Seed and Soil: Psychological Affordances in Contexts Help to Explain Where Wise Interventions Succeed or Fail

Abstract

Psychologically “wise” interventions can cause lasting improvement in key aspects of people’s lives, but where will they work, and where will they not work? We consider the psychological affordance of the social context: Does the context in which the intervention is delivered afford the way of thinking offered by the intervention? If not, treatment effects are unlikely to persist. Change requires planting good seeds (more adaptive perspectives) in fertile soil in which those seeds can grow (a context with appropriate affordances). We illustrate the role of psychological affordances in diverse problem spaces, including recent large-scale trials of growth-mind-set and social-belonging interventions designed specifically to investigate heterogeneity across contexts. We highlight how the study of psychological affordances can advance theory about social contexts and inform debates about replicability.

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