soon Jamario invited Eleanor to join their table for dinner with his friends. These twenty-somethings felt a connection with her. As one of the young men said, “When you make that sort of connection with someone, it’s hard to let it go like that.” That chance encounter was the beginning of an unexpected friendship.

The intergenerational and interracial friendship sparked at Brad’s Bar-B-Que fits with Aneta Piekut and Gill Valentine’s research. They are cultural geographers in the United Kingdom. Piekut and Valentine find that social gathering spots like casual restaurants, cafés, pubs, and community centers attract people from varying ethnic and religious walks of life and foster friendly interactions. These positive interactions, in turn, encourage people to reach out and form amiable relations with other neighbors from religious and ethnic backgrounds different from theirs, leading to casual conversation.

Seeing, Believing, and Becoming

Each year, thousands of college students across the country enroll in required mathematics classes. For students wanting to pursue careers in science, technology, or engineering, a strong foundation in math is essential. Obviously, it makes a big difference to students whether their professors are good at teaching math, but some years ago I wondered: does the professor’s identity group matter to students as well? To answer this question, my graduate students and I conducted a study in an introductory calculus class at my university. Because of high enrollment, this class was divided into smaller sections with identical content and exams but taught by different professors. We recruited students from many sections, some taught by women and others taught by men, all selected because they had equally positive teaching evaluations from prior years. We followed students’ progress through the semester, all the while measuring their interest in math, behavior in class, and aspirations to pursue math-intensive careers.

Although all students, women and men alike, said they liked math when we asked them directly via surveys, when we measured their attitudes unobtrusively, their implicit preference revealed something different. Women students showed a stronger implicit preference for math if they happened to be in a calculus class taught by a female professor rather than in one taught by a male professor. Similarly, they related to math more, felt more confident, and participated more actively in math class if their professor was female than if he was male. In contrast, male students’ confidence, relation to math, and class participation was the same across sections taught by female and male professors—they were unaffected by the professor’s gender. Did these findings emerge because women professors were better teachers? No. Remember we had intentionally preselected instructors with similar teaching skills. And all sections had identical content, lectures, and exams. Our results suggest that women students were inspired by a role model from their own identity group in a classroom and academic major where most students and professors are men; there are relatively fewer women in math. These women students’ interest and motivation in calculus class show that increasing gender diversity at the top among visible experts pulls in diverse talent at the bottom among novices.