Psychology of belonging and doing well in college with Dr. Mary Murphy

Dr. Mary Murphy is one of the leading scholar on the factors that impact student resilience and mindset about college, particularly for historically underrepresented students. She returns to ISU to share the latest research in this arena. Her workshops are extraordinarily insightful and with practical takeaways for both faculty and staff. Dr. Murphy's groundbreaking and extensively funded research focuses on developing and testing theories about how people\'s social identities and group memberships interact with the contexts they encounter to affect their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, physiology, and motivation. Her three streams of research within this arena are: How situational cues in academic, organizational, and group environments affect people's cognition, motivation, performance, and physiology. For example, many explanations for the under-representation and underperformance of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, and of minorities in academia, focus on biological and socialization factors that may contribute to these phenomena. Her work posits and examines the cues hypothesis, testing how the structure, organization, and situational cues in a setting impact people with stereotyped or stigmatized social identities, making them cognitively and physiologically vigilant, depressing their sense of belonging, and decreasing their desire to continue to participate in the setting. How organizations' philosophies of intelligence-whether organizations believe that intelligence is a fixed trait, or that it malleable and expandable by hard work and effort-shape the motivation of workers. Current work in this area examines representations of intelligence and genius in society and measures their effects on people's creativity, performance, and motivation in various work settings. Situational cues in inter- and intra-racial interactions that affect people's levels of identity threat, emotional experiences, cognitive performance, and motivation to build friendships.