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Abstract The importance of creating diverse and equitable environments in higher education has gained growing recognition in recent years (Allen, 2005). While individual-level bias training has shown limited efficacy, this study proposes that program structure—characterized by clear, transparent, and uniformly applied standards, expectations, and norms—may be a more effective route to equity. Leveraging data from a large U.S. public university, we present evidence from multi-level modeling that demonstrates the positive relationship between program structure and equity-related outcomes, including psychological well-being and academic performance. Notably, these effects appear to disproportionately benefit women and underrepresented minority students, suggesting that structure may be particularly impactful for marginalized students, who are often excluded from informal informational networks within their departments. This research contributes to the ongoing dialogue on practical strategies for achieving equity in higher education, offering an alternative to individual-focused interventions. We discuss the theoretical implications for research on marginalized groups and provide actionable recommendations for practitioners. The study highlights the potential of structural approaches in fostering more equitable and inclusive learning environments in higher education. 

First-generation college students and those from ethnic groups such as African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, or Indigenous Peoples in the United States are less likely to pursue STEM-related professions. How might we develop conceptual and methodological approaches to understand instructional differences between various undergraduate STEM programs that contribute to racial and social class disparities in psychological indicators of academic success such as learning orientations and engagement? Within social psychology, research has focused mainly on student-level mechanisms surrounding threat, motivation, and identity. A largely parallel literature in sociology, meanwhile, has taken a more institutional and critical approach to inequalities in STEM education, pointing to the macro level historical, cultural, and structural roots of those inequalities. In this paper, we bridge these two perspectives by focusing on critical faculty and peer instructor development as targets for inclusive STEM education. These practices, especially when deployed together, have the potential to disrupt the unseen but powerful historical forces that perpetuate STEM inequalities, while also positively affecting student-level proximate factors, especially for historically marginalized students. 

Previous research suggests that people show increased self-referential processing when they provide criticism to others, and that this self-referential processing can have negative effects on interpersonal perceptions and behavior. The current research hypothesized that adopting a self-distanced perspective (i.e. thinking about a situation from a non-first person point of view), as compared with a typical self-immersed perspective (i.e. thinking about a situation from a first-person point of view), would reduce self-referential processing during the provision of criticism, and in turn improve interpersonal perceptions and behavior. We tested this hypothesis in an interracial context since research suggests that self-referential processing plays a role in damaging interracial relations. White participants prepared for mentorship from a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective. They then conveyed negative and positive evaluations to a Black mentee while electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Source analysis revealed that priming a self-distanced (vs self-immersed) perspective predicted decreased activity in regions linked to self-referential processing (medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC) when providing negative evaluations. This decreased MPFC activity during negative evaluations, in turn, predicted verbal feedback that was perceived to be more positive, warm and helpful. Results suggest that self-distancing can improve interpersonal perceptions and behavior by decreasing self-referential processing during the provision of criticism.