Geoffrey L. Cohen

He and his colleagues have shown how brief values-affirmations can benefit school performance, close political divides, and open people up to threatening information.

[1] Cohen's work is based in the belief that one way to understand psychological processes is to try to change them.

[2] At Stanford, he runs the Cohen Lab, which investigates – through laboratory and randomized experiments, longitudinal studies, and content analyses – how, when, and why people change,[3] with a focus on racial and gender achievement gaps.

[2] His research has examined political ideologies,[4] adolescents’ misperceptions of their peers,[5] how different cultures view "passion" in relation to achievement,[6] and how to reduce school discipline rates for Black and Latino boys through interventions that reduce worries about belonging.

[7] In a 2007 paper, Cohen and co-author Greg Walton coined the term "belonging uncertainty" to describe the experience of members of marginalized groups in academic and professional settings and showed through experimental research that Black students’ academic achievement increased with an intervention designed to dispel their doubts about social belonging.